a game rout

Wizard in the tattered robe,
a storm-bedraggled grumpy rook,
vends acerb charade
even in triumph askew.
Halcyon skies belie the plague
that melts such truths as king & stone
& riddlesome glad stilb
till Ygg fetch fiercer sacrifice.

Ouija & the Bradbury Building. (via feuilleton)

bullwinkle's mythology

(susan kelly caldwell on fb)

The anti-trans movement. (via trace peterson on fb)

the hundredth turnkey, black ferry to Innsmouth
the wars we'd fight and never lose
hydroplaning lakes on skis of mammoth
the breaking of the blues
hyggelig beluga-egg & pilgrim grise

what if after so much water
water itself doesn't survive

     "...the ablative absolute
of power, as the boulders of Pattyquonck
pile bracken thirsty for the drink
that they are not in the field of the world, unmet."

--John Peck

petomanichaeanism

"All that you see will soon perish; those who witness this perishing will soon perish themselves." --Marcus Aurelius

In Ghouta.

all the hungry ghosts
outside this storage unit
& among them mine

a gease called world-devouring--
the cars lined up in the rain

Lafferty as a Catholic novelist.

flowers of evil for algernon

Fake sparkle.

arsenic or coin sear
to get the right cancer

to stand at Chicxulub
the only moksha lab

"The poem supposedly, for all its enormous length, recounts the succession of thoughts passing through the mind of an English Catholic at Mass during the course of roughly seven seconds." (via aldaily)

"...in my opinion Dylan Thomas's voice was a bright green." --The Secondary Colors

tricorne gambol

Diogenes Laertius online. (I was asked if we had a biography of Thales.)

the false lookout
young bodies, old buildings
the winterdead embankment

tased a toss
Sotades at

     "obnubilated
inserted in the nonsense cosmos..."

--In the Moremarrow

Unfinished business.

war & the fortunes of war
stalk our classrooms
the gun makers win
my path my path my path

another week, another gun massacre
it's lemmingrush
with cheerleaders screaming
at the top of their lungs

How to read a war carpet. (via)

krakatoan

List of fictional rodents.

only real things
but their
real things

solar antapex
evidence that deserves
a varmint

periherm
perihermeneutics
i go to you masked

the guest-eructed nesselrode

AI in the real world. (via @josh_sokol via @LeeBillings)

"Irony is electing a landlord who then drives down your entire country's real estate value." --@JohnFogelsang via @JoyceCarolOates

"Before the internet, binge-watching television (“Netflix and chill”) or staring at a screen for hours a day was a sign you’d given up on yourself and the world around you..."

A rare book by Edgar Saltus came into the store. I was agog. America, of course, has hastened to obliviate all its writers--except two or three, as if to prove that we can have them--, but this one represented practically the sole slender foothold of Continental 1890s Decadence in America at the time (& until Clark Ashton Smith--), & remains an amusing stylist (mostly) worth reading, still. (His novels are weaker than his histories or philosophical works, though the nonfictional part of his works are, let us say, slightly untrustworthy. Van Vechten appreciated him, & Cather scolded him. His second wife, an author also, apparently made a Theosophist of this erstwhile notorious cynic & atheistical writer. It's a twist that would have made a good Saltus story, I think. But if he had written it, somebody would have been murdered, and the murderer left unprosecuted.

chromet via majorleagueinfidel via bedouin-puunk on tumblr

gudetama tangram

(via feuilleton; about)

and there's no place left to climb
with the ape prospect ebbing
spiralling triage
in the ultimate castle

woodsmoke on a foggy night

"The Kosovo war really marked the beginning of our activism, and that’s when the Great Change started to occur. Formerly “antiwar” types were suddenly all in for the Clintons’ war. It was a 'liberation struggle' – one that produced what is today a gangster state, run by the Albanian Mafia. They don’t call it the heroin capital of Europe for nothing."

"Byzance is rumoured to have been the sewer of every sin, yet such was its beauty that it is the canker of our heart we could not have lived there." --Edgar Saltus

Knullrufs

(pic by robert bilbray on facebook)

guitar top dusted with ash of forests
feral morning breath
lost jetty
the sun barely there
in its wrapping of clouds
doubt clustering thickly 'neath the eaves

For & against vinyl.

"If the scrotum is a house, does that make the penis a chimney." --Bill Knott

as if total night:
burns whatever comes to hand,
this idiot age

a real from a false answer
unable to distinguish

The Man Who Ended History. (pdf download) --Mentions Gliese 581.

(pic by kim dot dammit on livejournal)

xibalba cumlin

Underestimating the collapse.

will their dead clouds
ache
as dawn collides
will their dead clouds
a diamond called Labyrinth scolds
orts of this ilk
will their dead clouds
ache

"that gift with blond haft and thick fixed blade..." --Peck

Art factory.

turquoise grove · soft harpsichord
rueful invention · quizzical jeremiad
purple koolaid · orangutan limberger
necessary mist · mossy nozzle
loose orange · kapok poleaxe
jussive quotidian · irreal ruse
hootenanny sampo · gorilla teetotaller
fungible undertow · ebullient vamoose
dying wharf · carouse xeric
blarney yowl · atonal zeugma
zipgun apgar · yarrow blister
xenodochium chorale · witch duster
viral ectoplasm · uffish foamcore

A Saltus sonnet.

