"That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Picadilly." --The Waves
stream of fallen pink
flowerlets wind-pushed along
the crease of a step
for the time
it takes to utter
what you thought
it seems right
& worthy of engraving
on books, tombs, billboards
"I tried to ask the black resourceful ants."
"The bird flies; the flower dances; but I hear always the sullen thud of the waves; and the chained beast stamps on the beach. It stamps and stamps." --The Waves
Callanish 2 Stone Circle, Isle of Lewis.
Amazed that Valancourt Books has new editions of The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck & Black Easter (coming soon). Wow...
"If the dinosaurs had had a telescope, they would have observed Saturn without its rings" --@fedeitaliano
charmed terrible chamber
this time furnished i failed
chart no further
like a debt delved
'gainst no beginning
darkest ghost
my kindness would have carried
Close look at Harryhausen. (thx Melanie!)
the earth's core · curling back
under our feet slipping · ferrying lands
thick layers of · luscious mantle
who are we to have it · it rolls the wrong way
"Fiction is not a camera, and not a mirror. It’s much more like a Chinese painting—a few lines, a few blobs, a whole lot of blank space. From which we make the travellers, in the mist, climbing the mountain towards the inn under the pines." --Le Guin
“If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.”
--Ursula Le Guin (via @cjsarett)
"Now eye and ear · err a moment.
What odd items · edge these pages,
beckon from the borders?
—Babooneries flaunt.
Of the narrative, enough! · Ignored margins,
chocked cheek-by-jowl · with the chief purpose,
reveal devices: · the verges swarm
so turn from the text · to tarry idle
amid the scribe’s sketches.
On the scraped parchment
round the writing, · there wreathe framing
grisaille tableaus; · designs and scenes
blazoned about · the black letter,
over and under · in the uncial quires:
emblems circle · on either side
in linked legendry, · a limner’s doodling
fool-fantasies · —or in fable-talk;
the key to the code, · correspondence:
a ladder linking · least to greatest,
above and below · bound by signatures.
Here an obscure master skilfully made
interlacing · illustrations
in painted panels: · picturings such
as to beguile our gaze. · This forgotten artist
(minor maker, · of a mannered school)
drew drΓ΄lleries, · his dreaming quill
—in silver-point, · then sepia tincture
culled from cuttlefish, · or by cooking together
oakgalls and iron · with Arabic gums—
wove the wormshapes."
--Rahul Gupta via
"The gourd has still its bitter leaves,
And deep the crossing at the ford.
I wait my lord.
The ford is brimming to its banks;
The pheasant cries upon her mate.
My lord is late.
The boatman still keeps beckoning,
And others reach their journey's end.
I wait my friend."
--Helen Waddell (translated from the Chinese; written B.C. 718) via
"In Paris the scholars seek the arts, in Orleans the authors, in Bologna codices, in Salerno gallipots, in Toledo demons--and nowhere good manners." --Helinard, qtd in The Wandering Scholars
"The book you want to write and the book you don't want to write are often the same book." -@EverySongIveEve
"The day opens its hand
three clouds
and these few words."
— Octavio Paz (via @isidro_li)
Sky and sea and the never-enough.
this scarp is too steep
say the mewling cicadas
outside my locked door
"I am trying to remember what it felt like to believe
disjunction, non sequitur, injection
between sentences might constitute
meaningful struggle against the empire
typing away in my dorm"
--Ben Lerner in Lana Turner 16
“I don't ask the poem to do anything but show up.”
-- Terrance Hayes (via @stonecirclerev)
“DIVIDENDS
This advantage to be seized; and here, an escape prepared against an evil day;
So it is arranged, consummately, to meet the issues. Convenience and order. Necessary murder and divorce. A decent repute.
Such are the plans, in clear detail.
She thought it was too soon but they said no, it was too late. They didn’t trust the other people.
Sell now.
He was a fool to ignore the market. It could be explained, he said. With the woman, and after the theater she made a scene. None of them felt the crash for a long time.
(But what is swifter than time?)
So it is resolved, upon awakening. This way it is devised, preparing for sleep. So it is revealed, uneasily, in strange dreams.
A defense against gray, hungry, envious millions. A veiled watch to be kept upon this friend.
Dread that handclasp. Seek this one. Smile.
They didn’t trust the others. They were wary. It looked suspicious. They preferred to wait, they said.
Gentlemen, here is a statement for the third month,
And here, Mildred, is the easiest way.
Such is the evidence, convertible to profit. These are the dividends, waiting to be used.
Here are the demands again, considered again, and again the endless issues are all secure.
Such are the facts. Such are the details. Such are the proofs.
Almighty God, these are the plans,
These are the plans until the last moment of the last hour of the last day, And then the end. By error or accident.
Burke of cancer, Jackson out at the secret meeting of the board. Hendricks through the window of the nineteenth floor.
Maggots and darkness will attend the alibi.
Peace on earth. And the finer things.
So it is all devised.
Thomas, the car.”
–-Kenneth Fearing
Film posters by Josef Fenneker.
rabbit dusk · i run too
blue flames at my heels
drive these dreary · helldrizzle
cerulean bowl bumbleways
maybe a mere · plot pivot
will save the seeming whelm
i gallop on gilded · timesplinters
i brake for no figments
"Anyway, you know what idiot organised an American election watching party in Oxford in 2016 and got stuck with a melting blue ice cream cake and soaring panic at 2 AM? Yeah, I even bought special sparkle heels. Which I had to give to a charity shop because they were cursed." --@saintsoftness
"ROSES ARE RED (Palindrome)
Wonder erases
or passes,
someway,
my awe.
