“ 'Courage does not take much account of other people,' said Matthew.
'All qualities leave victims in their wake,' said Rachel. 'Look at truthfulness and justice.' " --@icomptonburnett
Containment, quantification...
"write a tanka poem about brutalist architecture
Concrete giants rise,
Brutalist structures command,
Raw strength on display,
Harsh lines, shadows of the past,
Beauty in brutal embrace."
--ChatGPT
"OWL (Palindrome)
Too held in its tide,
tan, a meek owl woke,
emanated its tin, idle hoot."
--@Anthony_Etherin
Tumbleweed moments everywhere.
"He allowed himself to love these streets, as though they were a poem he had once memorized, and the years when he had first seen these colors and stones and studied these faces seemed a rich and vauable part of what he was now." --The Master
"We isolate, we exile our great men, whether by ignoring them or praising them stupidly. And perhaps this isolation we offer them is our greatest gift." --Conrad Aiken
The roof, where it was possible to dwell,
was its own world. Not that you could see
very far at all. But from the roof
ev'ry view was looking down. The roof
gave of itself this boon & that was all
you needed on the lovely roof. A dome
had one time been attempted. The bare rods
grew streaked with rust. I never went up there
to visit. From across the street i watched.
"XXXIII
Then came I to the shoreless shore of silence,
Where never summer was nor shade of tree,
Nor sound of water, nor sweet light of sun,
But only nothing and the shore of nothing,
Above, below, around, and in my heart:
Where day was not, not night, nor space, nor time,
Where no bird sang, save him of memory,
Nor footstep marked upon the marl, to guide
My halting footstep; and I turned for terror,
Seeking in vain the Pole Star of my thought;
Where it was blown among the shapeless clouds,
And gone as soon as seen, and scarce recalled,
Its image lost and I directionless;
Alone upon the brown sad edge of chaos,
In the wan evening that was evening always;
Then closed my eyes upon the sea of nothing
While memory brought back a sea more bright,
With long, long waves of light, and the swift sun,
And the good trees that bowed upon the wind;
And stood until grown dizzy with that dream;
Seeking in all that joy of things remembered
One image, one of the dearest, one most bright,
One face, one star, one daisy, one delight,
One hour with wings most heavenly and swift,
One hand the tenderest upon my heart;
But still no image came, save of that sea,
No tenderer thing than thought of tenderness,
No heart or daisy brighter than the rest;
And only sadness at the bright sea lost,
And mournfulness that all had not been praised.
O lords of chaos, atoms of desire,
Whirlwind of fruitfulness, destruction's seed,
Hear now upon the void my late delight,
the quick brief cry of memory, that knows
At the dark's edge how great the darkness is."
--Conrad Aiken, "Preludes for Memnon"
"Elon Musk is like a Scooby Doo villain who dresses up as a ghost to scare everyone away from the theme park but forgets that his business is theme parks" --@DrMatthewSweet
Gerty Gerty Gerty Stein is Back Back Back.
"Twitter is a former conference hotel that got sold off to a budget chain and now the pool is drained, the parking lot is potholes and breakfast is Great Value cornflakes" --@Sensualcmt via Mark Saltveit on mastodon
duck into rabbit
by magic of cicadas
& then neither one
suddenly shadows perish
spun of mechanical prayer
Ģ̴̶̸̴̭͍̰̘̟̜̈́̎̔ͣ̄̂́ͪ̚͡M̶̷̢͈̬̞̗̤̞͆̉ͮͦͭͮ͋̂͘͝_̢̲̯̟̭͐͐.
"Fibonacci Aelindrome
1-1-2-3-5-8-13
No sires
a progeny
of tenacious sums,
we deny,
often,
a progression."
--Anthony Etherin, from Fabric
Plano Rona LP. (One drawback with reversing a primitive electronic album, i belatedly realized, is that pure generated-waves such as sine & square are highly symmetrical, thus changing relatively imperceptibly when run backwards. Almost any other sound-source would be more noticeable! The differences i can hear are more due to the control device itself: attack, sustain, & fade, which become, perhaps, a cumulative effect of slightly-increased uncanniness.)
