five boils

(@CrookedCosmos)

"The drawings, fifty in number, were published in an expensively produced album, like the Van Meegeren Vermeers; it is difficult now, with hindsight, to see how anyone could possibly have been taken in even then."

caroler with MUMPS
penny on my UVULA
pocketsize MURAL

we meet on a higher PLANE
career in mail-order SALES

It all makes sense now.

(via)

"The pursuit of fantasy in every single cultural, political, corporate & media arena since the mid 1970s is what led us all here; and fantasy is not, whatever absurd rationale you’re tempted to use to wriggle out from under, an antidote to itself."

lawyer with a calf tattoo

Trouble in SR-land.

the morning's first PANG
plague perking in ASIA
i stick to my nibs

as one to the last GASP
joined in Her high HALL
joined to each brisk AGUE

stirs under LUNA
no doubt prepared to LEAP

oobleck lemming LAWN
sees its spiky AURA
gnawed in holy WRIT

but who bails from NATO

"And yet I couldn’t help thinking, with grim amusement, of the panicked aides likely ordered to produce, in minutes, a map of the world without words."

the violated lute

Snake Eye.

Thread.

brunch

"Their dolphin leap across the austral night" --Alan Seeger

How to Face the Mess We're In Without Going Crazy.

of hideous BIRTH,
to its persistence INURE
for one more RUPEE

the land's burn being a TREND
ev'ryone marks; no one HEEDS

"The Obama-to-Trump Zeitgeist gave fresh relevance to Margaret Atwood’s Reagan-era masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale, and generated a spate of new books set in similarly fractured Americas..."

(via)

trouble never comes

Later than you think.

jeepster in my blind spot, KARST
& nevermorfevrerie since i AWOKE

fiddling against the Devil, run out
of ROSIN

Greta at Davos
as, through Twitter, Idler SKIMS

though Graywyvern knows heapbig grammar
still lacks future TENSE

"Neo is the Platonic hero par excellence"."

(crookedcosmos)

zapruder screenplay

What is poetry?

void YEAST
scavenge EAGER:
calaveras AGREE
yet through to here, Tomorrow SEEPS,
gold TRESS

"In bed that night, I asked Colin, in a whisper, whether his dad had believed the world would end with Y2K.

'No,' he said, 'It’s more recent than that.' Above us, his childhood bedroom ceiling glowed with the light of a hundred stick-on stars. 'It’s kind of an Obama re-election, they’re-gonna-take-our-guns, NRA-Fox News-apocalypse type thing.' "

(via @archillect)

scow repaired

(via @CrookedCosmos)

Meanwhile, on MLK day...

iridescent neck, em'rald;
mallard wintering, park bright
or shade-crossed, i watch & muse
long on what's discovered here.

One must have a plan, but still
may invest in better hap--
& no vista whispers more
than this softly hauntless place.

Let it come as nothing worse
while a pattern snaps apart
than the neck of phlegmatic
birds whose wits just this scene grasp.

Duelling logos.

(via)

names for the new seasons

"...without cruelty, only a limited success is ever possible in opera." --R A Lafferty

Greta at Davos.

we must redefine what's PESTS
method ghouls EXTOL

muggy January under skies of slate
dream STOMA

so many now have joined the Black Fleet
gone over · left empty TOMBS

seventy six in my black jacket
Graywyvern feels each glint a waly heart SLASH

Tired of hatred.

(via)

plain rain or blinding rain

The Underground Rail Road

the wall full of PESTS
no technician can EXPEL
nor any child SPARE

orders in Latin were TERSE
the guards in their leather, SLEEK

Bosch brought to life.

(lanny quarles on fb)

two ways of becoming a hunter

"In 1971 she played the biracial Julie in a landmark London revival of Show Boat. Laine recorded Porgy and Bess with Ray Charles, and earned a Grammy nomination for her version of Schoenberg’s atonal song cycle Pierrot Lunaire."

the key was control of the PASSES
through which we drifted, dumfuggled-blind, AGHAST

i always thought i'd
end my days in a SHANTY

wanted to
learn how to make from a car tire a SANDAL

would we feel more like a fellow creature,
the marginal our ESTATE?

even Graywyvern
runs through STYLES

Too advanced to be real.

(pic by michelle rhea on fb)

antikythera mechanism

(pic by lanny quarles on fb)

Gilt-edged but out-of-pocket.

"The soul remembering its loneliness
Shudders in many cradles."

--Yeats

"For this role of ghostly ancestor, the actual man Freud isn’t needed or even wanted."

dizzaceous land
of no progress
only new scores

for the old games

(via michael simms on fb)

scat atlas

(via)

The curious case of Proxima C. The article.

in this burning world
the fearless puppy killers
where the tree shade ends

Peaches.

(michael puttonen on fb)

damage changes hands

"...the time of looming has ended and the catastrophe proper has commenced."

cellblock · fickle winter sun
while i watch the loss of my edge

no long run to judge this worth
nor syntax code that parses

for myself unsneck the latch
zombie winter fistful tossed

In the bleak midwinter.

(via cyberpunkmilkshake on tumblr)

pistachio theft

(via)

Noise has its own agenda.