"He drank quickly. The wine was ancient and heady. It lifted up his skull so the moon, which now was sailing closer over the groves, could see in at his brain." --Tanith Lee, Faces Under Water (1998)

(chambers's own illustration, via)

circlusion

(pic by max nuclear on facebook)

the apes of reason
pushing buttons at random
certain of their goal--

& icebergs melt underneath
like butter in a hot pan

Embassy of the Free Mind.

stalagitite, long stillicide;
on the threshold trip

storying
in pain-roughened voices that falter

all our eyes
waiting for the building to collapse

somewhere there’s a clown
in accidental tumble

the rainbow, O Graywyvern,
carves a waterfall

Norah Jones's cover of "Down by the River" with Neil Young on guitar.

morricone ring tone

Who let the dogs out?

voices
and these marble
will their dead clouds
ache
there
the heaven bottle
metals
beside the sweet waterproof grass

"Every pastoral seals an epochal white-knuckler>" --John Peck, I Came, I Saw (2012)

Wistful Gwyneth update, with some sharp insights into Genji.

acerb zephyr · bzura yoin
calyx xylophone · dweomercraeft wood
eelgrass verdure · foster umbrage
guitar tango · hsigo sighting
indigo road · just quisling
kigo pungent · loom's oolong
Mnizuris nebulous

"That's not the sound they wanted to hear."

"What kind of world was it where evil and humiliation prevailed, yet a sun could be made to rise from a bowl of water?" --Faces Under Water

milk that expires today

(via @CrookedCosmos)

"My feeling is that the string section really wasn’t for me to feel sad about the sheriff, but rather it was for the investors..."

there goes Mozart
among the corpses

calico smile
indium grill

manananggal

Almost perfect.

shadowsocks

(sahara snow by zinnedine hashas via)

Name of a river.

all things partake of loss
shadowed by a word
this dark Iditarod
unworks its curse

old February grief
& still unsettled scores
melt away frontiers
in sunset goaf

holy words
in the rays of a dying light

"Zombie" live.

that crash has cleared

"Lykophron's Kassandra calls the ship [Argo] a magpie chatterer, but in Apollonios' poem the wood speaks only twice: at the outset and after Apsyrtos' murder." --Jack Lindsay, The Clashing Rocks (1965)

Dark eyes. (via languagehat)

seeking the deadly heart of god
many lives, many monsters, upsilambda
lost in the carbon bargain

dusty cardboard boxes of books
i meant to keep
hardly are keeping

light that never wasn't
by the new moon plan

Melymbrosia.

dimelabile gloves

(pic by dino buzzati via @HarrySKeeler)

The new Gary Numan album cover looks very...bedouinpunk. But that's already a thing, isn't it?

healed to pieces
otro lado medoc

grub-laughed
bricoleur

LI FE'A NI'U XACI
clown holdout festival

dig mill ruin

Copper Plated Integrated Circuit.

Identity is an arrow but it is not the trail.

DJ algae biofuel

kylixzyxt?
eyelidxysterhood
six more weeks
groundbolc
mute throatbuzzer's poet

no one at the other end
arsonist-in-chief
in the sleepless hours pecking
missives on a smart phone
red plush dragon

that boastful trickster
behind
this or that leering mask
lurid liming
indium grill

"...one memorable afternoon, while walking on Box Hill, he told me the whole story of One of Our Conquerors, which he had then hardly begun to write, and, as I listened to his wonderful voice telling of the tragic history of Nathalie and the dawning wonder of Nesta, I thought it must surely prove to be the greatest novel in the world; but though there are many powerful scenes and sayings in the book, I confess that when the novel was published I was disappointed: it seemed as if the 'gleam,' 'the light that never was on land or sea,' had departed from it, obscured by the whirl of words." --Lady Butcher, Memories of George Meredith O. M. (1919)

no country for young men

(James Siena: Untitled Yellow-Black via)

Weaver Adams (with a mention of Durkin).

in cancerland, where i may not run,
dreamquicksand floors, & here is gallumphing pain;
i only see the ones that got away.
what could i tell them else? pain is a drill,
a teacher though unwelcome? rhetoric meets
reality in the span of sixteen fingers
where i may not run, in cancerland.

Lake Toba supervolcano.

da akhirat wradz

A bout of hiccups; a bout of aphorisms.

"Citizen score"-keeping by algorithm.

showed me my story in a book
things loom & vanish
would probably suffice
this room lit by clown-lung
Loki storm, ort's kilo

Nice bit on Khodasevich here.

            "tonight once more
I find a single prayer and it is not for men"

--Merwin

What is the Rumi Tarot?

grimoire of the green cow

(al aqsa mosque, via)

Q ship · lacrimae
maniac mountain cedar
assembly language eclipsed
& eclipsed again
light dims, goes back to
as before
i rebutton my vest buttoned wrong

Oliverio Girondo.

