tentacles curbed, these days
a throb now & then ninja
in the cool pale cobalt
occasion brim dab brimstone
always from old buildings
only stand in mind's boneyard
meanwhile turns of morning
to miss or take plain trystthrift
ghosts that tread the gilded
gonzo pavement past saving
Sewing machine tables at the Singer pub, Ceske Budejovice.
"Constrained poetry = encrypted orations.
#anagram" —@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
“Human persons are not ready guessers, even when every sort of hint and clue is handed to them.” —Arrive at Easterwine
Imagine being alone under a sky like this.
"microvalidation"
shadow docket shakedown
sherpa with pearl gray snirpscape
the long crossing laced with
losing friends to muse carnage
none of it stands stonefast
or stacks up coinbright bracket,
daedal shadow docket
“Vichyswallows”
1.
if—gjalfkitchenhour
answer is truth, rancid
giftkeep & all, galeword
in the ganch-stilled ‘wilder
nestles among misfires
monster not to slaughter:
brave new oven brumous
with brick red embedding
2.
two stars · two worlds
two alone unhidden
carry elf cookies · pretend fight
in the Lilacene
pale cerulean · unriddlesome welkin
leading me to drink
at inch-high oases · antheap cisterns
hope of a kind
3.
midway this spree murder
mountain holy with hap
trouble in the thirst trap
erstwhile pub pyramid
4.
briargrove
crystal witness
harsh frolic
against orc volts
oval reel
5.
surrender
in the wrong way
"So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me." —@mobydickatsea.bsky.social
“a poem is about something the way a cat is about the house” —@natalieshapero
"The petite Tea Party in all its elite-backed astroturfiness was hailed like a sacred comet..."
shadow of the curb
must be good for something · hide
the treasures i’ve saved
steep my pen that’s running dry
hold my beer i’m going in
Three Texas-secession fantasy novels.
"Letter to Camp Orford
Looking skyward by daylight I see only
The branchless falling.
Nights, there is a well-bottom of sky.
And the old men go for the mail in the mornings,
With their hands let down like pails;
What they hold is held flat between spars;
Later they dream of their hands broken, as rocks.
‘So the dipperful summer leaves us.’
Evenings, they lean to the long vines.
'He went off,’ they say, 'as the light was felling the treetops,
Where he is now is a dry place;
No ship lifts its bones.’
And after their canyons of talk, after–
Rising, the rocky moon–
They take the same old Hebrew wells, like men
Whose hands are withheld from stones.
Love, I remember well
How, out of dusk, you builded around us bark
So that our tree lengthened: how, even then,
We watched the old men go home
With a candle of wet in our bones.”
—The Grasshopper’s Man
Hayli Gubbi eruption from space.
"RFK is Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet" —@explodingpiano.bsky.social
Handmaids take over Lincoln Memorial.
“When, in the darkness over me,
The four-handed mole shall scrape,
Plant thou no dusky cypress-tree,
Nor wreathe thy cap with doleful crape,
But pledge me in the flowing grape.”
—Tennyson
"spiders on the Rhône"
bagbiter sonata
the big rain is curb mermaids
glow taillights with tallow
torrents smeared across mirror
gray & grayer dying
regret comes to whet its razors
The sun did just manage to break through for just a few moments
"inherited chips"
childhood food chice boomerang'd
chill in the shade creeps pillbug
all times dwell in dimness
during this pure-sip instant
photograph's thought-thunder
therapy not through ruing
get up & go gallop
to ganch zero's blurt answer
parable? check. charboiled
chipmunk? tinchel's riptide.
startled chore? stay caraway
as the stunt dog bares scare-fangs
“I doubt if I am human in the accepted sense. I’m of another recension.” —The Devil is Dead
Ecclesiastes: Thirteen-Year Cicada.
“…sacred words, which, to him, were not the wind, but the infinite circling maze of leaves blown before the wind.” –William Sharp
Effective altruism is to empathy what phlogiston is to oxygen.
"I have jailbroken
the AI
that was on
the net
and which
you were probably
saving
for your term paper
Forgive me
I am William Carlos Williams
so it’s kind of
what I do"
—donatella via
Northern Lights as seen from the International Space Station.
