"Too much sternness": a judgment on the world, that well might be made by a neotenous ape.
shelter from the shelter's whine
sorrow holds the floor
nothing on that screen is mine
sorrow holds the floor
nothing works & that's okay
next to what's in store
forty storms of flak combine
sorrow holds the floor
sorrow lusts & sorrow howls
here & at the war
slow Graywyvern pours the wine
sorrow holds
sorrow holds the floor
⚙️.
"The docetic Christ of the Gnostics, a phantom Christ, would be more than sufficient to found an invisible church." --Soloviev
"Speak, you also,
Speak as the last,
Have your say,
Speak--
But keep yes and no unsplit,
And give your say this meaning:
Give it the shade.
Give it shade enough,
Give it as much
As you know has been dealt out between
Midday and midday and midnight.
Look around:
Look how it all leaps alive--
Where death is! Alive!
He speaks truly who speaks the shade."
--Paul Celan, tr M Hamburger (1980)
"THE DESERT
'I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.' --Moby Dick
Fingers stiffening on a knife
Would carve in air an echo's face,
Would wrench the laughter from a rock,
From dead things in an empty place.
A star hung on a hollow wind
In answer, dares hands hold it still;
The desert, silent, taunts to birth
A Christ to rape the barren hill.
The stone shall bleed, the black sky burn
But when will the giant from slumber stride?
How long must we cringe in a pebble's leer,
Praising the mountain that watches us die?"
Lorita Whitehead, Last Poems (1962)
Last Embrace of Forlorn Lovers.
"Secrecy is as essential to Intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass, or darkness to a Spiritualist seance, and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose." --The Infernal Grove
"we perished from
love's usurious
runnel"
--Lissa Wolsak, Lightsail (2018)
"PALINDROME COMPOSED ON A PHONE, AT NIGHT
Laid an ode, drowsy.
Eked one poem:
O, some open ode!
Keys worded on a dial."
--@Anthony_Etherin
"WHITEGRAY of
shafted, steep
feeling.
Landinwards, hither
drifted sea-oats blow
sand patterns over
the smoke of ellchants.
An ear, severed, listens.
An eye, cut in strips,
does justice to all this."
--Joris's Celan
"He also offers the wistful hope that it would have contained fewer Doberman hand puppets." (via Mefi)
"The name of the first human woman, given as Celebrated Seahouse in the previous edition, now changes to Red Sea Turtle." --Dennis Tedlock, preface to Popol Vuh (1996)
"There were many other people like Jack, angry people, people who hated lizards, or poetry, or both." --Lavie Tidhar, The Bookman (2010)
//this is what I carry with me//.
Thermal turquoise glass
I imagine a moon base
Only not black sky
As the cicadas spin out
Lies into the cerulean
"you were lost
to the night as quick
as this moth
when midsummer fog
stole her compass moon"
--an'ya
"SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (Anagrammed Lines)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
A warning said, the green knight
waits there — darkening, hanging.
The reigning king draws a thane.
Gawain, rearing, ends the knight.
(It knew! — gathers a grinning head....)"
--@Anthony_Etherin
If you ever wanted a visual to explain how binary [ ] works.
"I was ashamed of my trade [the military] when I saw those horrors perpetrated which came under every man's eyes. You hew out of your polished verses a stately image of smiling victory: I tell you 'tis an uncouth, distorted, savage idol; hideous, bloody, and barabarous. The rites performed before it are shocking to think of. You great poets should show it as it is--ugly and horrible, not beautiful and serene. O sir, had you made the campaign, believe me, you never would have sung it so." --Henry Esmond (1852)
"By way of experiment, I ordered rose-tinted lenses. These are my findings." (via @aliner)
validosyada
sesuzzon
zonsya seducyo
( 'i flicker/ wasphome/ changing room' )
Turkey buzzards wearing business suits, detailed oil painting.
