( via / via via mefi )

Fall of the House of Usher. With his poe adaptations he invented for cinema a new kind of poetry...

"Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked." --Valis

"My grandparents arrived to a cold country with a suitcase each and a pocket full of Ukraine’s soil."

my crooked map cripples
crow's flight veering merely
Southfork sabbath ether
assails sharing airspace
with ransom's raunch insole
reach in the chump dumpster
windshield warped with droplets
to wolf down Zen pinwheels

A Wizard with a Pen.

( via / via )

The Simpsons - 1950's Super Panavision 70. (via Mefi)

"Truce

Take heart, for now the battle is half over,
   We have not shamed our sires;
Pride, the lone pennon, ravelled by the storm-wind
   Stands in the sunset fires.

It may be, with the coming-on of evening
   We shall be granted unassailed repose,
And what is left of dusk will be less darkness
   Than luminous air, on which the crescent glows."

--Sara Teasdale

Sparkling cathedral.

"Encountering God was not a remission." --Valis

Top 30 Kate McKinnon SNL Performances. (thx Melanie!)

( via / via )

Midnight.

"suspension of the secret in abandoned rooms" --Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Solar Flare.

edged blurs blending · blight that is age
books grow the greener · gristle is half thought
peering through portals · pusillanimous
thing conjures thing · neume Nethescurial
& dawnglow gathers · do you gift a cairn
for what whisks itself · away on wings
having shown scant shelter · & shape melting

Crushing cars for fun.

( via )

Miss the Girl. (via @ladyliminal1 / via )

cakebloat curled · according to the footing
not learned yet · lesions & the lines hide
trolley trawling the · shadow side of trilling
overplus umwelt · answers if you need them
dusty dwale leaves · the derne shattering

Haydi Söyle.

"CNN has the Trump courtroom sketch artist on and Anderson Cooper is asking her why the color orange isn’t on her palette in case you’re wondering what the libs are doing right now" --@dee_of_e

Untrue Drive.

( sabine jamet in asemic on fb / me )

Evening Ceremonies.

"Also hey, Plano is hip now, as my nephew who grew up there tells me. (He is right that the most painfully unhip and super racist people have moved out to Frisco, the next suburb out in the rings of suburbs/exurbs around Dallas. They left because Plano has too many South Asian and East Asian immigrants AFAICT.)" --gentlyepigrams

Somewhat bogus but fun Kepler-22b video.

clotted cloudlegs · unclaim the hour
a few fingers · fondly riffle
this inbetween · twists an angstrom
in its surd socket · silent i carve
ghost-relic ruse · my high horse
in plummet places

𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘢.

( via / me )

"What kind of a company creates fake authors for a famous newspaper or magazine and operates them like sock puppets?" (via Mefi) Fritz Leiber (in 1961) called it "wordwooze". We might as well.

"Misattributions (palindrome)

To do glad item, I taste wrath.
– Sartre

Sedated, I ball: a sum, a cry,
tramp, martyr.
– Camus

All a bidet. A desert.
Rash tar wets a time tidal.
– Godot"

--@spoonerrhythms

Tijaniyya.

"The newspaper also said that the United States of America shot the moon rocket again [1972]. The spaceship was a wonder in the history of science. But despite such a miraculous development of science, the bloody [Vietnam] war would not be prevented for ever." --The Daily Life of Ku-poh the Novelist (1985)

Abandoned rail bridge.

( via / via )

Manticore.

"If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost impersonate Providence to another." --George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

"There’s a greater narrative these big publishers are writing, one that, even after all her schooling and work, seems more opaque than ever. A national narrative determined at the top, unwritten and seen only by implication, responsible, she thinks, for the lack of books that interest her." (via Mefi) Contains the small truth that even indie presses are blinkered. In less than cataclysmic times that would be the story. In less than cataclysmic times i'd debate it.

the loneliness of men is not assuaged
for all the flags & badges they devise
a part of them must skulk beyond the pale
& howl at them from ev'ry bloody moon

I Love a Man in Uniform.

( via / me )

Gloria.

undocumented days · in the utter dark
   leave still a certain stain
apex memoirist · wearily aims
   self at a silken absence
formica murmuring · garage of gruesome asides
   the wish to have heeded

First you take a firm hold of the legs.

