( 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.

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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 / me )

"Then he dismissed him: 'And now you may go, l’audience est finie. Je n’ai plus rien à vous dire'." (via @aliner)

"...it seemed to him that he would be the sorriest old bindlestiff wearing a coat of so many tatters, so many rags and patches covering so many holes that his coat was not his own, for his was a coat of holes, and he would carry all his worldly goods over his shoulder in his black handkerchief tied to his stick or cane, and all the dogs of creation would bark at him, nipping at his heels." --Miss Mackintosh via

Red Sprites with Lone Tree.

I found out, Heraclitus, how long you had 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

AI BAUTEN.

( via / me )

Widerruf.

"A fathead's panting grin"

dust smoothes these steps now
that trespass other lands
& over them planes
release their gifts by night
not Afghanistan

not decisions by us
but lies told deadpan
we've been served for so long
another flag gone
as in Afghanistan

in this realm no one
has given us the right
for the steps we took
drawing lines on the soil
each laden tree shook

& for all this less safe
for all this less peace
to be a martial land
bragging to have fought
even Afghanistan

wearily i say
beware of alpha-men
who plant but headstones
in rows at Arlington

their game is pure loss
let the dominos fall
of bogus duty
crap empire rips off all

better without it
fools killing for a cause
great day's conviction
will this ravel it all

tumultuous days
strung on a blindfold wish
too many people
in arson seeking bliss

steely eyes with fades
& plans to become men
are a trend so bad
& what's a bard to say
of Afghanistan

the real Afghanistan
times that fry our souls
in no distant future
sweet stench of success
as our failures unfold

the things that teach us
we can't bear to forgive
things that escape us
without them forced to live

whatever lie fobs
itself on us of tin
foil of despair of rot
will soon become our sun
or Afghanistan

not with weapons to right
whatever seems wrong
wiser chiefs would decide
nor attempt to best
nor bent outcomes deny

in an empire lost
in a desert of pain
running scared be all
global bully again

dust smoothes these steps now
that trespass other lands
deaths as undeserved
& as scant our regrets
for Afghanistan

Cicada Crunch.

"It was just that the things of the world weren't made for us, just that we'd had to come to terms with everything for which we'd nonetheless been born, just that suddenly it was as if love were the desperate clumsy shape that living and dying take, just that it was as if even in that moment the absolute had rendered us helpless; and the forever untransmissible truth that there was in her heart was the weight with which we love and love not." --The Apple in the Dark

"It's not a binary thing whereby autistic and allistic people do not ever share the same experiences and traits." (from the comments)