75. emoji-ma

It is only out of a surplus of serenity that we can accomplish anything drastic.

Ask Hal.

plastic at the bottom of the sea
in the smoking ruins
crepe myrtle in bloom

a ramekin of struggle-thwart
the dumpster in the parking lot
i toss a lemon-scented bag upon

we ought to read these warning signs
the air turned to green
the mocking of one handicapped

& wakened by sirens
an hour before the wakeup call
the trees downstairs are thrashing

we log on to see
the front on radar moving through
& broken things tweeted

Geocities-ized Luau Melt Hit.

74. transient anus

Pursued by dead closures, the shadow of an impossible perfection. This is not the way to end desire.

"After a Senate staffer read for three hours, they brought in five computers to read the bill simultaneously at a speed far faster than humans can understand."

dislustered halogen bulb
dimness that pursues
& folly as before
on the brown & gray carpet

dislustered ptarmigan
car the only car on the road
to be old
& afraid

cartouche

"Starting from Lau’s thesis that the Daodejing (DDJ) is an anthology of writings of diverse origin, together with the common hypothesis that the DDJ consists of a relatively more mystical layer and a relatively more political layer, in this article I divide DDJ into two parts, roughly equal in length, which I call the Daojing 道 經 (the mystical and metaphysical part) and the Shengjing 聖 經 (the part speaking of strategy and state service)."

(via gordon hilgers on fb)

73. making friends with a haunted bridge

"...They move beneath deep arches back through time,
Recalling ecstasy in foxglove dells,
Homecoming cattle, or the silver chime,
Colder than salt-spring, of Bavarian bells."

--Charles Spear (1951)

"If London is a metropolis of pigeons, Tokyo is a megalopolis of crows."

at Tsvetaeva's grave
after the sun has gone
a surly groove
at Tsvetaeva's grave
the empty years grieve
replete with bad gain
at Tsvetaeva's grave
after the sun has gone

in the blue hour
shakin' hands with Charles de Gaulle
unless you see you don't
some of these February days
should end up in August
windy passage over sidewalk & mud
echoes of the blue hour
when nothing of the coming night could yet be known

"Fusha is for parroting the official line; Darja is for telling it like it is."

72. cardboard affinity

(santa barbara lightning by mike eliason via michelle rhea on fb)

"All a changing of masks and beards,
a Volapük, a Guarani, and a sharp
Charabia that nobody could understand."

--Montale

"For the banjo to carry so many stories within it, charged with painful legacies and conflicting identities, makes it a potentially powerful medium for new music that creatively bends the associations with it."

the part not written
the part not written down

"...it’s the odd habit we have of locking away dying people in institutions, I think, that gives the meat robots what plausibility they have."

71. unimpeachable credentials

"No wise man will want to bring more long words into the world." --G K Chesterton

"If the lander set down in the equatorial region, the dominant feature of the landscape might be gargantuan spires and bladed ridges made of methane ice. Rising as tall as skyscrapers, these could be the product of the seasonal sublimation of Pluto’s icy surface as it gets closer to the sun."

nepenthecost
dead too far gone
rooted in cobweb-sepia
a wall that tears the skin to touch
steer t'ward the sidewalk spraypaint
for passage safe
the things that would be loved by us
are not the things we love

in the growing cold
armloads of bad promisesv toss

iceberg Lafferty
still to read
& maybe not even then

comprehend
in the crooked polyverse
if it still matters

iceberg lettuce

cryptic natural object
resembling a made thing
here because
here is where i'm finding it

whole branches of knowledge
turning into smoke

"...the church of my stroll
Has the form of an owl."

70. dictionary of survival sex

(via)

"Cloud-shadows of seasons revisit the earth,
odourless myrrh borne by the wandering kings."

--Geoffrey Hill

" No one really believes these alien planets you invented are actually there; to be honest, no one really believes this bus station you drew so painstakingly from life is actually there."

TOLKRI RODA
Inspector Pyrrho
Ice Station Buddha

TOLKRI RODA
eucalyptus panda
dum spiro, spero

TOLKRI RODA
Inspector Pyrrho

car exhaust white
where it hits the sun
at a light on Campbell

smell of leather gloves
blends with the smell of hot asphault
scratch my nose downtown Richardson

the dentist scene in Tlooth
if the sun's rays are a koan

smell of truck exhaust
cut with the rain

he has laid out the cards
seen what can be done

not with another draw

As Silverberg comments in his introduction to 'Dancers in the Time-Flux' (1983), a story set in the same universe as Son of Man, his goal was 'to reproduce in prose form some of the visionary aspects of life in that heady era [the 1960s] and pass off the result as a portrait of the far, far future.' "

69. supernumerary conscience

"don't mistake/ salt for sugar" --Rupi Kaur

"I commissioned an oil painting of Barbra Streisand's dogs."

along the tundra trails
for three days of night
crawl it is your fate
moon & moon & moon smiles

ice around & ice within
ice to tell the story
after Whelk has spent its scurry
the tale remains alone

to be gathered up
stored · in outer black
it is a work of luck
it is the work of hap

"We misunderstood who the Americans were."