“A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feelings / I too drift in it downbloodstream, younger still than your eye (...) You are light: you will sleep through my spring till it’s over.”

(Celan; tr. Hamburger) via @dreamsofbeing

Tempered Elan.

( via / via )

"Members of Kawartha Lakes First Nation argue they are exempt from laws and taxes."

" 'I don't understand you,' I said to him, although of course I understood perfectly well; understanding was assaulting me in spokes of yellow no less brilliant than the landscape, and along with my revulsion, there was respect as well. I will admit this; it was impossible not to respect Hubbs, because it was people like him who made the world work; people who were able to shoot off the grenades, spread the insecticide, inspect the chassis, look at death dispassionately—they were the hope of the world,these people; Hubbs was the hope of the project because some agonized,sensitive types like myself, trapped in our delicate sensitivities and revulsions, would have been incapable of taking the strong, decisive action that Hubbs had taken." --Malzberg

From UC Berkeley’s encampment.

"Abandoned house
The dreamcatcher still hangs
In the children’s room"

— Anna Goluba (via @haikucommentary)

Leaving Rafah.

( via / via )

The Impossible Meter.

"The hour is transparent;
we see, if the bird is invisible,
the color of its song."

— José Juan Tablada (translated by Santiago Daydi-Tolson) via @isidro_li

Woofus Takes.

"Popular culture’s incapacity to produce innovation is a persistent ambient signal that nothing can ever change. Sometimes, it can seem fiendishly difficult to account for what has happened to popular culture, but the explanation for its sterility and stasis is ultimately quite simple. Innovation in popular culture has overwhelmingly come from the working class. Neoliberalism has been a systematic and sustained attack on working class life – the results are now all around us." --Mark Fisher, 2015

Anitra's Dance.

( me / via )

"It ended when a creepy old man we thought was evil suddenly played a giant calliope."

"...dixie cup dropped on incline a sound like no other." --Gerald Burns

Space Case.

sidewalk pillbug solos
in the soapthorn morning
tiny tank sans conquest
contestant mild filed as
yet haunt ancient oceans
all unbragged their fragment
pavane's foray riven
right here in a mirror

"The world is burning and people are dying needlessly from hunger, treata[b]le disease, and war, and these deep thinkers are worried we might be mean to toasters."

( google street view / via )

Mehana.

lemmingcrowd · in the light of crispy
phantoms fadged · by foragesilicon
because we can · because bosses
hold no harm · in the hatchet swing
& those in thesterness · whose thoughts build
the castle cringe · their craft slighted
in the panoply of parrots · & the hero tales

After a night encampment raid.

"You can embody a curse without being able to articulate it." --Bellefleur

Huygens descent.

( via / via )

Estrella.

"Genius is all haunt’d eyes and bad haircuts: see Wittgenstein, see Beckett, see Marguerite Young. You don’t think the dapperly-coiff’d Thomas Wolfe’s a genius, do ya stupor man? John Ashbery (whose haircuts’ve gone slightly better of late) wrote, back in the god-awful hair days: 'We have seen the city; it is the gibbous / Mirrored eye of an insect.' " --John Latta, Hotel Point 4/27/03

Damage I've Done.

speckfester spooked · sparse pinprick
with echoes · ailing-byblow upset
weirded out as well · by the waft of a cough
mostly unmoved · from the cosplay jostlecoup
radar's riddles wrench me · weekly
in the soft season · safety questioned
shall we gather glumly · in windowless waiting
our attention turned · to tiny screens
a dasrk red blotch · blandly encroaching
lines of the lucky · & the loss-insured

"If they had shared in the gains instead of being left to starve, if they had been given agency over their technological destinies, they would not have taken up their hammers."

( via / via )

With God on Our Side.

to write a novel takes but time & mucho chutzpah
though i have had a bunch of both i wrote no novels

the future comes to end our whims with picks & shovels
i whispered to the ghosts & ghosts took it for gospel

the once & future planet Pluto held my gaze
mongoose of a silvery snake or raving flicker

meanwhile all the rivers of this poet biz
dried up one by one & left us squatting Blackacre

the clock's hands move t'ward less & curiouser ullage
the loaves i turn out turn on the turnip-headed baker

to make a flop like this it takes a gloating village
i follow like a compass that stern brimstone sillage

San Francisco shoreline.

