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)

shipment of hopefuls

This is a roaring glacial melt, under the bridge to Kangerlussiauq, Greenland where it's 22C today and Danish officials say 12 billions tons of ice melted in 24 hours, yesterday. pic.twitter.com/Rl2odG4xWj

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) August 1, 2019

Some Spare scans here. (via wesley joyner on fb)

Narcolepsy as a compass point.

Virgil Finlay astrological signs.

     "MASKS (Anagram-Haiku)

Nightmare, shift. Who speaks?
The masks: A whisper of night
throwing makeshift shapes...."

--@Anthony_Etherin

"In 2008, the Iowa River flooded, essentially destroying the university’s art museum. Almost miraculously, Pollock’s painting—along with most of Iowa’s amazing collection—was saved and moved to a space in Davenport. In 2012, 'Mural' was shipped off to the Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, for a two-year face-lift. And ever since, like an aging rock star, it has been on perpetual tour, in the United States and in Europe, while the university rebuilds its museum." (via aldaily)

charge the surface

(via moon-princess-in-wonderland on tumblr)

Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?

If the subjunctive had never been used for escape, how much more respect would it command!

Deep adaptation.

raven letdown

(via, via)

"Months later, when I was back home teaching Greek and Roman classics again, it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure."

A nice little bit about Trilce, & here is an obit for the remarkable David Smith, whose 1973 version is quite good poetry, if (according to Eshleman) "a work that is, for the wrong reasons, more obscure than Vallejo's."

"XVI

I have faith in being strong.
Let me, crippled air, let me go
lacing myself with zeroes to the left.
And you, dream, give me your implacable diamond,
your timeless time.

I have faith in being strong.
Concave woman goes by over there,
a colorless quantity whose
grace closes where I open.

Praise the air, friar past! Thieves, idiots!v Glimpse the green presidential banner,
striking the six other flags
and everything that's hanging in back.

I have faith that I am,
and that I've been less.

Hey, big man!"

(via)

The Lost Words.

the dharma of orientalism

Lumbermen.

red phrases in the warm rain
lungfish view out of rude wine

this dawn involves no raven
solace a smouldering lamp

Jean thrown sprawling in the dirt
for want of an upright word

New audio.

"For myself, this matter of the disproportion between the profit which the average man draws from science and the gratitude which he returns--or, rather, does not return--to it' this is much more terrifying." --Ortega y Gasset

"We were never going to live forever anyway."

(via noealzii on tumblr)

teignmouth electron

(via)

Death to Leviathan.

quote Bukowski stealing from Yeats
in what used to be a famous poem
like a gray sheet of paper torn away
a little bit of blue shows through
after Pluto-time saffron
wet streets nothing much falling
brighter now
gray
saltado
plunderphonic spree

i am Malala
i am the Grand Canyon

"Appalled at the depredations visited by feral pigs upon the island’s brown booby and masked booby colonies (reduced to 500 and 150 birds, respectively), Stager procured a shotgun and killed all 58 pigs."

the color of elephants

(via proud snowflakes on fb via todd buckley)

The Grand Appellation of Agrippa.

"The patent lost atom be lost, and be lost.

O lost, beloved. I loved it so long so loved so long; so long, so long. Where so long, so long he’d lain; where he so long had lain: where I so long have lain, where I float.

Yea, slow to wrath, my store untold and told them a story and the story been told. Of him is the story told. That hears the story told: — to hear the story told. And to hear the story told.

To hear a story told he told a story to her, too low or too high, to hallow all. Iole, ole, ole. Iole, ole, ole, ole. Blow high, or blow low, blow high, blow low — oh, look and behold O look and behold and lo, and behold!"

--from "Articulations"

skylark cento

Succubus.

this ain't the first planet
to say nothing of a Release
speaking of peculiar things
enigmatic Nth space
thick-clustered groups
wanted for piracy, drug-mongering
a glop-skinner's glove
whisked her from the spaceport
those mass hysterias
invisible hovering, three-dimensional hyper-circle
functioned perfectly
this was an impasse

the sun was a blue giant
Brobdingnagian fabrication
a third-level operator
maximum blast
a yieldlessness
a glop-skinner's glove
the airlessness of absolute space
do not relax your vigilance in the slightest
nothing that occurred should irk you
a few tons of foreign matter on the planet's surface

orgiastic Saturnalia
in the macro-cosmos, causation prevails

trope port

     ｆｒａｔｕｌｏ　ｄｉ　ｄｒａｋｉ，　ｋｏｍｐａｎｏ　ｄｉ　ｓｔｒｉｇｉ

17 reasons why.

"...their great and gorgeous grammar raised
Its pillars, arches, corridors, and domes,
Beneath whose roofs ethereal thoughts like doves
Melodiously breathed..."

--Nimrod

"Today, Lovecraft’s cold materialist vision seems outmoded, and hopelessly naive; and it even works as a sort of consolation."

medieval dry smoke
the new administration
building rises

our duck apparently kept away by
inflatable orca on the sidewalk

trrapawul

Pizzly.

"Oblivion's lucid-surfaced mystery" --Orion

Thich Nhat Hanh weighs in.

    "After An Affair to Remember on the big screen"

the pacts we make
to stymie time & death
are three parts murk

the pacts we make
turn ricochet & mock,
bring riddling dearth

the pacts we make
to stymie time & death

Life and Adventures of Jack Engle.