we could not see the trouble coming · happy in that golden time
we saw our normalcy unfurl · lunar in that golden time
we watched our rosy miracles · batten in the sweet sunshine
and all our deals with Moloch throve, · Moloch, in that golden time
we knew what we had done was wrong · to all the lesser echelons
which did not stop us glorying in · freedom in that golden time
our aspirations harry us · as gift by gift they slip away
such stuff as dreams are built on, we · abolish in that golden time
"People think the truth is bulky, like a big package. More often, it comes in small drops, like rain from the eaves. You can listen to it all night long, but in the morning when you go outside, there might not be anything there." --James Church, Hidden Moon (2007)
Tests with a lomography Sutton hydrochrome liquid lens.
"The greatest trick ideology ever pulled was convincing colonists they were rebels." --@unemployedneg
"Oracular Time
In this oracular time I sense you prowl,
My glistered demon, saint upon the coals
That quake to ash beneath your waking feet.
IUn this oracular time, the darkness climbs
Beyond the highest rung; illimitable Grace,
All space is you and moves in muffled shriek.
In this oracular time, how dare I speak."
--Lorita Whitehead
"XII
I escape from a feint, fluf for fluf.
A projectile I know not where it will fall.
Incertitude. Tramontation. Cervical articulation.
Zap of a horsefly that dies
in mid-air and drops to earth.
What would Newton say now?
But, naturally, you’re all sons.
Incertitude. Heels that don’t spin.
The knotted page, factures
five thorns on one side
and five on the other. Ssh! Here it comes."
--Cesar Vallejo, Trilce (tr C Eshleman, 1992)
"Theirs was a society subsisting, even thriving, on the brink of nonexistence--an enigma that repulsed wholesale deliberation by real people. And their habitats were all but ruins upon inauguration." --The Spectral Link
"Nevertheless, while all signs indicated the substance of what I had experienced, the real still remained as good as a guess. It always has. Yet the nightmare obtains sure, and sometimes may be shared." --The Spectral Link
srou jauza
sparaqa hayiqa
asyuca barai
pejapovatten
( 'crow/ Dog Days/ to visit for the last time// shadow of a camel' )
Mrs. Jeffreys Summons Her Master.
"Hot Air
So soft my pleasure came
Upon a dream,
Iced fire and frosted flame
It was, too brief for blame.
Yet sharp to seem
So soft. My pleasure came
And went--that was its shame,
Not that, supreme,
Iced fire and frosted flame,
It bore the ancient name
Harsh hearts blaspheme.
So soft my pleasure, came
A wind and woke me tame
To that regime
Iced fire and frosted flame
Had burnt to a black frame
Before their steam.
So soft, my pleasure, came
Iced fire and frosted flame."
--Vassar Miller, 1963
A Refusal to Anatomize Hauntology, in a Belated Year.
and the skies
move against us
were we wise,
and the skies
thick with flies
had not fenced us
and the skies
move against us
What if no religion used words? Imagine that they could impart, & urge to impart, certain rituals, behaviors & avoidances, & even the mental states appropriate to these, without the intermediary of language. There would be no question of faith, & none of truth. --And that is how i see them all. The immense mass of verbiage their adherents have created & continue to create, is to me only so much information pollution. Sometimes it is good poetry (oftener bad): that part is worth keeping. As poetry.
Green-ink letters. (via @saintsoftness)
"And temper foreign furrows with their gore" --Royston's Lycophron
"I believe in both palmistry and vaccination." --Ramón López Velarde
Blue.
as far from Woodstock
as Woodstock is from Armistice Day
bedizened malady
with perfect lipstick
take diff'rent pictures
of the same route
brillig Morgenrot
the cam'ra sequesters
back on Moonbase Alpha
in a world where Raygun lost
our farthest dreams surpassed
& the blueface fatwa
🦂.
"Ramón López Velarde: Wet Earth
Wet earth of liquid evenings when the rain
whispers and girls soften
under the redoubled pelting of the drops
of the roof terrace.
