44. the starveling funnies

Ducks quacking in our pool out back.

summer roads, summer intersections
uncertainty
sings us to sleep,
the dead grass frosted

train horn
in the melody
did i think then
i would remember
that particular dust on my borrowed shoes
as an emblem
the not knowing
so casually not wondering
what the day would bring
goaf
herald
insistence
just adjustment
kylix cyanide
lost map & allotment
march into mild honkery
let the dead bury the
kestrel-dropped question
jonesing for dark
illeist
high hat
ganch

"...his churches are awash in the bloodstains of pagan symbolism, labelling the architect an occultist and earning him the name 'the devil’s architect.' "

43. romero & juliet

Old Somtow interview.

parkour corporeal · crafts a new disease
tailcoat in ruins
pyrogeography for the risk-averse
stink of diesel blur
these poorly-made-but-not-inexpensive shoes
are falling apart
more quickly than i had anticipated
don't i know this will
only get harder, harder as the years wear on
& more threadbare still
our illusions of the status quo lasting
in search of repair
we wait hours, in search of redress wait years
long-shadowed witness
& faithful as children to their santa claus

Semi-vaporwave.

42. 6 days of the kondo

(via dualvoidanima on tumblr)

"That Haraway’s name was less routinely dropped in press releases and curatorial statements this year than last might be taken as evidence that her ideas have percolated through to the theoretical bedrock of contemporary art."

through the high sentences
there was time
uncial striation
is carnal tuition

warble of the job routine
fletcher niebelung
uncial striation
is carnal tuition

LE CRITU MORNA
i download for free
uncial striation
is carnal tuition

this is war
you are here to be destroyed

by our games gone haywire
this is war

as scourges never were
in the war god's stride

this is war
you are here

to be destroyed

"...I forgot I'd learned to recognize the sound of
my bones becoming brittle..."

41. hgoogle

Klingon podcast.

         ritual inactions
         solicit nun tiara
         tin citrus lanai
         in antisocial rut

         cranial tuition
         uncoils aria tint
         taciturn liaison
         attains runic oil

Counter-Desecration. (via)

(via)

40. frog swap

Ask me about the great Vowel Shift.

this is the light i wanted
my Prague to be
or Pluto's
surface of ice eroded
with weather we can barely imagine;
& i think of Sxwaixwe
after all these years
well something
needs to sleep at the bottom of a lake
what melancholy
is a few hours' gray then the plunge
midafternoon into darkness;
in a teahouse
with a teahouse candle my muse
i wrote in languages
that would never be living
i sent my ulcer to the other side

this coat that was old even then
huge bridges i had to trust
like the big moon of Pluto
never wavering
constant in its phased regard
your place always a given
your days before
as bright & perfect as gems

money that's already spent

"Remember how we used to title our blogs? I was Brand New Insects when some of you first knew me. I remember your titles too. I remember your distinctive color palettes and fonts. How your spaces seemed individual, like studios strewn with the fits & starts of your making. I remember your acrobatic appendages, the comment boxes dangling below. (Yes, I remember when those rotted off the body too.)"

(via katherine white on fb)

39. the power of norton

"So clack your tongue, unhallowed angelus! Start gibbering the profane vespers! Shriek back the godless antiphon! I will join in with you! For I m obscenely consecrated! I, Selda, am the immzculate bride of Hell!" --Harry Hervey, The Damned Don't Cry (1939

"But The Elements's new clothes can't hide the worsening limp and spackled complexion that plague this aging zombie of a book."

me eke
(pillar through meineke)
spend the day your way
line of telephone poles
bare trees another geometry
eighty a few days ago
freezing now · DJGG
         ouniq iyoh
desideratum
burdened with gear
in line at walmart

zarf
caltrops
foraging
in the wopwops
lozenge malachite
orotund riddlethunder
ricochets longueurs proof
of the puddlechief
if gumdrop ship
Fallujah
cafard
zuz

a deck of Kryon cards
falling out battery days
canto las terribles armas de Marte
by the dark
of the moon i planted
one hundred · thousand bombs

landscape of edges we wend bleeding

"I really don't have any problems with Martha Stewart. She handled her jail time with a great deal of grace if you ask me, she seems to love her chickens, and besides that (and most importantly) she is friends with Snoop Dogg and if I envy her for anything it's that and that alone."

