"Mirocaw has another coldness within its cold." --Grimscribe
dusty boots in the closet
will not resume
the road at any future date
yet averse was i
to let them start
a lonelier trek apart from me
swag of many sojourns
the shelves are full
& boxes i have stowed away
yet not those tatter-charts
no longer kedge
will i discard for space i need
in this forlorn & jampacked house
Schödlberger Felsküste im Mondschein.
"Gubbinal
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad."
--Wallace Stevens
"Wow, I'm the most dangerous little old lady of 84 you've ever heard of! Was it the blue XXXs? Too hot to read? Adult entertainment only? I wonder which satirists of ancient Rome would be banned there? And I'm banned from Russia, too! Oh alas, whatever will I do? Hit Utah with my cane?" --@margaretatwood
"...he brought American poetry into the 20th century."
Gargoyle Rain by graywyvern on Scribd
( via / new book i made for Hanuman Eds)
"The civil defense crew collected about 1050 kilograms of flesh and bones from this morning’s massacre, which left more than a hundred people dead and in pieces.
The estimate is that a grown-up weighs about 70kg. The civil defense crew divided the collected flesh and bones between 15 large plastic bags.
These would be 15 bodies to be buried today." --@MosabAbuToha
pumpkin space salient
silicon-swap stormfront
in the time of a temp
hempen primes the heatpump
dangerously unhinged
harbinger in lawn signs
drum sings virulent drones
searing last summerdirge
The Orange Rooftop Of Your Mind. (via @wendyOrourke)
"This Dark Ride..."
thick cicalatide thrown
threshes the pause clothespin
nose as cast-down kinfolk
send foes psychopathic
namely write, remember,
reminders, car blindfold
you were ever obverse
to the antheap reaping
Mar Behnam riding an angry horse.
Hallmark character recites
Wordsworth in Wordsworth landscape
hilching chihuahua
watches with narrowed otchkies
crow on the pebbly sidewalk
marches out of sight
comes back into the picture
other birds are now squawking
thus the dismay of poets
for a time stationed
full of impotent reports
on the edge of the action
"Though 'praiseworthy and masterly', wooden inlay was nevertheless an extravagant waste of time, wrote Vasari..." (via Mefi)
"EVIL (Palindrome)
Evil:
All its mist
is time gone.
No gem,
it sits...
'I'm still alive!' "
--@Anthony_Etherin
"It's like thinking some rabbits are conspiring together because they're running pell mell in the same headlights." --BlackLeotardFront
1.
green-tinged stool
blood-dimmed tidepool
cantaloupe
horizon loom
the Batman
taught us to boost
as august,
idiocies
Cheetoh grew
from this foul choice
of warped taste
bilge waterfall
in the dawn
McDonalds line
green-tinged stool
blood-dimmed tidepool
2.
Elmcrest · squirrel-brown
dawn tide ferrying
animal crackers · squeamish brandname
Plano centipede
in witdimpse certitude
dawn tide · ferrying home
redbrick middling gray · cool noon
Nagasaki ninepin
in the rearview · round craters
ahead only fathoms
of smeared smoke · & further crumble
macrame speaker cradles
to speak sparsely · i aspire while drivelling
my car seldom cools
building a book · like a ship in a bottle
sour glares reap
in this dark looth · left alone enough
think of the dead again
not safely names · in a sorted list
but those i would address
& gain counsel from · like the cold
black cup of night
in front of me plain · to finish & go
"The Last Thing I Saw Before My Eyeballs Were Incinerated, #2."
"I know such a lot of things. Things that are said and not thought, and things that are thought and not said. And there are so many of both. I should never have known, if I had stayed at home, or never have known that I knew. That is another thing you learn, to know what you know." --@icomptonburnett
"...at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike." --The Great Derangement
those also
died in the mushroom
become part
of a famed
duo · we will never call
war crime · genocide
"Orpheus In The Underworld
Curtains of rock
And tears of stone,
Wet leaves in a high crevice of the sky:
From side to side the draperies
Drawn back by rigid hands.
And he came carrying the shattered lyre,
And wearing the blue robes of a king,
And looking through eyes like holes torn in a screen;
And the distant sea was faintly heard,
From time to time, in the suddenly rising wind,
Like a broken song.