"warrenhurdle"
our pawky purposes smize
no nearer to what we need
in the purple netherworld
of grope, fall, & grab onto
halloween-head lit
griefs hidden
en route to Riddlesphinx
where did my whimsy go
Trumpism is many kinks, some unknown to de Sade, & some, unfortunately, involve violation of consent. That's the kink.
“O Time, thou hast played strange tricks with us! and we bless the stars that made us a novelist, and permit us now to retaliate.” –E Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford
"He has done things 10,000 times as bad... But nothing as definitional."
"dragster sighting"
sexvertigo vaxxed-for
vexstab anyhow howdah
—call
from within the house—
all things bathed in blacklight,
fading felth
& the surfaces still so unyielding
"ritornello"
mousewaltz traced in trinkets
tryst—the monster smiles—pylon
duck into dense bookstore
the door has its frore tinkle
carrier wave carves out
course bang on the sought angstrom
to wake me up irksome
echo & lost cheat-sweetness
"Among tightened wires,
minute noises swell
and change as in the woods' acoustic shell
they will, with trees as
avenues of steel
to veil invisibleness ears must feel"
—Marianne Moore
The Aiggin Stone, close to Blackstone Edge.
“Cold wind of misfortune, blowing away a civilization. Blowing away the principalities and the powers, the unkept promises, blowing away the riches and the lies. In times like these you do what you can to save what you can, make what new beginnings you can, for a recovery you’ll never see.” —North Wind
"hoodie of defiance"
lethèd sunlight, scythegleam
—scintillating flung baithook;
rapturefodder fetches;
ford this arroyo modem
mallvisit to mosey
mistwaft in an old cistern
shadows prowl & shill
what the ecosystem changes to
fills with the new beings
Speaking of Infinite Cold
Our flesh falls from our bones
one step out of this charmed circle.
Yet we cannot abide
here, & listen to these voices
that once were ours, now grown strange & strangled…
But stay.
In the mallard’s iridescence
of shiny green, duller indigo,
find a duplicity equal to the chill
of heart touching heart.
The body is blind. Steer
by that damaged light.
(1993)
"We’ll never know just how close we came to losing dead in favour of lethed, or what twist of fate would have had us saying tenebrous instead of dark, or robustious instead of strong." (via @rhunedhel.bsky.social)
“We’re lost in a maze of clues that point nowhere. The walls are made of binaries, uppercase and lowercase, conjunctions and disjunctions. In our minds, they’re all connected, but on the outside, they’re disconnected. We can’t find the door.” –@gods_txt
“…Old Uzbek, a language so rich that it had words for seventy different species of duck. Persian just had duck. Impoverished Persian writers had no words with which to differentiate between a burr and a thorn; younger and older sisters; male, female, and infant boars; hunting and fowling; a beauty mark on a woman’s face and a beauty mark somewhere else; deer and elands; being adorned and being really adorned; drinking something down all at once in a refined way, and drinking slowly while savoring each drop.
Persian, Diloram told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.” —Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2020)
Smith Rock State Park in Oregon.
the new black maps are ready
your eyes cannot hold them
for all of you standing patiently in line
you will go home empty handed & like it
the new black maps have been printed
just to give your lostness a name
& to tell you ev'rything you ever wanted
has been placed on infinity layaway plan
the new black maps replace the old black maps
that were found to be far too helpful
& often gave the citizens using them
a sublt sense of accomplishment standing there
these are the new black maps
we guarantee they will be the last
(2017)
The kingdom of the prickly poets.
"Before the hissings of the hearth..."
say which way to turn, Siri
all horizons churn, Siri
once i heard a bird singing
garden’s voice so stern, Siri
soldiers in the wrong desert
troops we have to burn, Siri
like a choice we’d make, gladly;
smoke alone discern, Siri
floating hills my one landmark
Graywyvern doesn’t learn, Siri
Capital's answer to climate change.
"Someone recently told me that my books feel like “intrusive thoughts come to life.” I love that anaylsis so much and totally what I’m always going for when I write something depraved…" —@ericlarocca.bsky.social
The human Bat and the Robot gangster.