(via)

38. universal sign of choking

"I don't know why poets don't open renaissance workshops and have apprentice poets knock off poems in the master's style, but perhaps that's what writing workshops do already." --William Logan, Desperate Measures (2002)

"The Russian author composed the text of about 10,000 lines in his head and memorised it using a bread rosary as a mnemonic aid."

astatootob
headache
at first light

local honey on whole wheat bread
pencil down to nub

greenish-black
names
paper towels torn in two for napkins

shadowless
errand
pseudo-rustic new coffeehouse

like a bar in a 60s TV western
but not for those who remember it

"...the book exemplifies a mood, at once swaggering, frustrated, vengeful and despairing, among men of a certain age, class and education on the Upper East Side and the West End."

(pic by krista schlyer via v p crowe on fb)

37. evidentiary support

(via)

"...through this world there was some other that was flickering for him [Khodsevich], full of infinite meaning, created by him and his contemporaries, a mirror-world of reflections, meanings, and realia connected to our world." --Nina Berberova, The Italics are Mine (1991; orig tr 1969)

"Once the Great Barrier Reef turned bone white and it became clearer that humans could not avert their fate, a new chapter opened on mainstream magazine doom mongering."

fog-louder sounds ply
his reverie of elves
he wrote the book
but it didn't stay a book
red bow blown
off the xmas freak's house

50 words for snow.

(via the-prince-of-cups on tumblr)

36. gehennessee

"Briefly, I might add that, in today’s age of questioning what it is that algorithms really want—for example, critiquing why social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and, especially, YouTube recommend what they do—we are essentially repeating the same questions Ballard asked about modern urban planning and architectural design. Do we really want these spaces being foisted on us by a design ideology—a cultural algorithm—and, much more interestingly, Ballard asked, are we psychologically prepared for them when they arrive?"

a walking rumple
leg scraped without noticing

awake before the starting
buzzer

Ground Control to Metatron

not even sure
what it was i heard

pour the coffee
before it's finished running

Portals.

(pic by geof huth on fb)

35. fogpipes

(via via steve moore in memories of dallas on facebook)

"For me it’s as if sleep is just another state of awareness, heavy with rules, demarcated by its own event horizons and transitional states."

strong black coffee & heavy new records
a few, like the short shelf of books
& you don't have to live like a refugee is just plain wrong

time to study
some past arcana
wherever you look, it's already been done

& not so much the lack
of a future at all
is the close embrace of so many lethal certainties

the dark rituals of knowledge persist
the ligatures, but not the reason for the ligatures
O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!

"Gary Numan by way of Alice Cooper and Jethro Tull."

(via via mefi)

34. the obedient atom

"I have believed in monsters, in ambition, in science, in nothing, in love, in the Beatles, and for a brief period of time, in mulching." --Stephen Tobolowsky

Pyrogeography.

superstitious
for the used quids · snowman
on the edge of the solar system
read a story of death
from the sky
murder but no myst'ry
mapleshde
same as saguaro
this pre-storm scramble
like before a super bowl

a froth of particles
in the headlights dancing
landfillhrmonic
gray killing time

you hurtle like a drunken-piloted drone
through all the depredations of the word
distant menaces here but mad absurd
& no one will believe it when they're shown

the mud-filled houses where the river rose,
the charred hulks standing in a field of soot
are pure anomalies--it snows a foot
in half an hour--never mind--we doze

& strnge new fascinations claim our time
who have no time to gether up the clues,
while those outside the narrtive must choose
what can & can't be told of their bleak thoughtcrime

what i have woven, Nightmare's sharks unweave;
& i'm denied the grace of pain alone,
as i hurtle like a drunken-piloted drone,
& even when i'm shown, i don't believe.

"You may as well face the fact Samantha, the whole burden of civilisation has fallen on us."

(via)

33. wind surgery

(virtualrealityresort via aestheticneons on tumblr)

The haunted world of Muscut.

Oberon. Que Sera, Sera.

Titania. Move Over, Darling.

Umbriel. Secret Love.

Ariel. Autumn Leaves.

