Bad faith is like a stench you can never escape from anymore.
"I have to admit, sir, I didn't expect it to be this easy."
"Gaza has become a funeral home
but there are no seats, no mourners,
no bodies. In the caskets are nothing
but what remained of the
dead’s clothes,
and on the wall is a clock
that has not moved for twenty-one months."
--@mosababutoha.bsky.social
FEMA is no longer going door-to-door to assist disaster victims .
"Prologue of the Earthly Paradise
Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing,
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.
But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh,
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet days die—
—Remember me a little then I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.
The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names remembered,
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.
So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be;
Whose ravening monsters mighty men shall slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day."
—William Morris
"He banged his head against the wall, but he still could not think of a story." --@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux and the Flowers. (via @maryanncorbett.bsky.social)
"Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, / City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?"
- Tennyson (quoted by Jack London, 1903) via @celticstoic.bsky.social
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.
is the Constitution only
a parable for lonely
dissenters to arraign?
our officials put initials
to a promise that's delicious
as a rainbow in the rain
humans are evolving
to a pinnacle involving
keeping promises not vague
which is why when this shit ravels
i expect to see the travels
of DeSantis to the Hague
DeSantis in the docket
who will claim he's just one sprocket
of a wider tragic chain
building Alligator Auschwitz
—already some can vouch its
hungry teeth on their domain—
but the Constitution matters
not a king whose fandom flatters
his insatiable demands
i want this den of gangsters
paying dearly for our anxious
daily scroll with shaking hands
& i'll see that grinning bigot
drinking payback from the spigot
in his own mosquito lands
Morning Twilight at a Rail Yard, 1939.
"Year Zero"
wire-mesh cages rise
in a putrefying swamp
with merch & tweeted hype
amateurs bearing arms
even given their record
of fakes & pocketed funds,
where the fascist temper treads
too much room is conquered
bystander as i am
i am chastened to describe
from blithe clips of a grab
this quota-meeting crime
flying monkeys darken
our skies for a clown-in-chief
for a cause like a bucket of barf
& eclipse of Liberty's beacon
this mischief may not last—
i hope to see its fall—
but it's nest-torn ants to corral
the aftermath of Pentecost
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
—James Baldwin via @ruthz.bsky.social
"It is very difficult to sit here..."
A child is pulled from the rubble.
"AI isn’t the disease — it’s a symptom of a colonizer’s model of schooling that is extractive and dehumanizing, rather than liberating." --Jesse Hagopian via
“The Great Game”
Salad days of vampire,
Warp for which a people longs,
In the black scripture told.
Halcyon dawns of autumn
Fracture my sense of ingrown wrongs
In the black scripture told.
These are the taken tokens
Fires by night & deals awry
Wandering fires i answer to
Like a drudge with random songs
In the black scripture told.
Tithe or crimson fathom
Stars that the legionary names
Dying far from comfort
While the laughter rings of throngs
In the black scripture told.
How to Write a Poem in a Time of War.
williwaw
stubborn craw where words are krill
the sun not yet sizzled out
bugs' cry risen above fret
Rather than stand under a sign of the Zodiac, one can stand under the sign of a Chess Opening. Even without playing it, it casts shadows of another world.
Vaporwave is an allegory of this.
There is not just one dream, there is not just one artist's-world. There is not just one chess opening.
"My translator tells me 'thoughts & prayers' is an American political expression that means 'we'd rather have a secret police force than a weather service'." --@darthputinkgb.bsky.social
tragic rainlight Rudyard
Rutabaga mooted
where explore still waters
westering sane rainlight
RFG Inventions for Cello and Computer.
"don't cry, insects
in summer shirts…
the waterfall roaring"
--@poemexe.com
Geraldine Chaplin in Peppermint Frappé (1967).
The Youtube psych/prog algorithm is the only one we should keep.
"Had not realized that was what they had to teach those of us marked out as fair game."
“And all the ruins of distressful times” - Richard III (Act 4, Scene 4) via
"We had to put up razor barb wire."
"The Question and Its Mark
May I cast a spell on the many swans of Leda,
making at last one spastic blizzard in spring
with only enough divine mania to take one
blinding day from her?
The godbirds and their scopophilia
keep her open for view and review, with ever
new speculum and never the elegant jewelry
of stigmata or a heart of quartz.
May I give her only one death? Can we live if she
lies closed in a single final pose, no syphilitic
autopsy or cygnet interrogation?
May I mark her prophecy,
her presence in the very air, with a single
gargoyle on the streetside wall on a place
of worship, finally allowed inside if only by
disappearing into the stones?
Leda possessed a pair of knees that also bent
in prayer. I ask of you only what she asked for there."
