"The book you want to write and the book you don't want to write are often the same book." -@EverySongIveEve
"The day opens its hand
three clouds
and these few words."
— Octavio Paz (via @isidro_li)
Sky and sea and the never-enough.
this scarp is too steep
say the mewling cicadas
outside my locked door
"I am trying to remember what it felt like to believe
disjunction, non sequitur, injection
between sentences might constitute
meaningful struggle against the empire
typing away in my dorm"
--Ben Lerner in Lana Turner 16
“I don't ask the poem to do anything but show up.”
-- Terrance Hayes (via @stonecirclerev)
“DIVIDENDS
This advantage to be seized; and here, an escape prepared against an evil day;
So it is arranged, consummately, to meet the issues. Convenience and order. Necessary murder and divorce. A decent repute.
Such are the plans, in clear detail.
She thought it was too soon but they said no, it was too late. They didn’t trust the other people.
Sell now.
He was a fool to ignore the market. It could be explained, he said. With the woman, and after the theater she made a scene. None of them felt the crash for a long time.
(But what is swifter than time?)
So it is resolved, upon awakening. This way it is devised, preparing for sleep. So it is revealed, uneasily, in strange dreams.
A defense against gray, hungry, envious millions. A veiled watch to be kept upon this friend.
Dread that handclasp. Seek this one. Smile.
They didn’t trust the others. They were wary. It looked suspicious. They preferred to wait, they said.
Gentlemen, here is a statement for the third month,
And here, Mildred, is the easiest way.
Such is the evidence, convertible to profit. These are the dividends, waiting to be used.
Here are the demands again, considered again, and again the endless issues are all secure.
Such are the facts. Such are the details. Such are the proofs.
Almighty God, these are the plans,
These are the plans until the last moment of the last hour of the last day, And then the end. By error or accident.
Burke of cancer, Jackson out at the secret meeting of the board. Hendricks through the window of the nineteenth floor.
Maggots and darkness will attend the alibi.
Peace on earth. And the finer things.
So it is all devised.
Thomas, the car.”
–-Kenneth Fearing
Film posters by Josef Fenneker.
rabbit dusk · i run too
blue flames at my heels
drive these dreary · helldrizzle
cerulean bowl bumbleways
maybe a mere · plot pivot
will save the seeming whelm
i gallop on gilded · timesplinters
i brake for no figments
"Anyway, you know what idiot organised an American election watching party in Oxford in 2016 and got stuck with a melting blue ice cream cake and soaring panic at 2 AM? Yeah, I even bought special sparkle heels. Which I had to give to a charity shop because they were cursed." --@saintsoftness
"ROSES ARE RED (Palindrome)
Wonder erases
or passes,
someway,
my awe.
Mosses, sap...
Roses are red now."
--@Anthony_Etherin
selfcare falters · cinders
settle on car windshields
pugs put off the checkup
it's a pawn shop firesale
for awhile whims spurting
like whine bulwarks useless
the dark sky of Skullgrin
scatterlings vie nicks 'neath
trees so full of sound
our hearts so empty
by massacre unchastened
trees so full of sound
where shall i send
these fruits of futile dimmity
trees so full of sound
our hearts so empty
"I don't go to sleep so much as I give up on being conscious" --@_ryanruby_
"One of the most baffling things about America.."
"...that there was a deluge once, seems not to me so great a miracle, as that there is not one always." --Religio Medici
Pythonesque frieze of clouds & saucers.
"The Edges Of Time
It is at the edges
that time
thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently
coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket
of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat."
--Kay Ryan
Blot.
"In apocalypse capitalism—can I call it that?—being alone is part of a luxury aesthetic." (via via Mefi)
the road's ruined this way
& also the other way--
shipwreck ev'rywhere--
who never chose the navy
"They belong to the Renaissance in Italy, five centuries away, those torches. To find them burning in the tenth is to see strange shadows." --The Wandering Scholars
The first time i ever heard these lyrics i was spending the night in a salvation army bunkroom. Another customer was repeating them out loud as i tried to sleep. I thought he was making them up.
"MORNING (Anagrammed Lines)
Nature painted this morning
as a thorn in untried pigment,
a mad night in turpentines, or
the turning points in a dream...."
--@Anthony_Etherin
the weight of things changes
chary of quitting quite
old debts meet new charges
barge regrets a shore wait
"Gaza now has the largest number of child amputees in history." --@malakashwaikh (via @ae_stallings)
"My heart is moved..."
