( via / via )

Utopia or Planetoid Luzifer?

"YESTERDAY

Yesterday the wind came to the bush,
Knelt and prayed in the bush,
Bled on the briar as it danced
Its incantation, yesterday.

Yesterday we walked in sackcloth
To the water, you and I,
Shrouding the rude skeleton of thought
In rough-clothed whisper, yesterday.

Yesterday I knew you and I loved,
I loved the soft wave licking at your feet,
You running on the sand, the gentle scrape
Of you upon my breathing, yesterday.

And now this endless calm.
Today, tomorrow, a tiny bush enflamed;
The far dark whimper of the hearth
Away, a light, alas, and gone
The mercy of a gentle rain."

--Lorita Whitehead

"Bookshops will soon no longer sell books, but only book-adjacent gifts, book-related merch and subscription cards to ebook servers."

"...you get used to living among palimpsests." --The Recognitions

"What will these projects reveal about what we used architecture to do, to project, to signify? I’m afraid they’ll evince that we were happy to use architecture to reinforce our sense of powerlessness in the face of huge injustice, that we were happy to be complicit in the hollowing-out of the civic realm, that the best we could do was hold up the status quo with the language of gentleness." (via @saintsoftness)

( via via feuilleton / via )

The art of Jordan Belson.

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty." --Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

Tech_alley.

"Memoriter

Ovals of opal on dislustred seas,
Skyshine, and all that indolent afternoon
No clash of arms, no shouting on the breeze;
Only the reeds moaned soft or high their empty rune.

The paladins played chess and did not care,
The crocus pierced the turf with random dart.
Then twanged a cord. Through space, from Oultremer
That other arrow veered toward your heart."

--Charles Spear

Sidewalks and Skeletons live in 2015.

( via / via )

"We were spoofing the idea of the concept album, but in a fun way that didn’t totally mock it."

gilded age engorgement
a good thing "more pudding"
falls among amusing
mass noises & pastimes

of a shipwreck rapture

Portrait of gone-feral C3PO.

"If our present suffering ever leads to a revival, this will not be brought about through slogans but in silence and moral loneliness, through pain, misery, and terror, in the profoundest depths of each man's spirit." --Simone Weil, "The Responsibility of Writers", in: The Simone Weil Reader

Yellow, black & white-quake.

( via / via )

Worlds within worlds.

"It is ironical that very nearly everyone glorifies Rome and admires her as the civilizer of the human race, while at the same time very nearly everyone is filled with horror by the thought that a similar phenomenon [Hitler] might appear in our day." --Simone Weil (1939)

Galactic Insects.

the humans, in their wisdom,
find neighbor-foes to fight;
which does not stop them finding
closer bones to pick

for any kind of diff'rence
can be made to blame
the "enemy" bug is fruitful
& the outlook grim

but let it be the thinking
that makes the other strange
quick they clepe it crazy
& all your rights infringe

the Nazis left no symbol
like pink or yellow star
to stand for those autistics
they hastened to destroy

but we're still puzzle-people
a syndrome to prevent
to torture into faking
as otherwise unfit

& made an insult wider
than public'lly we're known
first plied with pills when younger
then after, cast alone

to ponder this jerk circus
from a distant planet's remove
the only ones of the clownfolk
who weren't told how to live

Wizard & bubbles.

( via / via )

Dream waterfall.

         "X.

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
   Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
   Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
   One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
   Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
   Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
   Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
   To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
   Fare on our long fool's errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
   My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
   We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
   To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
   Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
   Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
   Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale."

--A E Housman, Last Poems (1922)

"I’m not sure I have a stable identity—or perhaps it only emerges through an engagement with language."

"Each being cries in silence to be read otherwise. Not to be deaf to these cries." --notebooks of Simone Weil

"And so black folk know the name of at least one black poet."

( via / via )

The history of wearable feelings and other sentient garments.

"We cannot know if there would have been a Romanesque science. If there had been, no doubt it would have been to our own what Gregorian chant is to Wagner." --Simone Weil

SB #3.

street so torn up
   i must take
no better luck
   for this scornful ape

   happy to carp
or offer critique
   as the sky grows dark
& the plight deep

"What inspired you to create a graphic novel using AI?

( me / via )

Thick as a Brick. The whole thing.

