"There is more tenderness/ than one can fathom in wearing what never happened." —Alina Stefanescu
"more cold, more dark"
more & not after
—the only way—
—nor epitaph
they'll bother, just a little later...
ruins-to-be, where lights now shine;
—our piracy fled
—in suicide,
& long time dream dread's flag again.
the concrete split, eyes lusterless.
"Snowdrops
I shadow her down a path and through
a small graveyard. She lifts the grey spar
of the gate, gives herself space to pass. A track
to the shelter of a few windblown trees. Winter
has come, but she presses on. She’s arrived here
because she didn’t want to be there
where she could not be useful, but now
this here has become another there
she wishes she didn’t have to be part of.
She would like best to be a firefly
of pure thought – of disinterested attention –
should that be possible. Her body is again
a burden to her and she trips as she climbs,
feet finding roots and ruts: clumsiness
as always, a path of discovery.
Why, she asks, have you brought me here?
I don’t know, I reply. I had hoped to bring you
somewhere ... where ... I could know you differently.
Well, I’ll be gone. She brushes past me – her habit
with anyone for whom she cannot see purpose.
There are memories of an island graveyard, fallen
stones illegible and edged with moss, a promised view
over choppy water, something fierce in the weather –
and the rest of the white page determinedly blank."
—Tom Pow via
This one is tagged "Clown Attack".
"Literature is a Force.
And like skateboarding, it does not owe you shit." —Stefan Baciu via
An entire glass by Marc Chagall.
"But meaning, in a gale, is the first to go." —Diane Seuss
the light itself cannot help you
it is a prisoner
just like you are
light that crawls from surface to surface
never delving deeply
never finding further facts
than texture, & the way matter reflects
"geese of the golden triangle"
whalerescue in realtime
ruts multiply crosstown
Buckingham graves grackled
Sagrada webcam fadeout
"Certain paths are blessed with feral mystery. They pull you along them. Tease with a sense that around their next bend will be ghost collision, sprite glimpse. We walk them without loneliness for we keep step with invisible companions, walk the storied richness of the land."
—CL Nolan via @hookland.bsky.social
" 'Don’t worry about the drinks,' she whispered. 'I just put them on Van Morrison’s tab'."
“Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but this morning He's going to fucking well have to share.”
― Matthew Woodring Stover, Caine Black Knife via @adamsnotes
"before & after wasabi"
1.
spidey bode garbanzos
bent catloaf sensor
hive bivouac inhabits
as the whole light polevaults
into ash ape ramparts
2.
the murders that occur are gentler things
commission in the cradle, ones & oughts—
though terrible enough when witness falls;
& there are no detectives avid like these,
& ev'ryone knows who, already, helpless.
3.
chip by chip · on the chain gang
still mad sick
in the pale crib
stained cup antelucan
& roadkill unwailing
fly out of the · fly bottle
moldy lemon · in fridge door
maintenance
with a bullet
4.
the T's have somehow gotten
all mixed up with the M's
"I believe that religion did a great disservice to the word soul by grabbing it for its own goody-bag."
"The only kid who survived the massacre says:
I am the only one who jumped higher than everyone.
Neighborhood boys told me that this is something supernatural,
I am the one who jumped higher than everybody.
Yet I didn’t reach the sky.
Now you know very well;
that we need an open door
only for us,
it could be any door,
even the door of the sky."
—Mohammed Alkronz via Gaza Poets Society
I'd rather watch puffins than most human hijinks.
"fine shreds
pending above the rigid leaves"
—Denise Levertov via
The day I swallowed a hurricane.
“The kind of people I know now don’t have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. They’re wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and wait for chances.”
― Charles Portis, The Dog of the South via @adamsnotes
"Les Fleurs du Mal, CXII
The Two Good Sisters
Debauchery and Death are pleasant twins,
And lavish with their charms, a buxom pair!
Under the rags that clothe their virgin skins,
Their wombs, though still in labour, never bear.