"...if all of Twin Peaks takes place inside the Black Lodge, then all of Lodge 49 takes place inside the White Lodge." (via @amyhale93)

daily the new LOWS
solo on the OBOE
this thrang dream we WOVE

not even slight SEER
prenu mask i WEAR
glut irony ERGO

after lit AGES
always a shaded ROSE
between feline PAWS

woodsmoke · bitter ALOE
a sleeping one WOKE
our end in a speck SEED

"It is hard to see the reputation of, particularly but not only, the BBC ever recovering."

florid comma splice

(doctor-autobot)

"...if the most excellent of those of us within disability culture will never be able to be excellent enough for an able-minded and able-bodied world...where is there a place for just normal, mediocre ass POC in academia—the type of normal mediocrity that is enough to allow abled white folks career success at a dime a dozen??"

rain dance boiling in the slack
nightmare for the puissant left
wallet full of glacier drip

whose fault never ask of moss
stone flung gray & hard above
combat boots in wud raindance

"In my estimation, putting 禮 front and center on the front cover of the book was a much better choice than having a portrait of Confucius, as on later editions."

emergencies in a meditation

My colors are my solace.

Dallas is a major target area.

we'll live in a DOME
& murmur prayers of OXIDE
koala MIMIC
in effigy whose death EDICT
was approved by all the SECTS

"The last few years is when it all started to really fall apart, like, does anybody use the word 'postmodern' anymore? It seems antiquated, but not because the state of affairs has changed, but rather because neither word means anything anymore."

(via)

vanilla pi satori

"Some say the world is made of word,/ Some say of code..."

vanilla HAITI
curve of minaret ACORN
breaking IOTAS

burnt silhouette TRACE
ring with Celtic knot INSET

"I only pretend to swallow the paperclips they make us eat."

(via)

translation of Issa

Xorlo. (Not to be confused with the The Horla.)

haiku: The world is but a single dewdropn set
trembling upon a stem...and yet...and yet. (tr Stewart)

PA DIRGYJAU GE
TERDI GI JIMCA CPANA
DESKU .AICU'I

('One waterdrop is
the world, as on a twig it
trembles. --I don't know!')

Fake.

(via)

down, clown

(by lanny quarles on fb)

Saltair Pavilion. More. Video location tour.

LADEN
with fires ABOVE
secret smiles of DOGES
windowless bridge in the EVENT
moans' NESTS

"There seems to be a fatal misbelief that minor symbolic events, almost like voodoo dolls, can be used to trigger larger systemic changes on a higher, more important layer in the political sphere. This is only rarely true, unfortunately, and it is really not politics but a form of performance art resembling ritual magic."

(via)

pointless scaffold

(lanny quarles on fb)

"It is not necessary to drown to become ocean."

prog an honest answer
from the airborne corndog

the drone sang
as it dove home

the streets are thronged in Tehran
& i whisper Abraxas

winter sun
deadlines begin

we will keep talismans
of the destroyed places

until they grow too many

The past is never dead.

(via pinkcollapse on tumblr)

regretinue

Popocatepetl.

outrage that the echo DULLS
takes solace in the broken USUAL

animals burnt up
seat's LUMPY

even my mere poetic riposte tires me
more & more i LAPSE

Graywyvern would hold his fire
were he SLYER

Brainglass.

(via)

the oblong heads have it

Zothique illustrated.

those who didn't have the wit to SCRAM
& whatever happened to Dagmar CHILI?

praying to the prawns
with insufficient RIGOR

nine blue piles
to be viewed by Hord's klaxon ALONE

never mind ol' Graywyvern
whom dusk MIRES

Why do these people existing.

the assassination of qassem soleimani by the coward donald trump

Interview with Nature.

season of the harsh DOUBT
dog that turns on its OWNER
till we cry UNCLE
curtsey like a Southern BELLE
at the hanged men in the TREES

I'll never feel the same about sea cucumbers.

(mvbxr on tumblr)

mysterious drone swarm

(aestheticneons on tumblr)

"From the point of view of poetry, the symbolist theater succeeds more often where verse fails to fulfill its symbolist objectives." --Ann Balakian, The Symbolist Movement (1967)

Abyss.

maybe i only dreamed we escaped
like dreaming i set the alarm already
to the half-filled urn
i bring dreams to abolish
christmases
as fever deliquescent
& more not many
& pastimes born of fever only
widderguess
in the rearview mirror perse cruise of tsimtsum

"How striking it is that in a poem written at the dawn of urbanisation there seems already to be a conflict between civilisation and the natural world."

(via)

dag the wog

(via diamondsunsets on tumblr)

"...cheval-de-frise,--jagged pieces of bottleglass in brown, green, and clear--mortared into the tops of the low walls around the Spanish colonial buildings, to prevent vagrants from sitting." --Telex from Cuba

(my webster's unabridged tells me this derives from the spiked poles laid out by the Frieslanders [who had no horses] against the invading 17c Spaniards...)

Madonna of the dark soul.

belly's random DARTS
nothing, to a world AFIRE
bleak visions RIVAL

what i follow is the TRAIL
poppy to the one that SELLS

Wind Maps.

(alphagravy via pinkcollapse on tumblr)

sula bendih gadi

Anthology of Persian experimental music. (thank Robert Price!)

my meritorious acts
are sand in the eyes of the fire tornado

one more book
& yet another wretched sonnet

further · into the darkness
that is our last game

solo on the great iridescent washboard
tying to a pole this pallid rag

"A good summary of American politics is that Republicans think Democrats aren’t 'real' Americans but an enemy that needs to be suppressed and destroyed, while Democrats think Republicans will change their ways/minds if they’re sent sheet cakes frosted with lines from Hamilton."