( via / via )

"...if all of the communication is built upon past, prototypical experiences, then it would be difficult to imagine the origin and evolution of such a language."

"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

"The biggest woodblock print I’ve ever done."

"SAW

I sat.
I lost
I was ill.
I was sent.
I was raw onyx,
a lag,
a wonder or rime.

Lost, solemn;
I was I & you.

Banal plan!
A buoy & I
saw in me
—lost sole,
mirrored now:
a galaxy;
no wars,
a witness,
a will.

I saw it,
so lit as I was."

--@MerlinaAcevedo

Got my Mojo Workin'.

( via / via )

"To create a parallel English-Tamarian corpus, first a Tamarian-to-English dictionary that captures the inferred meaning of each Tamarian utterance was required."

"But what do the fascists say?"

"Penelope, her weave unraveled."

   decrepit ship sets
out for the opposite shore
   all that hope · sinking

in a matter of hours
as thousands watch them flailing

should have learned to swim, they say

Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?"

( via / via )

"As is the Icelandic way, a hole is made in the house-wall, the corpse being pushed through it and the hole afterwards sealed. It was thought that if a corpse were carried through the front door its ghost would know how to come back inside and haunt the inhabitants."

bright & customary strength
among the interconnected tidepools
the sky whatever it is

hurtle to no reckoning
beyond a rearrangement of glyphs

Catch y’all on the flip side ✌️😵‍💫💖.

The only gameplan they have for human capital is strip-mining.

It feels like a dead mall in her.

( via / miekal and in asemic on fb )

Degenerate creatures having fun.

"the silence
at noon
wind in autumn
from the beggar's shack"

--@poem_exe 4-13-16

The war.

it is raw
material to hurl
against the rainfront of castle-melt

saltbane
for my snail palace

through the red-litten windows see

"John Hughes films that seemed sanitized at the time now look pretty edgy."

( via / via )

"I think most philosophers aren’t aware of just how rapidly the discipline of classics is imploding these days."

      "II: When Israel out of Egypt Came

When Israel out of Egypt came
   Safe in the sea they trod;
By day in cloud, by night in flame,
   Went on before them God.

He brought them with a stretched out hand
   Dry-footed through the foam,
Past sword and famine, rock and sand,
   Lust and rebellion, home.

I never over Horeb heard
   The blast of advent blow;
No fire-faced prophet brought me word
   Which way behoved me go.

Ascended is the cloudy flame,
   The mount of thunder dumb;
The tokens that to Israel came,
   To me they have not come.

I see the country far away
   Where I shall never stand;
The heart goes where no footstep may
   Into the promised land.

The realm I look upon and die
   Another man will own;
He shall attain the heaven that I
   Perish and have not known.

But I will go where they are hid
   That never were begot,
To my inheritance amid
   The nation that is not.

Where mixed with me the sandstorms drift,
   And nerve and heart and brain
Are ashes for the air to lift,
   And lightly shower again."

--A E Housman

"Crossword sonnets, infected sonnets, golden spades, stanzas copped from John Donne—there is plenty of formal innovation and imitation to be found in this month’s roundup.."

"A cat is the boundary between her and me..." --Eshleman & Barcía's Vallejo

Little Fugue in G Minor.

( via / via )

"This is as sane, cheery and level-headed an account of a nervous breakdown as you could ever hope to see."

"The fact is that Dante, by many expressions throughout the poem, shows himself to have been a notably bad climber; and being fond of sitting in the sun, looking at his fair Baptistry, or walking in a dignified manner on flat pavement in a long robe, it puts him seriously out of his way when he has to take to his hands and knees, or look to his feet; so that the first strong impression made upon him by any Alpine scene whatever is, clearly, that it is bad walking." --John Ruskin, qtd in Longfellow's notes to his Inferno.

Itzcuintli Dog With Me. I was not actually a fan of hers until this painting came to Dallas in a travelling show. I still think it is one of the scariest paintings I've ever seen (no photo does it justice). I think the little dog "represents" Death. Or maybe just her own death, that went everywhere she did.

"AIR, FROM THE OLD WELSH

Like seaweed under water,
The uneventful trees
Move at my window
In the mist of the morning.

If I could count the leaves
And multiply them by
The number of seasons left me,
And were every leaf a love,
There still would not be enough
To have before I die.

Ah, what stubborn stuff
I waken to find
In the cells of the mind
On the sills of the morning."

--Rolfe Humphries

"Sikun Labyrinythus," however, is a place on Titan. Which took me to a website for planetary placenames because, y'know, it's not enough just to go there...

( via / via )

A poem in which 70 Ophiuchi is invoked.

Palindrome: Kraken ARG: Ngranek ark.

"[T]he unnamed planet in the 1970 tv series UFO is described as being at a distance that well matches 70 Oph ("100 million million miles" = 17LY).."

