( via / via )

Another Streets of Minneapolis.

"After My Doctor Tells Me My Labs Are Normal

Studies have shown that you should not be feeling this way. Studies do not show a correlation between the symptoms and the disease. Studies encourage you to weep but only to yourself. Studies are always correct. Studies occupy the same position in time as an alarm clock. Studies have been conducted entirely in space that also say you should not be feeling this way. Studies indicate that pain is not weakness leaving the body but rather getting comfortable in it. Studies suggest that pain is all in the mind. Studies have not found a cure. Further studies have been canceled."

—Ly Faulk in Have Has Had

Piaf & Cocteau.

"Dust on the wind / Boots on the ground / Smoke in the sky / No peace found." —Ian Bogost quoting Velvet Sundown via

Japanese poster for Danger: Diabolik.

( via / via )

Epstein's Art Collection.

"The study concludes with a clear message: the sensationalist narrative linking lead to the fall of Rome is unsustainable." —Guillermo Carvajal in La Brujula Verde

What's Your Dream?

“CXXIX

When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting,
That this was love? When did I ever, I say,
With iron thumb put out the eyes of day
In this cold world where charity lies bleating
Under a thorn, and none to give him greeting,
And all that lights endeavor on its way
Is the teased lamp of loving, the torn ray
Of the least kind, the most clandestine meeting?

As God’s my judge, I do cry holy, holy,
Upon the name of love however brief,
For want of whose ill-trimmed, aspiring wick
More days than one I have gone forward slowly
In utter dark, scuffling the drifted leaf,
Tapping the road before me with a stick.”

—Edna St Vincent Millay

Walter Benjamin Leaves Paris.

( via / via )

Miskatonic University Classified Collection, Middle-East Expeditions, 1900-1936.

"不自殺聲明"

no death
by my own choice:
& if something happens
that looks like an accident, it
wasn't.

A declaration of no suicidal intent.

"We bought Article II of the United Nations Charter with the blood of a hundred million human beings, and less than a century later, it's being sold for nothing by people who don't even understand what they're doing." —@goldwagnathan.bsky.social

Reality Check: Ryan Coogler, Sinners, and Things That Go "Tsk...Tsk" in the Night.

( via / via )

I need this poster.

I'm just talkin' 'bout 𝑠𝑛𝑜𝑤-𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑠. I'm just cussing 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑔𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑝𝑜.

No need for streetlamps when the Aurora is this bright.

      Vallejo: "The Eternal Dice

   My God, I'm crying over the life I live;
it grieves me to have taken your bread;
but this clay, poor and pensive,
isn't the crust fermented in your side:
you have no Marys who leave you!

   My God, if you'd ever been human,
today you would know how to be God;
but you, who are always fine,
feel nothing of what your creation feels.
And man, yes, suffers for you: he's the one who is God!

   Today candles burn in my witch eyes
as in a condemned man's eyes,
my God, you light all your candles,
and we'll play with the old die...
Perhaps, O gambler!, throwing for the luck
of the entire universe, the dark-circled eyes
of Death will turn up,
like funereal snake-eyes of mud.

   My God, and on this night, deaf and dark,
you can't play anymore, because Earth
is a corroded die and, already worn down
from tumbling out luck,
is unable to stop except in a hollow,
the void of an immense grave."

(tr Rebecca Seiferle, 2003)

Study for Ice Storm, Maine.

( via ☆☆ / via )

Greenish half-light greebled.

"FOR BEES
(Aelindrome in the Golden Ratio)
16180339

You hone yields
and inform us.
You perform in fields
and you honey."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

In space no one can hear you in space.

"Of course, it’s not really possible to avoid affirming life, even when you’re writing a horror story defaming it. The act of writing is an affirmation, as is the act of suicide." —Thomas Ligotti via

The Eternal Dice.

( via / me )

"To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals..." (via @timesflow.bsky.social)

"Farewell to the humble charms of wabi, the morose pleasures of sabi. Greetings to the potent joy of cold-forged steel...to the harsh intoxications of temperature-resistant polymer components...and a special hello to pure ballistic stopping power." --Thomas Ligotti, My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002)

Hey Joe.

   greenish clouded light
Violet Opal lyrics
   explained by AI

the same story i suppose
fire behind embracing pair

Cortez the Killer.

( me / via )

Official lyrics explained. Okay, what could be more 2026 than an AI-generated explanation video for the meaning of an AI-generated song?