68. strayed Nestorian

"when i did my undergrad in Ecology in 2000, we were told that Garrett Hardin was the racist uncle of our discipline, that we would have to spend our careers disavowing him; that feminism solves the "population bomb" problem,

and that we would spend the rest of our lives explaining that the "tragedy of the commons" was actually that the native farmers were thrown off their land by speculators, only to become footsoldiers for colonizing Ireland and North America, and throwing Amerindians off their land in turn"

ouniq, hiraeth, Upharshin
whelk at the vintage Royal

diverge (the parting of the hair)
up to 19-- one way;
after, another way

music from all times
till i don't know the year

an animation of water
for as long as the water runs

ashes carried to the stars · the air
altogether ice

"It is crammed with illustrations and marginalia on all manner of arcana, including pet rocks, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Borges’s 'Library of Babel,' The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Humpty Dumpty, unicorns and the pink fairy armadillo."

67. H to He Doublehockeysticks

The Quality without a Name.

Sovbe' jatlhwI
Glenneaglegram
fossil monkey nebula

the woofus reconsidered
whether to use unknown languages
in a missive to the earthlings

colossal desert snail
chrome amethyst trail
view from a height atop

the Turbo-Whelk on Pluto
a Pluto tulpa
never to be written?

nor can the woofus help
night's Plutonian jairce
manifest on the astro

Qapla'
all you pumped-up kicks

"If Time smelled like the Nat’l Geo. there would be some excuse for it being printed."

66. supernumerary conscience

The swiftness of glaciers.

tumbling in flight
yet ever onward
the last monarch rides

through gray skies & blue
over field & forest
the last monarch rides

in orange & black
it cannot see
the last monarch rides

the world's ruin glides
my horse of dreams stumbles
the last monarch rides

a veil across these city streets
that link the treated & the treats
i want to use my lights but don't
as i collate bizarre defeats

or i conflate disjunct sound bites
to feed chaotic appetites
--to be erased by those who watch
as Thug, the moving cursor, writes

fuel it should be for kindness, grace,
& love of the drama taking place
bu i cannot but long for more
than motorcycle bugs-on-face

i am a monarch, last of those
whose sky trail spanned the sunset rose
& made a legend out of wings
--only to reap the end we chose

i am a monarch, exiled far;
i am a king, forgotten deep;
i wield doors of Pellucidar;
i swing the eye that cannot sleep

traveller of wars
harbinger of worse
the last monarch rides

Products that don't actually exist.

65. uncool loins

"I also had already given langpo a starting date, the appearance of Robert Grenier’s essay 'On Speech' in the inaugural issue of This in 1971."

pyramaskberg
la libellule
old textbook
you are forgiven

algebricolage
dinged
floor never cleaned
calcspar starless

misty
in this clearing

"What I don’t tell them—or what I sometimes tell them, but nobody can hear until it’s happened to them—is that even if you get a book published with a good publisher, and it does okay, you will still experience it as a terrible wound to your ego in most cases. Some people completely crack up, even though their book seemed to do fine. That’s because, somehow, you think that people will be changed by your book. You think your life will be changed, and the world will, too. There will be at least some ripple in the pool. But your book was just another book, and that is very hard to take."

64. the five love languages of locusts

"In the eighties I helped organize a translation conference in New Orleans, for which Merwin was our major speaker. He and Paula were still unmarried, but I remember well how in love they seemed to be. I was a graduate student, 7 months pregnant, and went with my major professor to pick Merwin up. We took him to a lovely New Orleans restaurant. I was so excited: here was my favorite poet in the world and I was getting to show him around my birth city! That evening we went to check him in at a hotel on St. Charles. It turned out Clint Eastwood was staying there with his entourage, filming, I think, Tightrope. He had overstayed and now had the room Merwin was supposed to have. Our major speaker for the conference had no room. I saw Eastwood in the bar and went to talk to him, stupidly thinking he might be able to have two of his people double up so Merwin could have his room. After a probably too long appeal to him, he looked down at me and said, 'Who is W.S. Merwin?' Appalled, I explained who he was, at which point Eastwood said 'Get the f*** out of my face.' I went back to the lobby where the conference organizers were trying to obtain a room at another hotel for Merwin, who was sitting on a sofa with Paula looking all zen. He said I seemed sad, and asked me what was the matter. I explained the conversation with Eastwood, and when I had finished, he looked at me with quiet amazement and said, 'Who is Clint Eastwood?' " --Sheryl St Germain on Fb