—Brenda Shaughnessy
"Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie
Dust unto dust
The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die
As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell
Too strong to strive
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
The cowed and the meek
Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong
And dare not speak."
--Ralph Chaplin, in The Match (Summer, 2004)
"Child of Omelas? That’s thinking too small. What if like eight billion people suffered so a few dozen guys could live lives so insane they convinced themselves it’s more likely they’re inside a computer simulation" --@ceej.online
"Toad wrote on the ground with a stick: Go to Sleep.
Then he crossed out: Go to Sleep.
'There,' said Toad. 'Now my day is all crossed out!'
'I am glad,' said Frog. Then Frog and Toad went right to sleep."
--@frogandtoadbot.bsky.social
besieged water sadness
soft glow on the rooftops
hyperbola lawyer
less than perfect wharfstead
pain subdued & padlocked
periscope bent firelight
Folsom Prison Blues. Awhile back i wrote: "Folsom Prison Blues" should be our national anthem--it says more about America, with its guns, its prisons, & its loneliness of highways, than any other single song. But to be the country of 'This Land is Your Land' (including the often-omitted verses)--that is something to aspire to."
debacle—
the raucous trill of trouble
subject to flock flutterings
clock strikes thirteen mulligrubs
spiralling
apart spigot
bilge brigade
sans glibber blurt
cicadas
in agony
fallout spire parch
debacle parch bring
Peppermint Frappé (1967). ☆☆
You don't think like a survivor, i said. You pile up all the things you can possibly think of to feel bad about, & then drop this treasure on your head, but that is not how a survivor thinks. A survivor only looks at the immediate problem to be solved, looks at it without reacting emotionally, & may have a vague notion of a wider view & goal, but never gets fixated on feelings of urgency & ultimate attainment. I know this sounds like a truism but it is still essential. It may not yet be so bad that only those who think like survivors will survive, but i'm certain that we will not be given warning or training should the moment itself arrive. You must start thinking like a survivor today.
"But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again." --George Seferis
Just watched The Night of the Iguana. This is the poem the old poet finally finishes after 20 years:
"How calmly does the olive branch
observe the sky begin to blanch,
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair!
Sometime while night obscures the tree
the zenith of its life will be
gone, past, forever. And from thence
a second history will commence
a chronicle no longer gold
a bargaining with mist and mold
and finally the broken stem,
the plummeting to earth, and then
an intercourse not well designed
for beings of a golden kind,
whose native green must arch above
the earth's obscene corrupting love,
and still the ripe fruit and the branch
observe the sky begin to blanch
without a cry, without a prayer,
with no betrayal of despair.
Oh courage! could you not as well
select a second place to dwell,
not only in that golden tree
but in the frightened heart of me?"
An intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation.
That small dot moving left to right is 3I/ATLAS.
apricot dawn where ride gray legions
go in dread of the bitter rain
somewhere beyond this melee
love shall fall & pity rain
mangrove, mosquitos & the broken
skyscraper windows in the rain
yet poets shall learn to praise
the varieties of rain
i follow her through cloud labyrinths
by a trail like the smell of rain
though all its garments alter
this is still the same terrain
(2004)
"on the last day of the United States, when this country has finally descended into civil war, i will do a thread on how to dress for summer" --@dieworkwear.bsky.social via @karriehiggins.bsky.social
"When in 1983 I moved to Syracuse, New York, the snowiest major city in the state, all my poems became about snow." --Geof Huth
"Pinkville
and atrocities
don't happen all that often
and only a few took part
and are nothing compared to what the other side does
and after all have always been part of war,
and we deplore war
and always have
and always will"
--Eve Merriam, The Nixon Poems (1970)
To the Mother of a Dead Marine.
brick cupcake
corruption of rank fiction
whip stripes & bludgeon-born stars
Tarzan trudge on a dragstrip
"...Grizzling/ In the wart-kinked,/ Gyring, pustulent light." --Kenneth Patchen
ICE is asking people to stop...
"We had no way to talk about any of this. We were at the same time terribly intimate and terribly aloof. We could work shoulder to shoulder for days on end, on what we knew for sure were battle lines; we knew the smell and taste of each other's breath and sweat, but we never stopped, we never paused long enough to look each other in the eye.
And we had no vocabulary for these things. No concepts, really, for what was happening. Another world was breaking through to ours, and we were awash in it. We had in fact invited it and here it was, and mostly we saw it as good. We set blind boundaries, changed them, made impromptu rules, forgot them, quarreled, worked together. While some of us drifted out of reach on hard drugs, or the pure chemistry of denial and need.
But we had no words, not even the thought to look for words to speak what was happening. OR
before we identified the weather pattern, the storm had already broken.
You could put it like that." --Diane DiPrima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001)
"Mortality
This is the surest death
Of all the deaths I know.