"you call me unemployed, but in Japan this is called being a rōnin, they make movies about people like us there" --@tropicalcamatte
Polish cover of Ligotti's The conspiracy against the human race.
book tour · in the blaze zone
the air aim-riddled · & echo bled
our furthering fever · nine-tenths defunct
impossible the passage · to port & gangway down
"Suddenly, you were standing there, and you were with your people, and you knew why you were there."
"THE DALE AND THE DREAM
(Aelindrome in 12341234123412341234)
Melody, abloom,
treads a dale
in gloomy March.
A season,
and he abandons
a search.
May, looming,
leads a dream
to a bloody elm...."
--@Anthony_Etherin
Two angels sew my body back together.
"I am like the tyger (in poesy) if I miss my first spring--I go growling back to my jungle." --Letters of Byron
Still the only the dog to receive such a nomination.
"...Loeb-reds, Loeb-greens, like Christmas in
The mind."
--Amit Majmudar
the hostile half-masted
heft of this reft flagday
troubles my soul trawling
tragic-shiny minefields
humans failing fumble
to fix human doomward
arc or illness wholesale
act as if pawns squandered
in the clearmare morning
amongst thickened liquids
Garamond fallout
fry carbon
smart mouth snivelling
"The fact that even in 2024 we are driven to LARP what is basically 18th century merchant ideology from England and Holland, rather than some other arbitrary LARP, is an instance of our technology and industrial capability outpacing our intellectual culture by centuries." --@mmjukic (via @mr_scientism)
Fast vector renderer unlocked.
The Shareholder Supremacy. (thread)
"I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness." --The Waves
buzzardshade · in abeyance petitioned
usually, yet i yearn
as cathedral stones · by strong rainfall
are dissolved, that your season come
we feign to fathom · the whole phenomenal
panoply & in our play
bring doom to cities · & dense forests
alone death's honesty
but fall before · kind buzzard
shadow glide on him
wizened ventricles · tiny vessels
all the friable elves
some weakness close · to snafuing ev'rything
cleanse us of this monster
there are plenty of planets · spinning in the void
we have only this one
I am learning to abandon the world.
"Hospitality is the only antidote..."
worse faster
which is expected
behavior
of most slides
due to the nature of fall
& of cursed bodies
"How shall we sing?—By waters that are strange,
In days of harrowing change
From that sweet witchery of the season’s prime
To this distempered time?—"
— Arthur L. Salmon (via @isidro_li)
Season finale. (via @mjohnharrison)
Wild Azaleas. (via @amjuster)
"It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse –
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse."
--Cecil Day-Lewis (via @poochigian)
the paved wodwo paddock
perilous loom brumous
stained glass wavy window
awaited soot football
in the shade striped striding
"All fictions are cultural, but at the moment the Weird is intensely cultural & self-aware."
the race goes to the reaper
not to the fast or the faltering
fever road
i hear the children chirr
trapped in the high trees
charting the traceless
on the beach steel buries
itself deep, deeper
it's boiling dimes
on the frail fever road
“Only the paltry, superfluous, shameless wishes are fulfilled, and the great ones, the ones worthy of a human being, remain unattainable.”
—The Secret Heart of the Clock, Elias Canetti; tr. Joel Agee (via @dreamsofbeing_)
"...we firmly believe that malice, dishonesty, and injustice were the framers' original intent." (via @philsplace@mastodon.sdf.org )
"Wild that this ruling means a president could even escape prosecution for sleeping outside." --@heatherchristle
rattle-imps only · the rage of the season know
the bath-warm air · not easing as the sun declines
unseasonal rage · & ruinlust stalks
these Dog Days · nadir as yet not reached
"Social Studies
'This is your history,' said the teacher of it.
And it was. So, now, is she,
passing around her portrait of a Cree
Indian in a top hat. Any child could see
how meticulously bad that drawing was:
a face like a heraldic shield,
with stuck-on eyes and cheeks of pencil fuzz;
a mouth of line, and, dangling beneath,
a canted Celtic alphabet of teeth.
In hands like dinner forks it seemed to hold
a strip of parchment, sumptuously scrolled;
and this, Miss Ward revealed to us, revealed,
in Bible Gothic, signed with an x and sealed,
how Indians had given up the deeds
to our dominion, in return for beads.
Beside the blackboard, maps were tacked
which showed the world cut up like orange rind,
sliced and sectioned, air-brushed, dotted lined
and crammed with calculations to distract
each young, impressionable mind
from the corrupt, the riotously inexact
contours of unornamented fact.
