Sunday, August 30, 2026
"The engine of human prosperity is not selfishness. It never was. It is cooperation at scale."
"In the comedies, everything comes right and then there is a stopping place that is not a true ending. The box that gives the comic story its shape is made, on purpose, too small. It cannot contain the true ending." —Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog (2023)
Christopher Priest Did Philip K. Dick’s Reality Trick Better.
"Mordor Toblerone" is the name of my next band.
crazy masks of the world
& machine-made masks
vie among rubble
"thunder ale"
pobblebonk thick with petrichor
tilt evil blivet lit
parable blitz potsherd
runic noir
rents spiralling
imported consonants thwartsome
"quagmire vs quagspire" —@geofhuth.bsky.social
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Tilt evil blivet lit.
My diaphragm is bones
on the Plutonian beach of Tanguy
if you want to look for them
the refrigerator-trucks full of corpses are there
halcyon day, the neighbor’s yard festive
glittering now, & later there will be lights
they walked across the Bering Strait
they did not know when they would get there
they did not know when they would get there
“For the rattling glory of ages to come,
For the high tribe of men,
At the feast of the fathers I have forfeited my cup,
And my joy, and my honor as well.
A wolfhound-age leaps up on my back,
But I am not a wolf by blood.
Better find me a coat of Siberian steppes
And stuff me inside, like a hat…
Let me no more look at the coward, at the mire,
At the bloody bones in the wheel,
Let the blue foxes blaze the whole night through
In their primordial beauty for me.
Lead me into the night, where the Yenisei flows
And the pine tree reaches the star,
Because I am not a wolf by blood
And only my equal will take my life.”
—Bernstein’s Mandelstam
"Who has no house now, will not build one." —Rilke via
Isn’t reviewing just like earnestly reading the face of an inaminate thing, to find out its thoughts? We look at everything as if it had a face—except each other. We look at each other as if we had no faces.
"Germany digs up more than 2,000 tonnes of live wartime ordnance every year."
the end that is most like ev'ry other end
the air filled
with its buzzing
like mosquitos unseen
till after you find you are bitten
"We are moving into a period of bewilderment..."
"Demo
No. Not from me. Never.
Not a step in your march.
not a vowel in your unison,
bray that shifts to bay.
Banners sailing a street river,
power in advance of a vote,
go choke on these quatrain tablets.
I grant you no claim ever,
not if you pushed the Christ Child
as President of Rock Candy Mountain
or yowled for the found Elixir
would your caste expectations snare me.
Superhuman with accusation,
you would conscript me to a world
of people spat on, people hiding
ahead of oncoming poetry.
Whatever class is your screen
I’m from several lower.
To your rigged fashions, I’m pariah.
Nothing a mob does is clean,
not at first, not when slowed to a media,
not when police. The first demos I saw,
before placards, were against me,
alone, for two years, with chants,
every day, with half-conciliatory
needling in between, and aloof
moral cowardice holding skirts away.
I learned your world order then."
—Les Murray via
"He liked to tell the story of how he once skittered so fast across a frozen pond to escape a plane that was strafing his platoon, he couldn’t get back after the attack because the ice kept breaking when he tried to step on it again. They had to send a raft out to retrieve him." —Paul Tatara via
"Supposedly, the trend began in 2013 with Nardo Gray, a non-metallic gray on Audi RS 7 sedans." (Payne's Gray or Confederate Gray?)
Autotune voice = Mar-a-Lago face for singers.
Accidental backroomsy reflection.
"full moon over Plano"
Hormuz anosmia
natheless burning
archery
of boomerang
caudillo doom · where the wrecking ball nods
& those of us thrice cursed with
red-assed baboon schooners
live on for
principly spite
you bring back the music · not the affliction
droll bardic bileflux
bound to be groundless
as ignored
as Cassandra
once was · from a deity's command
"Neither tumbledown castle barricade/ Nor volcanistic basalt palisade.."
Friday, August 28, 2026
"the adjuvants"
motorcade trademark
Galilean long-days
catch shows on the wing
papertrail for traipsing
vortex of evil
fed by tiny refusals
the windshield looks clean
but not from the inside
hasten down the windmill
"Sometimes he would slaughter exotic animals from a safe and elevated platform. Sometimes he would fight gladiators who were armed only with wooden or dulled weapons." —Martin Longman via
Little magazines online archive.