"Doomsday

The end of everything approaches;
I hear it coming
Loud as the wheels of painted coaches
On turnpikes drumming;
Loud as the pomp of plumy hearses,
Or pennoned charges;
Loud as when every oar reverses
Venetian barges;
Loud as the caves of covered bridges
Fufilled with rumble
Of hooves; and loud as cloudy ridges
When glaciers tumble;
Like creeping thunder this continues
Diffused and distant,
Loud in our ears and in our sinews,
Insane, insistent;
Loud as a lion scorning carrion
Further and further;
Loud as the ultimate loud clarion
Or the first murther."

--Elinor Wylie

"Our society has attached a meaning to greatness that is not as far away from Hitler’s as it would like to believe, despite our cant about democracy and freedom."

"Apostrophe catastrophes; evolution & Diana." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

"The label describes it as 'music for you to listen to while you walk through cemeteries alone at 3am'..."

( via / via )

This is what that sound looks like in my brain… 😳v.

"War is not a proposal; it is the refusal of all proposals. War is not an institution; it is the breakdown of all institutions. It is not something that we all agree to have; it is something that we do have when we do not agree." --@GKCdaily

Sounds from a black hole.

bat-winged shadeword
strands · out of the midden
Nephilimbergery
& demanding license

cardboard garage floor
screen dims
while i am reading it
hierarchies & even if

having made it out alive
at unchanging 4 AM
there is no one left

bat-winged shadeword
cardboard garage floor

Reissue of Crazy Horse Never Died.

( me / via )

"Translation is fundamentally an ethical undertaking."

haunta vau dib
varaidi
hebula savat

gon esocyada

rah gonien
asyuca barai

( 'during the heat wave/ i made/ a sentence diagram// then it changed// not now/ the dog days' )

Blue amoeba.

"INTERSTELLAR WILD (Anagrams)

We speak of the interstellar wild
like we aren’t part of it. She dwells
in we who still sparkle—a fettered,
skeletal star. We flow in her tepid
earth, like weeds, patterns of will
personified. We talk, shatter well—
written like Death’s pale flowers."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Letter #1.

( via / via )

𝚌𝚢𝚌𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚗 ᵖⁱˣᵉˡ 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚜 🔁.

"O Dian, guardian of the groves,
Invoked with cries at night throughout
The cities where the roads are forked..."

--Mooney's Hosidius Geta

Sell Power Tools by Mail on Venus!

1.
the rats are coming
the werewolves are already here

ev'ry dead clock chiming
the rats are coming

fire & blue sky commingle
on the torn up road from Kandahar
the rats are coming

the werewolves are already here

2.
the radar tower
sky of middle gray behind
window droplet specks

wear all-black by accident
a crow torn from Seattle

3.
more carrots than peas
in these peas & carrots
who would suppose
more carrots than peas

a new gray appears
to lift our spirits
more carrots than peas
in these peas & carrots

4.
none too soon autumn
easing of summer's deathgrip
even bless school zones

Weil & Oppenheimer's lost
correspondence in Sanskrit

Transcript: "to have John Donne with the judgment of God"...???

( via / via )

Billie Jean.

"entering ruins

of the farm house

a cow grazes

in the shadow

of charred rafters"

--R G Rader

Into White.

"Well, that's all parsley for our boiled potato!" --@HarrySKeeler

.⊢ | 1of1.

( via / via )

"Her intention was not to write books; her attention was not on publishing books. Rather, she used her notebooks as a way of doing philosophy, akin to a form of prayer as she understood it."

"as a marxist shakespeare authorship truther, i believe the plays contain the kind of moral depravity and spiritual rot that could only come from the mind of an aristocrat" --@kukukadoo

"Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it."

"Wintering

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam
And the bottles of empty glitters -
Sir So-and-so’s gin.

This is the room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects -
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I’ve taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lad.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women -
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish Walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring."

--Sylvia Plath

"The vehicle of revolution in Weil and Camus’s day — communism — long ago turned into a rusting hulk. But the world is heavy with other vehicles of immoderation, and the fumes are thicker than ever."

( via / via )

Two views of the same storm.

1.
polaroid guitar
neglectful urns octave
unlit bottlenecks
against morning gray
the water tower

polaroid guitar

2.
   coolth rubble
twice failed rocket
   blink arrow
i turn prior
   sense bubble
secret the pact
   bubblewrap
skin polaroid
   ballistic
cool gray morning
   no signs of
the war slowing
   skyward beams
kids born since then
   pylon winds
eight-track tape drifts
   work resumes
because what else
   watch those lanes
fifty year old
   songs mock us
what of this coolth
   after worst
summer ever
   six months to
hear rejection
   the iron rain
folds into song

Money Buddha.

