journey to a forever-home

Nicola Verlato.

liquid catsuit
sneaky fat magnet
hammertome into
to what end?

only fricafixion
of the capybarista
two great artists arguing
over Russian verb tenses

tweets of support

Wallace Beery shirts.

   while we excruciate the Human
Centipede of electoral outcomes
   let us be kind even to the dupes
let us be kind, most of all, to the dupes
   who still believe in making scapegoats
despite generations of being taught else
   & whose idea of a good deal
never departs very far from swindle

48 laws of powder

Let it all hang out.

keldspar, Plutonian escargot
labyrinthine orichalc
catechumenate
mad with distraction
not cranch the sorrow
to make my way in the world

rotten snow

"Perhaps the lack of interest in the nature of capitalist socialist relations that many impute to the speculative realists derives from this circumvention of the Hegelian and Marxian notion of negativity."

blindly forward, faith & snow to the rescue.
whether i turn from this lane or the other,
an amalgam of second-thoughts,
a halcyon day with ev'rything to do.
keldspar, you crazy diamond,
as if there will be
survivors.
orange cones at an end
& no blocked ways.

kinephantom

(via via mefi)

Topolect.

my foothold on the world
is words
though i know they lie

setback
not downfall

chappaquidditch

"...the great abstractions come whistling hoarsely out in Miss Dietrich's stylized, weary, and monotonous whisper, among the hideous Technicolor flowers, the yellow cratered desert like Gruyère cheese, the beige faces. ...(the Surrealism of this film is really magnificent)... Alas! my poor church, so picturesque, so noble, so inhumanly pious, so intensely dramatic. I really prefer the New Statesman's view, shabby priests counting pesetas on their fingers in dingy cafes before blessing tanks." --Greene on The Garden of Allah

the three stigmata of palmer rockey

"Everything about a creature that comes out of a shell is dialectical." --Bachelard

"The movie suggests a Chick Tract as directed by a redneck Ed Wood—if that description doesn’t make you want to hit 'play,' I’m not sure what will."

Aelindromes set me to thinking. At last I came up another way to encode Pi in a poem, & this one is really devious. Taking the basic metric feet: 1. iamb, 2. trochee, 3. anapest, 4. dactyl, 5. amphibrach, 6. cretic, 7. antibaccius, & 8. bacchius, since there aren't fully ten usable, i have to convert the digits of pi into base-8 (with 8=0)--fortunately there are online computer programs that will do this for me-- 3.11037552421026430215142306305. So i think, what i need is a Latin Square to order the number of feet per line, vis. 4 1 5 2 3/ 2 3 4 5 1/ 3 5 2 1 4/ 1 2 3 4 5/ 5 4 1 3 2, which gies me: **-/*-/*-/*--//**-//--*/*-*/*-*/-*/-**//-*/*-// and so on. Throwing some words into this, i wrote:

In the wyrd of words there is no downfall
no despair
setbacks & digressions aplenty, waging limitless
peace in the noise
of blindfold choosing--here is where
perilous to the touch
the rainbow bridge of complete
uncanny the grand canyon & nearer
gapjil & erase switchback constant plan to remainv before now

I call the form a "koph" (or "qoph" if quantitative versification is used instead).

All the Pale Fire references in Blade Runner 2049.

coulroterrorism

(view from trappist-1f via)

Where things went wrong.

cold sun & melancholy thoughts
out dumpster-wards, with books in tow
the market's law
trembles contested lifeboats

what yesterday found sooth
now bound for the landfill
a saddened & belated fool
gleans empty names to conjure with

"The Wizard of Oz is an American drummer's dream of escape. ...If we regard the picture as a pantomime, it has good moments: the songs are charming, the Techynicolor no more dreadful than the illustrations to most children's books..." --Graham Greene, reviewing the movie when it came out

blades paleo, elapsed alb

(view from proxima b via)

One installment of the Nabokov-Wilson feud.

hwyl & subsidence & nothing gained.
the night's warmth fled, the dawn brings chilly dew:
commute to chosen music, wend the cones
as java's benison hardens into will.
i trust in sev'ral scattered knights at scrimmage,
onlyso i can return to my cricket-vigils,
that this pale saffron light prove all-sufficient
as i & my words alike fade out & pass.

kinephantom call it, not real time
in which one causal link begets another
& the cars zoom on like they had goals & dreams;
our probes reach distant planets, decay sets in
& eke this tapestry with moths a-flutter

el toponym

(a planet of trappist-1 via)

