writing only in waiting rooms

"There's no one here to leave you behind" --Gary Numan

the twinkly gout
many an ohm

tourist's ergot
turns minds to pulp

the smell of winter

Turned up on a search for "kwotsxwoe".

I return from the dead to stop other people from writing my books
hatchgreed
attenuating

Opes a noir pro
in Aesop

gaslighted by our own possessions

t rex in the lotus pose

"Belphegor's prime is 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001: a palindromic prime number with 666 in the middle and 13 0s on either side. It is named after Belphegor, one of the seven princes of hell." --@qikipedia via @Anthony_Etherin

The story of Belphegor's Prime.

monstrance for a gray wyvern

Aelindrome: Archpoet, mime top char.

A Mouzell for Melastomus.

"To bear a name is both terrible and necessary." --Don De Lillo, Ratner's Star (1976)

everything happens for a reason

sunlight, fresh tarmac;
a cello long-shadowing
the autumnal glare

a day on which there might be truth
but for all the days before

21st century slave market.

"Now I for one greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under the surface like slime." --Chesterton

cunctation

Dandelions.

    Aelindrome: Stark foam, oaf karst.

Albireo barrowkin
pallor of being personage
Amalfi bound
candle paths sniffing the postman
apteryx-shaped

keel's chatterers spring
after necessary roosting
of voices pillars
thought flowers like protection
rising unbuilt

rising unbuilt
in the bright November sun
like chess against grass
emeraldworn
even a moon is killed

Rabb’s fringe limbed tree frog

iceberg-mask thirty
years to fall · start now learning
all the letting go

you who cannot bear to leave
dead leaves carpeting a lawn

what if we add a bomb to chess

Richard St. John: Pluto 2

After the action of the International Astronomers Union 8/24/06

"Poor Pluto, icy stone, never so lovely as Venus
or possessing Jupiter’s pull. Dragging along
your equal moon, that old cold pagan dance-partner,
Charon. Still tangled up with Neptune’s elliptic
and its inner tides. Second-tier, our mirror,
unable even to clear your wobbly orbit of debris.
Yet, for all of it, the sun’s faint ray still falls
on your gravelly eye. A great debate – and bang! –
you’re X’ed from the canon by the IAU, in Prague
not Rome, but still the same: too many minor objects
threatening the cosmic balance. It’s just as Irenaeus
argued and the holy fathers, in their wisdom, then declared
the gnostic gospels bogus – full of outlandish sayings
like: 'Pick up a stone, and you will find me there.' "

(from Vox Populi Sphere via Michael Sims on Fb)

In Mosul.

lautado

"Wagner's Buddhist opera, Die Sieger, was unfortunately never completed." --Donald S Lopez Jr, The Scientific Buddha (2012)

Dennis Cooper on Firbank (via Feuilleton).

"The market doesn’t have a brain, a conscience, a morality or a sense of history. The market only has one rule and it’s a bad rule, a rule that would only work in a world where there was an infinity of raw materials, what the eco-Marxists are calling the “four cheaps”: cheap food, cheap power, cheap labour, cheap raw material.

There is no new place to go to get cheap resources; there is no way to get cheap food, and so on and so forth. The “four cheaps” are gone, and yet the market is designed to do nothing about that. So this story needs to be told and it’s kind of being told, but it also needs to be shaped, and this is where I feel a bit desperate and a little crazy." --Kim Stanley Robinson

the world is flan

"Love's bones now glimmer where his eyes once gleamed" --Ficke

Untranslatable.

    "RADAR (Palindrome)

Sun items emit,
for a dark radar
of times met in us."

--Anthony Etherin on Twitter

charlotte's wen

Richard Wilbur: "Junk."

"A man cannot help being intelligent, but he can easily help becoming intellectual." --Jacques Barzun

"...no one was surprised."

Aelindrome: Add, O goad, mad Ogdoad.

"My old redwood Victorian was built in 1867 and lived through being a brothel, a halfway house, a Hell’s Angels den, and a witch coven. It had a ghost and a ton of history. I don’t think it was possible to childproof that house. In fact, I don’t think Vallejo will ever be child-safe. I moved my daughter out of the town before her second birthday."

(via dailykos)

books the fireman saved

(via)

        "Moon-Archery

This is a record of what has not been,
Is not, and never while time lasts can be.
It is a tale of lights down rain-gusts seen,--
Of midnight argent mad moon-archery.
Ah, life that vexes all men plagued us more!
And made us motes in winds that blew from far,--
Credulous of the whispers of a ghost,--
Fain of the light of some long-quenchèd star.
What were you that I loved you? What was I
That I perturbed you? Shapes of restless sleep!
A shadow from a cloud that hurried by,--
A ripple of great powers that stirred the deep.
And we, too supple for life's storms to break,
Writhed at a dream's touch, for a shadow's sake!"