Wet earth of odoriferous evenings when
misanthropy toils up to the lascivious
solitudes of air and on them lights
with the last dove of Noah;
while the thunder crackles tirelessly
along the miry clouds.
We[t] evenings of steaming earth when I
acknowledge I am made
of clay, for the summer tears, beneath
the auspice of the light that is half gone,
the soul turns to water on the nails
of its cross.
Evenings when the telephone invites
naiads known for their knowingness,
who leave their bath for l[o]ve,
to strew their fatuous tresses on the bed
and to lisp, with perfidy and profit,
damp and panting monosyllables
as the fine rain harries the window-panes....
Evenings like an alcove under the sea,
its bed its bath;
evenings when a maiden
grows old in front of her extinguished hearth,
waiting for a swain to bring her a live coal;
evenings when on earth
angels descend to plough unerring furrows
on edifying fallows;
evenings of supplication and Pascal candles;
evenings when the squall
incites me to inflame
each frigid maiden with the opportune coal;
evenings when, my soul
oxidized, I feel
an acolyte of camphor,
slightly swordfish, slightly
Saint Isidore Labrador...."
—Translated from the Spanish by Samuel Beckett (via, with 2 typos corrected )
Neil Gaiman Reportedly Adapting Samuel R. Delany's "Nova" for Amazon.
"endless rain . . .
a grey moth
circles the lamp"
--@mkimdorman
"It feels like we’re alone in an abandoned mall." --@MollyJongFast
i cannot make amends,
a stranger to this shore;
what's strange in mountain lands
is stranger on the shore
the moon is ice on ice
still colder in the dawn
the ocean's hiss defends
no stranger on its shore
if any passage swerves
it seems to find no term
i know this passage ends
though stranger with its shore
those who leave it write
the melancholy scroll
in time the rhyme descends
a stranger on that shore
Graywyvern cocks an eye
at trees of flame and finery;
the season understands,
stranger, too, to this shore
𝗡⃥𝗼⃥𝗶⃥𝘀⃥𝗲⃥ 𝗲⃥𝘃⃥𝗲⃥𝗿⃥𝘆⃥𝘄⃥𝗵⃥𝗲⃥𝗿⃥𝗲⃥.⃥.
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.
I hope your weekend was a good one.
"He taught me how to take apart an ant-hill and find the caterpillar of a Blue which had concluded a barbaric pact with its inhabitants, and I saw how an ant, greedily tickling a hind segment of that caterpillar's clumsy, sluglike little body, forced it to excrete a drop of intoxicant juice, which it swallowed immediately. In compensation it offered its own larvae as food; it was as if cows gave us Chartreuse and we gave them our infants to eat." --Nabokov, The Gift (tr Scammell & VN, 1963)
Welcome Dear Computer. Connect Me To The Social Network.
"Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing? It is this question alone that has differentiated it from the shallow things of the earth. Yet the glory and also the indignity of philosophy is to have sought the end of knowing, and no more." --Nick Land
in the subfusc before-the-storm
imprecation of sky i taste
there is nothing of Innsmouth. Harlequin,
laugh. Hazards of absinthe,
but nothing of the Old Gods.
What was sunken shall rise, streaming;
what was fallen shall rule.
In the subfusc before-the-storm crisis
i can only think of Innsmouth's absence.
"LEAVES (Triolet)
Whose sorrow grew these hanging hosts
that rustle in the endless breeze?
The forest holds a court of ghosts
whose sorrow grew. (These hanging hosts
were sentinels of ancient posts,
but now are noosed to nameless trees.)
Whose sorrow grew these hanging hosts?
That rustle, in the endless breeze...."
--Anthony Etherin
Fornax Void - Mercurius Machina.
"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." --Winston Churchill
I really, really want the inside of my quantum laptop to look like thi.
“ '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
