"Traces of the Swarm
No coffee left in the coffeepot.
Embers turning to ash, ash whirling up into the unruly wind.
Beside me, I see a locust hovering above
The stove. I see nothing else.
Then a lone ant searching the sand for crumbs,
Searching for what the swarms left behind."
—Jabir Sha'ith via
"ASCII SHRUGGED" —@skleinedler.bsky.social
"After the bombs stopped, silence filled the streets the kind of silence that follows loss.
We walk among the ruins of what used to be home, trying to find pieces of ourselves." —@jamalzuhir.bsky.social
"I still remember
the taste of coffee from a thermos
on the trail
now my only companion
a stone in the shoe"
—Maria Tomczak via @evecastle.bsky.social
"Even in his youth, chaos was never too far away."
"the war on rainbow crosswalks"
lit array of rideflags
this crisp route of whispers
nameless the neumed contours
absolved-for-now glower
for now glower
ceasefire has its sessions
bard assesses guardedly
tired like the dead teased by
promise of dawn con jobs
of dawn con jobs
pale cerulean prism
enough prank is thankful
shadowed long & shivers
for the next shift wreckstrewn
next shift wreckstrewn
"Today, the US federal government honors a Genovese man who did his own research." —@thefred.bsky.social
According to Bartlomé de las Casas.
Just think if Nixon were alive he'd be the most honest Republican.
Poem written in a copy of Beowulf.
"tipping point for coral"
tools in drawers a drizzle
drink feculent Yuletide
paint over paint pulls you
past intricate sickness
the stories fray starkly
stir ruinous kinship
war on rainbow webwork
wields effigy grudgefest
tools in drawers a drizzle
“STEP ON IT
Passing the threshold one
does not reach
the threshyoung.
Language
contains words
which contain words
that contain us
who contain no words
prior to birthsill—
Shall I say that this
is grass, is overkill,
and have my symbol
also, a snail
scotchtaped to a stopsign.”
—Bill Knott
They run out of plotlike in-character things for me to do, so i start doing plotlike out-of-character things.
"Amber does not remember the pine."
"...whatever walked there, walked alone."
"He could not decide whether he stood on the edge of truth or illusion, or a yet unglimpsed alternative to either." —Barefoot in the Head
Dogs Get Cancer Too
Red tiptinged gold
then a pure chromatic orange
wherever i abscond
the work is soon with me
i gather persimmon traces
from the floor of a subway car
scumbled over by a
charcoal gray
i look into faces
that might have once held light
now they are like everything
buried too long
i can only free colors
You win the internet today & it's still early.
"Have just learned the term 'slut’s wool' for dust bunnies" —@kellyrosehpffer.bsky.social
Just became my #1 time travel destination.
"LILITH AND HECATE [anagrammed lines]
I stirred, there, cups of haemoglobin true.
There’s magic in our blood, the purest fire.
The nighttime pours a red, or cries of blue;
bright Luna comes to pour the rife desire....
Horrific, gruesome battles (hope untried)
are fought, remote, in scriptures I behold.
The rip or turn of loss became their guide:
'Rise up!' The rust of iron became their gold.
From Hecate rebuilt, their grip’s due soon.
Before she put their drum to Grecian soil,
I buried starlight sure, the creep of Moon
demure of air. I brought the serpent’s coil.
Rebuild me too! Repair the curse of nights —
before I rule, through past demonic rites!"
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"...while Republicans treat the Constitution like a choose-your-own-adventure game."
"Arrokoth"
sift the dust
for evidence
for evidence
was a house
here, were children
here, were children
& now peace
that thin word kneels
that thin word kneels
sift the dust
Scrawled in chalk, then erased clean.
"Life was so short, and also so full of desolating boredom and the flip voluptuousness of speed-death." —Barefoot in the Head
( via / 'Voracity' @ARodrigoRuizFe1 x @JeanSaucisse6 )'Voracity'@ARodrigoRuizFe1 x Jean Saucisse
— Jean Saucisse (@JeanSaucisse6) November 22, 2022
#DistortedRealities Step II, link + details 👇🔗 pic.twitter.com/ULX3Bmvin2
Cosmic microwave background cross-stitch.
