la formo unika di la instanto

The fire this time.

"When the best student is told about the way,
It is barely within his power to practise it;
When the average student is told about the way,
It seems to him one moment there and gone the next;
When the worst student is told about the way,
He laughs out loud at it.
If he did not laugh at it,
It would not have been good enough to be the way."

--Lau tr Tao te Ching, II.3

"So, with Trump we have a small but not insignificant chance of a Mad Max future, whereas Pence brings on The Handmaids Tale. As it is, things are getting too Man in the High Castle for my comfort." --Big Al 8000 on Metafilter

siolence

"Possums are notorious...

Looking through a big heap of old books donated to us, i spy a name i know: B. Traven.
Never seen it before. Didn't even know it existed.
It's an ex-(British) library copy of the 1935 novel Government...a first edition.
They start on addall.com at $1200.00. I price this one at $800.00 & put it in the Nostalgia case.

Let me die like a Mexican.

monstrous moonshine

"Humanity is not a zero sum game. ."

    colored rags we tied
to a branch to mark the way
    still unfaded songs

the scale of a poem, versus
the scale of the poem's war-world

    clear viridian
the death is not in you but
    i can't take it out

force myself to stay awake
driving in a dawn hour

Savage aesthetics.

"The frail flame-wingèd embers should rehearse" --Stickney

the silence of the bugs

(by @meganabbott on tw)

Foucault in Death Valley.

so much hostility in the comments. i just finished trying to read a rohingya thread. it didn't even degenerate, it started out at boiling. we are losing the ability to converse among ourselves without shouting.

The short, strange music career of Leonard Nimoy.

    cusp between seasons:
venal air, viral nave, cry
    of children playing

car moves without a signal
into my lane, then drifts back

    music from Twin Peaks
CD in my car · never
    had vinyl of this

slice strata of remembrance
hand tingle, more now than not

    still dream of sitting
down at my old typewriter,
    write what?--the dream stops--

cats i hardly know their names
look at me inquiringly

    visit my father
who will show me the sketched plan
    he won't carry out

tow truck towing a tow truck
a moment to figure it

    i know i watched smoke
boil out between the buildings
    on a CRT

yellow against cerulean
for a delicate moment

    days to come are blank
i can't even drive for a
    mile without braking

how can my love be so far
in this crystal air of fall

cxhuxhu

"Across this dun September atmosphere' --Stickney

Spoken Pirahã with subtitles.

"It may be a wild risk to make a vow; but it is a quiet, crawling and inevitable ruin to refuse to make a vow." --G K Chesterton

Haint-free blue door formula.

blue neon in the half dark
vertical bar like a sign
of unalterable certainty
yet only
a tone of voice after all
neon that is blue
that might well have been otherwise
lights that might be on in here
i sit as if they are

"...Omar El Akkad's American War, a novel about a second civil war, has been widely reviewed and has sold well, though whether readers are taking it as a warning or a how-to manual is not yet clear."

nieman cong

Revisiting ghosts.

"Long fluid jewels of auroral silk" --Trumbull Stickney

"We have not lost them. We have only forgotten what they mean." (via aldaily)

Four more, 666 (22112 ju'uvo), aelindromes:

Chortle a deal, torch.

Venal air, viral nave.

Seer toy, say so terse.

Wood wand and a wodwo.

tsalal a la last

(pic by clarence john laughlin via lanny quarles on fb)

Rosanne Cash reads Adrienne Rich.

drazeth brisk
fail azure pebble stymie
whale aboard origami kibble

ossuary skimp
of fallible gift glimmer
rabbit bzura

Just like a woman.

(via)

"As well as hunting for poems in at-risk languages, the National Poetry Library has commissioned four poets to write new poems in threatened languages, or languages lost to them personally. Joy Harjo will write in the language of her own Native American Mvskoke (Creek) Nation; Northern Irish poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn in Irish Gaelic; Iraqi poet Nineb Lamassu will use Assyrian, a language not officially recognised in Iraq; and Ugandan poet Nick Makoha in his mother tongue, Luganda, which he lost when he fled Idi Amin’s dictatorship as a boy." --The Guardian (via The Page)

The wall that will be built.

infertility journey

"American law, hard though it might be for us to accept it now, was a model for everybody in the early 20th century who was interested in creating a race-based order or race state."