Bad news about Baxter.

icebergmasked scirocco
carry to this room
crackle in the wires

ev'ry other car has
smoke of how to handle
is all we see

dead branches spied
through tinted glass
on a carpet stairwell

pyramid innermost room

"Though it was explicitly fiction and Oliver claimed he channeled the book from an entity named Phylos, the novel laid the groundwork for many of the legends still surrounding Mount Shasta."

63. to kill a mocking jay

"Be minimum, then, to swim the hiving swarm" --Hart Crane

Queen Peggy.

natural beauties
of a former slave state
pink inkpen
on a gray day writing

what might be detected
seconds in advance
hanging man in the background
of the music video

"The crux of Sheffer’s argument is that autism and Nazism were inverse states. To be ‘cured’ at the clinic was to be brought into Gemüt-ful tribalism."

62. basilisk memoir

"A schoolmaster searches for chocolate inside a crystal opera house." --@MagicRealimBot

"You can’t drive to The Lightning Field on your own, the desert terrain is rough, there are no markers, and it’s not on any maps."

IED, Light was.Nightlong:
edgelowered beigehome
purpose as never in studying
in killing
these lockdowns commemorate

meanwhile strangers topple
at behest of our drones

"George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, 1984, saw a 9,500 percent increase in sales in the month following President Trump’s inauguration."

61. nightmare bee

"The issue of Contemporary Annals, with the first chapters of Nabokov's The Defence, came out in 1929. I sat down to read these chapters, and read them twice. A tremendous, mature, sophisticated modern writer was before me; a great Russian writer, like a phoenix, was born from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile. Our existence from now on acquired a meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved." --NIna Berberova

Bacon's studio preserved.

the sort of folkish-looking black & white &
green Hobbit cover
as the temp'rature just keeps sinking, sinking
& ev'ry record
once was the fav'rite record of somebody
el fin del mundo
registers ev'ry vista with its time stamp
penguins frolicking
Ozymandias in the crisp stratosphere
chipping ice off the
windshields till my fingers grow numb & i put
my gloves on then · i
don't know i've never "kippled" · but if you hum a
few squiggles i can try
not just dancing about architecture but
dancing to describe
buildings & describing them no other way

it's a dangerous place but i know my way

"I think the arts deal with this better than philosophy, because the arts are fully aware that they are not primarily a form of knowledge. Neither is philosophy, yet many philosophers have convinced themselves otherwise."

60. in the company of emojis

"...Endure/ vigil's identity with entrapment." --Geoffrey Hill

Even more Sharbat (thread).

" 'By having'...!"
MI-A-MI

part of the clasp broken
don't know when

sound of gulls
like nothing else on earth

Kindness is the only gift; if you don't give it to your kids you give them nothing. Every act of joining expresses the desire to be thought worthy of kindness. The rolls of the aspiring fill, yet the earth is a howling wilderness without that simple thing--rarer than diamonds, though rather more easily produced.

the glow of the new water dispenser
the very hungry president

hungry, very hungry
hungrier than anyone

we are lined up on the bank
of a river with teeth

Ishmael Reed on Hamilton. (via feuilleton)

59. tales of white fragility

Bobcat-a-Go-Go thread with sufficient snark.

         another day
         another day has come
         & the death star
         still dominates the sky

the mirror of the ghazal
breaks the blur of the ghazal

care finds a cure in the small
disaster of the ghazal

having lost my tiny way
in the fur of the ghazal

this winter for now forsworn
will recur, like the ghazal

Graywyvern like a verjuice
isomer of the ghazal

secernment of something like a way

Snow.

58. 10 reasons the earth is not flat

(via via miekal and on fb)

"She was stabbed through and through with beauty sweet as honey and sharp as a sword, and it was as if her heart must break in her at its turning. After this brief intensity of joy or pain, whichever it was, it was as if something in her actually did break, scattering loose a drift of pent-up words. That was how poems came. After the anguished joy, the breaking loose of the words, then the careful stringing of them together on a chain, the fastidious, conscious arranging, then the setting them down, and reading them over, and the happy, dizzy (however erroneous) belief that they were good....That was how poems came, and that was life at its sharpest, its highest intensity. afterwards, one sent them to papers, and it was pleasant and gratifying if other people saw them and liked them too. But all that wad a side issue." --Rose Macaulay, Told By an Idiot (1923)

Blood and rockets.

