"Night of Unshed Tears
Skies have been bound with such pent airs,
The moon, that mad for brighness stares
Off the black bitter peak of night,
That purest curving crystal even,
Which wasted to a horn trails light,
Moves veiled and brooding over heaven
With cloud like heavy waters flowing,
And every burnished star sunk deep.
But though the heavens be proud, they weep.
The heaven has wept and thou hast known
Orion, thr round liquid moon,
And all washt brightness showing."
--Those Not Elect
"Water-bulrush, water-willow
From the margin of the hollow
Shade thy bed and shape thy pillow,
Time be slow and apple-mellow..."
--Rolfe Humphries
"I think of all my pills as male, a fact that I have not yet disclosed to my psychiatrist." --The Drowning Girl
"I sat, solemn,
I lived as a reliever.
If all is in us,
I sat, solemn,
I erased it.
Erased insane poem:
sad as me;
open as nides* are.
Tides are in me lost,
as I, sun is ill.
A fire veil era:
sad evil in me lost,
as I."
--@merlinaacevedo
( * a brood or nest of pheasants)
"Let these now be para-noetic strategies to restore a sense of self, transfigure destinies emergent through psychic and somatic experience of architectonic place, space,time, and heighten sensitivity to the liquidity of surface and kinesthetic non-locality withideas that engage theses of the Cosmos, to espouse a thriving socius/polity; still somewhat of a mirage perhaps, but an audacious shimmering bridge between wave and particle, by far the two august languages of reciprocity." --Lissa Wolsak
"The miserable
The day is about to come; wind
up your arm, look for yourself under
the mattress, stand again
on your head, to walk straight.
The day is about to come, put on your coat.
The day is about to come; grip
your large intestine tight in your hand, reflect,
before you meditate, for it is horrible
when misfortune falls on one
and one's tooth falls thoroughly.
You have to eat, but, I tell myself,
do not grieve, for grief and graveside
sobbing do not belong to the poor;
mend yourself, remember,
trust your white thread, smoke, call roll
on your chain and keep it behind your portrait.
The day is about to come, put on your soul.
The day is about to come; they go by,
they have pened an eye in the hotel,
lashing it, beating it with one of your mirrors...
are you trembling? It is the remote state of your forehead
and the recent nation of your stomach.
They're still snoring... What a universe is carried away by this snore!
And in what state your pores are left, on judging it!
With so many twos, my god! how alone you are!
The day is about to come, put on your dream.
The day is about to come, I repeat
through the oral organ of your silence
and it is urgent to take the left with your hunger
and to take the right with your thirst; in any case,
abstain from being poor with the rich,
stir
your cold, for my warmth becomes part of it, beloved victim.
The day is about to come, put on your body.
The day is about to come;
the morning,the sea, the meteor, go
after your weariness, with banners,
and, because of your classic pride, the hyenas
count their steps to the beat of the jackass,
the baker's wife thinks about you,
the butcher thinks about you, groping
the ax in which the steel
and the iron and the metal are imprisoned; never forget
tht during Mass there are no friends.
The day is about to come, put on your sun.
The day is now coming; double
your breath, triple
your rancorous goodness
and scorn fear, nexus and emphasis,
for you, as one can observe in your crotch, the evil man
being, god! immortal,
have dreamed tonight that you were living
on nothing and dying from everything..."
--Eshleman & Barcia's Vallejo
I am Homesick and Tired Without You.
"season"
1.
antelucan takings
perturb me in the burbclave
staring at bills' boredom
of bale-ago hailing;
unpaid-for, still, studies
2.
better coffee
at the first hospital
than the second
leaving in unaccustomed sunlight
my walk so slow it shocked me
3.
so much farther
into the darkness
my glimmering leader
learning so slowly
the forces that made that scribble
not the formal quirks that drew me
4.
quagmire scout
of the dummy i play
& of the sage
nature fakers
where the gravel meets the scree
"Trappers and hunters have perished in the icy wastes of the arctic to bring the ermines and sables in which these queens are robed; divers have been torn by sharks to bring up their pearls from the depths of tropic seas, and miners have been crushed in the deep earth to dig their blazing diamonds; chemists have blown themselvces up in search for their cosmetics and dyes, and seamstresses have grown blind embroidering the elaborate designs which twinkle upon their silken ankles. All this concentrated in one brief glory-march [on the Hollywood Red Carpet]--do you wonder that heads are high and glances regal?" --Oil!