"Winter Ocean

Many-maned scud-thumper, tub
of male whales, maker of worn wood, shrub-
ruster, sky-mocker, rave!
portly pusher of waves, wind-slave."

—John Updike

"It’s one thing to fall out of fashion, another to fall out of favour, and Updike seems to have fallen out of both while still being suspended mid-air, cushioned by the thermals while posterity figures out what to do with him."

" 'Per week. Yes. As to the amount of strain upon the intellect now. Was you thinking at all of poetry?' Mr Wegg inquired, musing.

'Would it come dearer?' Mr Boffin asked.

'It would come dearer,' Mr Wegg returned. 'For when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind.' "

—Our Mutual Friend

Strawberries.

( via / me )

Storm.

Cats have one appetite: to find the perfect temperature in a room within 0.1 degree.

The New World.

"reparations"

fathom'd loss or facemask
affixed, deranged mixture
in the car-void codebook

carry other other swear words
prosperous hasp homeboy
huddled amidst bloodwork

i go where the gore stints
ergo it's a hare's dodge
codex stalking staredom

strewn through the gray boondocks
& gathered thrift throng-dense
even as thrall crawlspace

Intensity and Height.

( via / via )

What happened to Darjeeling?

orb rotates— voracious
veldt of elderberry
the letter squares scattered
ascribe spooky lucre

wrong, owlwise & orchid
ironclad grief that surfs here
dark wood darker hardware
wander the mid-region

The Shadow.

"The talk to your friends app and the witness the horrors app being the same app is not great for the mental health is it" —@mckelvie.bsky.social

Derivations.

( me / via )

Greek Ode ‘Against The Slave Trade.

“(If there's anything worse than an unreliable narrator, it's an unreliable narrator with a bag over his head.)”
-Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim via @jacobwren.bsky.social

Still Life: a Treatment.

      "From Far, from Eve

From far, from eve and morning
   And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
   Blew hither: here am I.

Now—for a breath I tarry
   Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
   What have you in your heart.

Speak now, and I will answer;
   How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
   I take my endless way."

—A.E. Housman

Probability.

( me / via )

Confluence on CD.

"year of the horse"

friend in the miles frozen
frabjous lobe of seeming
one & a half Hesper
hoarse osprey the fierce word

lumbers across lattice
alert to swart rumblings
the loom trembles traincross
its trestle graffiti'd

& splurge splinters glumly
to splay inner gimbals
true as trek's gleanings
traduced in vast deserts

Tanka.

“The reverse of melancholy is always irony.”

— W. G. Sebald (interview, 1998) via @yoonkim.bsky.social

Life is Possible Again.

( me / via )

When I'm Wearing Red.

4.
fiend Delphinium · fortress of Anschluss
in the wopwops wizen · into bile & halftime
derp calls to derp · i watch dooms crumble
marionette · strings on fire

5.
dank dungeon of children
posh deluge of rapists
i'm supposed to sandwich
poem sendings with these
world winding up firewards
as clown frenzyjinks clatter
i cloister a foisting
worm's angle on Ingsoc
ever curb-acerbic
eyed by angry corbies
will leave fierce confetti
four field goals Macbethish
empyrean pinball
panlykonium humbug

Confluence.

6.
then dance versts of vanish
who vouchsafe blank clinkers
golden alike gantry
with gore spattered catwalk
at spiral-hire sunset
just spawning a dust-whirl
the one told the secret

Violet Opal and their album Blue Sun are part of Unreal Rock Songs, an AI-generated music project that creates fictional bands and original albums.

( via / via )

"I’ve always thought the opposite, that most poetry isn’t hard enough."

"Diggle, whose expertise really is ungainsayable, identifies maybe twelve instances of ‘wrong or dubious’ Greek in the poem, most of them pretty trivial (he also finds ‘a few false quantities’, which is venal rather than mortal sinning, I feel)." —@adamroberts.bsky.social via

Dead Man's Party.

"orange cyber truck"

2.
not the frown spread · on the face of the sky
nor the rising wind · nor birds wax tellingly
but a fourth sense · would presage rain
bulletins teem · in our tiny rooms
   ev'ryone's talking to persuade
on shadowless roads · shambles the man
who needed a word · & made one

3.
Meadowknoll annealing
Dang & Zapata Law
an ascian lurks otchkies
irked by wires cerulean
indwelling mob munchkin
mistletoe for kismet
two-worlds-lost contestant
i tell the yegg-regolith
of Meadowknoll annealing

Vitai Lampada.

