( me / via )

Thick as a Brick. The whole thing.

"Doomsday

The end of everything approaches;
I hear it coming
Loud as the wheels of painted coaches
On turnpikes drumming;
Loud as the pomp of plumy hearses,
Or pennoned charges;
Loud as when every oar reverses
Venetian barges;
Loud as the caves of covered bridges
Fufilled with rumble
Of hooves; and loud as cloudy ridges
When glaciers tumble;
Like creeping thunder this continues
Diffused and distant,
Loud in our ears and in our sinews,
Insane, insistent;
Loud as a lion scorning carrion
Further and further;
Loud as the ultimate loud clarion
Or the first murther."

--Elinor Wylie

"Our society has attached a meaning to greatness that is not as far away from Hitler’s as it would like to believe, despite our cant about democracy and freedom."

"Apostrophe catastrophes; evolution & Diana." --Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo

"The label describes it as 'music for you to listen to while you walk through cemeteries alone at 3am'..."

( via / via )

This is what that sound looks like in my brain… 😳v.

"War is not a proposal; it is the refusal of all proposals. War is not an institution; it is the breakdown of all institutions. It is not something that we all agree to have; it is something that we do have when we do not agree." --@GKCdaily

Sounds from a black hole.

bat-winged shadeword
strands · out of the midden
Nephilimbergery
& demanding license

cardboard garage floor
screen dims
while i am reading it
hierarchies & even if

having made it out alive
at unchanging 4 AM
there is no one left

bat-winged shadeword
cardboard garage floor

Reissue of Crazy Horse Never Died.

( me / via )

"Translation is fundamentally an ethical undertaking."

haunta vau dib
varaidi
hebula savat

gon esocyada

rah gonien
asyuca barai

( 'during the heat wave/ i made/ a sentence diagram// then it changed// not now/ the dog days' )

Blue amoeba.

"INTERSTELLAR WILD (Anagrams)

We speak of the interstellar wild
like we aren’t part of it. She dwells
in we who still sparkle—a fettered,
skeletal star. We flow in her tepid
earth, like weeds, patterns of will
personified. We talk, shatter well—
written like Death’s pale flowers."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Letter #1.

( via / via )

𝚌𝚢𝚌𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚎𝚝𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚗 ᵖⁱˣᵉˡ 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚜 🔁.

"O Dian, guardian of the groves,
Invoked with cries at night throughout
The cities where the roads are forked..."

--Mooney's Hosidius Geta

Sell Power Tools by Mail on Venus!

1.
the rats are coming
the werewolves are already here

ev'ry dead clock chiming
the rats are coming

fire & blue sky commingle
on the torn up road from Kandahar
the rats are coming

the werewolves are already here

2.
the radar tower
sky of middle gray behind
window droplet specks

wear all-black by accident
a crow torn from Seattle

3.
more carrots than peas
in these peas & carrots
who would suppose
more carrots than peas

a new gray appears
to lift our spirits
more carrots than peas
in these peas & carrots

4.
none too soon autumn
easing of summer's deathgrip
even bless school zones

Weil & Oppenheimer's lost
correspondence in Sanskrit

Transcript: "to have John Donne with the judgment of God"...???

( via / via )

Billie Jean.

"entering ruins

of the farm house

a cow grazes

in the shadow

of charred rafters"

--R G Rader

Into White.

"Well, that's all parsley for our boiled potato!" --@HarrySKeeler

.⊢ | 1of1.

( via / via )

"Her intention was not to write books; her attention was not on publishing books. Rather, she used her notebooks as a way of doing philosophy, akin to a form of prayer as she understood it."

"as a marxist shakespeare authorship truther, i believe the plays contain the kind of moral depravity and spiritual rot that could only come from the mind of an aristocrat" --@kukukadoo

"Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it."

"Wintering

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam
And the bottles of empty glitters -
Sir So-and-so’s gin.

This is the room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects -
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I’ve taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lad.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women -
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish Walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring."

--Sylvia Plath

"The vehicle of revolution in Weil and Camus’s day — communism — long ago turned into a rusting hulk. But the world is heavy with other vehicles of immoderation, and the fumes are thicker than ever."

( via / via )

Two views of the same storm.