Dictator style.

nary a drop
gold & the iron gray sky
these swift corridors
unmeaning, unsought
unfinished
& if one of us
were to dream else & try
a black thread
from a white thread
what i tell you three times is true
widdershinto
nourish
nidor of sagas for Odin

faith & snow

(royal temple of the emerald buddha, via)

The life and crimes of Palmer Rockey.

   keldspar, void's one barnacle;
is said & the resonance hangs
   yardang of breath, half the sky
emits such manic quietude
that the dank meme pulpitbull you
      think caught reeks of loss

T S Eliot was booked to read at SMU in 1958 by Lon Tinkle. 9,000 people showed up.

apocalyphany

(via return of the pleb on fb)

The trouble with Sam Harris.

williwaw pilliwinks schist
interestingness abjure,
pilgrim. once again lane blocked
a field of noise glimmering

remembrandt trush
cockroack milk moustache
amphibology
on my organ donor card

ses purs ongles tres haut

"Why are you afraid of ghosts? Me, I meet them every hour of my life. They're what keeps the air fresh." --Lafferty

ramshackle promises

(pic by Emily Carr "Totem Walk, Sitka" via)

A polar flyover.

1. for one who would have
escaped
no trace
on the internet
what does an artist want

if not sales

2. redbud no harbingerv our concrete desert's cherry
Charon's sprig

doomed oasis

"The portent wound in corridors of shells" --Hart Crane

toils of sucrose

(via)

with forthright gasketflicker
soundly whiterhinovoid
pilliwinge vengeful
Ginnungagap-toothed

"When Leibnitz was occupied in his philosophical reasonings on his Law of Continuity, his singular sagacity enabled him to predict a discovery which afterwards was realised--he imagined the necessary existence of the polypus!" --Isaac Disraeli

Worlds of Trappist-1.

frictional unemployment

Hard Case Crime.

    1.
sinkhole seiche · beneath subfusc
our crowded skirmish · forward blindfold
in the garden of · accountability
shibboleths · in lieu of discernment

    2.
one unpronounceable street
crossing another

    3.
a coward's death · or a hero's
the terms · do not apply
in the razing of whole cities · in the killing time

    4.
on stilts made of debt
kept out of the muck
all the preachers of insight
lack insight
all the preachers of love
cheat & defile the poor

on stilts made of debt
kept out of the muck

    5.
a day slipped out of December
a lover of emptiness

the incandescent ones

one day my sinuses just opened up

("checkpoint" by f scott hess via)

The Dalecarilian Horse.

“It wasn’t really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books—an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone. And this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.” --Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2003)

alpha Corvi
angel proof
the rules of humans

customwer Kali
& the smell of asphault
& throwing words at these things

manageably arctic id

(in Detroit: pic by James Mardis on Fb)

Pulp Malzberg.

I don't even know what happened
to the station wagon
I got painted black

incognito is the only mask;
mask, the only face

kid gets down on his knees to touch
the new-laid tarmac

the drone of a human voice
into a machine

incognito is the only mask;
mask, the only face

BLACYCOLBLA

duck with umbrella

Does not translate.

Brother Swaggart, how do i
ice swan begotten of fever
green fairy reft from lost lists
strigine on leap day vertiginous
& after that no next snowfall-
'tline runs through shudder

"It turns out the small-scale farmer is no match for such incomprehensibly vast weather; most people have migrated from what farmland remains, leaving the battle to be fought by armies of enormous machines — but even these live on borrowed time..."

"Once Lower Manhattan is underwater, I'm sure we'll all look back fondly on the period when there were approximately 45 media reporters for every 1 climate reporter" --@KateAronoff

we were theologians

Rockey's Style.

signature
of glaciers
half-strangled thoughts
the kitbag rescued
in a world which saves nothing

& that nothing it saves
is pure blowback
forlorn breconian decree

that wind ruffles my hair

the pursuit of happens

Eight pictures of real exoplanets.

to catsle into desuedute'
-iful bagatelle
return of the Redeye
algolagnirithm debunk

i pit a popcorn ore tipi
funeralissimo
& Allah prima
no next snowfall begorra

no piper portico dawn

megacryometeors

(via bruce sterling on ello)

"For this defining emotion of the Democratic self-styled 'resistance' we can borrow the Slovenian word hrepenenje: an intense, quasi-nostalgic yearning for that which has not happened."

coop ripper into
spark nada, dank raps
popper icon riot
hick made skulk

Marconi's word reaches Zeta Lupi
iron potpie crop
on Serpo the cocktail hour
is long enough to watch a double feature