Miranda. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

a grinding sound & a flash
apart by this duration

warm & muggy at Imbolc
subfusc but nothing, not now

aroma of just-cut gas
& a prompt sinus attack

a waly mask would absorb
would allow would justify

sky with only looming storm
our lack of word for this

our lack of a word for war
so invisibly constant

flashing saffron · slowly i
approach my known turning

big dog, small child, a pallid
pig of burning-rigid clay

assassin of purloinings
word row by thrifty word row

to go on coping, as if
our local sanity counts

things built for a world now lost
all but its glowing story

Tasmania is burning
& will not grow back that soon

dust of stars long storying
bringing at last abrupt calm

winking crimson-azury
parkinglot cop inaction

"The genre work retroactively renders the genre’s development historically intelligible." (pdf)

(via)

32. survive the savage moldbug

"A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler." --Thoreau

"The ice-cream gnomes, glowworms, and skunks of the early part of the book are edged out by hyenas, leeches, bats, and wasps toward the end."

Ayn Rand's book on Objectivist Epistemology
think of it as a pile of muddy stones
whiff of something dead
recalcitrant bandwidth
pilo de la hundo
window
tooth
wraith
xeric
yellow cab
ziplock baggie
ambergris insect
broken cycle harvest
catch without excessive force
bury the wrong hatchet
anything of iron
zeroeth task
yields nil thwart
xyster
wrist

"Nowhere else in the south of England houses the ghosts of history with such poise as Wiltshire."

(via)

31. ten kinds of melted sunrise

Lost Coltrane album. "Coltrane’s music during that period, possibly encouraged by the cathedral-like room, became blimpier and churchier."

dirgewrixle solastalgia
voice can no longer reach
those notes · ice
on the famous peaks

but a bike from a car
but giving up straws

tears in the sea
necessary tears

these bright overcast
now typical skies

i love you so much
i wish it could help

if i knew then
what i know now

i would of kept the Buick

"...in the imaginary city of Lojbanistan called La Xagvar, where nonconforming Lojbanists are said to congregate, it is still the customary greeting to ask, 'What base do you count in?' "

(via aestheticneons on tumblr)

30. glass eye of the tiger

"...when they did a symphony of Beethoven...it would take four 78 records, but there would be one side that would be empty, but the company didn't want to put an empty side, so they would put on maybe a Rossini overture...and for years I thought the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven ended up with The William Tell Overture." --Philip Glass, qtd in: Your Song Changed My Life

Bloscrois yotir.

come be · my Shih Tzu
you won't need · jujitsu
like a raisin in the sun
i'm Radiosonde

Colombo · is baffled
the roboDobermans · are snaffled
like a raisin in the fire
i'm Belphegor

a labyrinth
familiarized
red, black, turquoise
in alternation
trail of birdseed
not missed by the birds

a smidge of coconut
a clue
the language of Thomas & Auden
in the voice of others
saying what
has this century become
their ruins
not ours · elapsed
odes pale · tourists
in the new explanation

one million fixes later
a rubble of shadows

things i never learned the shape of

"...If a person is killed while under hypnosis, will the ghost be hypnotized?"

29.flowers of suspicion

I think i'm not writing, but i'm 18 days ahead on my blog.

Happiness is howling in the snow.

dream e-reader
one word to save
did not save

weeks so quick to go
like three days between weekends
& these little sourceless hurts
so slow to heal
are like bookmarks

Anorak tsar, he hearts
a Koran. Mists disclose
the gauze
thwarts

greenhouse in the sky

Insectageddon (twitter thread).

28. volcano in a box

(via)

I try to slow things down so i have time to write, & then i don't write.

Dark Blood.

it might be Pluto light
& whether rain or nay
a somber way the gods allot
it might be Pluto light
it might be shape-complete
or funnelcloud alert
for proof, stand by
it might be Pluto light
& whether rain or nay

Out-Cabal, the Deep State
another color · of darkness

anorak tsar · he hearts a Koran
Ragnarok · of the Out-Cabal

Horseback Mueller, in a dismal year:
it's schadenfreude all the way, from here.

         another religion
         i'm an atheist of

27. prolate spheroid shape

(via)

"Poetry advances into the unpoetic, not like a conqueror but like an ignorant man with a club." --William Logan

"Lost" Plath story.

the ocean has its storms
yet blanket else Earth lacks
wishing for sameness torques
the caster of pentagrams

alone on the open sea
constitutes sharp norms
whose teaching parallax
is its own black constancy

there is not this season
to waste in idleness
a comfort zone
there is not, this season
by folly or mad design
we put our neck in the noose
there is not this season
to waste in idleness

my mind has wandered far & it is not yet done;
my mind has done its best at home by far.
Airbrushed in three dimensions, one with the blitzkrieg mentions,
a shrieking hairbrush airbrushed in three dimensions.

dance · between · the landmines

the opacity of the air no longer intervened

26. tower of cardboard

Prayer is like the kayfabe of religion.