For the curst poet, foe to married rest,
The friend of hell, and courtier on half-pay—
Brothels and tombs reserve for such a guest
A bed on which repentance never lay.
Both tomb and bed, in blasphemy so fecund
Each other’s hospitality to second,
Prepare grim treats, and hatch atrocious things.
Debauch, when will you bury me? When, Death,
Mingle your Cypress in the selfsame wreath
With the infected Myrtles that she brings?"
—tr Roy Campbell
The Oriental-Occidental Express.
"tiny white flowers
neighbor’s Parsley Hawthorn tree
its promise of fruit
—i often wonder why
peace can’t be this simple"
—@evecastle.bsky.social
"But there are limits to repudiation."
"Frog pulled Toad up onto the island. Toad looked in the basket. The sandwiches were wet. The pitcher of iced tea was empty." —@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"Where do we see renditions of inwardness, except in a few images of Einstein wreathed in pipe-smoke?" —Sven Birkerts via
On Witness for the Prosecution.
"ant empire in our driveway"
merest lozenge of slime
lucky ticket
fever not emptied
by burrowing the Nine Worlds
early sunlight owlish
matter itself feverish
something i lose they keep for me
for i'll be back tomorrow
"from the glegly bleeze-leam"
piste upon snow joyous
cough cark perks. exertion's
rainbow. hyaline phone book
highball in your eyeball.
"Paul studies the pin and identifies what he calls wu, something no counterfeit can possess: a mysterious quality of spiritual presence. 'To have no historicity, and also no artistic, esthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value—that is a marvel,' he says." —Joel J Miller via
"If there is freedom from injury available to creatures like us, it is here. Not in forgiveness, which keeps the offender in his throne and drapes the throne in white. Not in resentment, which keeps the offender in his throne and curses him from the floor. But in the slow, unspectacular act of building a self around a different centre, until the throne is empty and no one has noticed that no one is sitting in it." —@beyondthresholds via
"cow's horn"
otherwise
had it wended
shades absent
in the igloo
cover song
a wave sending
pale high walls
purview lunar
lost strongbox
a few old books
scholar's chase
& chess castle
blood traces
no pocket knife
someone else
has the story
"The moment we cease to hold each other..."
kaiju battlefield breakdown
boot extravasated
half inch tape
holds the record
white concrete · against dull azure
parrot's cantrip prated
with pure secrets stippled
half inch tape
carolled the doldrums
kaiju shoeshine · & Borges sonnet
"The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination. The word-bound concept is always inadequate to the torrent of life. Hence it is only the image-making or figurative word that can invest things with expression and at the same time bathe them in the luminosity of ideas: idea and thing are united in the image. But whereas the language of ordinary life—in itself a working and workmanlike instrument—is continually wearing down the image-content of words and acquiring a superficial existence of its own (logical only in appearance), poetry continues to cultivate the figurative, i.e. image-bearing, qualities of language, with deliberate intent.”
—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens via @themeanderingmiltonist
The dark sky we're driving into.
"Verlan became so popular that even former French President Francois Mitterrand showed off his knowledge of it during a television interview several years ago. When he was asked whether he knew the word chebran (Verlan for branche, which means hip), he answered, of course, but added, 'That's already passe; you should say cable,' which literally means 'wired for cable,' but means 'plugged in' or with-it in current slang." —Alexander Stille via
What Aboutness boasts of:
abode-pointing roadsigns.
File under find-glegly,
affordances hoarded.
Myst'ry not with noose-tags
is netted, nor by whetstones.
At noon shadows shindig
their shriven-least river.
"Rhyming slang (on dyke) gives Raleigh bike, three-wheel trike and thus three-wheeler."
"The Year of the Whale
The old go, one by one, like guttered flames.