Death without death, which also has its adherents,
shawabty of the farther 'stans
& Grob, a grub without issue,
& the owl of Minerva is not yet mobbed by bats

An abject lie. (via silliman)

What's my favorite neologism? After considerable reflection, i say: Paul Celan's "threadsuns" (Fadensonnen)--because it names something that needed naming (what you see when you look at a light with teary eyes), it symbolizes his post-Holocaust life (& titled one of his books), & both the English translation & the original German sound neat. Is it translated otherwise? As "twinesuns" & "fathomsuns" (because the word is also used for the nautical measure that was based on a length of rope; you can think of a shadow meaning of "suns seen through a depth of water" also)...

the things they carried fall apart

Napoleon's English lessons.

a vlachwind blows
amidst the piteous, sparkly, penitential throng

Milkshake duck.

They pass for humans until they mock a school shooting survivor, then they out themselves as slime monsters in human form.

hegel & peroxydase

(via retro rockets on fb)

"Unlike science fiction, which forces us to suspend our disbelief in order to imagine the (as of yet) impossible, philo-fiction allows us to suspend our belief in the sufficiency of philosophy to legitimize itself or its claims on the nature of reality."

gasketflicker
for the spirits to pass
iron poet prop
skulk amid heck
no piper portico

igneous proprioception

Owned by Sinclair.

Glad decay of Jalg
Otiose the spur constant
Like a crescent never full pale orb
During all
Eclipse sale of the decade
Now a daze
Retailed by the spore
Only standing for one's erasure
Dllas, all sad, sure
Are your many entrapments
Dark epiphany & carnival
Oval air
Renews. This
Night does not contain us yet
Even under a
Dog star of piteous sparkle-watt
Look! we have
Orchards to play in
Groaning with the weight of turbulence

In Flanders Fields.

(via alan gardner from retro rockets in fb)

oud cutlass

(pic by kim dot dammit)

Azam Ali singing "Inama Nushif" (in Fremen) for the Children of Dune soundtrack.

green flash
that i have never seen
smell of a field of wheat
at dusk

that i have never seen
this is what i would
at dusk
clasp

this is what i would
green flash
clasp
smell of a field of wheat

Mueller, style icon. (via @Shteyngart)

oasis in the flame

All together, now.(via silliman on fb)

Velleity protean, yet undying gleam:
among the thwarted clowns a nascent jest
& on these stones like jackals we make feast,
3 kinds of ghost, en route to Bethlehem
morning root of cyanide
green ice gears in the city of Dis
of this my voice the fall of ivory dice

Angels again in America.

"You cannot dim a harvest of stars." --Violette Leduc

lagomorph olibanum

"It has often been noticed that, though indifferent about the external appearance of their villas, they took the greatest care to secure fine prospects from the windows. But the abstract term for nature was wanting."

years fantastical
enemy of my enemy
Breconian hentthwart
they say is furthersome

(if furthersome is to be broken)
i don't know why it matters
that we absolve time
our game is diametric

it is raindrops falling up

Kidjo remains in the light. (via feuilleton)

(via the archaeologist anarchist on fb)

utopia, myopia

Litost.

a fair field full of ragweed
my quartz sphinx loved by jackdaws
Roko for aura of koro,
tainopia regained.

In the shadow of a saint.

"Word of the day: 'keld' - a deep, still part of a river, such as has a 'smoothness while the rest of the water is ruffled' (Brockett, 1825)." --@RobGMacfarlane via @JoyceCarolOates

jefferson davis eyes

(via)

Weng Weng. (thanx Jayson!)

a moment of steepening darkness
a bouquet of harm
pothole never fixed
so let's give it a name
shiny black car in the sunlight
briar cove
where the dead men lost their bones

3 gray blobs encircle me
as the apparatus of rust
nods to the apparatus of invisibility
SOZYPLINI call
from a nonworking number
which might well be the dead

the darkness,
growing steeper

David's Town.

pied piper red

(via)

Theda Batra Cleopatra.

shards on the
slope
dope fiend's moon
remember i was paper

barrier wall of meeting

Planet Tadmor, then & now.

hand-lettered cardboard sign

Exploded steam locomotives.

the nights become shorter
from here
as records shatter
the nights become shorter
the eye a bad shutter
in this drive of Ben Hur
the nights become shorter
from here

Stockpiling guns as a symptom.

(pic by francesca borri)