1.
polaroid guitar
neglectful urns octave
unlit bottlenecks
against morning gray
the water tower

polaroid guitar

2.
   coolth rubble
twice failed rocket
   blink arrow
i turn prior
   sense bubble
secret the pact
   bubblewrap
skin polaroid
   ballistic
cool gray morning
   no signs of
the war slowing
   skyward beams
kids born since then
   pylon winds
eight-track tape drifts
   work resumes
because what else
   watch those lanes
fifty year old
   songs mock us
what of this coolth
   after worst
summer ever
   six months to
hear rejection
   the iron rain
folds into song

Money Buddha.

"That a wealth of experience is essential to write poetry is a myth rooted in the mistaken belief that poetry exists within the poet. Neither is poetry in objects." --Lee Seong-bok

Get Out of There.

( via / via )

PBSF15.

"CONCERNING THE ANAGRAM-HAIKU

Constrained poetry:
Scan entropy or edit
to read encryptions.

---------------------------------------------

CONCERNING THE PALINDROME-HAIKU

Sure, flip. Ah, play, mage!
Modes, reversed, omega my
alpha — pilfer us."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Revisiting my master thesis on real-time Incompressible Schroedinger Flow.

sands of illusion · sojourn
inside brittle witness

no edge alter Coltan
oriole fuel gulag
progs espresso icepack

toothpick thin clinic

King.

( via / via )

"The digital world seems vast, but how long will it last?" (via aldaily)

   riddlestoure
sift eddy adds
   glim pelf Usk

stirious poll
   run briskly

Edge of Reality. (He fell off before we did--)

"hunger moon
the sound of a rat
and a deep blue sky"

--@poem_exe 12-24-14

"Anyway, I fell in with a Canadian fashion mafia at some point."

( via / via )

Under_through.

"Tom and Jerry used to be a five-minute interlude between Crackerjack and Blue Peter. Now it's the whole schedule." --Adam Roberts

Roberts on Lanark.

"I go out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
lit only by the far off
moon on the edge of the mountains."

--Lady Izumi Shikibu (tr Rexroth)

[this is my all-time favorite tanka.]

   Out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
   i go, illumined
only by the far-off moon
on the edge of the mountains.

(my paraphrase into form)

   lenu mi klama
fi le manku le manku
   cu se gusni fi
le cmalu lunra po'o
nevi le cmana salpo

(in Lojban: My going from the dark via dark ways, is illumined only by a small moon on the mountain slope.)

Exodus.

( via / via )

Whim Wham.

make things that take up space & nobody wants
switched over to neatly stackable, only postage asking
a little more coffee, the voice held heretofore back
sputters its inanities at the newly
lethal clouds, & sometimes i miss my turn
i know there is a story here somewhere
before my destination shuts this off
like the Ferrari i remembered from the movies
& with five million dollars could be mine

Butterflies & Braids.

"Life is a delicate balance between managing your anxiety & letting time slowly destroy your body." --@doththedoth

"...it is perfectly possible to track explanatory progress in the conceptual realm without invoking some dubious metaphysical narrative about the ineluctable forward march of Spirit."

( via / noealzii on tumblr )

The Sky is Cryin'.

"country song about yr computer shutting down and losing all yr open tabs" --@_ryanruby_

Kashmir.

"American Rhapsody

Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow,
There will suddenly be new success, like Easter clothes, and a strange and different fate,
And bona-fide life will arrive at last, stepping from a non-stop monoplane with chromium doors and a silver wing and straight white staring lights.

There will be the sound of silvery thunder again to stifle the insane silence;
A new, tremendous sound will shatter the final unspoken question and drown the last, mute, terrible reply;
Rockets, rockets, Roman candles, flares, will burst in every corner of the night, to veil with snakes of silvery fire the nothingness that waits and waits;
There will be a bright, shimmering, silver veil stretched everywhere, tight, to hide the deep, black, empty, terrible bottom of the world where people fall who are alone, or dead,

Sick or alone,
Alone or poor,
Weak, or mad, or doomed, or alone;

Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, surely we begin at last to live,
With lots and lots of laughter,
Solid silver laughter,
Laughter, with a few simple instructions, and a bona-fide guarantee."

--Kenneth Fearing

Madman Across the Water.

( via / via )

Swelling ripples.

old oaths by others sworn
forage my hours swiftly
my dim shadow in the warm garage
knows as much
wherefore do i drone
this discontent content provider of one
not alone in the lingering aftermath
of all-slaughter
is it to populate a dream
of ashen before
the staircase quips
of the flagrant epigone
Sirius is too young
for what Sirius remembers

Call Me.