"An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends." --GK Chesterton
〜⚪︎〜.
"He knew that there was no point in claiming that if the play had needed cuts he would have made them before he finished it. Every day now he made excisions, and he thought it strange that after a few hours, he remained the only one who noticed the gaps, the missing moments." --Colm Tóibín, The Master
accumulation
other rule of entropy
clutter increases
in the house & in the mind
can't find what you're looking for
as if anyone
could make things clear · not the clear
more than the obscure
chirring waves overhead blend
into the heat of summer
"If one is defective, as are we all in some way, being uniquely defective is something of a consolation in the absence of a cure." --The Spectral Link
C o d e ⇾ s t r u c t u r e s.
🦠.
"Once having consigned the dead to the ground, the living do not wish the dead to return, not really. They feel that the dead are strangers to life, and especially to the present. Still wearing their old suits and gowns, and burdened with their outdated notions and former bad habits, the dead are like discharged servants: they have found another situation." --Bruce Duffy, The World as I Found It (1987; reissued 2010)
Aelindrome- Plano fist: 'tis no flap. (12321,12321)
Straw man argument relying on the reader not realizing that this sort of disposable nonfiction which takes 300 pages to convey one idea (that is only a half-truth at best) is somehow the norm in the history of books. Part of today's junk culture, rather.
Wrong attitude. A careerist philosopher looks for things to say in order to put a personal brick in someone else's edifice of explanation. A dedicated philosopher tries to gain insights & the insight is the point.
"After the breath stops, the words listen." --Spicer
besieged beast
assigned tilth merle
agile bed
adjust ebb delve
baulk ascend
Till the Real Thing Comes Along.
"A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance
What have I lost? When shall I start to sing
A loud and idiotic song that makes
The heart rise frightened into poetry
Like birds disturbed?
I was a singer once. I sang that song.
I saw the thousands of bewildered birds
Breaking their cover into poetry
Up from the heart.
What have I lost? We lived in forests then,
Naked as jaybirds in the ever-real,
Eating our toasted buns and catching flies,
And sometimes angels, with our hooting tongues.
I was a singer once. In distant trees
We made the forests ring with sacred noise
Of gods and bears and swans and sodomy,
And no one but a bird could hear our voice.
What have I lost? The trees were full of birds.
We sat there drinking at the sour wine
In gallon bottles. Shouting song
Until the hunters came.
I was a singer once, bird-ignorant.
Time with a gun said, 'Stop,
Find other forests. Teach the innocent.'
God got another and a third
Birdlimed in Eloquence.
What have I lost? At night my hooting tongue,
Naked of feathers and of softening years,
Sings through the mirror at me like a whippoorwill
And then I cannot sleep.
'I was a singer once,' it sings.
'I sing the song that every captured tongue
Sang once when free and wants again to sing.
But I can sing no song I have not sung.'
What have I lost? Spook singer, hold your tongue.
I sing a newer song no ghost-bird sings.
My tongue is sharpened on the iron's edge.
Canaries need no trees. They have their cage."
--Jack Spicer, 1954
"If Pessoa promoted Sebastianism, it's not because he believed in it but because he didn't." --Richard Zenith, intro to Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems
🟠🟡🟣.
"We see now, as our forebears never could, where this overweening enterprise was leading--to the ruin of humankind, or of as much of humankind, at least, as has cast its lot with Biz. Civ. But a ruin, let us admit it, that is altogether fitting and proper, a thoroughly merited ruin, which we are obliged to inhabit as becomes decaying gentry. That is to say, with as much style as we can muster, with whatever pride we can still pretend to, and with, most importantly, a perfect nonchalance." --Thomas Disch, On Wings of Song (1979)
"Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall
Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt."
--A E Housman
The Barbie/Oppenheimer crossover has begun.
