( via / via )

Spray.

"ballade of the under side

by archy
the roach that scurries
skips and runs
may read far more than those
that fly
i know what family skeletons
within your closets
swing and dry
not that i ever
play the spy
but as in corners
dim i bide
i can t dodge knowledge
though i try
i see things from
the under side

the lordly ones the
haughty ones
with supercilious
heads held high
the up stage stiff
pretentious guns
miss much that meets
my humbler eye
not that i meddle
perk or pry
but i m too small
to feel great pride
and as the pompous world
goes by
i see things from
the under side

above me wheel
the stars and suns
but humans shut
me from the sky
you see their eyes as pure
as nuns
i see their wayward
feet and sly
i own and own it with
a sigh
my point of view
is somewhat wried
i am a pessimistic
guy
i see things from
the under side

l envoi
prince ere you pull a bluff
and lie
before you fake
and play the snide
consider whether
archy s nigh
i see things from
the under side"

--Don Marquis

This one makes my eyes hurt but in a good way.

"Lovecrafts monstrosities are at the same time a joke and the best visualisation of the modern cosmography we have" --@LokiEstraven

"...we may have only a few more years — or perhaps as long as 15 years — of relative normalcy in our everyday lives here in the U.S. before the approaching climate change storm ends our golden age of prosperity."

( via/ via )

From The Directory of Occupational Titles.

"I struggled with some demons / They were middle class and tame"

- Leonard Cohen, You Want It Darker via @everysongiveeve

"There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you."

Random # 244 = 466 in base-7; 4 + 6 + 6 = 16 lines

Origami car
Mustn’t get it wet
   Ilka plot
Unravels in the mildew air

May we call this lilt
Something more than doom
   Silent film
Preserved where fire & knives permute

Boiling waves of light
Folded in my palm
   One more crime
That wouldn’t be the wizard’s fault

Origami soul
Sketch of fragrant stars
   Sweet shops close
But not the mat where lovers quarrel

"Home is where all..."

( henry moore / me )

Don Marquis thread on Mefi.

the wraith riding beside
i'll let carry my load
riddle that leers
& blood that never blackens

to be fair, those before me
blundered famously
& they managed somehow to sleep
so i know there's a knack

to simply navigate
Aceldamas of ice
& baldfaced fields of folly
with iron fortitude

unseeing the wraith beside

In Memory Of The Unknown Poet, Robert Boardman Vaughn.

"I am so full of my dead, no else can die, for there is no more room."

- Elias Canetti, The Book of Death (tr. by Peter Filkins) via @aliner

"...people have real concerns about the costs and impacts of the energy transition... Dismissing those people & concerns as victims of disinformation is condescending." (via @amendlocke)

( via / me )

Hay una Mujer Desparecida.

"Word of the Day: FESSITUDE (n.) tiredness, exhaustion" --@haggardhawks

The Sun.

Random # 187 = 355 in base-7; 3 + 5 + 5 = 13 lines

sickle moon
& the grouper knows
the grouper
knows where they
are · hiding & dying the
grouper knows where they

glow of shoppingcenter lights in antelucan
   cloudcover heraldry commute
   color between colors · making
a bridge between the things that are & things that aren't

   & the grouper knows
the grouper knows where they are

   antelucan lights

Batak Pustaha spell book from Sumatra.

( via / me )

Considering the Possible Music of Your Hair.

" 'Taliban bans ...'
a girl in red on the rooftop
pirouetting
against the Kabul sunset
as if there were no tomorrow"

--@ericcoliu

Restaurant Bar Knox. Akasaka.

"Demanding that your fellow citizens adhere to the strictest interpretation of the Bible while not requiring any adherence to the Bible from your preferred presidential candidate is one of the clearest ways to express that you see the Bible only as a tool for your own power." --@brcremer

"When he did exchange words, he sometimes mentioned his true friends: the plants."

( via / me )

The view through the archway of St Michael's tower.

"To love is to give what you don't have to someone who doesn't want it." --Jacques Lacan via @lacancircle

Black Lake.