"Of course much truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to seem plausible to be believed." --@JoyceCarolOates

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

6/5/4/3.

     "THE FALL OF ROME

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast."

--W H Auden, via BLCKDGRD blog

The Gods Have Their Reasons.

a richest grief

(via @SHINKAN34721410)

Thoughts on a strange day.

"An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars." --Wendell Berry

Sue Coe reads.

(via @jeffreyford8)

"Having escaped
the gray parrots"

--Celan

Jewish Maghrib Jukebox.

      "Oft when dawn
With a grave red looked through the ash-pale woods..."

--Orion

Animal cafes.

(via @SHINKAN34721410)

delusions of the dodge fury

Chinese scifi thread.

"Boars cannot swim nearly as well as they imagine themselves able to." --R A Lafferty, Apocalypses (1977)

Paphnuty.

"One needn't be nearly as holy to pray for fog as to pray for rain." --ibid

Collectible cheetoh.

(via @SHINKAN34721410)

Auschwaltz.

"Florida is California on a Troma budget." --Kelly Link

inexorable carousel

"Since the Dark Learning apparently did not involve any issues in real life, it was also known as the 'Pure Talk.' " --Luo Yuming

A blast from the past.

"The bow, that ne'er till now its glittering points
Bent back without recoil and whirring twang--"

--Richard Horne

Velociraptor.

Ghost riders. (via chuck taylor on fb)

"In his Orion review Poe castigated 'the cant of muddlepates who dishonor a profound and ennobling philosophy by styling themselves transcendentalists' (XI. 253)." --Harriet Holman, in Poe Studies

Gothic rock and death rock in DFW.

The music of hailstones.

"The colours of the outfits of three of the main characters, Alison, Gwyn and Roger was based on an older International Colour Code for electrical wiring (red, black and green)." --A Year in the Country blog

A long way from home.

jawn

Beyond the beautiful darkness.

"Pity is but half justice." --Kahlil Gibran

Cauliflower sans Merci.

"I survived the Bowling Green Massacre by hiding behind a Polybius machine when the first shots rang out." --@PattonOswalt

The literature of creepy clowns.

     “Annals of Thirst”

reprieve to reprieve
in halcyon sunlight creeping

sunlight
yet nothing is clear:

A coast so full that the tale
    has happened

careening through the murk
i took an awful bump
for this to work
you gotta be a chump
i think I’m past the hump
when raucous rapids start
Lord Heffalump
is choking on a fart

to torture is a perk,
vasty empire’s slump
calls each to shirk
their turn at the stuck pump
i finger the myst’ry lump
under a pentacle tart
conundrums stump
the occidental heart

and now one wambly clerk
reels way too high to jump
our shapes Dunkirk
this aching at the stump
but not to be a grump
as ev’ry day’s new smart
gurgles the sump
of a phantom tumbril-cart

here in the klaxon’s blurt
king of the burning dump
with shackles girt
angles for a warped thump

Critique of Tunnel.

"Starfish, poinsettia on a half-tide crag,
a galliard by Byrd."

--Basil Bunting

unhappily sewn tux

Huber the Tuber.

"The Fool is like a fantastic dancing flare lighting up the features and furniture of the dark house of death." --Chesterton

Candle nub then.

the realm of the nebulae

(pic by geof huth)

Alexander reads Arendt.

"They locked up a man
Who wanted to rule the world

The fools
They locked up the wrong man"

--Leonard Cohen

Water Protector Legal Collective.

"Obama must feel like Sean Connery watching George Lazenby playing James Bond" --@MattOswaltVA

The Wreckage, the Collapse.

the cabinet of dr calibri

Ponyatiya.

"The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of the under-world, to which you once condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at least they are more homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come when you will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars." --G K Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross (1909)

Biedermeier.

"Man is a contradiction in terms; he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen." --Chesterton, ibid

What facebook does. (via Bruce Sterling)

"Resistance is futile. That's why I like it." --@NeinQuarterly

What lies broken.

"Without idealization, simply take note that what they have in common—which is their unnecessary suffering, their endurance, their cunning—is more significant, more telling, than what separates them. And from this, new forms of solidarity are being born." --John Berger

Darker.

"The left: Should we punch nazis? Did that Barron joke cross a line? Is La La Land actually bad?

The right: We just dismantled the New Deal." --@FernieCommaAlex via @KameronHurley

maniac anger race

(The Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells, via onlyinyourstate dot com)

The truth about Pepe.

"Now in another country, in the city
founded by Cadmus, citizens of Mars
despaired because their king was mad..."

--Ross's Statius (2004), iv.

Big Data worked.

"The year is 2017. America is a tire fire. The resistance is led by Teen Vogue, Badlands National Park, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary." --@mightybattlecat

Rambler and Magneto.

(by Dan Ransom via @Fascinatingpics)

Mystic Fire Video.

"He’s become in two days the paranoid and deluded ruler of so many novels by Latin American and African writers. Usually this point is reached after several decades of rule and the imposition of terror and a cult of personality." --Infinite Coincidence

Google Street View tour of a former prison.

a mileposts-in-sin ad

Venus.

“…the poet from Cracow, who did two things rather dangerous in those days: moving from Cracow and going to live in Poznan; and trying to combine being a poet with being a patriot.” --G K Chesterton

pianissimo sled tan