"once a fool
had a good part
in the play"

--"Madman across the Water"

Train Kept a Rollin'.

( via / via )

Strand.

"It is nice of you to miss me so much, when I wronged you under your own roof. But it was not my fault that I had no roof of my own, and had to do things under yours. And roofs seem to give rise to situations. Whenever anything happens, there is mention of them." --@icomptonburnett

Make sure you know whose skulls you're nesting on.

thirsty the earth, dark the after-rain;
only a third of the Yemen coffee to blend
with generic espresso; into the smell of hot dust
i go, with little light, to the other fridge.
a tentative new routine at 4 AM
i can hardly taste this second-hand bread
somehow the book i admired has lesser heft
& i want to absorb small features of the night
or in my mind instead. the hour yields
to further things required by the hour's place
how contemplation binds two times together
melts, with the gathering roar, in the after-rain
a glint of purple as i lift my glasses

"Why is it that destroying things is an activity to share with someone you love, while repairing things is done alone."

( via / me )

"There’s a lawn decoration, I see, in the shape of the Twin Towers, which you can buy at Walmart, in case you think your neighbors might be in danger of forgetting to Never Forget." (via mefi)

is that thunder
in the too shadowed dark
jets overhead

not stars
the last blank corner of the sheet

To be immortal is commonplace.

"I suppose when I tell you I don't know who Tibido Aird is, you'll boot me out of yonder door." --@HarrySKeeler

3 Displays of Distortion in the Void Garden.

( via / via )

Poet Wrestling with {Artificial} Intelligence.

Got mistaken for a homeless person again :) .

"...[Fanthorpe] made a brief comeback as a fiction writer with The Black Lion...; it is a not-unsuccessful Science Fantasy, the first of the projected Derl Wothor trilogy whose surtitle is an anagram of 'other world'."

"In the sharp-branched tree,
The starling’s iridescence:
Spring’s frosty wind"

--Jack Galmitz at Ahapoetry

Thirteenth Etheric Dialogue.

( via / via )

One night in Hong Kong. (via @gretathunberg)

      "Met

'I get navigation,' you will
   scream
The host will be
   too white; the safe rain will
      break your navigation
You will unearth your rage
Fulfil, fulfil
You will be lily-white, making
   lands into innocence
The nigh insides will
   retreat the black meetings of livid
      hosts upon your heart
What did your throat do before it
   heard you?
Who did you satisfy, converging,
   wandering for your
      hordes?
Another host will be wandering in
   the external host,
      wandering and cheating, a safe
         wraith
You will be not
   a danger, even though
      for hours you have eaten kings and
         made audiences with your hair and beheld
            your stuff seem fantastic
You will like
Jaggedly, green ice will root,
   like a teller
You will be not a
   sense, though for
      hours you have tasted rivers and made
         comforts with your
            body and watched your
               navigation wake
Know what you will
   be. Know what it
      will be to be
         a seraun.
Outside externals and
   close legions
You could feel yourself
You will have no faith
You will watch your envy, your
   surroundings, your information
You will saunter in
   late autumn among
      white meetings
Your lip a horde in
   the scene and ashen enough to meet
Hosts, interiors, meetings, the forgathering legions
You will render yourself wonder
   in a book of ivory"

--Robot X., 1831.

"As a child, Henry Zorton was plagued by nightmares." (via @mjohnharrison)

"Does an insane man, KING OF SKUNKS, know how to place commas in his own death letter?" --@HarrySKeeler

Some grim views.

( via / via )

"Mars is irrelevant to us now."

"CLOUDS AT DAWN (Palindrome by Triples)

Sky white. Rain,
as fawns adorn my morns....
A dawn
as fainter whisky."

--@Anthony_Etherin

Centos & the Problem of Reference.

"Never Enough of Living

Never, my heart, is there enough of living,
Since only in thee is loveliness so sweet pain;
Only for thee the willows will be giving
Their quiet fringes to the dreaming river;
Only for thee so the light grasses ever
Are hollowed by the print of windy feet,
And breathe hill weather on the misty plain;
And were no rapture of them in thy beat,
For every hour of sky
Stillborn in gladness would the waters wear
Colors of air translucently,
And the stars sleep there.

Gently, my heart, nor let one moment ever
Be spilled from the brief fullness of thy urn.
Plunge in its exultation star and star,
Sea and plumed sea in turn.
O still, my heart, nor spill this moment ever."

--Léonie Adams

Calculator was set to Radians.