    --Arthur Davison Ficke, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter (1922)

love in the time of cthulhu

    "ON THE FRONTIER

A Tartar horn tugs at the north wind,
Thistle Gate shines whiter than the stream.
The sky swallows the road to Kokonor.
On the Great Wall, a thousand miles of moonlight.

The dew comes down, the banners drizzle,
Cold bronze rings the watches of the night.
The nomads' armour meshes serpents' scales.
Horses neigh, Evergreen Mound's champed white.

In the still of autumn see the Pleiades.
Far out on the sands, danger in the furze.
North of their tents is surely the sky's end
Where the sound of the river streams beyond the border."

--Li He via Language Hat

Terrestrial planet discovered around Ross 128 (despite the hurricane!). At Centauri Dreams. Drew ex Machina. And in fiction. But not without a name... At first i was going to call it Omoultakos, now i am leaning toward Josaphat.

cthuhweh

Second notice.

" What if we were to interpret the obsession with safety and things like sports teams that play to a tie as a series of displacements and condensations, metonymys and metaphors, referring to a fundamentally different desire and unconscious awareness of circumstances? The world that parents and children have inherited is one of fundamental precarity and the absence of opportunity. It is a world where those that came before us on both the “left” and the right, deregulated every aspect of institutions that make social life possible, bringing about the disappearance of jobs, worker representation, the realistic possibility of retirement as a result of getting rid of pensions and replacing them with poor investment plans, and all the rest. They created a world that funneled money to the top 1% on the backs of everyone else, creating the largest wealth disparity in nearly a century. They created a world in which people are drowning in both college and credit debt, not because people or irresponsible or wish to live ridiculously lavish lifestyles, but because now, living from paycheck to paycheck, people are more or less forced into debt to make ends meet. They made a world where the planet is burning and dying in ways that might very well bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it. And they created a world where people feel powerless to do anything about it." --Larval Subjects

Arthur Davison Ficke.

infinity's offer

"The long, mysterious Exodus of Death" --Longfellow

Black origami.

effectively infinite
child molester's scripture
bound in red leather

gurgle winds down
lust on a marble plaque

ellen hopkins discovers stanzas

(WFAA-TV via Darius frasure on Fb)

A short piece on experimental fiction.

1.
Maroon Bilal, albino Roma road
As mists suspend, fog swirls, & ghosts deride.
Pauciplicate the miraculvert wusp
Rising from the mpoist glomrad.

Irk, bathe the takbir bright in reason wrong:
Clatter the dropped phone ring
I saw before as something not so real,
A reached-for rung.

A big semi
That's hanging off of a bridge
Mopar zebu lux:
Cih, Chicxulub, Ezra Pom.

2.
Sea-green sleep invasion
Starred carved -egranate
Shinar you crazy diamond

Teeth cracked from the clench

Alchemist for the nuclear age.

(Rammellzee via)

"The final straw was when she discovered that the telephone had five different taps on it."

ravenous tastemaker

Can Xue thread.

There never was rose-hologram
As rises in my mental eye,
Nor ever one received the sham:
And now the giver's on the lam
Who safely tells

With all the wasted poems once flung
That hologram will always bloom
And after this deceitful tongue
Has fizzled out, no longer young,
A rose remains

What Borges hymned, what Milton held,
What green Graywyvern might in trade
For at that time so sore a weld
Let go of, though a cat thus belled
Still jingles on.

the whole world is faunching

(pic by thea temple on fb)

Visions of darkness.

"So: Twitter. I’ve been a very active user for nine years. I have around 8K followers. I met my partner on Twitter and I’ve made many other wonderful connections there. And like all of you, I’m ever-more repulsed by the platform’s blatant fascist favoring. How I’ve got to use an enormous blockchain to make it slightly less likely frothing tiki-torchers will dominate my mentions. How Twitter conditions me to waste my time obsessively refreshing my feed and bickering with Pepes and bots. How I’ve reported and identified dozens of users blatantly violating Twitter rules by doxxing and threatening others, with nothing coming of it 99.9% of the time. I’ve been using it a lot less already - but I haven’t quite been able to give it up.

So last week I decided to do an experiment vis a vis Twitter as Nazi Trashfire: I’d try to get verified, which I had previously resisted due to privacy concerns. I sent them my employee profile page at my org at Harvard, my Slate contributor page, and my long-time personal website. I mentioned I’d been an engaged user for nine years in the extra comments box (which, you know, I’d assume they could see I’ve been a user that long).

Got an email a couple of days later: denied. Nope, Twitter won’t verify me. Just a day after they verified an Actual Nazi. Evidence is consistent with my hypothesis that Twitter is in fact a Nazi Trashfire.

My not-so-slow fade from Twitter continues. The injury it did my attention span was bad enough: catering to Nazis is the nail in the coffin.