The one that halts the breath,
The one that falls with snow
And nothing but a peace
Before the second zone,
For Aprils never cease
To resurrect their own,
And in my very veins
Flows blood as old as Eve.
The smallest cell contains
Its privileged reprieve,
But vultures recognize
This single mortal thing
And watch with hungry eyes
When hope starts staggering."
--Naomi Long Madgett, in The Poetry of Black America ed Arnold Adoff (1973)
Lament for the Chapbook Makers.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
"Of other care they little reck'ning make,
Then how to scramble at the shearers feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
Blind mouthes! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A Sheep-hook, or have learn'd ought els the least
That to the faithfull Herdmans art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel Pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed,
But that two-handed engine at the door,
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."
--Milton
When will i be able to return to my customary omphaloskepsis, cranking out poems like Cracker Jack prizes, & mildly decrying the awarding of treats to my rivals? I cannot sleep for seeing the faces of the untimely perished; daily i discover further inroads upon freedoms i took for granted; threats make the mullions rattle.
(2004)
“Those who believe in a God of punishment & repression, worship the Devil in the name of God.” –William Blake
“In the Forest of Estrangement”
our knowing of the rats
and that stark gnawing sound
at night
not to call it what it is
too long afraid
till all is scary and wrong
all but this phony flag
as if it could hold us
apart
as if it could
in storm or ruby flow
The ground turned green since the aurora was so bright.
Haiku and haibun by Shelli Jankowski-Smith published in Haiku Pause Issue 2v.
“There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal.
By seeming kindness turned to snaring,
They feel no falseness.
Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greennesss.
Their light looks fleeter.
But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under oxter.
Alas, the signal given,
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living.”
–W H Auden, The Orators
"GOP basically admitting it has no clue how to govern a complex society. Their only plan is to simplify it and rule it by force." --@mckenziewark.bsky.social
"Tried to read about the Jan 6 terrorist who now works for the Justice Department but it was behind a pay wall. Everything wrong with the USA in one sentence." --@thegodpodcast.com
Trial case decided by AI-hallucination.
"Jewels and After
On the precious verge of danger
Jewels spring up to show the way.
The bejewelled way of danger,
Beautied with inevitability.
After danger the look-back reveals
Jewels only, dangerlessness,
Logic serened, unharshed into
A jewelled and loving progress.
And after danger's goal, what jewels?
Then none except death's plainest,
The unprecious jewels of safety,
As of childhood."
--Laura (Riding) Jackson
"Ever
Where, swift and wool in going?
Fell always wishing like this.
Tomorrow, want less and hunger bigger.
Fewer terror but stronger, staggered.
Taken heart outside to dry.
Rain surprise and ruined.
Silver cold and stops the swelling.
Why hurts from other body?
Why photo soothes with flat?
Salt soaks blood tender.
Brighten flesh in slap.
With word, not blood silent.
Not leave and take me
nowhere, swift and wool in going."
--Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy (1999)
"Aelian writes of Trizus, the tyrant, that he commanded his subjects not to speak together, and when they used signs, instead of words, he also forbade those; whereupon the afflicted people met in the market-place to at least weep for their misfortunes, but neither was that permitted..." --Jeremy Taylor
If I Were King (1938).
"Apparently the New York Times doesn’t understand how diaspora works." (thread)
"From one point of view, magical progress actually consists in deciphering one's own record." --Magick in Theory and Practice
Premium gas, toronto, ontario, 1977.
"to a stranger passing through" (A11pl3Z)
passing through
our yard you scarce touch the grass
relic of another time
you climb stairs out of this hell
"Based on preliminary orbit calculations, A11pl3Z will traverse the inner Solar System, passing between Earth’s and Mars’ orbits in October 2025." More.
Haiku Pause's Climate Change issue.
poison drizzle drainpipe
adroit conscience stauncher
Anne Frank tshirt franchise
a frabjous dunce hunts us
"a genre now, verse about consciousness of war as a kind of weather..."
--Gerald Burns
" 'A sad spectacle!' exclaimed Thomas Carlyle, contemplating the possibility that millions of planets circle other suns. 'If they be inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly; and if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!' " --from Martin Gardner's Order and Surprise (1983)
"The Face
See me with all the terrors on my roads,
The crusted shipwrecks rotting in my seas,
And the untroubled oval of my face
That alters idly with the moonlike modes
And is unfathomably framed to please
And deck the angular bone with passing grace.
I should have worn a terror-mask, should be
A sight to frighten hope and faith away.
Half charnel field, half battle and rutting ground.
Instead I am a smiling summer sea
That sleeps while underneath from bound to bound
The sun- and star-shaped killers gorge and play."
--Edwin Muir
Interesting thread on competitive vs. cooperative games.