"Come, ye gnomes and ogres..." —Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo
"Autistici"
bots faster than Bolt
beset Autistici
from Westworld
blackclad gunsel
(husbanding moolah · at the Moulin Rouge)
read, not scan, my runnings
redbrick agonist
drottslop seeks
volapukajxo breath · kale brillig
dreichly languish
aqua regia agents
icebergmasked in gas cans
from Westworld
wearily traik
Thursday, August 27, 2026
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
“Software wolves comb through the ruins of the future.” –Fanged Noumena
"When an addict of apocalypse is asked to wait."
my own bad custody
burial with headphones
lime plastic
stained by luxe years
my contribution · carried out to the curb
kid leaps off an iced roof
"silence of the dolls"
if it’s not the moon
maybe it’s a smudge
spiralling balloon
as beneath we trudge
let that light go by
if it’s not the moon
other alibi
won’t be begging soon
with such feints is strewn
journey to the tell
if it’s not the moon
lures us · just as well
up there does not budge
what belies the tune
churned by ilka drudge
if it’s not the moon
(2022)
“It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.” —Blaise Pascal
The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane.
"Like a rhizome cowboy" —Garrett Strickland
"volapukajxo"
florid miasma
frail outlook sought
Eloi deadfall school
Excerpt from a dreamy new short film.
"Recently I’ve Been Researching Chakras”
Not for many a day
have we done the Vict'ry Dance
Patty through the wire mesh
touches the end of my trunk
no Habeas Corpus
will come though I know myself,
Happy, in the mirror:
the twolegs look in the same glass
with the face of a monkey
& the face of a god stares back at them.
"Start your prayers with appeals to Our Lady of pigeon forge and document your miracles. The American Pope will canonize Saint Dolly in about 3 years" —@dapowell.bsky.social
“onboarding & beyond”
the gun barrel moves
from pointing here to pointing there
silent
capturing all our attention
like a laser pointer
to a cat
in hard to dust places
we will be taken there
An interview with one of the Amazon employees at Amazon’s AI training facility VGT3.
"So yes, there is scientific confusion about what consciousness is! And there’s metaphysical confusion about what consciousness is! But there’s no definitional confusion about the word 'consciousness' itself. " —Erik Hoel via
"Trying to figure out whether it was more impressive that Dolly gave away so much money, or that she was a working musician who figured out how not to get swindled out of all the money she earned in the first place" —rajandelman.bsky.social
“XLVII
CILIATED REEF WHERE I WAS BORN
according to the chronicles and folders
with familiar lips illustrated
in second grace.
Ciliated archipelago, you lose your islands to the depths,
l; to the bottom, my archipelago!
You put up with the calls
of the highway, the way they try us out
and we don’t give in for anything.
Noticing the closed eyelids,
unfeathered little grownups, devouring blue bonbons,
old rats start cackling.
Their eyelids closed, as if, when we’re born
already wasn’t time yet.
The altar goes, the candle so
nothing hapens to my mother,
and for me who’ll be with the years, if God
wanted, Bishop, Pope, Saint, or perhaps
just a headache of sacred columns.
And those tiny hands that boat themselves
grasping something floating,
not caring to hold on.
And it’s 1 already.”
—David Smith’s Trilce
I saw that show when it came to Arlington.
“Fragmentary Stars
So wide the wells of darkness sink,
These having their own light, that are lost with the light,
Appear immersed in mournfulness over the night,
Like things that in sleep will come to the mind’s brink:
The bright Aldebaran, and seven that hover,
Seven wild and pale, clouding their brightness over,
And the flame that fell with summer, and the rose of stars returning,
Like tears piercing the sky;
Glittering without cause, for the piece of a legend,
Wept, I know not why.
O lovely and forgotten,
Gathered only of sleep,
All night upon the lids set burning,
Shaken from the lids at morning.”
—Léonie Adams
My blog is a ship in a bottle.
"I never expect much; it remains a great honor to be read by anyone at all."
“The real end of the world is the destruction of the human spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on." —Karl Kraus, Selected Aphorisms (tr Harry Zohn, 1976)
"alizarin Alcatraz"
Urizen gold-gazeproof
gathering sludge trudgemiles
flight of thinks
scattering frore
what anal sex · was to the 80s
same barricade surfeit
insane plane of longing
rising sun
dog reckoning
this turn where Ebola · guest bed stayed
All the wars, all the destruction of the 20c, & our society has learned only two things: how to politicize resentment, & how to monetize suffering.
"terroir of the abyss" (for Dolly)
listen to the winds of light
implicit in the ragged gloom
ev'ry other ray is crime
& fraught with loot
pealing from the belvedere
derelict & lavender foam
positions teem
this outcome has been seen before
listen to the winds
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Moloch fed & feeding
sparks no joy
soon loud hoods
hide stain
"I dipped a toe into the new Lake America and now they have to wash me off with Dawn like those ducks" —@dly.bsky.social
"McDonald’s is to America as the aqueducts were to Rome."
"Texas’s drag ban was found to be unconstitutional this morning and one of the plaintiffs who brought the suit was an Austin-based drag queen who often impersonates Dolly
Dolly was named in the final judgement itself and after hearing about the lawsuit, she sent that drag queen a signed guitar" —@okie.gay
accidie takes practice
as smoky frames unspool
one carps at each momentous
application of the rule