"No age has produced an artist who paints a tempest on the canvas in the whirl of tempests." --The Daily Life of Ku-poh the Novelist

Nano Garden.

( via / me )

Putin in context.

"Marxists wrongly thing that the Logical inevitability of revolution is only stifled by its practical obstacles, whereas Gnostics rightly think that the practical banality of revolution is only stifled by its Logical absurdity, that that which revolution is meant to abolish not only does not oppose revolution but itself only operates in and of revolution." --Aaron Raul Biddle

Sisyphus Having a Break.

"dreamer deceiver"

rooms full of rancid mud
cipher's tsunami read
that road stopped

supernal candy · cure
whatever ails you
& claimed awe

could've-been-true tryst

The harrowing of hell, with thousands of damned clowns, clown-devils, and a clown-jesus over them all, detailed engraving, gustave doré.

( via / via )

Palestine Penalties.

"hostage to road construction"

scoriac sky · splayed animal corpse
more justifiers jockeying · to explain mass murder
pull my head out of the past · long enough to paint
a red postcard · self-righteous & empty
could run to rain · or rustling hover
days at this drivers' · scrimmage of ortscrappers
after Avenue K · onward to some Keurig
Beck says "Baby I'm a bad cause" · sure
when you thirl it like that · thankfully poets
can resort to zilch- · farming famously
watch the gas gauge · go t'ward its
ineluctable limit · i live in my head

The Mid-World.

"But still the winter images will not leave us.
We track the sun beast to his bloody lair.
At dawn our hands are red and empty.
And the Dove broods in a tangle of bitter branches."

— George Mackay Brown via @Isidro_Li

Knowing I Live in a Dark Age.

( via / via )

Pavane.

"The slabs grew. Seven of them on the desert, white, six feet in height, cunningly hollowed out, where at the stone's orders, their horrid secrets began to pulsate. Complex readjustments were made in the biological system of the intelligences; from those changes came something that both was and was not like them. One within a slab, guarded from the landscape, those things grew." --Phase IV

After the Fire IV.

"the surge"

dark as Vulcan's workshop
worrying bin hurdles

i walk among stingers

Conduits of the hum. (via @LadyLiminal1)

( via / via )

Malzberg's Phase IV online.

"changing year
yet a continuum
of snowstorms"

--an'ya

Technopaegnion.

"From the beginning of 1971, he was determined not to read the news related to the elections. But because the political unrest had much to do with his writing job, he had much interest in the election. Suppose a war or a plague broke out in his town, how could he possibly keep on playing the guitar because he was a guitarist? Should he not throw away his guitar and rouse himself to help his neighbors who were fighting? Until that time of a war or a plague. he would not rouse himself up actually in his society but only imaginatively in his works. On second thought, he failed to rouse himself up as much as he should even in his writings." --The Daily Life of Ku-poh the Novelist

Shaped poems in Classical times.

( via / me )

Apollinian.

"The sheer distance between the reality as we witness it and the reality as the administrative and political class project it (thereby facilitating authoritarian crackdowns here and genocide there) is, I think, a major part of what makes this moment unbearable." --@dan_sinykin

The Winner Takes It All.

"ammunition for the other side"

a cord's handedness · gryllisfoetor
ecgonine bonanza · anempst Pervasor
shortfall · Naturwissenschaft
dim fluorescent delved · corridors flexing
ant Brutalism brillig · job is to narrate

though you've won the John · Campbell Award
Pervasor mild · as a March mildew

More Saxonisms.

( via / via )

"The few isolated figures most notably Diogenes the Cynic (whom Raphael has given the countenance of Michelangelo)..."

"I must wait as he sings

This mysterious creature · calls to me each morning.
I rise from my dungeon, · drag my body
down the long hallway · to the demon’s hearth
where I cater to his fierce · and constant hunger.
I pour buckets in · his parched throat,
watch the floods of · fluid cascade
as he gulps in thirst, · guzzling gourds.
I measure sacred · minerals with precision,
the dirt’s musky scent · drifting through air,
and scoop meal into · his salivating mouth
as the beast pulsates, · consuming his feed.
I must wait as he sings, · his stomach grumbling
as his pangs subside · and he assesses my offerings,
his ravenous appetite · now at peace, fulfilled.
Once I’ve waited, · weary and worn,
my master rewards me, · releasing the grasp
he holds upon me and · for a moment I’m freed.
I drink the nectar · of his deeds and design,
cleared from this ritual, · calmed for a spell.
What is this creature? · Call out his name."