Civilization Phaze iii (minus talking).
"Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass." --White Noise
the long view's
telescope
keeps getting knocked from my hands
fugitive blooms
harvested in the bomb-hush
& with the stitches out
Bright flash observed on Jupiter. (via @arrroberts)
"CYCLE REMOTE
I wanted to give the world back
to the Earth, yet I missed the program
and could not find it anywhere,
not on cable
or any streaming service. Baby blue,
a robin’s egg began to chirp,
something far off
moving its throat to what sounded
like yearning. To long for worms or
the tiniest bugs
is to hold a cubic centimeter of Death
inside one’s heart. A rock
and its shadow
mean immutability and expression
simultaneously. Push
the button harder. Push it again and,
if no flashing light emerges
and the horizon
remains blank, look for the source
of its energy. We live into
and through
our bodies. We pay a small toll for
every poem we level at
the world.
Making love requires we be patient
and allow the glow plug
on the diesel engine
to warm slowly in the snowy carport.
If one is alone late at night,
one feels for the future
with one’s tongue. What good will
an unbroken mirror perform
if the last man on earth refuses to see?"
--Gordon Hilgers
"the swimming domain of sorrow
records another shadow"
--Washburn & Guillemin's Celan
"Apparently
some movie studios
are reintroducing
mask mandates
but really this is no surprise
after all movie studios
know all about sequels
in which the supposedly
defeated monster
comes back yet again."
--@PlaguePoems
"Word of the Day: EXCALCEATE (v.) to remove one’s shoes" --@HaggardHawks
A joke about the first edition of the Iliad, & the real megillah...which starts around $3K. (Oh, you want the Greek first edition? That one sold at Christie's for $89,000 (in 1994).
"Sometimes I wonder whether alien space vessels are inherently fuzzy & out-of-focus (that would be terrifying)." --@neiltyson
"From nine spools is your Lachesis-woven thread."
"If You Fall Asleep at the Wheel
It’s not the noise but the air.
It’s not the traffic or the heat but the clouds.
It’s not the lightning or the rain but the thinking.
It’s not the insomnia but the night terror.
It’s not the pain but the swelling.
It’s not the mask. It’s the tear."
Also, "Labelye went over-budget and over-deadline, struggling to get his new caisson technology to work, losing in total five boats over the course of the building with horrifying casualties among the workmen..." Scholars writing for other scholars in a dead language is not so different, after all, from poets writing poems that can only be understood rightly by another poet.
"across the street
shadows of
the black iron gate...
my shadow
reminds me
im lonely"
--@senryuchest
"Christopher Nolan’s attention to detail in Oppenheimer was so thorough I’m giving him a hall pass on this one:
July 16, 1945, 5:30am Los Alamos, New Mexico is in full dawn of summer twilight. But cinematically, the atomic explosion looks more striking against the dark of night" --@neiltyson
"It's fascinating and depressing how both the entertainment industry and higher education have become dominated by a parasitic class of managers who are just blatantly hostile to the fundamental missions of the institutions and workers they are supposed to represent." --@reluctantlychad
"flood plain
inch by inch shorter
the bulrushes
like this long bridge we
once built between us"
--an'ya
Haiku market news & deadlines.
"Thomas Ligotti on Philosophy
'All the systems and speculations of philosophy— The Will, the Thing-in-itself, the Ubermensch, the concept of Nothingness, and so on, are merely characters in a series melodrama.' " --@alien_ecologies
Fluid Forms Beyond the Utopia.
"The Lineaments of Gratified Desire"
He retired to the sea.
There he found what he needed:
a surf-screen to shine his thoughts on,
a solitude wide and dark enough and seamless;
rocks to build the theater physical.
Only the gulls saw stone pile upon stone,
like the identical days of his stone exile
converging to a point just short of the sun
the round irregular walls.
He said the tower would give him a place to write
in the peace he'd sacrificed everything for,
but his typewriter's mute, and the tower continues to rise.