"The Ballad of Halla and Baekdu"
the names of the hours of the night
break the jaw to say them
yet are they not known otherwise
& light is at a premium
the precious, short-lived bulbs
dance away under our outstretched hands
Today in pulp I look at the scandalous history of lady jeans.
"Blue racoons are weeping blood" --Li Ho (Li He)
( via / lanny quarles on fb )
"already
three-quarters around
life's circle
from this point forward
just counting tree rings"
--an'ya
"i like to lie in the dark and remember things" --@katefolk
"Promising to address a point but then avoiding it by going on a long digression is a rhetorical device known as APOPLANESIS." --@HaggardHawks
“Muses!
Cite
Open or often
No sadness.
Send a song of bards,
Time opal as opera.
Muses!
Palinodes revered,
I ride, reversed on:
I lapse,
Sum a reposal ( a poem).
Its drab fog no sadness,
Send a sonnet for one poetic.”
--Anthony Etherin
(via)
Leave Your Sleep. (via Silliman)
"Neda"
ornament and useful both
shote doing roister towns · niqaap vIDaHa'
long highwire
haywire highway why
uproarious chide as adjunct they
yIvoq 'ach yI'ol youth's moor
champion; Deb rur
xunpalta cpana nabypau John
invites us
in Gadsby "not so much of summary" Whig
Qav charade
perfidulo torn black zodiac
mlechchha "ha' gone home" who took
"That gleam shone in Carthage." --Hichens
My specs, taped up, again resemble repaired.
My shoes slant where the heel's been ground away.
The hubbub in the hills gathers its strength
at wax of the moon, thereafter trickles away.
What one of us has graven on her blog
hovers a space, not long; then's tucked away.
The headlines catch a scrimmage on the wing,
count bodies strewn, let nascent shove it away.
Once this was where the fleeing sought their hope;
it's our turn now to shed, hope slipped away.
Saffron moon at dawn i'd have you delve
as i do, now my car gets towed away.
Graywyvern woned among green emmets whose veng
incurred deletion, while they moiled away.
"The Gods of SeaTac"
1.
i would have liked to do nothing the
straitening
attosecond orero
coupon weekend game
plan a language only of vowels
start the washer come
back in an hour and the clothes are still dry
wall flower thousand deep threat
bare bodkin
dull · sitdown beat nickel odium
song of the dwelling just one place
in a consonants-only language
2.
saffron moon at dawn
G P S with woman's voice
tells the river where
as we jolt through a school zone
watch my car in the mirror
"Many writers have felt, like Pound: Why not invent an art form that will permit me to put all my life, all my thoughts and feelings about the universe, directly into a work of art? But the trouble is, when they've invented it it isn't an art form." --Randall Jarrell
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield.
Three-Logic, finally, is not a syllogism but a response to the world. When ingrained, it takes the form of: a preference for triads in analysis, refusing to uphold tribal boundaries (Us vs. Them), "else also" in response to given dilemmas, an abiding sense of the mysteriousness of the world, and an unshakable faith of the validity of the imagination.
"Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow" -Smith
"Worry Bead Museum"
1.
collect pictures of breakage
tomorrow that will turn to structure
appreciation
that doesn't end in purchase
to have said something
lost on the solitary air
and goon saying
and watch it keep
2.
the cry went out
so i stood there
the call was for scissors
but i didn't care
tweezers not scissors
made the wrong kind of poet
in this epic debacle
who'd limn & intuit
some face for the gazers
& now they will goggle
tweezers not scissors
with scant honeyfuggle
O maybe it's banzu
but certainly chirg
in skugry to tweezer
a scissor's fey darg
Prophecy from 47 Ursae Majoris.
Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies.