Mosses, sap...
Roses are red now."
--@Anthony_Etherin
selfcare falters · cinders
settle on car windshields
pugs put off the checkup
it's a pawn shop firesale
for awhile whims spurting
like whine bulwarks useless
the dark sky of Skullgrin
scatterlings vie nicks 'neath
trees so full of sound
our hearts so empty
by massacre unchastened
trees so full of sound
where shall i send
these fruits of futile dimmity
trees so full of sound
our hearts so empty
"I don't go to sleep so much as I give up on being conscious" --@_ryanruby_
"One of the most baffling things about America.."
"...that there was a deluge once, seems not to me so great a miracle, as that there is not one always." --Religio Medici
Pythonesque frieze of clouds & saucers.
"The Edges Of Time
It is at the edges
that time
thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently
coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket
of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat."
--Kay Ryan
Blot.
"In apocalypse capitalism—can I call it that?—being alone is part of a luxury aesthetic." (via via Mefi)
the road's ruined this way
& also the other way--
shipwreck ev'rywhere--
who never chose the navy
"They belong to the Renaissance in Italy, five centuries away, those torches. To find them burning in the tenth is to see strange shadows." --The Wandering Scholars
The first time i ever heard these lyrics i was spending the night in a salvation army bunkroom. Another customer was repeating them out loud as i tried to sleep. I thought he was making them up.
"MORNING (Anagrammed Lines)
Nature painted this morning
as a thorn in untried pigment,
a mad night in turpentines, or
the turning points in a dream...."
--@Anthony_Etherin
the weight of things changes
chary of quitting quite
old debts meet new charges
barge regrets a shore wait
"Gaza now has the largest number of child amputees in history." --@malakashwaikh (via @ae_stallings)
"My heart is moved..."
"you call me unemployed, but in Japan this is called being a rΕnin, they make movies about people like us there" --@tropicalcamatte
Polish cover of Ligotti's The conspiracy against the human race.
book tour · in the blaze zone
the air aim-riddled · & echo bled
our furthering fever · nine-tenths defunct
impossible the passage · to port & gangway down
"Suddenly, you were standing there, and you were with your people, and you knew why you were there."
"THE DALE AND THE DREAM
(Aelindrome in 12341234123412341234)
Melody, abloom,
treads a dale
in gloomy March.
A season,
and he abandons
a search.
May, looming,
leads a dream
to a bloody elm...."
--@Anthony_Etherin
Two angels sew my body back together.
"I am like the tyger (in poesy) if I miss my first spring--I go growling back to my jungle." --Letters of Byron
Still the only the dog to receive such a nomination.
"...Loeb-reds, Loeb-greens, like Christmas in
The mind."
--Amit Majmudar
the hostile half-masted
heft of this reft flagday
troubles my soul trawling
tragic-shiny minefields
humans failing fumble
to fix human doomward
arc or illness wholesale
act as if pawns squandered
in the clearmare morning
amongst thickened liquids
Garamond fallout
fry carbon
smart mouth snivelling
"The fact that even in 2024 we are driven to LARP what is basically 18th century merchant ideology from England and Holland, rather than some other arbitrary LARP, is an instance of our technology and industrial capability outpacing our intellectual culture by centuries." --@mmjukic (via @mr_scientism)
Fast vector renderer unlocked.
The Shareholder Supremacy. (thread)
"I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness." --The Waves
buzzardshade · in abeyance petitioned
usually, yet i yearn
as cathedral stones · by strong rainfall
are dissolved, that your season come
we feign to fathom · the whole phenomenal
panoply & in our play
bring doom to cities · & dense forests
alone death's honesty
but fall before · kind buzzard
shadow glide on him
wizened ventricles · tiny vessels
all the friable elves
some weakness close · to snafuing ev'rything
cleanse us of this monster
there are plenty of planets · spinning in the void
we have only this one
I am learning to abandon the world.
"Hospitality is the only antidote..."
worse faster
which is expected
behavior
of most slides
due to the nature of fall
& of cursed bodies
"How shall we sing?—By waters that are strange,
In days of harrowing change
From that sweet witchery of the season’s prime
To this distempered time?—"
— Arthur L. Salmon (via @isidro_li)
Season finale. (via @mjohnharrison)
Wild Azaleas. (via @amjuster)
"It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse –
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse."
--Cecil Day-Lewis (via @poochigian)
the paved wodwo paddock
perilous loom brumous
stained glass wavy window
awaited soot football
in the shade striped striding
"All fictions are cultural, but at the moment the Weird is intensely cultural & self-aware."
the race goes to the reaper
not to the fast or the faltering
fever road
i hear the children chirr
trapped in the high trees
charting the traceless
on the beach steel buries
itself deep, deeper
it's boiling dimes
on the frail fever road
ππππππππππππ.
“Only the paltry, superfluous, shameless wishes are fulfilled, and the great ones, the ones worthy of a human being, remain unattainable.”
—The Secret Heart of the Clock, Elias Canetti; tr. Joel Agee (via @dreamsofbeing_)
"...we firmly believe that malice, dishonesty, and injustice were the framers' original intent." (via @philsplace@mastodon.sdf.org )
"Wild that this ruling means a president could even escape prosecution for sleeping outside." --@heatherchristle
rattle-imps only · the rage of the season know
the bath-warm air · not easing as the sun declines
unseasonal rage · & ruinlust stalks
these Dog Days · nadir as yet not reached