The death of the Red Planet’s longest-lived robotic explorer.

ever-pushed-back upgrades
or decay in denial
the art of coping
& promises turn into background noise
what valor export
can you expect from the polar vortex
lane divisions erase
past-participles erode
what zeal to destroy
can be expected
when the highest rot proclaims,
& the drones bring, fatal joys
alternative orders
around various kernels
of superstition coalesce
i swerve for a pothole
have only been swerving for years
& no path come of it
a symphony
for the most part silence

25. B0083OMB16

11 poems for Apollo 11.

Old hardback special Britain issue of Texas quarterly, on page 84 Sylvia Plath has a poem, "Witch Burning." It's 1961. She sent it to them in Texas, & they used it. Later i find that for this poem & another she was paid $35. Lunch with the editor in London. "Charming, odd man, " she writes.

four years' cold trail
not Kapteyn b
my ansible trill four years' cold trail
this quest beyond control
paraffin alibi
four years' cold trail
not Kapteyn b

black wheels without hubcaps
cerulean so pale
the things that inspire
a chore to compile
the list of a fall
this queueship so fell
we struggle to merge
before there's a sun
i sit here & write
a fragile design
the list of a fall
this queueship so fell
a half-caf to go
of misto & jam
from Senegal pours
O Holiday Boojum
the fist of a loll
this queueful so sharp
black wheels without hubcaps

Do we need gender-neutral or just nonstandard-gender-friendly parenting? Is there causation or just correlation between yang, maleness, & rapacity? What would rapacity be without dominance-drive in a hierarchy? Is there good-yang, like hot rod culture & rock? Can we end the binary of gender & still prize valor?

24. zilcrino

(fuzzyghost on tumblr)

"Bobby Fischer was an expert at solving the 15-Puzzle. He had been timed to be able to solve it within 25 seconds; Fischer demonstrated this on November 8, 1972, on The Tonight Show..."

bare cerulean boiling
through the high sentences
there was time
it could have wondered

anything to be occasioned
descending stocks and sinister angels

that is the transaction's
         white
pit step deity tone
we stay among the hills of the
         voice
moribund as a reason

23. a new collection of monsters

(via via feuilleton)

"Can we talk about how vaporwave the EyeWitness intro was."

Miranda. Samoas.

Ariel. Thin Mints.

Umbriel. Tagalongs.

Titania. Do-si-dos.

Oberon. Savannah Smiles.

22. sharkitect

(elm street in 1946 via gus wilson on traces of texas facebook group)

It appears that one of my books is in the Bridwell Library.

among the things i can't say
cerebral palsy instagram impostor

saffron sky
the silhouetted buildings
almost falling asleep at the tra-
ffic light

surely Allah is Myst'ry
we all must submit to
we all must be called to
but what is Myst'ry's prophet
if not the saffron sunrise
if not the melody
in a song i can't quite construe
the scale of
almost school bus yellow
four door pickup
at Centennial
chrome
yellow
luscious
toxic
call it Allah

21. umberto calcium

"Vaporwave resides, according to Pitchfork contributor Jonny Coleman, in ‘the uncanny genre valley’ that lies between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that ‘could’ be real."

on government shutdown
sinking in the dead sea
on government shutdown
sinking in the dead sea
the nightmare is over
it's only just begun
the nightmare is over
it's only just begun

looking for a shortcut
that he never found

20. baby shark tattoo to do too

"Spicer’s use of the word 'goop' in his poem 'They Came to the Briers and the Briers Couldn’t Find ’Em' suggests that he might have derived the term from Burgess rather than from Hitchcock..." (via The Page)

Antawe venis
al vi multaj ordonoj.