Out of his sleep, from time to time,
From between half open lips,
Escaped the bewildered words which try to tell
The tale of his bright night
And his wing-shadowed day
The soaring flights of thought beneath the sun
Above the islands of the seas
And all the deserts, all the pastures, all the plains
Of the distracting foreign land.
He sleeps with the broken lyre between his hands,
And round his slumber are drawn back
The rigid draperies, the tears and wet leaves,
Cold curtains of rock concealing the bottomless sky."
--David Gascoyne
Between 'checkmate' & 'chess' comes 'Chernobyl'.
" 'Please,' cried Frog, 'please go away!' But no one went away." --@FrogandToadbot
like the Gone-One Womb
in all things hides,
takes peeling by discerning gaze
train i wasn't on
brings back the poem
my shadows crease the megalith
windowless this room
antitank blocks
across the Orwell estuary
Imagine biking up Mystic Mountain.
"I look at his wrist.
It is crushed,
nearly severed.
And then at his shoulder.
A bone is fractured.
He is four years old.
I say to my wife,
Oh look how brave he is.
He is not crying.
No sign of any pain.
Even with no parents
beside.
I look at his face.
His eyes are not moving.
His heart is not beating.
He is taking a rest."
--@MosabAbuToha
" 'After I put on my bathing suit, you must not look at me until I get into the water.'
'Why not?' asked Frog.
'Because I look funny in my bathing suit. That is why,' said Toad."
--@FrogandToadbot
"God perceives no continuity in the rainbow. Every color is distinct from every other; he sees a world encrusted totally in jewels, materially transformed by the passage of shadows" --@ctrlcreep
"A Valley of Applause
Is this where we would have had to go?
We might have made it here –
the other side of a bridge
from everyone we loved,
our plans, the shape we’d made
in the universe’s lack.
Just off a train,
the rails curling round
and out of sight
we could, your hand in mine,
have stood a state of willed amnesia –
the sky a pyre – shaken off our shame
like dogs who’d swum through oil.
Frontier life,
water and shelter life,
imagine our first night:
unstoried earth to walk on,
a river to wash our hands
and mouths with,
hills to stop our gods from staring in.
The only words we’d need
would be ‘I’m safe’
or ‘start again’,
your scent a lotus flower,
my skin broken by your teeth
like soft applause.
Remember you said
we should admit the way we felt
however difficult?
I’m saying now,
too late for you to waste your life.
Here isn’t where we would have gone
but where I always was:
cut off from sun,
green-shadowed on all sides by noble boundaries.
The sky is hellfire.
I burn like coal,
whose heart is unforgetful coal. "
--Declan Ryan in Poetry Ireland
"Courage
This pebble word that sits balanced
on the tip
of my tongue,
a rounded weight of meaning,
carefully measured, it gives shape
to gaps between worlds,
a surface shared then split then travelled -
millennia, eon, ocean,
rolled, reeled, relinquished,
to lie sheltered in shattered sand.
I pebble-press this thought into your palm
from the other side of this blistering Earth. "
--Larissa Reid via
"Saying unto my soul--'Here I shall find
Shams like myself--men who have thrown away
Huge fragments of their life in vain pursuits...' "
--J Stanyan Bigg
Church of the Flower Fathers of Fantasia.
"All things have been enigmas unto me,
And I have spent my soul in their solution;
Leaving them all but unsolved riddles still..."
--J Stanyan Bigg
"Dróttkvætt Stanzas for David Attwell
The banished skald addresses praises (without a refrain) to the Head of Department upon being
sacked by him for satirizing the departmental training-course for postgraduate tutors
Heed my verses head of
our home of wise-foaming
mead: I brew blood-honey,
that blessèd quintessence
of first holy feasting
in myth to frith, learning,
and those schooled in skaldship
—I skink words for drinking:
may praise be a pleasing
full PROFESSOR’s measure,
this drápa let dripping
from a mouth drouth-stricken
to find sounds to fasten
such featous laud meted
that may rate with rightness
the reach of this teacher!
To greet this great DAVID,
I grope for my scopcræft,
in verseform confirming
a York chieftain’s fiefdom:
the curt ‘courtly measure’
proclaims this jarl’s naming
in a settler’s city:
my song from the longships.
Ere bequest of Kvasir,
once quickened the trickling
Well of Wisdom swaling
at the World-Tree’s knurly-
writhen root, sweet-rising
Mím’s rill, bourn of Nornir;
Óðinn’s Eye is hidden
in Dell of Urð, ATWELL."