"Superstitions are not always dark and cruel; often they add to the gaiety of life." --Bertrand Russell

Cached Moment Glints Mown

("Marion Davies by Elmer Fryer, 1920s": via In Search of Pagan Hollywood on Fb)

"Wreckage is romantic. But a politics of ruin is doomed."

The blue of this sky is not a koan.

Ponjo lojbo citno girzu 2. (via) --And: number 1

A new house has inexplicable sounds like an old house, but different ones.

The art of language invention on YouTube.

Two barely distinguishable but not quite matching socks: an affront to the idea of order. As if all such attempted pairings were equally misguided.

Clowncast discusses the 8 Commandments.

the sharks talk only to the jets
& the jets talk only to god
try talking to your despair instead
& twitterbots

the writing life, with
nothing written down
wings made of paraffin
to penetrate the drouth

the poem for which rilke waited
& missed his daughter's wedding for
is now a shark in decay,
jet by gremlins boarded

√-63

(via @HarrySKeeler)

madmidmost
song of the woofus
blue blood mooncalf
hop on Carrot-
top

thief of maggots
ujzd kavka
the smart car taking me

where i am most likely to go

14 wolves.

To our tribunal the forests, we have as yet prepared no defense. We wanted to hold on to our words?

bumbled onerous loop

Still no songs about global warming. Is it trouble finding rhymes?

What's Cindy Sheehan up to? (We just got in a signed copy of her book.)

sandalwood,
a beacon.
not a rathe malediction
in the springtime of your ferch

where the stars grow dim
Aklo & imbedcile god

"A detective novel in which the killer is revealed to be a city." --@MagicRealismBot

feral tarot

What? did they fear those tiny beginnings of our now-glorious swamps & fantastic incandescent deserts?

Malignant loneliness.

Too often it's the dummy that answers.

Golgonooza News. Hail the depth of the skin. "Making things more obscure is Eldridge's modus operandi, whether intentional or not" Good selection of images. And still more.

"For words are not thoughts we have but ideas in things, and the poet must attend not to what he means to say but to what what he says means." --The HD Book

Timelapse stained glass.

clodmotes gather
inter-urbana Aklo chase
ash cloak spiral
spools
clodmote
clodmote gather

"Around all our sentences lie the deforested lands, the denuded and poisoned oceans, the lost soil, the vast herds of creatures living and dying invisibly in dark sheds."

la caos reptante

(Miro: "The Red Sun Gnaws at the Spider" via @artist_miro via @HarrySKeeler)

anchorage in plummeting
instead of what i would be building

winter trees
whisper-ornamented at sunrise

Video beast.

Maybe i only dreamed i had a car. Maybe i only dreamed there was a place i came from. Maybe this parking lot is forever.

Work in progress. (via Ligotti Online)

the jihad ate my kimchee

(via @archillect)

swansecrets
huge eyes glowing
trilobite crystal seeing
even of eBay
i interrogate
the two-headed snarling angel
risen from the past
with its bronze wing of meaning

The author of the acacia seeds...

It is easier for me to imagine i have done something, than to remember to do it.

hideous likeness

From the circlejerk to the circular firing squad, is but a step.

In the box.

Blind eyes straining to tell the future
far velvets, lost itineraries

crossed contrails
directly beneath the sun

dimmer the names
& just how they figured

in the plot

"I read an interview with a Chinese asylum seeker to Australia who was present at the Tiananmen Square massacre. He ran home and told his family what had happened, what he'd seen with his own eyes. They believed the TV news instead." --@nicolapedia via @KameronHurley

" It is great that words find me, that they flutter down onto my shoulders and hands like I’m a Disney princess."

We know we'd rather die of poison than share the world with bugs. But we want our poisons to smell pretty, too.

irradiated city

(via)

Did you hear the latest meme?--our talk begins. Hoping there's someone more poorly-connected, to impart it to.

Glitch textiles.

My labyrinthine term.

"The real event took place outside the occupied rooms, in the psyches of the artists and the staff, in the fear that their fetishized art objects were being damaged. To produce this effect was our intention, to spread – if only for a minute – anxiety and discomfort in the minds of the self-reassured personnel of the art world-machine."

"A powerful delusion/ and a plague upon the Earth." --Brandi Carlile

"What do you call a word that no longer means what it once meant? Probably there is a word for that, too. But what do you call the mechanism by which you see if a word no longer retains its original meaning? I think we should call this the Scantron Test."

The Nautilus probably wants to be understood by somebody, also.

the secret life of pints

(warsaw via)

"When one is overwhelmed by sorrow, that sorrow cannot produce a haiku." --Otsuji, qtd in: Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku

"Homer offered five hundred dollars to any surgeon who could crawl into the passage and cut his brother’s leg off."

Without affordances, one must either join the landscape, or quote it.

"In retrospect, it appears that Nick Joaquín was one of the best short story writers of the 20th Century. And yet despite his having written in English, he is hardly known by anyone who is not Filipino."

At the center of every strongly-held belief is a thoughtcrime, deeply buried, like a sacrificial victim secreted in the foundations of a castle.

"...so long as we fail to comprehend the inhumanity of the human, this rational-revisionary process, we fail to understand the human, and so have little hope of solving problems pertaining to the human."