This winter sun & misplaced spring beguiles
one not quite all beset by lists to do
but bristles at the lanes closed down too long
as witchhouse plays (i keep misplacing), jam
that almost doesn't hve hardcopy form
will writing join them? all the Kondo droogs
hearing the number thirty, haul in boxes
& boxes, each book they ever owned
& what relief so easily divest
vocoder be my tongue let Crashsound ring
from dead branch cluttered sky & Wolf Moon wash
your face: the Lycanthropacy is real.

singing yesterday
twice a day

cling
dead hand
extended
fighting falsehoods
giaour on fire with pain
Hotel Insidious Hunch
i find you inscrutable
holding all the high cards
Giuoco Piano
found through playing
each hard choice
dragging
chains

"I used to love playing SimCity 2000."

(via glitchphotography on tumblr)

19. year of the pig

(via glitchphotogrphy on tumblr)

"Societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress."

    ghost velvet raghdirst
sepiaja tsiju ward
    with Chinese math rock
or squaredanced to dirgewrixle
    putanovau go
Pulgasari kompromat
    & green serape
orfevery lockdown dreams
& the sagas of Penult

"Forget self-driving cars, 3D printers and autonomous drones. Those are the pong and slinky of Generation Omega."

(via fuzzyghost on tumblr)

18. social discredit

(underground dallas by david n dallas from memories of dallas on fb)

"I've labelled them Economic Growth and War, and these are the existential bad guys in the Bold as Love story. Both of them are monsters; or have become monsters. Both of them have to go."

Voronezh
& the rocks
just a nudge

Voronezh
at the fine edge
of elegy & anthrax

Voronezh
& the rocks

shadows were lengthening on the great ice plain
Tupelo hole put
wombat April with his oobleck quarto
the oblique cartel
choc'late for breakfast & a long black portent
Tupelo minefield
out of rebus magic · ray of light crawling
when he goes home loan
& the cold garage's rolled Diogenes
self in the black glass
on an icebound plain the plan in the mirror
whittles butter pile
iodine bouquet in the song of the woofus
whose loofah's entire
repertoire becomes drunk with apocalypse
nowl · about that squeak
from next week's tall installment of storying
more an I Ching fall
the run of the age futile & beautiful
picking out vistas
a systematic failure to true debate
two dogs stalking it
tarmac upon & isotonic pontiff
carousel selfie
two dead in attic addict Shangri-La Vey
oy veh Grayviron mental floss encaustic
fallout call out cult-
Chernobyl savage Taj Mahaloholic
fiction of choice blurt
certitudinous umgang gangplank plankton
straight out of Swinburne
inborn toenail aileron Quixote team
lemming Alderaan
foldeol formaldehyde idea sink
in sync with darkness
brink of daybreak camouflage logistics prank
terrifies Twitter
on the great ice plain i 'splain a crate o' stank

Deep dreamed from a drawing i made.

17. undefined %

(pic by QuarrellaDeVil via)

"Now mercy save the peril-stricken man,
Who 'mongst his shattered canvas sits aghast
On the last sinking plank alone, and sees
the congregated monsters of the deep
For his dead messmates warring all, save one
That leers upon him with a ravenous gaze
And whets its iron tusks just at his feet..."

--The Brides' Tragedy

Neurochauvinist.

oolongphaeic horizon
regret like a fingerthin
ray of light crawling wrathful
earth's shadow drawing closer
mostly sharp drizzle here but
scalded riddles allow this
dance of tale with unbroken
dreaming · where is the exit
stench modest, strategy brash
woofusorial tugs it
tide of caustic unknowing
gray talent across deep blur
reaches · sands upon founded
interrobang blasfemur
calmly murder the sleep web
throne of balsa wood whisper
throne of Easter betrayal
self in seeming or aiming
thristflood gathered debris · dull
roar of yearning · thick parka
versus windchill of minus
surface with Niflheimlich
blank · Hamlet's hemlock blinking
nard
onslaught
pentagram
quartz questionmark
rumba borborygm
slooms through subfusc season
thousand-starry thesterness
silt of sought retrieval
ruing the wrong done
quiz requiem
ptyx Schicksal
ornate
noon
m cut up tumor
cut-out rum map
mum car output
a trump outcum
woofus in the ice mountains
following pastel sunshine

black sky perilous landscape
lanes shut down for the woofus

sunshine is sovereign good
orange cones equivocal

no rest here for the woofus
marooned in the ice mountains

"Icepunk has been described as 'Steampunk in an iceage.' "