(1981)
"no shade
but
the hawk’s shadow"
--R G Rader
The story of Halyx & the Mefi thread that led me to it (via a newer Defunctland thread).
Of course, "Halyx" is really a biostimulant based on hyaluronic acid of high molecular weight (1.0 – 1.5 x 106 Dalton), produced by bacteria Streptococcus equi, formulated at a concentration of 40 mg/2ml in a physiological buffer, sterile, biodegradable and isotonic.
I think there's two legitimate Halyx swag items here. The pin.
"The cargo cult humanities. An ongoing disenchantment with humanist methodologies and a corresponding desire to import new, readymade 'ways of seeing' from other disciplines. Which are credulously attributed with 'reality-seeing' powers far in advance of what they can actually do." --@ghostofchristo1
Halyx on Youtube. Tribute band. Halyx Rising. Another song about Halyx.
It's also a mouthwash, an ottoman, & a video game...
Dwellers of the Cubicles, Meet your new Manager.
"The longing imps grasp tomes of old
And rant therefrom each damned one's name."
--Betelguese
Baharnoth
falls ahead dark
orb anthem
to stagger where
uffish walg
nothing but a name
a fishhook in the air
a stubbornly ripe bend
Watched the Sinéad documentary with Melanie. Gradually i realized: backward, priest-ridden IRELAND has abortion now & America DOESN'T.
Also seemed to confirm my surmise that she was on the spectrum.
One Sings, the Other Doesn't. ☆☆☆☆
"There's a strong founding father element in game creation, chunks of code that turn up over and over, appearing on your screen as wooden crates, railway sidings, rusted metal sheds; vaguely identifiable South West Seaboard US cityscapes: but that doesn't completely explain it. Why are the games so sure?, I wondered, somewhat spooked. The Apocalypse mooted in Fall Out isn't seriously 'Nuclear'. It could just as well have been Zombie Plague that did the damage. 'Nuclear' is a convention, a shorthand. It covers a lot of things, the intractable truth about how we got where we are now. What we see ahead, and how poor in solutions we find ourselves." --Gwyneth Jones on Livejournal, 9/2013
"X.
Pristine and ultimate stone of groundless
adventure has just died
soul and all, October lodging with child.
From three months of absence, ten of sweet.
How destiny,
mitred monodactyl, dies laughing.
How behind they oust pairs
of opposites. How number peeks
from under every avatar.
How whales plunge to doves.
How the latter cleave their beaks
cubiquitous to the third wing.
How we saddle up, before monotonous haunches.
We tow ten months toward ten,
toward one more beyond.
Two at least are still in diapers.
And the three of absence.
And gestation's nine.
There is not the slightest violence.
The patient sits up
and seated preens tranquil pomades."
--Magda Bogin's Trilce
"Finnegans Wake can indeed not be translated, it can only be rewritten..."
"Posthumous Letter to Thomas Merton
Unlike you who discovered solitude
To be 'Forerunner of the Word of God',
I search and find it no more than the soul's
Chafing against itself like any dog
Rubbing its mangy rump against a tree.
I might have asked you how to bridge the gap
Between our two alonenesses, between
Yours, self-elected, freely chosen, and
Mine blindly blundered into from the womb,
At first not even seen for what it was,
And then, once recognized, raged at, kicked at,
And cursed. Perhaps there is a gulf between them,
The gulf dividing mind to which God is
A harmony, from mind to which God seems
The discord, shattering tidy tunes of thought,
Yet no, devout monk though you were, your God
Was not a mystery emasculated,
Poked at through barbed wire meshes of the creeds,
Led out well-groomed and curried for the faithful
To adulate from their safe vantage point.
Now that your words have smoked away to silence,
I dare not put an answer on your tongue,
As though a devotee had stuffed your mouth
With speeches that you never made. I only
Write you these lines, less poem than presumption,
Addressed in care of my bewilderment.
I ask you, self-styled marginal man,
Do not we sufferers always inhabit
The edges of the world as pioneers
To prove how much humanity can bear
And still be human, experimenters in
The bloody laboratory of our lives.
Taking and testing every pain tossed from
The pulsing cosmos, fragments we reshape,
As best as the materials allow,
To buttress God's cathedrals build from chaos?"