“Upon seeing Utah for the first time, Tarkovsky remarked that now he knew Americans were vulgar because they filmed westerns in a place that should only serve as backdrop to films about God.” --@fvrmvn via @LeeBillings

You can still read about Jacob's Planet. (It was being taken seriously as late as 1943.) Others might think "See's Planet" is a better claim--who first calculated the orbit--, or until 1978 & Heinz, anyway...

I don't have handy my calculations about the farthest planet dynamically possible for each of the stars*, but i know i chose the solvent chlorine trifluoride because i had discovered it was a non-protonic solvent with a reasonably broad liquid range, & though UNLIKELY, could not be said to be IMPOSSIBLE**. The biochemical equation, i think, i came up with involved gaseous SiF4 (aka "tetrafluorosilane") & fluorosilicate-based life... The secondary sun, having been described as "violet" (like very few other stars) deserves something more exotic than, ahem "New Persia"--oh wait, that's 70 Ophiuchi A.

Just don't call it Sikun.

Scaling Ngranek.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* I see that it's somewhere around 4.8 AU for star B, or a maximum period of 10.9 years (so much for 17 or 18--!).
** The calculated planet would have a "year" of 401.6 days

( via / via )

"I reckoned that I had the largest trigram collection in the world outside the secret files of the National Security Agency."

"If his bouquet is composed of strange flowers, of metallic colourings and exotic perfumes, the calyx of which, instead of joy contains bitter tears and drops of aqua-tofana, he can reply that he planted but a few into the black soil, saturating them in putrefaction, as the soil of a cemetery dissolves the corpses of preceding centuries among mephitic miasmas. Undoubtedly roses, marguerites, violets, are the more agreeable spring flowers; but he thinks little of them in the black mud with which the pavements of the town are covered." --Life of Baudelaire

1979 Bell Jar. Not as bad as its reputation. ☆☆

closures still no remedy
only the name of one
wings of card & paraffin
sugar glass the humvee
sugar glass the humvee

ride without these wings
where such creatures go
narrowest arching bridge
to the next hour's close
to the next hour's close

strongest light i run t'ward
through the redbrick fingers
turnstile for isle hungers
honed on the only flint-word
honed on the only flint-word

"...nicknamed 'Kraken,' by some.."

( via / via )

Onomatopoeia.

loudly the cicalas purl
even unto September's maw
& faster blur
the headlines that appall

i thought i dodged a speedy pill
as i into some form return
even this din
brings a familiar swirl
to the late shadows that swell

i spent four lonely days in a brown jelly haze
loudly the cicadas purl
Plutonian Braille
among bright blurs

An old limerick of mine.

"There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply." --Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady's Man (1978)

A new, heroick, limerick i just wrote.

( via / via )

"Wishing to keep the change he received after going to the store, Camus’s adolescent alter ego tells his grandmother that it had fallen into the latrine pit. Without a word, she rolls up a sleeve, goes to the hole, and digs for it."

"St Francis of Assisi...founded an Order which quickly began to participate in murder and massacre almost immediately after it was formed." --Simone Weil

The Primary Hourglass.

"Melody, abloom,
treads a dale
in gloomy March.

A season,
and he abandons
a search.

May, looming,
leads a dream
to a bloody elm."

--A Loris Abandons an Opera

Dalí Atomicus.

( via / via )

Two-word anagram phrases. (thread)

enemies in the same land
mostly not yet come to blows
each scorns what the other has
past wrongs unatoned

but there the resemblance ends
Cain & Abel are not one
one argues with deep meaningful words
one answers with a gun

so where will this brouhaha
lead who are short of days
supplicants to the Mighty Oz
as tornados churn away

fake firenados & Ebola feigned
with real mud at Burning Man
they can get the pictures out
but not the picture taker's feet

Death guiding damned souls through a lake of fire.

"It's not a small chance for an unexpected ghost." --Hell of the Cyr

Scratch piece.

( via / via )

"I have always had great esteem for the poet. As for the thinker, I find that he leads to a dead end. I have preferred never to enter into an argument with him. It would have served no purpose either for him or for myself."

"...They moved
Obliquely with a dry-wet
Sound, with a glittery wisp
And trickle."

--Sylvia Plath, "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor"

Kashmir.

         "Exile

By the sad waters of separation
   Where we have wandered by divers ways,
I have but the shadow and imitation
   Of the old, memorial days.

In music I have no consolation,
   No roses are pale enough for me;
The sound of the waters of separation
   Surpasseth roses and melody.

By the sad waters of separation
   Dimly I hear from an hidden place
The sigh of mine ancient adoration:
   Hardly can I remember your face.

If you be dead, no proclamation
   Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea:
Living, the waters of separation
   Sever for ever your soul from me.