You’re not a plagiarist you’re just a person with plagiarism.
frogsuited this frightful
frytorpedo feedbag
of cardboard occasion
cage unloaded odium
in my deep-dug frog suit
doggèd verse amerces
the pixel-limned lurksphinx
lurgy & thwart-Northstar
“dead people laughing”
the incompletion of each project
is a kind of constellation
i can see animals in
i feel accompanied
by these animals
“But why do I talk of rascality? folly, folly is the scourge of life! Give me a scoundrel (so he be a sensible one), and I will put him in my heart of hearts; but a fool is more mischievous than famine, pestilence, and war.” —Peregrine Pickle
The highest freedom is the freedom not to have to lie.
"We had a Jesus on a cross, and he’d get off and invert it."
the bandage
Muse, i while away hours; but is she so?
nothing denies. dreams, my gift offers her nightly.
so she is but hours away, while i muse:
nightly her offers gift my dreams—denies nothing.
Suddenly i know how this horror movie ends.
the Thermostat Turned Way Up, The Door Wide Open
i love this wind
i should always end my dreams in spring
“One needn’t be nearly as holy to pray for fog as to pray for rain.” —R A Lafferty, Apocalypses
All our vehicles are armor, armor against our travelling’s attempts to change us.
"widdershizzle"
the glum glamour
of gluey brew
polaroid pill
pulls us drooling
rancid to rinse
or roam chromeplate
typewriter tarp
towed to yodel
let darg's digging
double our flub,
nothing known there—
benighted plight
“For Harvest
The year turns to its rest.
Up from the earth, the fields, the early-fallen dew,
Moves the large star at evening, Arcturus low with autumn,
And summer calls in her many voices upon the frost.
I who have not seen for weeping
The plum ripen and fall, or the yellowing sheaf,
Am not unmindful now of the season that came and went,
The hours that told off freshness,
The bud and the rich leaf.
Though I turned aside before the summer
And weathered but a season of the mind,
Let me sit among you when the husk is stripped,
Let me tell by the bright grain,
Those labours in an acre of cloud and the reap of the wind.”
—Léonie Adams
On Tom Phillips: I have a paperback edition of his treated work. I don’t open it very often, but i keep it close at hand. When i first started making books, i instinctively knew i wanted to have as much image as text, but i didn’t know how to do it. The problem, in fact, is to balance, so to speak, the centrifugal & the centripetal, which is identical to the epic poet’s task. On one end of a continuum, there’s the regular text with square windows cut out (i used this for Mysteries from Forgotten Worlds); on the other, is making a landscape in which words appear, in a constant flow (perhaps this can be said to stem from “Un Coup de Dés”), & the trick is to avoid actually illustrating the text literally (as a children’s book would). A Humument, being composed by covering up all the words but a few that are then used in that order, introduces both a random element & a forward impetus. Phillips turns the latter into sheer lyricism. –Then it becomes necessary to avoid copying his solution (as in my second edition of Star Grope)…
“The plan was as simple as it was daring. [James Whitcomb] Riley would fashion a knock-off of Edgar Allan Poe and pawn it to the reading public as a recently found, unpublished work by the dead poet. When the piece received critical praise, Riley’s case would be made. Riley’s 'Leonainie' appeared on August 2, 1877, in the Dispatch, a Kokomo, Indiana, newspaper edited by a man in on the hoax. It was printed under the heading: ‘A Hitherto Unpublished Poem of the Late Lamented Edgar Allan Poe.’ To provide cover, one of Riley’s ex-medicine-show-Iocal-sign-painter pals, Will Ethell, found a facsimile of Poe’s 'The Bells’ and, approximating Poe’s handwriting as best he could, set out to copy Riley’s 'Leonainie’ onto the flyleaf of an old Ainsworth dictionary. If anyone asked to see the original, the Ainsworth would then be trotted out as evidence. Here’s Riley’s faux-Poe:
'Leonainie-Angels named her;
And they took the light
Of the laughing stars and framed her
In a smile of white;
And they made her hair of gloomy
Midnight, and her eyes of bloomy
Moonshine, and they brought her to me
In the solemn night.-
In a solemn night of summer,
When my heart of gloom
Blossomed up to greet the comer
Like a rose in bloom;
All forebodings that distressed me
I forgot as Joy caressed me-
(Lying Joy! that caught and pressed me
In the arms of doom!).