--Rahul Gupta at Academia.edu
New Sapphire Goss music video.
"EARLY MOON (Anagrammed Lines)
Early, misty Moon.
My solitary omen.
My rain looms, yet
it’s only a memory."
--@Anthony_Etherin
Till the Real Thing Comes Along.
"poor man wanna be rich
rich man wanna be king"
--Springsteen
What's So Funny About Ahmed Adaweya?
"I opened my eyes and beheld reality, and I began to laugh, and since then I have not stopped."
— Søren Kierkegaard, 1843 via @DylanoA4
rattle battle in the · parfait arroyo
kleenex klaxon · second cup of coffee
jiaya jester · sundern carpool
& i march to the maggot song · so handy
in the parfait arroyo · rattle battle
"In this house of blues the cold creeps stealthily upon us."
"Apology of Genius
Ostracized as we are with God—
The watchers of the civilized wastes
reverse their signals on our track
Lepers of the moon
all magically diseased
we come among you
innocent
of our luminous sores
unknowing
how perturbing lights
our spirit
on the passion of Man
until you turn on us your smooth fools' faces
like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries
We are the sacerdotal clowns
who feed upon the wind and stars
and pulverous pastures of poverty
Our wills are formed
by curious disciplines
beyond your laws
You may give birth to us
or marry us
the chances of your flesh
are not our destiny—
The cuirass of the soul
still shines—
And we are unaware
if you confuse
such brief
corrosion with possession
In the raw caverns of the Increate
we forge the dusk of Chaos
to that imperious jewellery of the Universe
—the Beautiful—
While to your eyes
A delicate crop
of criminal mystic immortelles
stands to the censor's scythe."
--Mina Loy via EPC
"Repair is the dream of the broken thing."
"I had never imagined the day when one of my countrymen would not haggle, but these boat people clearly understood that the law of supply and demand was not on their side." --The Sympathizer
"Someone about ten years ago got one wish on a Monkey Paw and said 'I wish a lot more people become interested in the ancient world' and now we have proto-fascists reading Marcus Aurelius" --@CSMFHT
"And then I realize it was absolutely impossible to write in the apocalypse anyway."
"wake up
little butterfly
we have far to travel today"
--Bashō via @bashosociety
Only flowers and chrome survive here.
write a poem about mussolini's brain at st elizabeth's asylum in the style of ezra pound's cantos
"In corridors where echoes chase,
In the asylum’s shadowed grace,
A mind once crowned in iron spire,
Lost in the maze of spectral fire.
Hushed murmurs, the silent creed,
Where fate and folly intercede,
The brain of iron, now a rust,
Buried in the asylum’s dust.
Time’s cruel mockery, wraiths enshrine,
In halls where light dare not confine,
A labyrinth of fractured dreams,
Writ in the softest, maddest seams.
Legacies of steel and rage,
Map of a tyrant's final stage,
The Dictator’s tangled skein,
Etched in the asylum’s rain.
Here the echoes softly scream,
Fragmented thoughts like shattered dream,
A state of madness, grandeur fell,
Within the asylum’s gloomy shell.
His mind a tattered war-scarred cloth,
Woven in ambition’s broth,
Threads of conquest, fierce and vain,
Twisted in this dark domain.
Lost in the shadows of his reign,
A psyche torn by pride and pain,
An empire's roar, now soft dismay,
In the asylum’s cold decay.
The ghosts of Rome, in silence chant,
Histories in shadows plant,
Of glory marred and tyrants’ woe,
Where once the fervent winds did blow.
Here lies a tale of grandeur's blight,
In the asylum’s somber light,
Where Mussolini's mind does fade,
In the echoes of the past parade."
--ChatGPT
a set of glass slides · clues
after the cataclysm
only down the corridor
from where they come to hear
disordered brain cells
still can't decipher
bundle of sticks
"There’s something kind of funny, in a disorienting way, about seeing so many arguments about 'you have to teach your students to use AI in order to prepare them for the future' at the very moment when the AI bubble is bursting."' --@libshipwreck
this is how we surfed the internet.
the sky has no more promises in this rich month
the pealing of the gray ones sags
my glasses fog when i return to warmth's embrace
i cannot think of further stuff
some story will have coalesced around our mad
defiance of the obvious
in times to come whence i cannot expect gifts dropped
though motor idling pensive still
& needful of remarking even that vain wish
velleity with teeth --or so--
Rival frameworks besieging cosmic apprehensions.