"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas." --Thomas Wolfe

Insta-stans.

unalive, you rave

(pic by Lanny Quarles on Fb)

One hundred points.

Anele cares says the adage
out of the brass head
on the dollar bill atop the cone
that mocks me
& it makes me a little bit mad,
so much can a buck
anele. Cares? says the adage,

toughen up:
from your mild vantage in hell
your nine year old car
no hot rod
refer back like serac aloha
shine of rays as the lights die
out of the brass. Head

asks a fez
of sylph Elena, whose runny lea
can snirp this anvil being
out of the brass head,
anele cares. Says the adage.

Seraphinianus pdf--!

(via)

predicted ant-wren

"Story is a beautiful word and our mind's best gift. Story is also a weasel word and the coward's best call." --John Dominic Crossan

How the Starck Club became a Dallas legend.

sandal strap come undone
caput mortuum
error augments rent

to fool rose
aerosol foot
Aklo polka jig
to ape a clown falling

yeah that's a gas
in my dumpster reveries
piecing out the sky

bear-shimmer above
rust & the heavy scrape
styrofoam muse

neither parent charged

" As European and North American liberals were falling head over shoulder to defend Rushdie's freedom of thought, Iranian en masse were being subjected to a pestiferous theocracy to this day."

the pit and the pendejo

"...as someone once counted, there are 784 questions asked in the Investigations. Of those only 110 are answered."

Watching people drive explains to me why they vote the way they do.

On being an ally.

Customer had me looking for Children of Men & (The Road? Station Eleven?)--seems she was doing Apocalypses, & did i know any good ones? I said this was rather a played-out genre (though they are writing more now than ever), but i could recommend a few. First, J G Ballard destroyed the world four times over, once for each of the four elements; i think The Crystal World is his best one, with The Drowned World a close second (i've reread each of these three or four times). Then, for a full-dress Armageddon, it's hard to top James Blish's Black Easter. M P Shiel: The Purple Cloud is classic loonyness. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (damn, i need to reread that) comes close--for a rational human being. The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber is the widescreen baroque one i enjoyed most (cast of thousands! yellow & purple rogue planets!). R A Lafferty does a dozen, each more absurd than the other, who can pick a favorite?--oh hell: Fourth Mansions. One of Doris Lessing's scifi series--i hate to admit i forget the title right now--conjures real sadness in its depiction of a whole world just freezing to death. But the deepest-sounding one of all is the poem "Night" by Lord Byron.

drazeth friday

(via)

sienna sky
over Anaheim
tenor arguments err

bear-worn caverns
like my brain by words

Nurse with Wound overview (via feuilleton).

"Imagine, for example, an ad campaign meant to convince people that the only thing they can do with a bicycle is drag it behind them."

emergent runts roar

(whitby abbey by james whitesmith via)

Aklo polka.

"in the spirit of #metoo i would like to lend women around the world a hand with a more detailed description of my experience with a danish director . it feels extremely difficult to come out with something of this nature into the public , especially when immediately ridiculed by offenders . i fully sympathise with everyone who hesitates , even for years . but i feel it is the right time especially now when it could make a change . here comes a list of the encounters that i think count as sexual harassment :
1 after each take the director ran up to me and wrapped his arms around me for a long time in front of all crew or alone and stroked me sometimes for minutes against my wishes
2 when after 2 months of this i said he had to stop the touching , he exploded and broke a chair in front of everyone on set . like someone who has always been allowed to fondle his actresses. then we all got sent home .
3 during the whole filming process there were constant awkward paralysing unwanted whispered sexual offers from him with graphic descriptions , sometimes with his wife standing next to us .
4 while filming in sweden , he threatened to climb from his room´s balcony over to mine in the middle of the night with a clear sexual intention , while his wife was in the room next door . i escaped to my friends room . this was what finally woke me up to the severity of all this and made me stand my ground
5 fabricated stories in the press about me being difficult by his producer . this matches beautifully the weinstein methods and bullying . i have never eaten a shirt . not sure that is even possible .
6 i didnt comply or agree on being sexually harassed . that was then portrayed as me being difficult . if being difficult is standing up to being treated like that , i´ll own it .

hope

let´s break this curse

warmth"

björk (via facebook)

Favorite Wilbur.

"Poets should not be told to write what they know. They don’t know anything, that’s why they are poets." --Derek Beaulieu

Pascal on imagination or, as we would say, "fantasy."