This past winter
Tammag the bee-man has taken his cold blank mask
To the honeycomb under the hill,
Corston who ploughed out the moor
Unyoked and gone; and I ask,
Is Heddle lame, that in youth could dance and saunter
A way to the chastest bed?
The kirkyard is full of their names
Chiselled in stone. Only myself and Yule
In the ale-house now, speak of the great whale year.
This one and that provoked the taurine waves
With an arrogant pass,
Or probing deep through the snow-burdened hill
Resurrected his flock,
Or passed from fiddles to ditch
By way of the quart and the gill,
All night lay tranced with corn, but stirred to face
The brutal stations of bread;
While those who tended their lives
Like sacred lamps, chary of oil and wick,
Died in the fury of one careless match.
Off Scabra Head the lookout sighted a school
At the first light.
A meagre year it was, limpets and crows
And brief mottled grain.
Everything that could float
Circled the school. Ploughs
Wounded those wallowing lumps of thunder and night.
The women crouched and prayed.
Then whale by whale by whale
Blundering on the rock with its red stain
Crammed our winter cupboards with oil and meat."
—George Mackay Brown
"by the bottom of page three, the time traveling immortal protagonist has traveled to 18th century London and forced Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton to drink his piss to save him from arsenic poisoning so he can give him a solid gold ingot from the future" —@knifepoint via
“…mosques…were built with mortar that had been mixed with musk. …It is even said…that the Mosque of Zobiade still smells of musk today.” –John Trueman, The Romantic Story of Scent (1975)
[A great poem is such a mosque.]
Mallarmé: Salut (my tr)
Zilch, froth, pure poem
Just to gar a goblet
So a distant flock dunks
Of mermaids, many upside down.
Sundry friends, we are sailing:
At the stern, already I stand;
Y’all at the stately bow break
That surge of sizzle & winter.
A wonderful wooziness prods me
Not recking even its roll
To hoist upright this hail
(Loneliness, lodgement, glimmer)
For whatever it is that earns
Our sheet’s wan shelter.
"today i learned that brent crude, the trading classification for two types of petroleum, was named after the brent oilfield in the north sea, which was itself named after the seabird, the brent goose.
this fact has profound implications for geopolitics: the iran war can now be officially proclaimed a wild goose chase; trump is a silly goose; starmer wouldn’t say boo to a goose; let’s have a gander at oil prices; bad idea, that gave me goosebumps; petrostates are the goose that lay the golden egg; and if this whole charade carries on for much longer our goose shall be cooked" —@merothwell
marble floor to the rain
rainbird in do-si-do
the world
in its far claims tarries
in the dark rains rocking
a realm void of Fillmore
ravels out the tapestry
depicting this nexus
& who will know else?
lost days of spiralling shrug raised
to a kind of Stonehenge
"We are born to be torn by ontology, the postcards of shorelines." —Alina Stefanescu
"On the one hand this scattershot approach feels like the great confounder sticking to his guns, keeping faith with the small presses and sequences of cryptic linguistic détournement which have formed the bedrock of his practice since the 1960s... " —Oliver Dixon via
three hundred year walls · absorb hardy
reject sound
in sentences
my aim lumbers into
there are arch bored forests
with soft stillness · honeycomb hours
missile launches · leave scatheless
old barrels
bear the knowledge
of the maze-'scape mapblink
i would master AWOL
amber trapped · true message
as empires founder · fever dreams flail
huge monsters
mug for cam'ras
punk rock pantomimes
pure despair snaring
the long brisk rapture · raggedly boiling
no one can parse this · no one parry
& a bard
with a biro
annotates lorn lootings
lost in hist'ry's mistfall
"Across every continent that survived empire, one figure recurs."
"small magnolias"
Eastward on the main drag · Brutalist gloom
encompasses thwart · the very chasm
leers clownlike
between lessons
oily lashes, leylines
delimit dirge scourges
what you know stinks noxious
in new bland canisters
but Eastward
benign esters
dissolve thwart · therapeutic
the answering fill · fistic cloudmesh
prepares gleam's
golden igloo
parking lot seems lucky
loud crows clyte upon frozen
harms & the whole ullage
of Hesper vends respite
since Eastward
unfolds Fillmore
"You’re going to want to remember this conversation in about 3 to 4 years."