--Vassar Miller, If I Could Sleep Deeply Enough (1974)
"We conclude that Betelgeuse should currently be in a late phase (or near the end) of the core carbon burning. After carbon is exhausted in the core, a core-collapse leading to a supernova explosion is expected in a few tens years." (Something else i've been waiting to see for decades.) Some pushback.
"Perhaps the effect even of Shakespeare's poetry might have been yet greater, had he not counteracted himself; and we might have been more interested in the distresses of his heroes, had we not been so frequently diverted by the jokes of his buffoons." --The Rambler, 156.
"Jersey City has made several strong bids for fame, with but moderate success, but its claim to distinction at last is firmly established. Nothing like this possibly could have come from any other place." --Los Angeles Herald 4-18-1909 (via)
"Entanglement
Among vetch and dandelions,
hollow shells, inhabitants gorged
by blackbirds whose songs tremble
in summer’s heat, you emerge -
wrap around my calves, bind
my arms, entwine my throat, caress
my neck, my ears – insidious
as haar that creeps in from the sea
to steal the sun. Overhead, siren
insistence of oystercatchers, while
beneath the hawthorn bush
a magpie tilts its head. Across
years and continents,
we cannot decohere."
--Marian Christie
"Betelgeuse is continuing to behave mysteriously."
9 Examples of Brutalism in Film.
"Poem
I first loved you
second to
your gentleness
like the blind who
divide their lives into
dark and dark I
have you and your gentleness
as a detail in a painting frames that painting
in the often
memory, your face
is surrounded by your eyes
unafraid
of the grays of gentleness
but better than your gentleness
I love your harshness
the harshness
when you talk about that prison capitalism
when you vow never to stop fighting
never
until each woman and man is free
until each woman and man is in the custody
of their gentleness"
--Bill Knott
"...there is another way of handling the novel, with a readerly focus not on obstruction but on flow. To read Finnegans Wake by, as it were, defocusing one's readerly attention, much as one does when looking at one of those
'Magic Eye' pictures that used to be so popular ten years ago or so. Read after this fashion the novel moves considerably more rapidly, with its organising principle not one of compacted verbal pointillisme but rather of drunkenness, where words gets slurred and people utter unintentional malapropisms and
yet still get broadly understood..." --Adam Roberts's introduction to Pervigilium Finneganis
"Volapük couldn't stop thinking about Poliespo."
Visit Tinkinswood & other virtual sites in Wales. (via stephanie burgis on mastodon)
"man ruins man: verse
as we cease our ruin,
we inure our anomie.
we are our own ruse."
--@primearepo (via @marian_v_o)
Ingordigiousness & others.
Delft city
affordance death
maintain frith
cam'ra ready
the MiG bloody
Delft city
unstrung guitars
my dead dears
for the Party
darb Vivaldi
Delft city
ev'rything cracked
cellar bricked
grenade caddy
cash confetti
sip from Delft
grugprab amid ease · burns
stipple the far hills
a cheery little ditty
as we prepare for work
doesn't hurt to check
in '91 i was thirty-three
crumb-profligate as old toast
nothing compares
pearls from the long-ago
countdown at my own desk
the tie that ev'ry day i tied
& shortwave in the truncate eve,
cassettes on a boombox
& half of what i made i didn't keep
"I miss being able to judge someone based on their CD collection" -- @dreamthievin@mstdn.party
On twitter as at the coffeehouse i shouldn't mistake for the Commons what is, after all, only a place of business.
.🟎.
"Midsummer
This starbreak is celestial air,
Just silver; earthlight, dying amber.
Underneath an arch of pallor
Summer keeps her brightened chamber.
Bright beauty of the risen dust
And deep flood-mark of beauty pressed
Up from earth in lovely flower,
High against my lonely breast;
Thou rhythm like the changing moon's,
The catch to which the waters play,
That as they kiss moon-silver sink,--
As soon to spurn the baffled clay;
Only before the waters fall
Is Paradise shore for gaining now.
The grasses drink the berry-bright dew;
The small fruits jewel all the bough.
Heart-breaking summer beyond taste,
Ripeness and frost are soon to know;
But might such color hold the west,
And time, and time, be honey-slow!"
--Léonie Adams