"That a wealth of experience is essential to write poetry is a myth rooted in the mistaken belief that poetry exists within the poet. Neither is poetry in objects." --Lee Seong-bok

Get Out of There.

( via / via )

PBSF15.

"CONCERNING THE ANAGRAM-HAIKU

Constrained poetry:
Scan entropy or edit
to read encryptions.

---------------------------------------------

CONCERNING THE PALINDROME-HAIKU

Sure, flip. Ah, play, mage!
Modes, reversed, omega my
alpha — pilfer us."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Revisiting my master thesis on real-time Incompressible Schroedinger Flow.

sands of illusion · sojourn
inside brittle witness

no edge alter Coltan
oriole fuel gulag
progs espresso icepack

toothpick thin clinic

King.

( via / via )

"The digital world seems vast, but how long will it last?" (via aldaily)

   riddlestoure
sift eddy adds
   glim pelf Usk

stirious poll
   run briskly

Edge of Reality. (He fell off before we did--)

"hunger moon
the sound of a rat
and a deep blue sky"

--@poem_exe 12-24-14

"Anyway, I fell in with a Canadian fashion mafia at some point."

( via / via )

Under_through.

"Tom and Jerry used to be a five-minute interlude between Crackerjack and Blue Peter. Now it's the whole schedule." --Adam Roberts

Roberts on Lanark.

"I go out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
lit only by the far off
moon on the edge of the mountains."

--Lady Izumi Shikibu (tr Rexroth)

[this is my all-time favorite tanka.]

   Out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
   i go, illumined
only by the far-off moon
on the edge of the mountains.

(my paraphrase into form)

   lenu mi klama
fi le manku le manku
   cu se gusni fi
le cmalu lunra po'o
nevi le cmana salpo

(in Lojban: My going from the dark via dark ways, is illumined only by a small moon on the mountain slope.)

Exodus.

( via / via )

Whim Wham.

make things that take up space & nobody wants
switched over to neatly stackable, only postage asking
a little more coffee, the voice held heretofore back
sputters its inanities at the newly
lethal clouds, & sometimes i miss my turn
i know there is a story here somewhere
before my destination shuts this off
like the Ferrari i remembered from the movies
& with five million dollars could be mine

Butterflies & Braids.

"Life is a delicate balance between managing your anxiety & letting time slowly destroy your body." --@doththedoth

"...it is perfectly possible to track explanatory progress in the conceptual realm without invoking some dubious metaphysical narrative about the ineluctable forward march of Spirit."

( via / noealzii on tumblr )

The Sky is Cryin'.

"country song about yr computer shutting down and losing all yr open tabs" --@_ryanruby_

Kashmir.

"American Rhapsody

Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow,
There will suddenly be new success, like Easter clothes, and a strange and different fate,
And bona-fide life will arrive at last, stepping from a non-stop monoplane with chromium doors and a silver wing and straight white staring lights.

There will be the sound of silvery thunder again to stifle the insane silence;
A new, tremendous sound will shatter the final unspoken question and drown the last, mute, terrible reply;
Rockets, rockets, Roman candles, flares, will burst in every corner of the night, to veil with snakes of silvery fire the nothingness that waits and waits;
There will be a bright, shimmering, silver veil stretched everywhere, tight, to hide the deep, black, empty, terrible bottom of the world where people fall who are alone, or dead,

Sick or alone,
Alone or poor,
Weak, or mad, or doomed, or alone;

Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, surely we begin at last to live,
With lots and lots of laughter,
Solid silver laughter,
Laughter, with a few simple instructions, and a bona-fide guarantee."

--Kenneth Fearing

Madman Across the Water.

( via / via )

Swelling ripples.

old oaths by others sworn
forage my hours swiftly
my dim shadow in the warm garage
knows as much
wherefore do i drone
this discontent content provider of one
not alone in the lingering aftermath
of all-slaughter
is it to populate a dream
of ashen before
the staircase quips
of the flagrant epigone
Sirius is too young
for what Sirius remembers

Call Me.

"once a fool
had a good part
in the play"

--"Madman across the Water"

Train Kept a Rollin'.

( via / via )

Strand.