( via / @neymrqz )

A book for every country.

"alighted
on a temple-bell,
a napping butterfly"

—Masaoka Shiki
(Sept 17, 1867 - Sept 19, 1902)

Tr. Janine Beichman via @eve castle.bsky.social

AI vs Wikipedia.

"To blow
A kiss, a bubble and a prayer hath like
Effect and satisfaction."

—Festus

Fracture.

( via/ @jwirtalla )

Held Over: Harold and Maude at The Westgate Theater.

"If I gobbled up the wagon-ruts
I'd be on my way."

—Washburn & Guillemin's Celan

AI-assisted book promotion scams are completely out of control.

"caltrops"

tree-laced languid light
lowest, thinnest crescent
rune-blockage, arrival
roaring human form

lapsehug for a harg
hierophant of contrails
in the mildew market
manymong prolong

Minnesota Goddam.

( via/ via )

Too Many Humans.

"An Allegory of Good Government"

What fires am i watching,
that no smoke smells of them
even in this small close room?

Fires that can't be seen,
fires that cast their tingling
on the brain instead of the face,
fires like i have watched too long before.

The wood seemed turned to water,
surging and splashing, alive
only in this sourceless radiance
and for this night of watching
under the bright stars also watching.

The King Will Come.

"Someone told me lately 'Bluesky is just like Twitter.' I argued that was untrue on the basis that last time I had a Twitter account most times I got a new follower their bio said 'single & looking for fun' & here when I get a new follower it tends to say something like 'professor of rare moths'." —@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social

"Art fiction needn’t be understood in terms of its giving us a more accurate picture of reality than leisure fiction, but rather in its capacity to give us more reality. (via Mefi)

( via / via )

Atlas of HP Lovecraft.

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." — Steve Biko via @thecolfax.bsky.social

Tanka.

      "perfusionist" ["orange cybertruck 1."]

bridge that you crossed · how many times daily
blast that you heard · heavily re-echoed
it's a tide · tell me Mr Bones
   what the floor reveals

spring mixed with winter · wailing with humor
   years on the wrong track
another brother · brought up on drones
   & what the floor reveals

kleenex for paper · perfervid ragtime
choirs our scurry · a salt waste to wade
   forest of monochrome—
no floor at all · reveals the flounder

no rescue will come · that much is clear
   in Minneapolis

That last one i need to steal for my sign-off.

( via / via )

A Distance from the Sea.

"pale saffron skylight"

that far bridge at brillig
brumous with smog, nog rattling
   over the scurry
somewhere else's island
aileron flap clap-smiley
   not for the drivers

"At the end of the class I sent Professor Hamby a little parody piece, a rebuttal from the nightingale’s point of view to the moping poet sitting underneath its tree." A Parody Anthology. Also here. I go into widerruf here, as elsewhere. This & this just turned up. Another new one to me. This was for the General's poem. I can't think of any better than Phelps Putnam's.

My comment on "Horace and Friends": Fascinating stuff, & if i ever returned to my onetime idea of writing a book on poems that answered poems ("the art of the widerruf") i would certainly mention it. (The term is Celan's.) Everyone knows about Raleigh's answer to Marlowe, but what about this:

Ogden Nash wrote a widerruf once:

"Lines Written to Console Those Ladies Distressed by the Lines 'Men Never Make Passes' etc.

A girl who is bespectacled
Don’t even get her nectacled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fascinets."

(um, you have to pronounce it "neck tickled" (ouch!)

Victoria added: "Thanks! There are absolutely tons of response poems in this period, it's an artefact of manuscript culture I think. Sometimes you get massive long strings of them and sometimes they are v. international -- the Pope replied (in a Latin poem) to a Latin poem by Herbert. For years people thought the response was Herbert pretending to be the Pope, and even commented on how it was very gentlemanly of him to give the Pope the best of the exchange, before someone spotted that the Pope's poem was actually included in his (the Pope's) collection of Latin poems as well."

POSTSCRIPT

I found out, Heraclitus, how long you hád been dead;
you weren't that sad philosopher, but a satellite of the Pleiade.
Unless there's lurking, somewhere in the desert, bits we've missed,
your "Nightingales" are gone as though they never did exist.

3 13 86

Dream Song 76.

( via / via )

Omnipresence.

"Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown."