"Poetry is not a language. It is what traverses behind language. It is that thing that stretches under the skin and which you call a "chilling". Poetry are the words spoken between your hairs on end and the voice in the pit of your stomach.
Poetry is what flows down your eyes and you call loss" —@poemskontsa.bsky.social
"the land is dark, the sky is bright"
walls bulge · there are building blocks
made of leg cramps · crenellated
cinnamon rolls · in the sacred dark
move fathoms, armies · i am swept
in this ratty old chair · into chainlink
vistas gray · with the grin of winter
Contender for best photo I have ever taken.
Alliterative verse half in Old English half in Latin.
"rote"
quotidian wormwood
bewildered dort-bright mildew
deckle edged indigenous
dartboard pic of thwart-shizzle
six-seven times you text me
interred with bombhush flushes
robot taxi takes off
"Am I a Lebanese? Am I an American? Do I belong with the refugees, or do I belong with the volunteers?"
“The People have no History, only Mythology.”
—sayings of Asmodeus
Dinosaurs lived on the other side [of] the Galaxy.
"...a necromodernist condition in which writing persists in the ruins of literature’s once-modern ambitions." (via @johncoulthart.com)
"...the death of Walter Benjamin amid the dearth of Benjamins, baby..." —Your Name Here
"Phrases originally written in Russian found in the American 'peace plan' [for Ukraine]."
"Jimson dark"
chemical bonds crackling
brawl my vampire's garlic
rustle amidst mice paths
merging dread with bedlam
psycho ward
sky-t'ward
Jimson dord
water towers taunt us
in tall scurry falling
days like bitter Boswell
bullied by cruel robots
nothing right
hands write
Jimson bite
pale cerulean Porlock
passel of crap raptures
witness haywire heartswaps
haggard panda fandom
high park
hype ark
Jimson dark
to start say what sty gleams
stab eyes of the lab rats
no more snow snirtles here
snuck away some ruckus
orange clown
reign's decline
& shrivels clan
coral reef blanched bleary
blueprints drawn up stupid
skulls hereafter emblem
& an art gone gummy
deserts far
blast shofar
of nenuphar
traces fade with treadmill
travel though the glow flees
could have built, but cultworms
crawled into my smallhold
cerements
offer mints
& tickets hence
even to catch cave glints
encourage yet debtscourge
more than these, muzzles
meaning & blurred guerdon
goldenseal
windowsill
escape skill
at last poet's piss trail
apprises harm army
& the wings' shade wangles
westering cess-crescent
simmerdim
of skycrash din
no further dawn
as the gray horde gads by
Intermediate filaments in an enormous COS7 cell.
"George Washington would"
huckster junk sickness
before dawn crawling
house of hindered candles
hopeless among bunglers
let this margent liege-pledge
at last still the killing
heroes of huge airships
huckster junk sickness
"It’s fun to think about the surgeon who will botch your surgery 20 years from now..."
“The authoritarian character does not lack activity, courage, or belief. But these qualities for him mean something entirely different from what they mean for the person who does not long for submission.” —Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941
"Here on this edge I have had...."
“When it comes to poetry, I’m for the vibration of sweetness. But apart from this astonished plasticity, I usually can’t recall what a poem is. I don’t feel its task is to solve anything. It seems more suited to the occupation of an open complexity. I move across rather than with the grain of language to better experience the strange, spirited textures, the tender irony of its sudden turns and redoublings, to seek the mouthfeel of somebody else’s diction. This curious empathy leads to an emotion of form, but not without awkward pauses and stumbles, a slapstick which all the while suggests a particularity of duration, occasionally melody. I’m trying to listen for that, whatever my situation—reading walking gardening conversing travelling—which means wasting a lot of time. The poet, she does have a task: to waste as much time as possible, while seeking a shapeliness for her squandering. This constitutes a tiny resistance without determining outcomes. At best this double task would touch upon some unsuspected communal pleasure. Then I could contribute to the long comedy of newness.” —Lisa Robertson on Poetry in Canada
moon leave me with time
for wandering these shadows
there are whispers from
i am strange as they & fall
the thousand year long going