"It is nice of you to miss me so much, when I wronged you under your own roof. But it was not my fault that I had no roof of my own, and had to do things under yours. And roofs seem to give rise to situations. Whenever anything happens, there is mention of them." --@icomptonburnett

Make sure you know whose skulls you're nesting on.

thirsty the earth, dark the after-rain;
only a third of the Yemen coffee to blend
with generic espresso; into the smell of hot dust
i go, with little light, to the other fridge.
a tentative new routine at 4 AM
i can hardly taste this second-hand bread
somehow the book i admired has lesser heft
& i want to absorb small features of the night
or in my mind instead. the hour yields
to further things required by the hour's place
how contemplation binds two times together
melts, with the gathering roar, in the after-rain
a glint of purple as i lift my glasses

"Why is it that destroying things is an activity to share with someone you love, while repairing things is done alone."

( via / me )

"There’s a lawn decoration, I see, in the shape of the Twin Towers, which you can buy at Walmart, in case you think your neighbors might be in danger of forgetting to Never Forget." (via mefi)

is that thunder
in the too shadowed dark
jets overhead

not stars
the last blank corner of the sheet

To be immortal is commonplace.

"I suppose when I tell you I don't know who Tibido Aird is, you'll boot me out of yonder door." --@HarrySKeeler

3 Displays of Distortion in the Void Garden.

( via / via )

Poet Wrestling with {Artificial} Intelligence.

Got mistaken for a homeless person again :) .

"...[Fanthorpe] made a brief comeback as a fiction writer with The Black Lion...; it is a not-unsuccessful Science Fantasy, the first of the projected Derl Wothor trilogy whose surtitle is an anagram of 'other world'."

"In the sharp-branched tree,
The starling’s iridescence:
Spring’s frosty wind"

--Jack Galmitz at Ahapoetry

Thirteenth Etheric Dialogue.

( via / via )

One night in Hong Kong. (via @gretathunberg)

      "Met

'I get navigation,' you will
   scream
The host will be
   too white; the safe rain will
      break your navigation
You will unearth your rage
Fulfil, fulfil
You will be lily-white, making
   lands into innocence
The nigh insides will
   retreat the black meetings of livid
      hosts upon your heart
What did your throat do before it
   heard you?
Who did you satisfy, converging,
   wandering for your
      hordes?
Another host will be wandering in
   the external host,
      wandering and cheating, a safe
         wraith
You will be not
   a danger, even though
      for hours you have eaten kings and
         made audiences with your hair and beheld
            your stuff seem fantastic
You will like
Jaggedly, green ice will root,
   like a teller
You will be not a
   sense, though for
      hours you have tasted rivers and made
         comforts with your
            body and watched your
               navigation wake
Know what you will
   be. Know what it
      will be to be
         a seraun.
Outside externals and
   close legions
You could feel yourself
You will have no faith
You will watch your envy, your
   surroundings, your information
You will saunter in
   late autumn among
      white meetings
Your lip a horde in
   the scene and ashen enough to meet
Hosts, interiors, meetings, the forgathering legions
You will render yourself wonder
   in a book of ivory"

--Robot X., 1831.

"As a child, Henry Zorton was plagued by nightmares." (via @mjohnharrison)

"Does an insane man, KING OF SKUNKS, know how to place commas in his own death letter?" --@HarrySKeeler

Some grim views.

( via / via )

"Mars is irrelevant to us now."

"CLOUDS AT DAWN (Palindrome by Triples)

Sky white. Rain,
as fawns adorn my morns....
A dawn
as fainter whisky."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Centos & the Problem of Reference.

"Never Enough of Living

Never, my heart, is there enough of living,
Since only in thee is loveliness so sweet pain;
Only for thee the willows will be giving
Their quiet fringes to the dreaming river;
Only for thee so the light grasses ever
Are hollowed by the print of windy feet,
And breathe hill weather on the misty plain;
And were no rapture of them in thy beat,
For every hour of sky
Stillborn in gladness would the waters wear
Colors of air translucently,
And the stars sleep there.

Gently, my heart, nor let one moment ever
Be spilled from the brief fullness of thy urn.
Plunge in its exultation star and star,
Sea and plumed sea in turn.
O still, my heart, nor spill this moment ever."

--Léonie Adams

Calculator was set to Radians.

( via / via )

The Late September Dogs.

the rathe scramble nimbly
rushing down the clown-queue
accruals unit crinoid

creak of the door forward
losing dream alizarin

Fools in Love.

"SUMMER SOLSTICE AT STONEHENGE (Palindrome)

Sun!
In my halo,
open,
I mull its altar: All.
I plait its lost light.
I lag, emanating:
I lay a ray, align.
I tan a megalith gilt.
Solstitial pillar, at last illumine —
pool a hymn in us."

--@Anthony_Etherin

River Roll.