Matsuo Basho
The Knapsack Journal, 1687 via @dapowell.bsky.social

Godzilla vs Destoroyah poster.

"too many villains in this story"

blaze barricades · the blunt trauma
of a day hurled · in your face like slurry
but the car's calming · hum takes over
   blur sharpens to shape

of a day hurled · in your face like slurry
detours & deranged · riot of newsreels
   blur sharpens to shape
   & you comprehend the curve

detours & deranged · riot of newsreels
blaze barricades · the blunt trauma
   & you comprehend the curve
but the car's calming · hum takes over

"...almost no-one owned any Shakespeare before the eighteenth century."

( via / via )

"This shift toward the ampersand came at a pivotal moment in Levis’s career."

fighting phantoms · in the robot wars
spirits drawn · by the reek of blood
screen fades out · if i fail to tap
a brisk thought · in the rathe dark

"In total, somewhere between 20 million and 60 million tons of hazardous waste were dumped in and around Dallas-Fort Worth — in the very hinterlands the city is now expanding into."

Addicted to low-level planning, like an inoculation against future shock.

"That is where the real money tends to come from. Other people’s dreams."

( via / via )

Between Poetry and Painting.

"And not even the blasphemers of the demiurge have dared to deny that the universe is most beautiful, but rather, they maintain that because of this beauty, souls are harmed."

—Proclus

Tunak Tunak Tun.

'fragiloquent' joss stick
the road jungled tungsten

pale cerulean piecework
roll periscope marrow

broken bricks in piles

On the Occasion of the 1,600th Anniversary of the Birth of Proclus . (pdf)

( via / via )

Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa in Alexandria.

NOTHING MEANS NOTHING

This morning i understood.
Or this afternoon.
A fly cast its shadow
on the gray wooden floor,
its wings a translucent one
a semi-shade.
Not that, not this—
cried the sage in the marketplace.
He wasn't playing
a sophist's game
with that Asian sun
nor did he seek to stifle
our questions like you'd swat a fly.
Invisible wings
(not this, not that)
were fluttering, and the half-tones changed shape.

When i saw her again today
so briefly,
i understood.

"A hero out of Camus or Walker Percy let loose in a world run by Zig Ziglar and Perry Mason."

"The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." —James Baldwin via

Lyin’& Spinnin’: My Apocalyptic Valentine 😬💘.

( via / via )

Emanation.

When we wonder what any of us can do as a single person, look at Ida B. Wells.

"Nearly every house had a message staked in the yard or taped to the window: ICE OUT OF MPLS, GO HOME, NO SECRET POLICE, SAY THEIR NAMES."

"Tomas Tranströmer TR Robin Fulton

Ice hangs down from the roof edge.
Icicles: the upside-down Gothic.
Abstract cattle, udders of glass.

Tonight snow-haze, moonlight. The moonlight jellyfish itself
is floating before us. Our smiles
on the way home. Bewitched avenue."

—@andrewbertaina.bsky.social

I asked Grok to measure the irony of this & Grok just bleeped & died.

( via / me )

1949-A-No.1.

"One pillar holding up consolations,
another pillar,
a duplicate pillar, pillarous
and like the grandchild of a dark door.
Lost noise, the one, listening, at the edge of fatigue;
drinking, the other, two by two, with handles.

Don’t I perhaps know the year of this day,
the hatred of this love, the planks of this forehead?
Don’t I know that this afternoon costs days?
Don’t I know that never does one say ‘never’, on one’s knees?

The pillars that I saw are listening to me;
other pillars are, twos and sad grandchildren of my leg.
I say it in American copper
which owes to silver so much fire!

Consoled by third marriages,
pallid, born,
I am going to close my baptismal font, this showcase,
this fright with tits,
this finger in deathrow,
heartily tied to my skeleton.”

—Eshleman’s Vallejo

"Always a great sign for how things are going in your country when 21-year-olds are like 'hey, I innovated a system to play bagpipes in tear gas'."

THE GOP IN 2026: less shame than the Mayor of Ohrdruf.

For my brother Miguel.

( via / via )

Meanjin has been saved from the Melbourne University capitalist death pit.

"Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."

—Gabriel García Márquez, Life. via @umadip.bsky.social

"This is, of course, a wishlist. ...But Gen AI can't do any of these things."

February wanhope
rewards hollow larder
trickle of smudge smackdown
smileyface carrel reaper

February fireworks
fumble the etch switchblade
tourbillon steel task list
tardy release fossil

35 million years later.