"XII
Voices break on the confines of passion
Desire Suspicion Man Woman
Solve in the humid carnage
Flesh from flesh
Draws the inseparable delight
Kissing at gasps to catch it
Is it true
That I have set you apart
Inviolate in an utter crystallization
Of all the jolting of the crowd
Taught me willingly to live to share
Or are you
Only the other half
Of an ego's necessity
Scourging pride with compassion
To the shallow sound of dissonance
And boom of escaping breath"
--Mina Loy
"And I have gone out in the winter's storms,
And felt the winds all smite me in the face,
And writhed beneath the buffetings of hail,
And heard the creaking branches of the trees
Groan out their 'Shame!' upon me as I pass'd,
And gone home, like an idler, to his meal."
--J Stanyan Bigg
"And so, thinking about a treasure they go, librarians imagining a lost floor
below A-level with books in dull yet jewel-colored bindings, smell of must
like the sound of foot on cement floor..."
--Gerald Burns
Two flowers that used to grow in our garden before the bombing.
"Juniper Blue
The shellac-hard days of high-dollar oils, of watercolorist’s mufti and glues—
All that’s just a metaphor, something to bind order to itself with, a palliative
Against steerage, that lonely outpost where the radio’s mostly
On the blink and the vegetables costly. The mastermind’s name is Dick, the
Mastermind’s name is always Dick. Interloper and liar, nails like claws
Leaving drag-marks in the sand. Mudpuppy, cave-dog, face like a poach’d egg."
--John Latta at Hotel Point 12-23-04
"Everywhere fixed is a prison, so any motion away is an act of insolence."
boxcars gilded · plenty of night left
plaited weariness · watchful into worn ways
red car calm · clever the ruse
to persevere some · & say it's for now
the cliff walk cloistered · in its own crystal
the acceptance couched · in terms of saving
music can muffle · much despair
i write a riddle · to the rung above me
"But these are but broken hints."
"THE DESERT (Palindrome)
Moody, burned dust….
Oh, still aerify!
My ravine defoliated,
dim, its mirage bit.
Sure no bliss of pools to order,
still its red roots loop fossil bone.
Rust, I beg
a rim’s timid detail of Eden.
I vary my fire:
All its hot, sudden, ruby doom."
--@Anthony_Etherin
“History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.”
--Edna O'Brien via @muirheimhne via @alastmorrison
to ev'rything
there is a season
there is a stain
to ev'rything
black fathoms churn
at the near horizon
to ev'rything
there is a season
Uncurated: The Case for a New Term of Art.
pale-oceaned globe · glisten
under snapping fluorescents
desertion of elves
is a harbinger
There are so many ways the national election system in America could be fixed. My favorite (besides redividing all the electoral districts to hold an equal number of people--this is something computers could be very useful in) is just to give every candidate the exact same amount of free air time, & refuse to allow them to buy any more than that. But the oligarchs whose commitment to preventing change is quite as adamant as any monarchy in European history ever was, of course won't even allow these ideas to be mooted. They are literally unspeakable. That's the worst thing to me. It's like we had to depend on ambulances that can only go around in a circle like an amusement-park bumper-car ride. The game can do things that are already part of the game. It can't change how the game is played.
"Old English had a word for someone born different or apart from others: 𝘴𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘳𝘣𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘯, from 𝘴𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘳- ‘separate, special’ + 𝘣𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘯 ‘born’. Today it would be ‘sunderborn’." --@wylfcen
pinkgold gathering · of whirring wheels
i drink drastic coolth
mere shadows move · not the thrust making
this fam'ly of serried forms
one's eyes evidence · icing of fancy
a stench momently mentions
& i resume bezique
The Big Cube (1969). ☆☆
shadows burned
into white stone walls
for staying
all the years
silos on the prairie clutch
their dragon treasure
"Nearly as vacant were the sidewalks, haunted only by the occasional set of uniforms shed by deserters. In some cases, the gear was in such a neat little heap, with helmet on top of blouse and boots beneath trousers, that a ray gun appeared to have vaporized the owner. In a city where nothing went to waste, no one touched these uniforms." --Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015)