(via)

why we give power to monsters

The 100,000 year war. "Perhaps the most significant invention in hominid history after the control of fire was the bone needle, that allowed for the sewing of form-fitting clothing."

cold bloom let the deep
perfect like a sleeping child
have as steel a star
not yet all my useless and
song shadowed winters are come

(fridge magnet tanka, 2003)

'"...frogs have very interesting eyes; they can see colors in the dark, something humans certainly can’t do, and it’s possible no other animals can do..."

(ashgabat via)

what's eating moby grape

(malikanas on deviantart via karl kempton on fb)

The zine revival.

Orpheologist
cobwebbed words
make way for the one-eared dog

thrones but no dominion
soft furnishings
attaining consciousness

Contronyms (or, if you will, auto-antonyms).

(pic by Flora Borsi via Karen Osborn Evans on Fb)

a serf aggrieved

(mogadishu via aljazeera)

Hex words revisited.

"A liberal education which will not enable us to face danger and death does not deserve the name." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Fascinating scifi/futurism thread.

Now that weathers have bred
such whisper, refill more
than thought would be on us

flag's knell, stones instead of
blossoms snowshowering down,
skyclad chaos: rattled?

drive with summer riddled
but not yet it's gone, though--
starswept void & relish--

i lug a famous corpse

Horror psychedelia.

"In the moonlight,
I met Beserk..."

--Stevens

how to pick a planet

Belinda's petition.

3/1/4/1/5/9 palindrome:

Farm sale trifle auctioneer
if let Salem far.

pairs:

Aorta imp:
I impair Tao.

triplets:

urn arbor, crazy on yon
razor car burn

pairs again:

story war we go
armed, O do me Argo
weary worst

regular one:

Erupt, O Grail, aha!
--Hali argot pure.

I need a word between schadenfreude & stark terror.

the grave gives up its secrets fairly

(pic by Anna Palmer on Fb)

"the Japanese have been obsessed with the Silk Road since the 1980s and scholars continue to work to re-create what was lost--in reproductions or in digitalization--in what in itself is an act of pilgrammage."

Our store got in the two-volume Nietzsche biography by his sister, in German blackletter from the 20s. A deeply sinister work. Oddly, this philosophaster herself was traduced in a weird forgery that, nevertheless (like so many other frauds that ought to have been buried already), has been attempted to be rehabilitated in the late 20c.

"I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away—first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud another voice, once I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth."

totes gadzooks

(pic by Melanie Pruit)

Space is the Place.

"We behold space sown with rotatory islands; suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems; some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation." --Robert Louis Stevenson

Threshgale.

heifer snorts troops

Why is bluegrass so white?

"Every production of an artist should be an expression of an adventure of his spirit." --Somerset Maugham

"I often get asked about ghosts and the occult in interviews but the ghost in Ghost Box is more to do with faulty memory and TV screen after-images."

"Confucius was deeply versed in the music of his time, and it is said that wherever he travelled in feudal China he could assess the state of government in any place from the quality of the music he heard there." --Eberhard

Slim sees orange.

tuesdays with moriarty

The Speculative Grammarian.

"The cardinal importance accruing to number symbolism in ancient China may be gauged from the fact that every dynasty selected a number as a kind of modulus for its reign. The chosen number might be one of the numbered tones in the old pentatonic music, which automatically linked it to one of the five colours. It followed from this that when a change in dynasty took place, the colour of court dress had to be altered, and a new scale chosen for the court music..." --Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols (1983)

Song of Inversion.

(by Etienne Delessert, via)

woke with the wind

Where the wild winds are.

plastic mummy
dawnbirds
tuba · desire

no pilgrimage
like scraping ice

Swedish death cleaning.

pass through blue lights
don't see
all the safe prior passages

is it time for the lights
to wink out as one

(via)

Into the ruins.

black diamond dogs

Fourth dimension.

"The next day they did indeed visit the Villa Giulia. They looked at the graves and the sarcophagi, with their lids supporting terracotta statues of the old Etruscan dead enjoying their lives--eating, drinking, embracing their spouses, and proclaiming the Etruscan philosophy. This, being wise enough not to have developed literature in the evolution of their cultural life, they never committed to writing, though of course it can be read unmistakably on the faces of their statues: only the present matters, and moments of beauty are eternal." --Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight (1937; tr Rix 2000)

(via)

you're the best kept secret in MLA

Australian psych.