No man knoweth our desolation;
   Memory pales of the old delight;
While the sad waters of separation
   Bear us on to the ultimate night."

--Ernest Dowson

Nothing Else Matters. (Not this one.) And this one is pretty good, too.

( via via Mefi / via )

I clearly need to get out more.

"about to complain
my cookie holds no fortune
I find the waiter
staring out the window
at freshly falling snow"

--Joann Klontz in Tanka Splendor 2000

Intriguing scene.

Aelindrome (22112): Kudo, nuts: tsundoku.

AI cursed images.

( me / via )

"However, in 2015 the Rijksmuseum announced that the location of The Alley had been identified by Professor Frans Grijzenhout: it was the Vlamingstraat in Delft, at present numbers 40-42."

"LOCH NESS MONSTER (Palindrome)

Emit,
sad Loch,
self’s tides....
   Nessie is sensed —
   its flesh cold as time."

--@Anthony_Etherin

The Last Thing on my Mind.

   poems in the shower
arise as clear as wires
   & then i lose them

streets i miss for years, returned
to on an idle errand

Elliptical Gears.

( me / via )

"Only dragons, the other intelligent species with whom humans share the world (somewhat uneasily), speak this tongue; but wizards learn it as part of their training."

   can that be thunder
heard from within this bubble
   lit before sunrise

go in early September
out for fast food breakfast

Friendship 7.

"It occurs to me that a lot of things in Providence aren't what they used to be, but no one's ever bothered to give them new names..." --The Drowning Girl

"I didn’t want to be a poet – just to be able to be one."

( via / via )

Lars Iyer’s My Weil Playlist.

"petalling
the prim gilt
penetralia..."

--Mine Loy

A Perfectly Gloomy Day.

tilted relative to the table top
green vinyl rectangle years
there; years before elsewhere

crooked stripes
orange one way purple the other

the orange one fading in places

//the racoon end of times//.

( via / via )

Toccata and Fugue.

"Night of Unshed Tears

Skies have been bound with such pent airs,
The moon, that mad for brighness stares
Off the black bitter peak of night,
That purest curving crystal even,
Which wasted to a horn trails light,
Moves veiled and brooding over heaven
With cloud like heavy waters flowing,
And every burnished star sunk deep.
But though the heavens be proud, they weep.
The heaven has wept and thou hast known
Orion, thr round liquid moon,
And all washt brightness showing."

--Those Not Elect

Flesh Ocean.

"Water-bulrush, water-willow
From the margin of the hollow
Shade thy bed and shape thy pillow,
Time be slow and apple-mellow..."

--Rolfe Humphries

Continuum #89.

( via / via via )

Les Chants de Maldoror.

"I think of all my pills as male, a fact that I have not yet disclosed to my psychiatrist." --The Drowning Girl

"...left-handed penmanship contests held between 1865 and 1867 for Civil War veterans who had lost their right hands..."

"I sat, solemn,
I lived as a reliever.
If all is in us,
I sat, solemn,
I erased it.

Erased insane poem:
sad as me;
open as nides* are.

Tides are in me lost,
as I, sun is ill.
A fire veil era:
sad evil in me lost,
as I."

--@merlinaacevedo

Inevitably Dark.

( * a brood or nest of pheasants)

( via / via )

Ode.

There are things that having only a Cat/Dog Science will miss, that having both a Cat Science & a Dog Science might not.

Welcome to Dune.

"i didn’t 'misrepresent' your ideas in my essay. i wrote fan fiction about them, which is valid and also an important part of literary history" --@kukukadoo

The New Climate War.

( via / via )

Peanut Tuna EP.

"Let these now be para-noetic strategies to restore a sense of self, transfigure destinies emergent through psychic and somatic experience of architectonic place, space,time, and heighten sensitivity to the liquidity of surface and kinesthetic non-locality withideas that engage theses of the Cosmos, to espouse a thriving socius/polity; still somewhat of a mirage perhaps, but an audacious shimmering bridge between wave and particle, by far the two august languages of reciprocity." --Lissa Wolsak

Analog Sunshine.

         "The miserable

   The day is about to come; wind
up your arm, look for yourself under
the mattress, stand again
on your head, to walk straight.
The day is about to come, put on your coat.

   The day is about to come; grip
your large intestine tight in your hand, reflect,
before you meditate, for it is horrible
when misfortune falls on one
and one's tooth falls thoroughly.

   You have to eat, but, I tell myself,
do not grieve, for grief and graveside
sobbing do not belong to the poor;
mend yourself, remember,
trust your white thread, smoke, call roll
on your chain and keep it behind your portrait.
The day is about to come, put on your soul.