Only spake the little lisper
In the Angel-tongue;
Yet I, listening, heard her whisper,-
"Songs are only sung
Here below that they may grieve you-
Tales but told to deceive you,-
So must Leonainie leave you
While her love is young.
Then God smiled and it was morning.
Matchless and supreme
Heaven’s glory seemed adorning
Earth with its esteem:
Every heart but mine seemed gifted
With the voice of prayer, and lifted
Where my Leonainie drifted
From me like a dream.’
…A slew of national newspapers swept up the story, notably including the New York World, Tribune, and Post. Some were enticed, others merely wary. But the poem instigated enough literary ruckus to arouse well-known Poe biographer William F. Gill of Boston, who petitioned to review the original and verify its authenticity. Gill suggested his depositing a large sum at a Boston bank as security so the Ainsworth containing the poem—a forgery just completed by Riley’s pal Ethell—might be shipped to him for study.“ —Poetry’s Afterlife
"If the Beowulf manuscript had been destroyed in the fire, all we would know of it would be the forty lines Wanley cited in his catalogue of 1705 and his brief and misleading summary..." (via @lilithsaintcrow.com)
“POEM
I fear an alias abandoned
At birth awaits to name me
After life, an ID I must
Assume again, a prior self.
Migraine angel whose crimes
Include the nail ordeal of hands
And the toe torment of feet.
When a chessboard meets
A crossroads face to face,
Is their contest foregone, lost
The sinuous routes we win?
Uncloaked by the light heaven’s
Decryption sends to none,
I come coven to your command.”
—Bill Knott
"And the pineapples roll. Sometimes they detonate." (via feuilleton)
"ashwaganda"
scattered frogs
slain where fascist cogs flattened
free speech in its final throes
wine of violence, creature-crutch
this vague creature · reaches versts
its passage gravelly · gorp swilling
cannot be named · by the near gazers
no inside or out · but its feet march
& takes what · all of us stand on
"Maybe prayer and electricity are fighting a war."
To me there is a palpable difference in the light from August/September to October, & i'd been sublimally clued-in to that for some time without realizing that it wasn't just the range of temperatures that was altered for me. It's like a key-change in music. The same notes mean something else.
“No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
– Lily Tomlin via @jacobwren.bsky.social
Autoimmunity
Irony-
flower, only
grows on graves, and
how you re-
gard is vision
too, but the
guardian
never knows what’s
under,
garbage or pure alluvial
matter:
even the flowers, wise beyond
words, don’t.
“The Captive
When gloaming droops
To the raven’s croak,
And the nightjar churs
From his time-gnarled oak
In the thunder-stricken wood:
When the drear dark waters
‘Neath sallows hoar
Shake the veils of night
With their hollow roar,
Plunging deep in flood;
Spectral, wan
From unquiet rest,
A phantom walks
With anguished breast,
Doomed to love’s solitude.
Her footstep is leaf-like,
Light as air,
Her raiment scarce stirs
The gossamer.
While from shadowy hood
In the wood-light pale
Her dream-ridden eyes,
Without sorrow or tear,
Speculation, surmise,
Wildly, insanely brood.”
—de la Mare
I prefer lyrics i can't understand because most musicians are pretty bad poets.
"When I was your age, searching for a phrase in quotes returned results for that exact phrase" —@weeder.bsky.social
"So how's our fourth quarter looking?"
Thule because Poe did
whose geography awry
at a certain flagrant season
finds employ
Thule because Poe did
whatever by it he might mean
this used map i gift you
& inordinate terrain
