( via )

Hell Hath no Fury.

"The Faery's Repose

Her quilts were woven
   of clover and glass;
her pillow was stuffed
   with daffodil-down;
garmented in
   a gossamer gown,
she slept to the dribble
   of a sandglass."

—Bret van der Brink

The Resurgance of Rhyme.

"While researching Plath I also learned that she used memorandum paper from Smith College to write The Bell Jar. After the book was accepted she used the other side of the paper to write poems that became Ariel." —aqeeb via

Unlocking new levels of cursedness.

( via / via )

Orson Welles' 1936 Macbeth.

"And all the windy clamor of the daws
About her hollow turret..."

—Tennyson

A Literary Map of America.

      "To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
   Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
   Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
   In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the 'Amen,' ere thy poppy throws
   Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
   Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
   Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul."

—John Keats (partly analyzed here)

PH-218.

( via / via )

Churches.

"I Stood On A Tower (1865)

I stood on a tower in the wet,
And New Year and Old Year met,
And winds were roaring and blowing;
And I said, 'O years, that meet in tears,
Have you all that is worth the knowing?
Science enough and exploring,
Wanderers coming and going,
Matter enough for deploring,
But aught that is worth the knowing?
Seas at my feet were flowing,
Waves on the shingle pouring,
Old year roaring and blowing,
And New Year blowing and roaring."

—Tennyson

The Movement of Characters Across a Page.

"Mais oui, Bill Knott

'Pain passes for sunlight at some depths' "

—@poemskontsa.bsky.social

Duns Scotus's Oxford.

( me / via )

Styxwharf, Charon Wherry.

"He has a theory, of course, that the poem, if it’s just in a book, exists like a musical story that wants to be played. It’s just on paper, and it doesn’t exist unless someone performs it or performs the score with an orchestra or on a piano or a ukulele or something. And a poem doesn’t have much existence unless someone recites it, someone reads it to himself or aloud. Preferably read it aloud to somebody, because that’s when it comes into existence again, after just being recovered from storage, kind of, by reading it. But whether it does all the things that he intended is another question." —Phliip Whalen via

What If Light Isn't Travelling Either?

"dusky pink rose
in a dark green vase
my tender gift
for mom to behold at supper
spoon after spoon, slowly"

—@evecastle.bsky.social

Weather Report.

( via / me )

Plath's Tarot.

"Beach Blanket Balzac"

newsreels fading
fodder-crowned
snow footsteps' foinline
wrought

Checking to see if Outlook is back up.

"Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet."

—TomRobbins, Still Life with Woodpecker via @artsalad.bsky.social

"Environmental destruction is so often described as something that happens rather than something somebody does>"

(via / via )

The Mulai.

"Uber-chic phrase: 'seraphic cherub'."

—Anthony Etherin

Colom at Medgar Evers' house.

"Trumpiana Deadnamed"

evaporated labyrinth
still carries...carillon
as if beacon barking
because because—gauzerip—
foam tracery, runes fissile
affordance stooge-tragic
& this old song, angular-
cursive, still hurls us

through deepspace chill, chipmunk
channelled, mask of gaskets
& i should pick patterns
apart from ruse-newsreels
should wise up, in warrens
of hunkerdown, worn ductwork
but this old song saddens
with its sorry-ass lyrics

that lostness i know, nestled
next to, as wars torsioned
the whole hapless sepulchre
nor did all of us heal from
& the drab iconic drachmas
adroitly coined witness
for an old song's hover
in the arduous remaining

evaporated labyrinth

From the West-Eastern Divan.

( me / via )

Swept away downstream.

"suddenly to have been dead a long time"

loud claim, amidst minstrels
this brokeback art
lost where horizons smear

password at the ghost checkpoint
all the songs bad covers

citadel
on spiral wings
teabag torn
leaks into the cup of tea

Grant's right-hand man.

"All that we have forgotten about narrative steals back into narrative and watches us with shining eyes." —Lisa Robertson, Debbie: An Epic (1997)

That's when i reach for my salt swatter.

( via / via )

"An eight-person collective of Montreal misfits that still debates every major decision and, aside from a booking agent and an accountant, remains largely outside of the music industry’s structures and strictures, they are the kind of band that should no longer exist, that the demands of the market should have eliminated long ago."

"sometimes I feel my life
is like a river running through
the Year of the Cat"

—Al Stewart

C'est pas prudent.

"Pools emit red now.
An inward tenet drawn in
a wonder: time's loop."

—Pedro Poitevin via

The purple-pink corona glows with a hazy radiance, while a dark central coronal hole is the source of high-speed solar wind.

( via / via )

" 'For that matter,' he said, 'you could say the same thing about novels.'."

"i have nothing but slop art, & i must scream"

mortal ronin
white cloud dodge
marked alley
woodstain newel
hoist debt

The Moon in Your Hands.

"I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story."

- Virginia Woolf, THE WAVES via @alinastefanescu

Like Air.

