( via )

"The plan is the lightning rewires us together and we all smell like mud and grass and ozone but can intuitively, and collectively, always keep the beat."

"Each card is labeled with a tactic she’s learned to spot: Deny, Attack, Play the Victim, Perform the Hero, Create Crisis."

D.O.A.

( via / me )

"A dilapidated stone piggery with a partially collapsed slate roof sits next to a large barn converted into a modern Airbnb rental. Beside these is a small cottage that dates back to the 17th century."

"My translator tells me 'thoughts & prayers' is an American political expression that means 'we'd rather have a secret police force than a weather service'." --@darthputinkgb.bsky.social

"...in every age, there have been those rooted in conscience and often in faith who refused to let empire have the final word."

tragic rainlight Rudyard
Rutabaga mooted
where explore still waters
westering sane rainlight

RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer.

( via / me )

Ethiopia, 18th c. (?).

"don't cry, insects
in summer shirts…
the waterfall roaring"

--@poemexe.com

Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappé (1967).

The Youtube psych/prog algorithm is the only one we should keep.

"Had not realized that was what they had to teach those of us marked out as fair game."

( me / via )

The Child Dreams.

“And all the ruins of distressful times” - Richard III (Act 4, Scene 4) via

"We had to put up razor barb wire."

"The Question and Its Mark

May I cast a spell on the many swans of Leda,
making at last one spastic blizzard in spring
with only enough divine mania to take one
blinding day from her?

The godbirds and their scopophilia
keep her open for view and review, with ever
new speculum and never the elegant jewelry
of stigmata or a heart of quartz.

May I give her only one death? Can we live if she
lies closed in a single final pose, no syphilitic
autopsy or cygnet interrogation?
May I mark her prophecy,

her presence in the very air, with a single
gargoyle on the streetside wall on a place
of worship, finally allowed inside if only by
disappearing into the stones?

Leda possessed a pair of knees that also bent
in prayer. I ask of you only what she asked for there."

—Brenda Shaughnessy

Raymond's Road.

( via / via )

You Must Live.

"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie
   Dust unto dust
The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die
   As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell
   Too strong to strive
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
   Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
   The cowed and the meek
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
   And dare not speak."

--Ralph Chaplin, in The Match (Summer, 2004)

Games We Play.

"Child of Omelas? That’s thinking too small. What if like eight billion people suffered so a few dozen guys could live lives so insane they convinced themselves it’s more likely they’re inside a computer simulation" --@ceej.online

New favorite picture.

( via / via )

Les Antiquités de Rome, III.

"Toad wrote on the ground with a stick: Go to Sleep.

Then he crossed out: Go to Sleep.

'There,' said Toad. 'Now my day is all crossed out!'

'I am glad,' said Frog. Then Frog and Toad went right to sleep."

--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social

Concrete and Barbed Wire.

besieged water sadness
soft glow on the rooftops
hyperbola lawyer
less than perfect wharfstead

pain subdued & padlocked
periscope bent firelight

Folsom Prison Blues. Awhile back i wrote: "Folsom Prison Blues" should be our national anthem--it says more about America, with its guns, its prisons, & its loneliness of highways, than any other single song. But to be the country of 'This Land is Your Land' (including the often-omitted verses)--that is something to aspire to."