( via / via )

I Hate This Place.

"The endless memes of Trump as Rambo and rescuers and Jesus show how much the lost boys and Maga women want an authoritarian leader, and the fact they can make one out of the physically and mentally pathetic Trump is a testimony to the power of tech-fueled fantasy."

"...is Plato’s Socrates the ‘real’ Socrates, or a mouthpiece for Plato’s own views, or somewhere in between?"

( via / via )

Robots Smoking Cigarettes.

"I think it did amaze the Cyclades
To see me writing verses on the seas."

--1672 Ovid, IX.

"Real Roman Colosseum shit. ...And this helped me understand how the election happened."

"Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite,
Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray thee,
Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread mistress,
   Nay, nor with anguish !

But hither come, if ever erst of old time
Thou didst incline, and listenedst to my crying,
And from thy father's palace down descending,
   Camest with golden

Chariot yoked: thee fair swift-flying sparrows
Over dark earth with multitudinous fluttering,
Pinion on pinion, through middle ether
   Down from heaven hurried."

--Symonds's Sappho via

"The literal end of the world does not excuse you from doing the best you can."

( via / via )

"I do not think we were wrong to try, but I do think this moment calls for adjustments."

"Call me
by our old name.
The one we had down there,
when we were set alight in the
darkness."

--@xxyxxy.bsky.social

"A cliff made, on closer inspection, of something friable between mud and stone."

"Continuing my comfort re-watch of MCU movies I watched some of Winter Soldier, a lighthearted film about Nazis taking over institutions of American government with a plan to eliminate undesirable citizens en masse. Very escapist!" --@tomtomorrow.bsky.social

"Never before have we seen these numbers."

( 66th perijove photo / via )

Pavane.

"I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde motions of things." --George Washington, 1776 letter

"How fascinating, herr himmler", detailed oil painting, hieronymous bosch.

otherkin gulag anthem
halcyon henchmen skies
ill hap used
in the lurgy labyrinth

London Calling.

( via / via )

"They’ve lived through all five mass extinctions..."

snowflake sunned in the furnace
burly bird flu season
see the bailiff
with his rods tied tight

snowflake cursing & cadging
tidbits of calm
his half-formed hatch
not at all certain of serving

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.

"With Stupidity and sound Digestion a man may front much." --Carlyle

New Jupiter pics.

( me / via )

Cheaper Eggs.

"For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever." --Thomas Carlyle

Backyard aurora.

"Celebration of Failure

Through pain the land of pain,
Through tender exiguity,
Through cruel self-suspicion:
Thus came I to this inch of wholeness.

It was a promise.
After pain, I said,
An inch will be what never a boasted mile.

And haughty judgement,
That frowned upon a faultless plan,
Now smiles upon this crippled execution,
And my dashed beauty praises me."

--Laura (Riding) Jackson

Won't Back Down.

( via / me )

" 'American reality stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates,' [Roth] writes, 'and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist'." (via @mckenziewark)

the Devil three times
has to be asked
those are the cursed terms
the devil three times

but now the Fox teams
with ready lies are tasked
the Devil three times
has to be asked

"Rage is a form of prayer too."

"howling like a damp dog in November" --Basil Bunting

Tarantula Nebula.

( via / via )

Five minutes' hate, detailed oil painting, hieronymous bosch, norman rockwell.

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

--Sir John Harington via @ae_stallings

Five minutes' hate, detailed oil painting, hieronymous bosch (another try).

"To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors' eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult."

-W.B. Yeats via ilya kaminsky via sheryl st germain on fb

In Jabalia camp.

( via / via )

Entering Gaza City. (via @mosababutoha)

once there was a gas they used for cooling
until they found out it messed with the ozone layer

i think that was the last time all the world
could see a vital problem & correct it

last times, last times, who could count them all
with all this neat stuff filling up my feed

yet i will live to tell from under the overpass
the face of the last tornado filling the sky

Family of Bones.

"The world has become too twined, too insalubrious with suffering, to float through it, as if one had the right to be anywhere." --Gary Indiana, Do Everything in the Dark (2003)

Five Minutes' Hate.

( via/ via )

Common Man.

"Gone into the night, complicit,
a star-
porous leaf
for a mouth:

something remains
for wild wasting,
treeward."

— Paul Celan (translated by Katharine Washburn & Margret Guillemin) via @isidro_li

Work Song.

  who will be the first
he will come for?--this question
  ricochets the room

a kind of numbed hush flickers
on the handheld tiny screens

Five Spanish pioneers. (via miekal on fb)