Random # 247 = 502 in base-7; 5 + 0 + 2 = 7 lines

crisp clipped crescent · across fathoms
flashing yellow arrow · orb
of contradictions, draw · Amontillado
floating bubbles · crushed bodies
a sick cadence · in the crystal night
   whispers past autumns
   voices of dead cicadas

Synthesized with procedural low level code.

( via / via )

Neap Tide.

"the dragonfly too
finding its way through this world
of scrambling brambles"

--@catbake

R.C. Harris water treatment plant.

"This is a moment of reckoning for freedom of thought, in this country and throughout the world. When those who speak out in defense of the oppressed become targets, and those who spew hate have the right to harass and bully with impunity, then what is at stake is the very soul of our universities." --Huda Fakhreddine via @FadyJoudah

Polaris update.

( via / via )

Wild wave.

"TIME (Palindrome by Word)

Time keeps forever.
It grows us in light.

The unfurling days
see shadows turn.

In turn, shadows
see days unfurling.

The light in us grows.
It forever keeps time."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Nice Noealzi sampler.

diagetic ditto
adroit tide of sidecars
arable Ygg dogloo
ant-pillaging dildo

the dream wanders whimless

The Danger of a Single Story.

( via / via )

Hegel & American Spirit.

Random #154 = 310 in base-7; 3 + 1 + 0 = 4 lines

   a tiny lizard
again i fail to capture

   something for the cat
to play with when he comes here

Вий (1967). ☆☆☆

"Crafting a tweet on "X" is like carefully decorating a cake before dropping it in the trash." --@daveastated

"I think the best first-century parallel, though, is Horace’s Carmen Saeculare, the only bit of Augustan Latin we know was certainly written for a performance (at the Saecular Games of 17 BC), and which marked Horace’s elevation to laureate status."

( via / via )

Hairy commute.

"The shampoo kiosk I set up at Burning Man is turning out to be another bad business venture on my part." --@MoMohler

Since You Asked.

"Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned."

--Dylan Thomas

My oil painting of a Margarita Doritos and Hummus.

( via / me )

"Sometimes trying to shift your mind into verbal is like trying to put a writhing two-year old baby into a snow suit. It just doesn’t want to go there."

random # 191 = 564 in base-7; 5 + 6 + 4 = 15 lines

searing guitar solo
consoles deranged angels
out of no mean instinct
   & hurled to the void
   unless you viewed

guitar solo talion
attains advanced cancer
just another nasty
   announcement sown
   in the Cthulhucene

the guitar weeps tipsy
tang of former mangles
none this town bred braver
   the instrument ebbs
   in solid orbs

Keep Waiting?

"You can hear the silence of it:
you can hear the rat of no-man's-land
rut out intricacies,
weasel-out his patient workings
scrut, scrut, scrut,
harrow-out earthly, trowel his cunning paw"

--David Jones via

We are Builders of Augmented Dreams.

( me / via )

Cicadas in late August.

I want nothing less than a return to crank vent windows on cars.

The Sailor's Grave at Clo-oose, V.I.

to be true · to a zopf orthodoxy
   hazy through the mire
   ley line & password
to be true · to a zopf orthodoxy

Grey Rubble--Green Shoots. (via @Jen3nfer)

( via / via )

Inventions for Radio.

Random # 216 = 426 in base-7; 4 + 2 + 6 = 12 lines

the one-wing'd · woofus manqué
mother of files · the glue failing
leaf-fall of labels · in the stagnant vault
   information lost

cold vigils calling · a coilname shuffled off
   nothing but to nuke
the whole house · with bug spray
strange days stemming · from a song on TV

skyscraper dawns · secret weapon chess
   love is a hologram rose
in the bedrock · of the bad seed
   silvery & the yesterday wind

Thread of maybe satellites burning up.

"Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything tremble, always, always?" --Henri Michaux via @poemakontsa

400,000 Hiroshima bombs a day. (via @jorie_graham)

( via / via )

"I think that the county probably heavily used AI to create these lessons and assessments, and she said, 'that makes sense, because when I asked for guidance on understanding the new standards, they said to feed it through ChatGPT'."