Boy, I miss 2011, when we thought social media would make democracy better, not hand it over to Anime Twitter Nazis." --faineg on Mefi thread

Zbalermorna.

"The sun climbs higher, and still the skies are pale' --Stickney

walter chronic & the rats of HTML

"...the art of an era is inseparable from the ideas of that era." --Octavio Paz

The color of pomegranates.

"A vivid lightning-gleam in that dead sky" --Arthur Davison Ficke

An American hippie in Bastogne.

1.
    in dark poppy
shelter in the stern quotidian
in plushy hell
somewhere safe
from mind predation
belatedly
the hours unscathed
by reflection

2.
beaten down track in the mown shoulder
as much noise as friction
thinking a flag i don't know
is scarier than any flag i know

hope depends on
such slight outcome
tumbling down a roof incline
your fingernails snag a sudden rill

equivocal indian summer how many more
miles on this trail of tears how much left

orakleto

Ani on bandcamp.

the old dark frog
on a cold gray morn

after all souls' night
there are fall golds, red

slight shiver when i drive
under a livid welkin

the old dark frog made
from a barking taken up

oumuamua

(pic by momus on tumblr)

Naming the intruder.

hunter's moon
a Zagreb hum in two
hum not a zebra wig:
Vegas, each, aces gave.

mild & rabbit martyr
hunter's moon
partermitanto
little oracle

300 years you've paced the night
& I haven't slept for 6
hunter's moon
front end alignment

the rains are like a dream
sweeping all before it
snarled morning hour of traffic
hunter's moon

Operatico Politico.

gold fork hatred

blind greed & bestial stupidity
have foreclosed on America's future
if we are remembered · for anything after this
it will be how much we squandered · & for not a single reason

The rat race pictured.

partermitanto: the algorithm-driven trashing of an information-delivery system

a thin odyssey

Sandwiches used to be parabolas, now are hyperbolas.

"What you cannot measure and monitor, you cannot rule, and so the world must become orderly and legible." (via ALDaily)(gee, as if Foucault hadn't written--or Mumford...)

"A factory in Silicon Valley produces vast quantities of nihilism." --@MagicRealismBot

Perceptions.

the old dark frog

New aelindrome: Vegas, each, aces gave.

Vladislav Khodasevich: “Nights” (tr Peter Daniels)

               for Sergei Krechetov

"A thin howl from the dogs on guard.
Tonight still camped in the same place,
no-good vagabond orphans, we are
warming our hands at the bonfire.

A sullen look beneath the brows
from empty nights of far-fetched sleep.
The smoke is full of ruby floaters
whirled from flames that whistle and crack.

The waste says nothing. Silent, barbed,
a distant wind pursues the dust;
we sing with an evil dreariness
that's chafing at our curling lips...

A thin howl from the dogs on guard."

"A huge number of these videos are essentially created by bots and viewed by bots, and even commented on by bots."

the huns of spring

wood wand and a wodwo
subfusc massacre crew
working on the astro

strange days full of dogbark
little speech · downtown slow
daunting tasks blind ahead

wood wand broken book drowned
caught by a yellow light
gods look down in anger

and a wodwo leads them

(via cnn)

a wilderness of mercy

green ants dreaming
live ammo

my desert kin

poem torn or no tempo
Algol air, viral goal

viral, viral air

Promethea thread with good comments.

"I think about the courtesan in Russian literature and suggest integrating the first lady into this train of thought." --Kim Dot Dammit on livejournal

New new math.

space where a wall used to be

    Palindrome work (22112-aelindromes)

Poem torn or no tempo.

Only loa: pi-Apollyon.

Irk bat, wodwo takbir.

Irk, bathe the takbir.

On new, also, Sol, saw neon.

Algol air, viral goal.

Maroon Bilal, albino Roma.

Metal agora far, goal tame.

vampire facial

in the heyday
of the madcaps
there were big tricks

between bot romps
& a drone war
you could make haste

but not have plans
you were hemmed in
by a locked gawk

as the jokes tore
through the laid waste
land of sib riff

matcha latte

ice fog & Middle Earth
robot hangouts worn through

man who loved cat dander
by spiralling reddened

Sxwaixwe in the schmiss goaf
Middle Earth & ice fog

Music to freak your friends.

three can keep a secret if two are dead

(pic by V P Crowe on Fb)

Computer-generated metal bandnames. That's all.

Okra, Ngranek, Ragnarok.

"The parsonage lies the same in autumn sunshine."

avulsed

Duchamp's last riddle.

Gilead lichwake
hedgelord fo'c'sle

brands diminish
yield plywood doors

halcyon thesterness
glib Untergang

Abendsland Roentgen
poison dwarf pur sang

"Praising Bobby Lee as an honorable man is just sad. Like some kid insisting his deadbeat dad is actually a secret agent away on a mission."