( via / me )

"Hate all the same things I hated when I was eighteen, also some others."

"...there is
no aim but paraded hunger"

—Debbie: an Epic

Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism.

      "DJ Arrest Quota"

dark shards cohere, fishhook
the shorn hour's furnace:
      is it safe
   serious quiz
game alone · in the parking garage

is it only art portals
ev'rywhere eye-buttons
      Brownian
   abrupt swirl-trail
drama in the flicker · on the drab sheet

trail as of old, trawling
tryst icy, loose gravel
      marks where fell
   not even a name
railroad crossing · wreck hauled off

to specify spiral
from spurious whirring
      unsought smoke
   amidst the smirr
on fire escape · clove memento

mahogany narghilay
or nonce expedient
      words rising
   to the ceiling

On Some Shells Found Inland.

( via / via )

Ricardo Reis collected.

"tisane"

marble among · mind-shadows
breath armature · broken pathways
low light · in the tilted room
a box · made of bombed playgrounds
a cough is a secret
that the dogs bark to show

"You didn’t need to choose a brand so much as a side..."

"literary fiction is when your advance is $100k and you sell 5,000 copies and genre fiction is when your advance is $5k and you sell 100,000 copies." —@andymboyle.bsky.social

The Xylophone Player V.

( via / via )

"I'm going to put on Satantango and tell my kids it's Harry Potter."

"Even the simplest journey was only the superficial evidence--the diagram--of another, more difficult one." —M John Harrison, The Course of the Heart (1992)

Bird is so metal.

"team Moloch"

gray cauldron
cardboard
six foot step
cool thousand
mile teeth
choice

Too Soft.

( via / via )

Universal Soldier.

"a game of blindfold football"

complicated symptoms
captured in a snap
years of war outnumber
peace plus recent spate—
the sacrificial victims of the state

complicated rapture
cold battlefields rolled up
in the coruscating dawn
spawn of flycloud-clyte
the sacrificial victims of the state

I'm sorry, we don't have the drugs for this anymore.

"If I had a 'familiar' it would resemble less a nervous exotic animal than a chipped enamel sink. You would not find it on my shoulder but in its natural environment at the bottom of a derelict canal in the industrial Midlands. Our connection would be the source of my special powers, which would neither mimic nor metaphorise its qualities but be unmistakably sink-related. I would feel no emotion towards it even when events caused us to be separated and tortured. A sink can feel nothing. That is one of the baseline or default qualities of a sink. But wherever I went, I would know that out there, bedded in the mud beneath the slow black water, never more than a mile or two from my present location, its energies focussed, site-specific and calm, there my sink would be" —M John Harrison, Wish I Was Here (2023)

Green Shirt.

( me / via )

Exhale.

"Dwellers in precarity must provide themselves with a narrative future." --M John Harrison

Balkan Cosmology.

      "epinician ode"

clues from the quisling clinic
reclaimed polder, goldflake
      innocence
   bullied inchmeal
steer into glare · that glass house of thunder

shadowy shark deadbolt
pale shroud of the tailspin
      weedy marge
   blindfold amerce
steer into glare · that gleet-dripping ingot

stale cerulean story
stirious measurements
      of the sky's
   arval feedback
steer into glare · that gloss on Revelations

Untitled melting Loackme.

( via / via )

Tanka.

"Mina's lamps"

scarlet whispers
flown
book stained by wheels
moonscrawl clown joist
past

At Netherne Hospital.

Thousand Year Reich, built from the bubbles on an idiot's lips.

Not to mention cats.

( via / via )

"In 2008, her Oramics Machine – an electro-mechanical interface built for the use of Oramics, thought lost – was discovered in a barn in France..."

"Popular posters of the Kefahuchi Tract were taped up on every wall. The New Men had some kind of cult, centred round the idea that this was where they had originated. It was as sad as everything else about them. Every child knew where they came from and it wasn't there." --M John Harrison, Light (2003)

Peak cinema.

"schadenfreude & fumes"

unidentifiable cry
in the Brutalist labyrinth
find my car by the bumper sticker
among the other gray cars

grackle crosses my path
like someone with a purpose
unidentifiable cry
in the Brutalist labyrinth

Verstiegenheit.

( via / via )

"Nothing is more important than summer."

"Spleen (Baudelaire: Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux)

I’m like the King of some damp, rainy clime,
Grown impotent and old before my time,
Who scorns the bows and scrapings of his teachers
And bores himself with hounds and all such creatures.
Naught can amuse him, falcon, steed, or chase:
No, not the mortal plight of his whole race
Dying before his balcony. The tune,
Sung to this tyrant by his pet buffoon,
Irks him. His couch seems far more like a grave.
Even the girls, for whom all kings seem brave,
Can think no toilet up, nor shameless rig,
To draw a smirk from this funereal prig.
The sage who makes him gold, could never find
The baser element that rots his mind.
Even those blood-baths the old Romans knew
And later thugs have imitated too,
Can’t warm this skeleton to deeds of slaughter,
Whose only blood is Lethe’s cold, green water."