" 'I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why.' [--Pessoa]

Replace 'God' with 'Literature' and the condition I found myself in between abandoning working towards recognised and socially valuable qualifications and casting around during the evenings and weekends begins to make sense." --Stephen Mitchelmore via

Tubular Bells live.

Random # 157 = 313 in base-7; 3 + 1 + 3 = 7 lines

   contributionwise
as each day starts · tremulous
   stars in their changes

garb of forty years ago
the smell of Poison rises

write about Throbbing Gristle
bus stop witnessed eclipse

Aleph.

( via / me )

" 'When we allow affective responses to set the terms for responding to history,' Schrier powerfully writes, 'we risk engaging in a deceptive nihilism'."

"Small Prayer

Change, move, dead clock, that this fresh day
May break with dazzling light to these sick eyes.
Burn, glare, old sun, so long unseen,
That time may find its sound again, and cleanse
Whatever it is that a wound remembers
After the healing ends."

--Weldon Kees

Hotel California.

"I remember when a computer didn't automatically connect to the internet, it used to make a screaming noise. We should have listened." --@granitedhuine

"Yet the promise is not of a monument."

( via [thread] / via )

"In a world half of light, half of darkness, where both science and magic strive for dominance, there dwells a man who is friendly with neither side." (Available here.)

“Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: because it consists of a few powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want.”

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe via @outlawspoetic

"Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness..."

no end to the tastes of the woofus
who is anything but a doofus
   still the world has its ways
   to harrow & craze
his rev'rie with scour like a loofah's

"This is what writing is for me."

( via / via )

It’s one thing to put the fear of a genuine disaster into the heads of listeners, but to actually change their literal perception of what’s happening in their immediate surroundings? That’s next level. (Which quickly became my favorite song in 7th grade.)

"I gaze up
at the white contrail
while writing tanka
as if there were magic words
to ground you in my world"

--@ericcoliu

The last musician.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

—Thomas Pynchon via @bernardtjoy

Combining my love of folklore and stupid dances.

( via / me )

Here Comes the Rain Again.

Aickman's method: to write an origin story for the feeling of estrangment he already has. Ligotti's: to start with that.

The allée couverte of Créac’h-Gallic in Goulven.

Random # 230 = 446 in base-7; 4 + 4 + 6 = 14 lines

   versts to go
gray water curls
   around wheels
last wharf enroute
   try avoid
the true horror
   stick to old
kind stereo
   take your versts
like vitamins
   Charon grins
fixed charmingly
   over ice
oozing never

"Land Art sometimes feels like site magic and it is, but it’s a learned alchemy not an intrinsic sorcery."

( via / via )

Westport, 2006.

"The Undersong

I hear the sea-song of the blood in my heart,
I hear the sea-song of the blood in my ears:
And I am far apart,
And lost in the years.

But when I lie and dream of that which was
Before the first man's shadow flitted on the grass,
I am stricken dumb
With sense of that to come.

Is then this wildering sea-song but a part
Of the old song of the mystery of the years--
Or only the echo of the tired heart
And of tears?"

--Fiona Macleod

Metal Machine Music--live.

"The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment." --Adorno via

Endgame at mar-a-lago, detailed oil painting, egon schiele.

( via / via)

"If we don’t name it, we can’t tackle it." (via @jorie_graham)

"Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing."

- John Ashbery via @everysongiveeve

"I hadn’t realized until then how much having neighbors nearby made the prospect of dying more bearable; dying with friends around you would be a mercy compared to dying on your own, with no one to witness it, or even know it happened." (via @fadyjoudah)

"The Pope at Ground Zero"

Hammocks. Rings. Owls. The march
to wryneck, softer than a whisper;
and ev'rything proceeds from scratch
as modules in my brainpan fester.
Today the weather might be March
although November, light so mellow
falling across the plains of pitch,
and where i go there is no one can follow.

Hero of insufficient starch
and highwayman with finger blister,
my sense of irony's no crutch
against the hurricane's rough bluster.
Whatever brought me here won't muster
reasons to stay, or songs to hallow
this perilous absence of high master,
and where i go there is no one can follow.

