Wednesday, December 11, 2024
"Condor
How flawless and unvarying his candor
Over the wide, over the high Andes
The great condor
So infinitely far from all dissembling,
Is there a doubt? He dares, he dares the sun
To watch him
And the sun watches. Watches, watches the condor
Over the wide, over the high Andes
With equal candor."
--Robert Francis
"It seems to me that, if there is mercy in the lyric that’s not as achievable in prose, it’s that the lyric is not beholden to human time. " --Molly Spencer via
This Beast Went A-Catching Sparrows.
"Frog and Toad waited a long time." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
"I think they were Fennecs, the smallest species of fox, but they might have been Rüppell's, which are more closely related to our Red Fox.." (via @davebonta.bsky.social)
"a curse from which there is no escape"
crystal night agnostic
knits up the snared care-sleeve
pellucid thorned lacework
alloted fraught queueberth
quebrith stench so stubborn
i steer better veering
remain major adjunct
among the deft bunglers
Andrew Tate having all his cars taken away.
"the wine of superiority"
cold winds · cruise the paved lot
social security · assigned in Hawk Tuah coin
the hottest year hurtles · to a rude reckoning
"There is an even stranger synchronicity lurking in [Jack] Spicer’s California mysterium. In 1948, back in Berkeley, he and [Robert] Duncan roomed briefly with a peculiar young man named Philip K. Dick, who once supplied an LP-recording device for their parlor games of poetic performance. As Killian and Lewis Ellingham point out in their definitive Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God, the books of Dick and of Spicer later became mirror images of each other, in theme as well as in imagery—grasshoppers, Martians, radios, salesmen, cities. Like Dick, Spicer was an impoverished and alienated artist for whom writing was, as Darko Suvin famously described the genre of science fiction, a motor of 'cognitive estrangement.' Both are cult artists who wrote, it can seem, as much for our time as for theirs." --Erik Davis via
"I find it vaguely comforting they found Xanax in al-Assad’s palace. Like oh good even the homicidal maniacs are on the edge" --@coolhand.bsky.social
"Pitcher
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.
Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late."
--Robert Francis
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
"Fruit
If poems ever dropped into my hand,
If there was ever any time
In any land
When I had but to shake the bough
For the ripe fruit to fall,
It is not so now.
Today the fruit I want is fruit I pick,
I have to climb,
I have to reach,
I have to be both slow and quick
For each particular blue plum
Or golden peach."
--Robert Francis
"That’s not hardball capitalism. That’s polluting our culture for your own minor profit."
"IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (Anagrammed Lines)
It came from outer space —
a comet of imp creatures;
a curse of meteor impact —
to permute a cosmic fear,
to cap our mesmeric fate..."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. -JFK via @misteres.bsky.social
"lightning
on the horizon . . .
the years
before me
stretch thin"
--Chen-ou Liu via @evecastle.bsky.social
"Beor's Lament
Among the mead-cups, misery I suffered --
Sloshed with gesiðas, smashed at the feast,
as hamstrung as Weland ‧ wandering back
to bed and breakfast ‧ in back of beyond --
consumed sufficient ‧ to stupefy legs --
winter-cold exile -- waking in ditch.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
And like Geat’s wife, woeful Mæþhild,
sad at symbels, a sorrow-love --
On wine I whine, wibble sleep-reft,
A miserable man, maudlin-bladdered.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
Like Theodric’s rule ‧ for thirty years
in the stronghold ‧ of the hotel toilet,
I seem to spend life ‧ spewing in cubicles.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
Whetted on whiskey, wolfish I became.
Like Eormanric, I ruled the meadbench --
sixty gesithas ‧ by sorrow bound,
grim while I regaled them ‧ with god-awful jokes --
companions praying ‧ the punch line would come.
That drunkenness passed, so may this.
Of my present plight ‧ I plead to speak.
I once was a wordsmith, a weaver of verse
Remembered by many -- Martin my name --
but cider and spirits ‧ I’ve supped with ale,
and mixing mead ‧ with mulled wine
has tied my tongue, ‧ taken my eloquence.
Beor has broken ‧ my bardic spell.
That drunkenness passed, so may this."
--Martin Vine via
A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace.
“We are in a prison of our own minds holding our own chains around us. We create our oligarchs and fight for their right to oppress us.”
― Heather Marsh, Binding Chaos via @kanenas-kaneis.bsky.social
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
--Frank Herbert via @mariejo1965.bsky.social
Allowables. Have taught this. Best poem about racism ever. Imagine that simple compassion toward racists would be so quiet & so unanswerable. I can't.
“Medicine Buddha”
Jesus wept because he came too late
To save, his promise made but badly kept.
Chagrin the more when murder is our freight:
Jesus wept.
You’d think with all the churches small & great
No effort would be spared for the margin-swept.
Under Jesus’s gaze they rant & hate.
His birthday gloats with ev’ry dazzling prate
Money can buy, morality’s inept
Substitute; & still they mouthe his fate.
Jesus wept.