Serpo can tan corpse
draze of ghost vorpal

wreath of wet feathers
sovran misfix box

i remove soothsay
sunrise catpads in

the gray Bardo onus
ours unless vestige

one unlit riddle
so vamoose rude boy

of riprap shattered
made & odes frozen

gauze wings let carry

Verifiable Nightmares.

57. shipping container blues

(by larry lundy via tom hendricks on fb)

Punisher style. (via mefi)

cactus is our bed
the addled suds led death
their rasps abide
cactus is our bed
a thousand merles on board
t'ward leagues of antic dearth
cactus is our bed
the addled suds led death

"Copland says that Spear spent his last days in hospital ‘translating favourite English poems into Latin’."

56. a cloth intent

(via)

"Such is the delight of mental superiority that none on whom nature or study have conferred it would purchase the gifts of fortune by its loss." --Samuel Johnson, qtd in: Webster's New World Best Book of Aphorisms

" 'You can’t trust everything Twombly says,' wrote Edmund White in an essay quoted by Rivkin. 'When I asked him what his parents did, he said they were Sicilian ceramicists, and that they sold their pots in Ogunquit, Maine.' "

black dog
follows each step
eats up all that i make
i ask is this one good enough
guess not

whose we're seeking delicate final trace wrack
on the ghost race track
dirgewrixle serves it up the pushing tin-sore,
only alt-centaur
apotropaic-against-the-stork copper
ring & cork stopper
toast of most intricate, Don Pardo barley,
rude Bardo parley

strange machinery stuck in an open field
in the bright sunlight
in addition to my regular tsourris
new stupid trouble
such as only seems to befall those
with poor choosing skills
to get away for a little while only
from all that i know
blue light pulsing faintly behind the green screen
three rabbits leaping
along the twilight lawn as we leave the car
i see two of them

"She and Anthony had attended the funeral of the poet Geoffrey Hill in Cambridge and were shocked that Anthony seemed to be the only poet present."

55. L. A. snowman

Ŝot edet 7.

to name this password
even as it melts into glittery
phosphenes · too too solid
because of the sand which is there

devilishly difficult
windfall
at the tip of the isthmus
a volley

cascade of small sounds
underlines · the solıtude
in which a description
is absorbed
bats at hunt
above the frozen · plain

pearl
quagga
Riesling pour
semiotic
tiny patina
under new merriment
vexillolatry Rogained
Uqbar borborygmic
vitreous anger
wanhope whispers
xhezve
Ylf
(tsunami Nommo
suspiracle
ruinous
quigmare
puce)
quahog
rhinestone eyes
stirious fetch
take the money &
umbrageous subway stop
until we fight again
toom ibrik phen crib
Slobodan sludge
raps clack talc
quartz sphinx
pools
pools of methane
pools of methane rippleless
pools of methane rippleless on a waxen shore
pools of methane rippleless on a waxen shore i skirl
pools of nethane rippleless on a waxen shore i skirl elegy

Simulating Ummo.

54. marketplace of mysteries

Tasseomancy.

days on which i know the way forward
like sunshine in winter
the candle of distant Earth
the moon
helpless to save

Wolf 424: the album.

53. the next wolverine

Mandombe script.

the radio stops working
i stop reading my mail
before being blown up
a private whisper recorded
not for posterity
dress socks with a hole in the toe
crisp brown wrapping
when the white flame within us
is gone

opals that look like opals

"Thus, in the other hoaxes of this era, the inhabitants of planet "Auco", according to what Saliano told the very same Sesma, came from Alpha centauri at 4.4 light-years, and the "Bââvites" who wrote "Bââvites letters" to Robert Charroux came from Proxima Centauri within 4.2 ligh-years [sic]."

52. a henna dune

By No machine-readable author provided. Moyogo assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public Domain, Link

(via)

"Words like moss, blackberry, and bluebell were erased from Oxford’s dictionary for children in order to make room for technological terms like blog, chatroom, and database."

Kriegspiel McGuffin
leaky shoes t the toes
only everything

cezveler
turquoise countertop
& Deleuzin dogs

ducks in the swimmingpool out back
raucous, mechanical
caliphate of drizzle

Estelle Louisiana
comes to the Metroplex
the simulation says

the dotless-i
unweather forecast
perhaps

perhaps perhaps
last holdouts by the river
sick but undefeated

unweather chart
each night ravels like
Penelope my muse

"I know a bad Korean word, she said..."