—tr Roy Campbell

I Have Faith in You. (When my wife played this, i thought it was a Leonard Cohen song i hadn't heard.)

"I consider the poetry reading to be the actual mode of existence of the poem, the actual place where it comes into its final existence. So that the written poem in the book is like the score for the poem..." —Gary Snyder via

"This is how fascists think and act; they meme themselves into being."

( me / via )

"Cynthia hijacked me, a loser, who desire/ had never touched before..."

To be the dancing ape, not the ape that bands together to kill.

Tanka.

"GLP/GPT"

the everflow
squidveil
& lodge pool
1 could stock mouse joints

Raptor.

( via / via )

Autumn Landscape with a River.

“Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death;
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.”

—Christina Rossetti

I don't pay any attention to the words in Italian opera, either.

Lack of self awareness IS THE BRAND.

I enjoyed reading this, as i would anyone (so rare these days) willing to give that era serious consideration; however, being one who has read deeply of its poetry as well as its prose, i'm baffled that you don't mention one who is clearly (in hindsight) the preeminent Victorian poet: Christina Rossetti.

( me / via )

Little Eye.

"a modern retelling of The Cask of Amontillado where Montresor tells Fortunato that they’re going to the Criterion Closet" —@theworldsgreatestwriter.com

Vegetative electron microscopy.

"adaptogen"

send a freenzied yawp up high
& crown the work of silence & dust
catculdesac heist
botox Melania
yawp up high
phishtexted Sunday
the crime scene oh so tidy
& spoonerized arch-malison

Love is Blue.

( via nightcafe / me )

Crimson tears.

   "love, lines, angles & shrines"

counter-Schicksaltaglodyte
refolding more correctly
imagine a society
just starting
      to get light
stilts unbuilt yet, relic
vote-sticker unvectored
i evade catering
coming to rest rhyme scheme
respite made of vespers

standing close to staycease
stilts assembling scrimshaw
plastic drivethrough. plowversts
applaud choice of gaudy
goldenbathed storefronts
baroque blackbird wingbeats

A Storm in a Stamp.

"After the Armistice Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to make large oil paintings as a form of remembrance, including The Menin Road. It shows a notorious stretch of country, ‘the most dreaded and disastrous locality of any area in any of the theatres of War’, Nash wrote." —John-Paul Stonard via

Let's hope and pray.

( via/ me )

Diaper Daddy.

"There's no running-from that is not a running-to." —The Rouse

A Salvific Kettledrum.

coming to rest
round putsch
highway stop
decoy
at staunch rote

Notes Toward an Ending.

( via / me )

"I think about that sometimes. How something can be over and still be on its way."

      "Low Tide

The birds are gathering over the dunes,
   Swerving and wheeling in shifting flight,
A thousand wings sweep darkly by
   Over the dunes and out of sight.

Why did you bring me down to the sea
   With the gathering birds and the fish-hawk flying,
The tide is low and the wind is hard,
   Nothing is left but the old year dying.

I wish I were one of the gathering birds,
   Two sharp black wings would be good for me —
When nothing is left but the old year dying,
   Why did you bring me down to the sea?"

—Sara Teasdale via @sallythomas

Waste Land Limericks.

“Of the welkin king, O irked imp!” —Sid Basu via

Staircase.

( me / via )

Lobocraspis griseifusa.

"The great Karl Popper: I think that there is only one way to science - or to philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it and to live with it happily, till death do ye part - unless you should meet another and even more fascinating problem or unless, indeed, you should obtain a solution. But even if you do obtain a solution, you may then discover, to your delight, the existence of a whole family of enchanting, though perhaps difficult, problem children, for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days." —@britishmythology

"A path through the predicament is to remember that right now is not the only era that artists have been working. Artists have worked in all eras, we may well be the defining workers of humanity."

"diagetic payroll"

still can't go back to not caring
court reporter for the Cthulhucene

Excel animation.

( via / via )

Midterms.

last-minute aasvogel
divebombing
nothing about this date

there were surely things that fell
how would now be diff'rent

rain of droppig margents
i've checked
nothing about this date

turquoise chill
how would now be diff'rent
last-minute aasvogel

A flute unseen.

Bezoar poems are the best poems.

Carving a frog fully in the round from this material is doing something the stone was not supposed to allow.

( via / oil painting by me )

Young Magpie Catches a Grub.

When i was young i much prized the idea that a painting had secrets that could be read like a book if you were patient enough.

"Throughout his wanderings, from Greece to Ireland, America, the Caribbean, and, finally, Japan, Hearn never felt rooted in any one place, in any one time, which makes him an apt guide for human experience at its eerie and fascinating extremes."

   "Prison

Man said:
Blessed are the birds in their cages
For they, at least, know the limits
Of their prisons."

—Mourid Barghouti via

"Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times."