"THIS STATUS IS JOY
I have confused
the letters
that were in
the poem
and which
you were busily
scribbling
for a book
Forgive me
they were a pale view
so sad
and so exact"
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
luigi mangione
moiling guinea
omega linguini
a noggin milieu
no ageing Ilium
imagine gun oil
gauge mini lion
aiming guile on
a limo gig ennui
Every Atom. (via brain clements on fb)
"Syllabub"
Rapist Cheetoh
Killed his million
Gets another
Whack at it
Some did crave it
Others didn't
More could hardly
Give a shit
Nations vary
In their downfall
Peter out or
Just implode
Sad to witness
Worse to be there
Worst of all to
Have to bode
A conversation with James Baldwin.
"CROW (Palindrome)
Deft,
I saw a crow,
over us,
a sure vow or caw
as it fed."
--@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
Monday, December 09, 2024
The road to Damascus. (via @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social)
Night road's thronged with thousands returning home
a lit stream wending where the dictator fell,
as we are set to raise another up:
our eyes incapable of Damascus sight.
Limerick writer and activist
Sat by as a figment enacted its
Unspeakable crime,
Waxed chipper for a time…
While another small country got whacked to bits.
"The twenty-first poem must
*
oh
but
you know
how they died —
thousands of children
underneath bombs and bulldozers
today, a girl still under a mountain of rubble
and buried in a line, thirteen children from one family – a precision air strike:
they tell us to ignore the growling dark in the sky
but a poem must write of drones
that swallow the doves
a poet
must scream
must
cry
*"
~ Rajani Radhakrishnan at Thot Purge
Yes Goblin is still around. Mood much?
"Here's my new favorite joke:
knock knock
who's there?
hike
hike who?
Unsuspecting friend.
I await with bated breath.
Sets the perfect trap."
--@jhammersley.bsky.social via @guentheralex.bsky.social
"when we rest, our eyes stay open"
--Ferron
Including the Triangular Grimoire of St Germain. More.
auburn, gold ullage
where the solid subfusc
airt suffocates;
driver denies my druthers
can't tolerate the talkers
who would drape torment
& announce fake normalcy
these crazed shadows crawl
to nuke the secret
Sunday, December 08, 2024
Bashar al-assad and an open window, detailed oil painting, edward hopper.
freshly harfang tholes
the taant frigorific news
sometimes gigglemug
assassin lookalike prize
is to speak with a person
I Give My Little Stars to Children.
“Toad ran home and slammed the door. There, on the floor, he saw his white, four-holed, big, round, thick button. 'Oh,' said Toad. 'It was here all the time. What a lot of trouble I have made for Frog.' " --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
Georges Méliès was born 163 years ago today.
"Godot is my co-pilot." --@memexikon.bsky.social
What a strange moment in poetryland that was.
"cash reins.
smooth tail
hideaway.
fluv,
dairy sound.
the tell remain.
jiggle lap.
the prairie.
mannered acreings,
cellbinds flicker,
deeper rigor
wraw an undermined.
the log that quays
rejoinder.
wha phail.
ploog tid humiliflier.
grain tinkles.
water lingers.
dry. huge. foaming. air.
tomorrow eyes capulet.
expectator jewels
aforementioned alight"
--Lyx Ish via
"The arc of fucking around is long..."
"To a Mosquito"
I mashed you against the glass.
Now you hang there, effortlessly,
like a spacewalker or Lucifer falling
and the cars fly behind you
in this raw blue dawn.
Of all the mosquitos here
you must be the largest and most fearsome.
Your delicate rigging is almost intact;
your scales poised, your antennae tuned to skin-seeking.
I don't know why I killed you:
it was more instinct than reason.
Mosquitos feasted on me nightlong,
but you were only trying to get out.
Somehow I have a feeling if I were to take
that tiny bulb of an abdomen and squeeze it
no blood of mine would issue forth.
We were waiting for the early bus together
and you must have been hungry as I.
[from PHOENICIANS (1981)]
CANADIAN Version of this series would have been boring.
“Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”
~Flannery O'Connor, ‘The Habit of Being’ via @willdonnelly.bsky.social
"I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance." --@mobydickatsea.bsky.social
triangular grimoire
opened, cannot force back shut
reads reversed both ways
The Footsteps. (via @aestalings.bsky.social)
"That Part in the Music
Once loyal to a cruel master,
the dog moves like a man who
not so long ago weighed a lot less
and is still figuring the difference,
what if anything to make of it.
It doesn’t matter, whatever
tenderness she’s known since;
the dog, I mean. They’re called
hesitation wounds, the marks
left where the hand, having meant
to do harm, started to, then
reconsidered. As if a hand
could reconsider. The dog
wants to trust, you can see it
in her eyes, like that part in the music
where it still sounds like snow
used to. There were orchards, still;
meadows. She’ll never be free."
--Carl Phillips via @yrfrenbren.bsky.social
"a bloke came down from Sheriffhales walking two goats across the Iron Bridge the black one called Apollo" --@mjohnharrison.bsky.social
All of Tarkovsky's films are available free and restored on Youtube. (via @tanitatikaram.bsky.social)