( via / via )

The Late September Dogs.

the rathe scramble nimbly
rushing down the clown-queue
accruals unit crinoid

creak of the door forward
losing dream alizarin

Fools in Love.

"SUMMER SOLSTICE AT STONEHENGE (Palindrome)

Sun!
In my halo,
open,
I mull its altar: All.
I plait its lost light.
I lag, emanating:
I lay a ray, align.
I tan a megalith gilt.
Solstitial pillar, at last illumine —
pool a hymn in us."

--@Anthony_Etherin

River Roll.

( via / via )

Lope to Radiance || 2023.

"Won’t some dice decide most now?" --@Anthony_Etherin

Women in the Night.

   bread · viaticum
salutojn · in birdless realms
   throbbing · light afar

thread of story · forest path
but blazed · by the Minotaur

Tribute to Emma Peel.

( via / via )

Made with Code.

things worth for a moment peace
the next one chases far along
opalescent this waly-dredged machine
& tombstone moss
wounds that never miss

parables defend you
stars the falling sends you
just a moment's peace & they are gone
& leave no trace
wounds that never miss
or traces enough

"When you think about it, it is about time someone make that claim, death is central to the modernist project."

"It's kind of presumptuous, isn't it, assuming that dead people get all the answers? Maybe they don't know any more than we do." --Murder of Angels

"In the ruin, history appears spatialized and built space temporalized." (via @saintsoftness)

( via / via )

Closing in on it.

"...it comes to pass oft that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent sharply twanged off, gives manhood more approbation than ever proof itself would have earned him." --Twelfth Night

Tree octopi.

Into forgotten dark as well,
clouds through the tower-canyons boiling
& all who died, unless you knew;
we have more recent body counts
& uptick in traumatic rue.

This quiet street t'ward Christmas-storm will slouch
as larynx by cicala larynx mutes.
What if i yet remember, can avouch
an emblem that gray loss refutes?

Vista 001.

( via / via )

He rode in a 1958 Berlinetta.

"The 'Transcendental Deduction,' which is the central section of the Critique of Pure Reason, deals with relations between subject and object in so intricate a way that, though particular insights are perfectly clear, the unintelligible character of the whole seems to stand out as the essential fact." --Karl Jaspers

Life Beyond the Earth (p. 72)--one of my golden books. Where i got HgBr2 from. He has a crater on Mars named after him.

"Dream of Evil

A gong’s brown-golden tones no longer loud--
A lover wakes in chambers growing dimmer,
His cheek near flames that in the window glimmer
Upon the stream flash rigging, mast and shroud.

A monk, a pregnant woman in the crowd;
Guitars are strumming, scarlet dresses shimmer.
In golden gleam the chestnuts shrink and simmer;
The churches’ mournful pomp looms black and proud.

The evil spirit peers from masks of white.
A square grows gloomy, hideous and stark;
Whispers arise on islands in the dark.

Lepers, who rot away perhaps at night,
Read convoluted omens of birdflight.
Siblings eye each other, trembling in the park."

--Georg Trakl, Song of the West (tr R Firmage 1988)

ចិត្តមួយថ្លើមមួយ.

( via / miekal and on fb )

Using Sirius as a place to put a planet reminds me of this old blog post on the uses of the Impossible. And let's not forget the Wow! Signal.

"Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned."

--Dylan Thomas

An Optical Poem. Try here.

"And if only we arrange our life according to the principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the most difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful." --Rilke, On Love and Other Difficulties, ed/tr J J L Mood

"...the famous 1977 Wow! signal was most likely generated by a comet." Crash go the chariots... "Of the thousands of stars observed by Gaia in the direction of the WOW! signal, Caballero identified 2MASS 19281982-2640123 as the best potential source for further investigation." Yup. And this star, once believed the source: "This is what i have done for χ-1 Sagittarii."

( via / via )

"This constellation of plenitude and scarcity, madness and perversion, desire and death was inscribed on the landscape of Southern California long before the invention of celluloid." (via mefi)

Last vestige of the British Empire is its kneecapping Greek & Roman names on the way out.

0909.

problems can be solved by song
in this the other world i ply
before it's even light my alibi
fills the billabong
problems can be solved by song

nor turn from problems of the other kind
burning forests crackle
now hasten i to tackle
the forests burning in my mind
problems can be solved by song

   antelucan crescent
   clear sky & Venus
   sound of running water

Birds Chewing.