"What defines such figures is not merely the evil they commit, but the mass of ordinary people who enable them, the bureaucrats, the voters, the neighbors, the media figures—those who look at cruelty and decide it is 'necessary,' who look at lies and call them 'strategy,' who look at moral collapse and label it patriotism'." —Michael Klein via
Herzog's best film & probably the best movie of the 90s.
"Yes, dear friends, I do not know what to do in order to escape from what does not exist!" —Paul Valéry via
"The music was often crude and kitsch, but intoxicating as if it were some forbidden fruit."
Hormuz hymnal · rehearse crisis
prices ratchet · prove normal
lightning bug's
time to burn now
Hormuz ferry · inchmeal otherwise
"One Foot in Eden
One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world’s great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time’s handiworks by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown.
The armorial weed in stillness bound
About the stalk; these are our own.
Evil and good stand thick around
In fields of charity and sin
Where we shall lead our harvest in.
Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies."
—Edwin Muir via Victoria Moul
"And then I got back to Iceland, and I went to an old bishop’s estate and there’s this beautiful chapel that’s completely wooden. So it felt like the perfect place to play the cello..." (via @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social)
"Everything emotional in America becomes a mere show and make-believe. Americans are trained to invest money, are said to take even desperate chances on that, yet never do they invest [in] beauty nor take desperate chances on that."
—Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
"It does not merely write of suffering. It turns suffering into a subtle artistic structure."
"[T]he sense of myself that I’d carried in my thirties and forties—of someone who could, through my editing work and my criticism, through the exercise of my judgment and taste, bring about some change for the good in American literature and culture—maybe even its politics—was gone; even for myself, I’d abandoned whatever residual ambitions I might have had in the rat race of contemporary American authorship and literary life..." —Justin Smith-Ruiu via
No way through & no one to go there.
"chemo nobodaddy"
packed Walpurgisnocturne
picayune shtick
the walls close in wisely
wone school zone
what should count as catnip
carves larvae
annul tornado alley
knock Occam
power lines luring
lewd eye mooting
nog Walpurgisnincompoop
"In the eighties, she said, 'Goodness, you can buy a ticket to Kathmandu from Cedar Falls, Iowa'."
"What seems clearer is that the early twentieth century offered almost no language, certainly no public language, for what Eliot may have felt, and that this unnamable quality is itself part of what gives The Waste Land its peculiar anguish: the sense of a desolation that cannot be located, a grief without a permissible object." —Jonathan Bate via
"stainless steel sink slightly beaded"
dag spoken in darkness
adapted eye rhapsode
night that sweeps its swart tide
sweltering felt
branch of the watch-winter
aware gnomic moments
dealing out darb labels
adroit toitbox
to split meted splinters
spliff piffles
as eyeshine loses ashfight
early in the furlgame
& crumb rumors
rumble at hoard-borders
"I lack enthusiasm for haiku, so when I compose them occasionally out of obligation, I cannot go beyond the eighteenth century. Sometimes, in the afternoon, I compose one seven-character regulated verse. I find it quite interesting, and I am quite proud of it. I am happy when it is completed." —Soseki via
I feel more fado every day.
"Cento: Poem about My Father
The trees rise from the darkness of the world
in this, my last poem about my father.
To hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him.
He told where all the running water goes,
and now he’s dead.
Everything’s mine but just on loan,
time and the bell have buried the day,
the round sky goes on minding its business.
I turned and looked the other way:
sorrow’s springs are the same.
I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful,
no one arrives without leaving soon.
There was nowhere at all to go."
—Steve Nickman via
"Is Tokyo as filmed by Sofia Coppola actually real?"