"Closed Casket Days"
the same girl only red-haired
the part that i care about
was for you not to worrysmall pocket garden
in the land of bright neon apocalypse
which is just
the size of any meaning past or future
shards of self-hatred still
some deeply interior vision
leading perhaps
to insight perhaps not
i'm sorry
we are not responsible
for lost articles
compassion
for the people
in that place of torment
do they want it wrapped in rhetoric
in superstition in advertizing
this is not about your nunytcu
to have said something
among the land mines
& their brazen silences
"Some of the government agents and inquirers swore the ignorant populace did really believe that, with the discovery of a new Word, everything in the world would be explained. A wild pamphlet did actually appear, in which the writer argued with insane ingenuity that, as all modern publicity and popularization consist of concentrating a book into a paragraph, or a chapter into a sentence, so at last the whole truth about the present problem would be concentrated into a word. Crowds of impatient malcontents were adjured to Wait for the Word; and apocalyptic visions were provided, of the scenes of world-change that would follow, when once the Word was spoken. The Word would contain in itself, it was gravely asserted, a complete plan of operations and an explanation for the whole organized strategy of the revolt." --G K Chesterton, Four Faultless Felons (1930)
Thriving, struggling, suffering.
"...from 2005-2008 the Koch brothers pumped in double the amount that even Exxon spent on undermining climate action over the same period." (via Metafilter)
"In these more recent stories about Hissa Hilal, however, the framing suggests that what is important is not so much how she does what she does...but what she wears." And: "I have seen evil..."
"From Dream... To Reality"
1.
whether these troubles are over
in a hundred
or in a thousand years
songs of teenage lust
& the need to find a slant on the chaos
that looks seems like purpose
for an hour
or a day
just to get through that djedi
like i do
at times when these pluja thoughts
look like so many spinning ice floes to walk
headline crashes
teeth of the Symplegades
across on the path of the raging aurora borealis
2.
the stars are se gusni jipno
of leaves
in the dark ricygri of the sky
my love for you is the dark tsani
it's the burden i carry
so when you suffer i don't
is that it
it's not something we share?
could you not stay awake
for one hour?
is the hour up yet?
the dark furling
under pressure of the dawn
is that a kind of magic too?
tomorrow i will hardly
even walk crooked
through the tents of the refugees
and the refugee-dug latrines
3.
a dimness of noon
the interior castle
ending at a set time
as will this roll of complaints,
their triggers, & the whole noise
"When the animate powers that surround us are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth is abruptly defined as a determinate object devoid of its own sensations and feelings, then the sense of a wild and multiplicitous otherness (in relation to which human existence has always oriented itself) must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself--the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable." --David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996)
Shhh. (I'm the dude with the hat & the sideburns :)...)
Cthulhoid snack-food.
Naming Fomalhaut b.
"Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities. On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth--it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen." -Bruce Sterling, The Caryatids (2009)
Whose thoughts outrun the hour, enfold its tangles now;
snares, mapmaker's troth busily mining.
Catalogue of all-defunctive dreams & plans,
what comes next is born of proceeds from disgorges from other womb.
I learn, at last i learn & if i squint into
the road ahead, it is with stoic sharp clenched heart
that i continue where i hardly see, & a wind
of no well fine bodings pushes back my hair.
Smogpunk. (via Docbrite)
"...because there is no workstation
it does not see you. They must modify your life span." (via Silliman)
"ghIqtal"
you flee without a clue
of my role in the fray
nor know how much i do
to speed you on your way
O Hoürs where we win
or lose what can be won
the viewless paladin
alone with just a a rusty gun
and yet at times i still
hold teeming such escape
as calls the tribes of will
a rattling of crepe light crepe
"The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia."
"That midden of the stagnant nadir skies" --Smith
no snoozing tonight
giant mesh face sweet vanilla yogurt thwart
and envenom'd habitat
ratatat the thing is being done
ratatat
to the intimate horizon come
Crashsound, aye! & Eschaton
bleak regrets amidst
can't tell even to these porous battlements
up this will
be the intuition's news
lens pops out of my shades
and falls to the floor
of the tow truck cab
"With all the broken skulls, genocides, cut throats, black site torture chambers and mass graves in this world, the flies of American and Mexican media somehow chose these five heads, upon which to alight. It was the Styrofoam coolers of course."
Prepper thread.