"No one knew who would be arrested tomorrow, whose portrait it was best to hang on the wall and whose to hide, which currency to accept and which to try to pass on to some simpleton. Life, however, went on. For a long time I did not have a room of my own; I slept on a sofa in the house of my cousin, a professor of medicine who specialized in venereal diseases. Sometimes there would be firing in the morning, but downcast patients would already be sitting in the waiting room; they invariably looked away from one another, and some tried to cover their faces with a newspaper. The names of the newspapers changed and what they said one day was quite different from what they had said the day before, but this did not worry the patients." --Ilya Ehrenberg, People and Life (tr Bostock and Kapp, 1962)

(pic by Tim Wetherell on Fb)

cloud provider

No way to prevent this.

1.
mansion of smiling masks
& real ones
who come to inhabit

a role in a movie finding there
if nowhere else
closure

2.
faces in the water
lost
the water
lost
the evening
striated

3.
yttrium
come

4.
haunted by the abyss
in words, & ev'rything made from words

take away all that is not
the form to be

a day of revelry
followed quick by death

as i imagine it

"...when it comes time for eldritch horrors to tell their side of the story, why, the strange dreams go whispering out from drowned R’lyeh to waiting minds."

(via Americans Against Fascism on Fb)

goodbye to a liver

(by Jack Levine via)

robots are calling me
in the midst of my first person shooter game

why should i stop
at playing at killing
just because a robot got my number

is there anything to buy
i haven't bought already
in this end of the world mad splurge

do you want to pretend
you want my mere opinion
for something that's long been decided

by the source of the stupid robot calls
& the owners
of my first person human-shooting game

Portrait of a Sufi artist.

"And poets evermore are scant of gold,
And if they find a piece behind the door,
It turns by sunset to a withered leaf."

--Aurora Leigh

fresher portions sort

"But nobody tells you about the part where a cop aims a loaded firearm into a crowd of people and tries to decide whether it’s worth risking their lives in order to murder an escaped slave."

Somewhere safe with someone good
if romance night, if prudence could:
to raise, & lower too, your guard
somewhere safe, with someone good.

The skyways teem with lesser guide,
assassins stalk this motorcade,
somewhere safe with someone good
--if romance might, if prudence could.

Nothing in Prospero's robes.

"...Chinese 'loan words' have been adapted to Korean usage and still constiture more than fifty percent of the Korean vocabulary." --The Poetry of Ink

cauldron of morning

(Raqqa today, via)

A writer's life.

Our enemy become ourselves,
& who is there to shoot at now?
It starkly falls through Reason's sieves,
our enemy become ourselves.
Not toy, not noise, not candy saves...
Another one portends, we know:
our enemy become ourselves.
And who is there to shoot at, now?

"The irony of it all is that the Western world wanted to capture paradise so badly, they destroyed it in the process."

a zealousness of gatekeepers

(via)

"To confront slow violence is to take up, in all its temporal complexity, the politics of the visible and the invisible."

Who are the Brain Police?

Don't worry; they're here.

Cage vs Duchamp. Music won.

"Choson Korea literati painting continued to follow Chinese dynastic models and academic traditions long after they had fallen out of fashion in China... Another example of this kind of stylistics development can be seen in the 'American Impressionist' school which continued long after the French and European avant garde had developed other artistic modes of expression." --The Poetry of Ink (2005)

Albertus and The Prisoner.

thy local orchid

"It is a mainstay of the traditional Florida culture to get as absolutely fucked up as humanely possible during a hurricane. This is such an accepted practice that Budweiser has a specific pallet of booze it ships to Florida grocery stores in the grips of hurricane season..."

And suddenly the skies have turned to gray
i count no longer seas'nable or otherwise.
As in a dream my thoughts gleam brightly filigree,
distracted mostly from more trenchant woes.
Ready to claim world-ending butterfly poise
as i refuse with all & sundry argue
only to hide 'mongst legions i despise
in the effervescent-toxic conygry.
Say this is period grace, or say not yet
the die is cast. If i could only hold
firm on a train of purpose, saved & healed
by knowing there will be--whether a yacht
or a raft--just not those goddamned jellyfish.

The "wind" issue.

interrobang & the mysterians

In algorithms we trust.

proper darkness
for the work
as pale smoke blossoms

gold
just over the horizon

"Poetry is a paradigm example of human inadequacy."