Hyenas nuzzle at the latch.
Tomorrow is a blasting gospel.
Only for now, the jewels i catch
linger, then perish faster and faster.
Whatever courage i can foster
must shore up my walls, as stern as jello;
i chase gray moths on a twilight porch
and where i go there is no one can follow.

This blue podcast, this slim fetch
dwindles in the winds of Hesper.
I cannot dream of goodlier hutch,
i cannot find a finer clyster.
Among the hooligans who cluster,
this one's apogee lies fallow.
Once to lift a stratocaster--
and where i go there is no one can follow.

You who never knew the bunker buster
still find blood stains on your pillow.
Graywyvern shifts across Ygg's twister
and where he goes there is no one can follow.

(2007)

Discontinued.

( via / via )

SDXL embedding stacks with animatediff via comfyui.

"these roses
in a porcelain vase—
I cannot believe
yet I want to believe
they are from you"

--Michael Dylan Welch

Indian Summer.

"This grave spade-wielder, this food-grinding churl,
Whose mechanism morning sets to work,
And evening finds stretch'd in a snoring sleep..."

--J Stanyan Bigg

Seachange.

( me / via )

"I know about the influence that Brutalist architecture has on cold wave artists… here in Lisbon, we don’t have so many examples of that, but in the past, me and Tony and Sergue from Beautify Junkyards used to live in the Oriental part of the city. Which at the time was an industrial neighbourhood. We used to rehearse there with our previous band, and it had a decadence… there were ruins, and factories that had closed..."

"A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light."

— Dylan Thomas via @isidro_li

Little Talks (2012).

Random # 49 = 401 in base-7; 4 + 1 = 5 lines

   weird tether
timesheet crankshaft
   ideal stool
deem stern shamrock
   seared crackle

"Only during those secret moments near midnight when my family sleeps and my dog snores am I permitted to live in the real world of airplanes."

( via / me )

"For decades, I vainly attempted to describe, evoke and recapture these feelings… until I realised that a generation of musicians, artists and writers were already – rather conveniently – doing the job for me."

random # 312 = 611 in base-7; 6 + 1 + 1 = 8 lines

rolldandruff the daily
dosage of last plastic
portals prog new martyrs
milch-rich & swart switchblade
no intrinsic traction
trellises bright gel pens
the g'rage fridge is fraying
frass in a nice bastion

The Dwelling of Our Peace, the Holy Tabernacle, the Mother of the Martyrs, and the Sister of the Angels.

"Flame-decked this plain of warring kings
Where poisoned fumes and beacons burn!"

--Betelguese: A Trip Through Hell (1908)

Counting Down the Days.

( via / me )

Szechuan.

"The Weird is a way of writing about the real. It evolved slowly across the twentieth century and then faster than the eye could follow across the first two decades of the twenty-first, arising from constant collisions, engagements and exchanges of fluids between the horror story, the ghost story, landscape writing, the hauntological and psychogeoraphical perspectives. ...The Weird is not a genre in itself, it is a process. ...any episteme you can assemble to 'understand' the Weird should fail; or even better, almost succeed." --Wish I Was Here

The dark and charred ruins of the auditorium.

random # 244 = 466 in base-7; 4 + 6 + 6 = 16 lines

   no more spoons
despite the need
   spoons must go
it's good they say
   quit of them
acquire junk else
   into fire
my thread follows
   cerulean
such a cool ruse
   my hands burn
on the bare wheel
   no spoons now
& never more
   be happy
with your whole fork

I had that Technical Drawing book

( via / me )

A fragment of an old & brutal fairy tale.

"Mass of Cygnus X-1 (palindrome)

Slang is sung, Y-class imago.
Listen–
No song of a swan.

Gamma G-spots warp,
suck radii.
Dark cusp, raw, stops.
Gamma gnaws.

A fog–
No sonnets I log.
A missal Cygnus signals."

--@spoonerrhythms

Kin-dza-dza! (1986).

"I would support a debate where when they lie they get an electric shock." --@paulapoundstone

"My friends are dead. And they have a simple plan."