   The day is about to come; they go by,
they have pened an eye in the hotel,
lashing it, beating it with one of your mirrors...
are you trembling? It is the remote state of your forehead
and the recent nation of your stomach.
They're still snoring... What a universe is carried away by this snore!
And in what state your pores are left, on judging it!
With so many twos, my god! how alone you are!
The day is about to come, put on your dream.

   The day is about to come, I repeat
through the oral organ of your silence
and it is urgent to take the left with your hunger
and to take the right with your thirst; in any case,
abstain from being poor with the rich,
stir
your cold, for my warmth becomes part of it, beloved victim.
The day is about to come, put on your body.

   The day is about to come;
the morning,the sea, the meteor, go
after your weariness, with banners,
and, because of your classic pride, the hyenas
count their steps to the beat of the jackass,
the baker's wife thinks about you,
the butcher thinks about you, groping
the ax in which the steel
and the iron and the metal are imprisoned; never forget
tht during Mass there are no friends.
The day is about to come, put on your sun.

   The day is now coming; double
your breath, triple
your rancorous goodness
and scorn fear, nexus and emphasis,
for you, as one can observe in your crotch, the evil man
being, god! immortal,
have dreamed tonight that you were living
on nothing and dying from everything..."

--Eshleman & Barcia's Vallejo

Children of the Sun.

( via / via )

I am Homesick and Tired Without You.

"season"

1.
antelucan takings
perturb me in the burbclave
staring at bills' boredom

of bale-ago hailing;
unpaid-for, still, studies

2.
better coffee
at the first hospital
than the second

leaving in unaccustomed sunlight
my walk so slow it shocked me

3.
so much farther
into the darkness
my glimmering leader

learning so slowly
the forces that made that scribble

not the formal quirks that drew me

4.
quagmire scout
of the dummy i play
& of the sage

nature fakers
where the gravel meets the scree

Far Cry 5 scenery.

"Trappers and hunters have perished in the icy wastes of the arctic to bring the ermines and sables in which these queens are robed; divers have been torn by sharks to bring up their pearls from the depths of tropic seas, and miners have been crushed in the deep earth to dig their blazing diamonds; chemists have blown themselvces up in search for their cosmetics and dyes, and seamstresses have grown blind embroidering the elaborate designs which twinkle upon their silken ankles. All this concentrated in one brief glory-march [on the Hollywood Red Carpet]--do you wonder that heads are high and glances regal?" --Oil!

Book, for solo cello, II.

( via / via )

Civilization Phaze iii (minus talking).

"Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass." --White Noise

Momentary Lapse.

the long view's
telescope
keeps getting knocked from my hands

fugitive blooms
harvested in the bomb-hush

& with the stitches out

Bright flash observed on Jupiter. (via @arrroberts)

( via / via )

I am the Walrus.

"CYCLE REMOTE

I wanted to give the world back
to the Earth, yet I missed the program
and could not find it anywhere,
not on cable

or any streaming service. Baby blue,
a robin’s egg began to chirp,
something far off

moving its throat to what sounded
like yearning. To long for worms or
the tiniest bugs

is to hold a cubic centimeter of Death
inside one’s heart. A rock
and its shadow

mean immutability and expression
simultaneously. Push

the button harder. Push it again and,
if no flashing light emerges
and the horizon

remains blank, look for the source
of its energy. We live into
and through

our bodies. We pay a small toll for
every poem we level at
the world.

Making love requires we be patient
and allow the glow plug
on the diesel engine

to warm slowly in the snowy carport.
If one is alone late at night,
one feels for the future

with one’s tongue. What good will
an unbroken mirror perform

if the last man on earth refuses to see?"

--Gordon Hilgers

"This paradox—the overflow of information combined with its fundamental incomprehensibility—became for a certain kind of writer the central problem for the novel to attempt to grasp."

"the swimming domain of sorrow
records another shadow"

--Washburn & Guillemin's Celan

Les Fleurs.

( via / via )

Tron Legacy.

"I think of Socrates as both not a philosopher and the only philosopher to have ever lived." --@14JUN1995

Drift.

"crow wings’ sudden splay-
semaphore throws crescent mist
back at the morning"

--@pseudepigram

No Curtains.

( via / via )

"In late summer of 1964 the Tonkin Gulf Incident occurred -- the purported attack on the destroyer Turner Joy, innocently going about its lawful pursuits, by a North Vietnamese PT boat. President Lyndon Johnson responded by ordering the bombing of Haiphong by navy fighter-bombers. I remember watching the announcement on television and thinking to myself: 'Gee, I hope that Tat Dat's father and sisters are O.K.'."

"Apparently
some movie studios
are reintroducing
mask mandates
but really this is no surprise
after all movie studios
know all about sequels
in which the supposedly
defeated monster
comes back yet again."

--@PlaguePoems

Crazy Train.

"Word of the Day: EXCALCEATE (v.) to remove one’s shoes" --@HaggardHawks

In With the In Crowd.