51. oshun's eleven

(via leila maria adriana lachani on fb)

"A lot of actors liked the script but they didn’t want to be the person who had to go through making it."

moths that drink tears
are flourishing
& cages are big

incantations
fixed you in place
in place

in place of orchids

Slot car racing in the Metroplex...?

50. zeep bracket

(via michelle rhea on fb)

Acceptance speech.

dark carnival dustbin
dark dustbin
our coign

patternly yield
of many
irks

salve with ancient song

& the light lifts
on our speeding
convoy

noyade
among the splendid
fishes

The Bolaño Bubble.

49. not pigeons but rock doves

(via)

"If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well." --Sam Harris, Free Will (2012)

The ibrik revival.

not slowly
& not reversibly
the work of these hands

that could have built cathedrals

They will never exist. (via feuilleton)

48. remembrance & memory

All the things that magic bullets can fix are fixed.

Ibriks.

Nyx
onset
pierrot rose
quisling quarry
ranciderations
sesquisulfide vespers
talion of the true moonglade
sustains consecutive
rotations of shiv
queasy lime twig
placed where most
Ogpu
naff

urn
vorpal
weasel words
xenophilic
yammering rat choir
zephyr out of Old Uz
as much as i hate to say
zebra-striped panoply
yesterday's pratfall
xylophone sex
witchhouse white
viper
up

blurred
Chosfer
dolomite
elephant gray
funicular lurk
gurney full of goodness
highfalutin' crayola
giver of golden rings
framed by snowy owl
eohippus
delicate
cloudhouse
breath

if
junkyard
Krampus gift
lavender tea
moratorium
niveous noontide land
or i'll dress you in mourning
names withheld from the tale
miles to go before
liripoop deck
kriegspiel spoke
justice
inch

pries
quicksand
rennet-free
Sxwaixwe quite scathe
tumulus toaster
umbelliferous shade
violet antelucan
ubac of the Qaf peak
to kill a bluejay
smize for the press
rhubarb erg
queue jump
prone

Enheduanna. More.

47. busted dubstep

More than J-Pop (thread).

the treadmill monkeywrenched
more by ourselves than by terrorists
describe all the things it takes
for making regolith soil

singing for yourself & not me
seeing neighbors loading up to move
anime rain window crawl
a gif like haiku, stolen

clown recluse spider in a jar
clepsydra & paranoiac
Clive Cussler fan from Russia
lightning trap in a bottle

nest built of fragrant denial
anon will flee to the hatchet-zilch
going out of bus'nrss sale
sign up winter-long fellow

"...for all its self-congratulation, the academy’s loftiest mission is a fierce compulsion to eliminate any impediment to donations."

46. a list with nothing on it that is on my other lists

(by david mcghee)

Nice Sir Lord Baltimore write-up.

We only listen to ghost music. By dead people. An algorithm takes the properties of what they have made & generates new music that is like what they would have made if they had made more of it: the same sound, & the same sentiments. Ghost music is the final solution to the musician problem.

set conducted under the shock baton
& hell-tour by a marmoset conducted
wending the parked cars
a sleepy gray parkour
goaf of this diamond fog
a yellow arrow floating
in the unforgiving air

sepia Plano
difficult to imagine
the ones looking back
Squarepusher with Badtz Maru
sticker a dozen years old

"Sucharitkul moved to Van Nuys from Washington, his home of six years, 'because I felt that I could work creatively in an atmosphere of incredible cultural desolation.' "

45. expanding my brand

(by kent christensen via lanny quarles on fb)

"I was born in the dark and the rain, and I got away."

In the future there will be no having or getting, only the momentary granting of permissions; & you will pay & pay for these--joined, of course, to a total system of social credit, so that for those with high credit, permissions are easy, but for those with low credit, not easy, or else impossible.

heart-shaped balloons on the graves
in the afternoon sun
woozy with post-nap brain
meanings felt through boxing gloves
lost in the rain in Cancun
& it's Valentine's day
Sparrowkiller's Waterloo
all that legend down the drain
those whom the gods destroy
in the afternoon sun

One for whom confusing things are simple but simple things are confusing. Like a pigeon whose head bobs as it walks. Does it matter that this bobbing is the motion of the world? Living on a planet a weathervane, pointing the wind. Train station at 7 AM.

"The idea of a foreign or alien past that is as convincing as it is manufactured is what separates good vaporwave from bad vaporwave, and defines the desired effect of the aesthetics of the genre."