For there on the grid, like a spilled drink:
the land of Canada, vast and milkshake pink,
pocked with lakes spattered with islands that had lakes,
a pattern of mistakes within mistakes,
profusely annotated with the names of towns,
Manigotagan, Flin Flon, Churchill Downs,
stuck like mayflies in a web of red
roads and rails, unravelling like thread
among the moraines and glacier melts,
dust bowls, tree lines, lichen belts,
along the flumes and gravel beds
where European traders packed their pelts
across our atlas, laying traps
to capture beavers when there were no maps.
Our history, I’ll be honest, is at most
a theory which the facts do not confute.
Some people came from somewhere to a coast
as ragged as the salt line on a boot,
and pitched their cabins in the wilderness,
and did the things that somehow led to this.
The country I live in is a patch of thorns
below a culvert in a sunken plot
where burly geese with necks like flugelhorns
intimidate the pigeons and are shot
by a district sales manager named Russ.
And that’s it. Our lives, our landscape, us.
But near the train yard, where I catch my bus,
a late October frost has clenched the ground,
the football field is hard as frozen meat,
enormous gulls are swaggering around
with snowflakes on their orange rubber feet.
They cruise through stubble with their beaks ajar
shrieking that what they are they are they are."
--Bruce Taylor (via @jasonguriel)
"Honestly the way we’re destroying ourselves in the stupidest way possible is so on brand for humanity" --@ambernoelle
"...entangled hazes faded hands create." --Anthony Etherin
"but rimbaud (guttered from my mouth)
where are we now say who
drowned what we sing
the wood has gone sour
sapped and soundless
in courtyards bottles mounded
smashed the half of them
sawdust moldering wet ash
rotten boards bricks
broken – a din
a deadened clatter"
--Wolfgang Hilbig via
"O, the dying are such acrobats."
"When a storm of ghosts shall shake..."
decays ride the codegrille
carbon snobs seek harbor
piled pelf in the Wolf Age
i pack heat, dime beatnik
"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."
--Marcel Proust (via @gigi_dreamer)
Pixillation (1970). ☆☆☆☆
"...those who read in order to find new targets of denunciation are so far along now in their convergent evolution with AI, that the best way to protect yourself from them is to conceal your writing under a shroud of irreducibly human style, much as a hunter learns to blend in with the exquisite vegetal surroundings of the natural environment." --Justin Smith-Ruiu
The Jellyfish (1974). ☆☆☆
"Such Insomnia and the Shape
it takes in the dark. Moon with a faint
dent. Clouds squishing like grubs. The minerals
awake in their sightless caves.
Indifferent. Loveless.
Wulfenite, azurite, hematite,
sulfur. What I must do
is breathe and think of breathing
things, orchids and insects, the soft
exhalations of cedars on the cliff’s
edge. Or Röntgen’s first images of X-rays
on photographic plates:
fragile skeletons of frog and fish,
the left hand of his wife,
her tapered bones within their cloud
of shadowy flesh. The beginning
of seeing past sight—
in which what’s interior becomes
visible architecture for the living self.
I love the thought of slipping
into a darkness which is actually
the beginning of a different kind of light.
But how to know which darkening
is just a dreaming spinning out
the cocoon it will soon sail away from?
No one to turn the lights on,
to say this grotto’s simply full of dust
and brush away the shattered pollens. "
--Katherine Larson
Holdmese (1975). ☆☆
"Elegy for the Quagga
Krakatau split with a blinding noise
and raised from gutted, steaming rock
a pulverized black sky, over water walls
that swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra.
Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam,
the last known member of Equus quagga,
the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died.
Most of the wild ones, not wild enough,
grazing near the Cape of Good Hope,
had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters.
When a spider walked on cooling Krakatau's skin,
no quagga walked anywhere. While seeds
pitched by long winds onto newborn fields
burst open and rooted, perhaps some thistle
flourished on the quagga's discarded innards.
The fractured island greened and hummed again;
handsome zebras tossed their heads
in zoos, on hired safari plains.
Who needs to hear a quagga's voice?
Or see the warm hide twitch away a fly,
see the neck turn, curving its cream and chestnut stripes
that run down to plain dark haunches and plain white legs?
A kind of horse. Less picturesque than a dodo. Still,
we mourn what we mourn.
Even if, when it sank to its irreplaceable knees,
when its unique throat closed behind a sigh,
no dust rose to redden a whole year's sunsets,
no one unwittingly busy
two thousand miles away jumped at the sound,
no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea."
--Sarah Lindsay
"Mit der Dummheit kampfen
Gotter selbst vergebens."
--Schiller, Jungfrau von Orleans
III vi ('Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.')
"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
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