--Cassidy McFadzean

Plano Rona LP. (again)

"Slow, heavy Dante Gabriel contemplates his marmoset's
skeleton, anecdote making of carelessness a vector
the rooms plush or tastefully papered, doors crafted
out of pleasant woods. His sister thinks charily of goblins."

--Gerald Burns, "Very Old Roses"

There are No Butterflies on Proxima B.

( paige klee via @dgar@aus.soc / via )

"The city surrounding it, also in shambles, isn’t much older."

"Talking, I warrant now, about the plan
And method of the universe; and plunged
In difficulties of the politics
And civil laws of Saturn; weaving webs
Of lofty speculation in their minds..."

--J Stanyan Bigg

Sailing to the Moon.

"in the school of Athens"

the fourfold flutterer's · image-fruits
in the tall tapestry · entangled morsels
for seconds absorb · my restless rolling

i fail to feel · the effects of breaking
so distantly drawn · so dire for the humans
who cannot cadge · like me a corner

void of violence · to view mere pictures

YAOSF.289.

( via / me )

"Although he spoke to a different meadhall, Earle Birney was a scop."

"Mappemounde

No not this old whalehall can whelm us,
shiptamed, gullgraced, soft to our glidings.
Harrows that mere more that squares our map.
See in its north where scribe has marked mermen,
shore-sneakers who croon, to the seafarer's girl,
next year's gleewords. East and west nadders,
flamefanged baletwisters; their breath dries up tears,
chars in the breast-hoard the dear face-charm.
Southward Cetegrande , that sly beast who sucks in
with whirlwind also the wanderer's pledges.
That sea is hight Time, it hems heart's landtrace.
Men say the redeless, reaching its bounds,
topple in maelstrom, tread back never.
Adread in that mere we drift toward map's end."

--Earle Birney

Deep Emotions.

"Revolt, rapid.

Neon fog.
No set upside.
Vastness.

I desire no law
or rosy briar air.

By sorrow alone, rise.
Dissent. Save dispute.

Song of no end.
I part, lover."

--@MikeSpeaks

"...where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in."

( via via @hookland / via )

"Behind the curtain of concepts like 'convenience' and 'progress' lies the audacity of an industry that claims that our lives are “just there” as an input for them to process and exploit for value." (via Mefi)

"Deaf Beethoven but a writer goes mute
writing what no longer can be heard performed
and syllables which habit made stand for sounds
diminish to inaudible directives...,"

--Gerald Burns, "Punch in a Nutshell"

"I wanted to compose Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse simultaneously in Old English and Modern English."

"dangerous secrets"

the buzzkill burned · into bated commute
not mollified much · with melodious drool
sweep up the swift · unswaddling's confetti
last night's tornado · before the next
by all means vote · avoid antlers
   as you shuffle through the short blades
   the storm made multiply

"The story has a hard edge to it, in a sense. I chose it as a means of demonstrating that history and culture existed in this country of ours well before the 1840 date commonly used by many Pakeha (ie European settlers) as our 'founding' date! I so often hear people talk about how they joined the SCA because New Zealand has no history..."

( via / me )

The Magical Garden of Virutal Deities.

"enhanced risk"

gray-cerulean grad school
of the grinch sky pelting
Southfork a soft option
sapphire its fell portal
& all the chimps cheering

INGREDIMVR CVNCTI, DIVES CVM PAVPERE MIXTVS.

"Fruit peels and the heels of bread were left to get moldy. But then we'd need, what, a bird, to eat the fleas from the rug." --Hejinian

"But I have become addicted, perhaps more than I should have, to the heroism of the metaphor..." (via @ae_stallings)

( via / via )

Oneiric visions.

"I have only partial answers...precisely in this deficiency ... I recognize the necessity to speak ... not, for once, out of settled conviction, but rather from the unconcealed helplessness we find ourselves in despite all our fine phrases."

--Musil re[:] Nation (via @genese_grill)

"The ground we tread on..."

"origin of Earth's second moon"

   fyelf eyrie
ferry slippered
   eft desert

dyad arrange
   wisp fettered

The Owl Flies at Midnight.