Cristof de Loet

📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00325 ◊ ZoSo ◊ Gregory Pardlo

ZoSo

Those hammer-ons on Over the Hills made my fingers bleed.
That is, my devotion to their shapes made my fingers bleed.

Child of Crowley, Bukka White, paddling hips across the stage.
Time’s architect, sketch blueprints lesser innovators read.

Sight the neck like a rifle barrel. Diagnose the truss rod sound.
Let’s caress the fretwork, inlays pearl and filigreed.

Contracts offer details juke growlers shrug off like sheet music.
‘How much,’ they only want to know, ‘am I guaranteed?’

On the frontiers of sound we are nocturnal, we move in shivers,
we watch bobcats, as night-blooming cereus lingers, feed.

My mind is a fuzz box today. Hellhound’s got my scent, cornered me
in Room 12-B with the hangman’s disposition whiskey drinkers need.

The left hand’s a gyromantic dancer, sinister. The cat’s cradle
of tablature captures the dragonfly’s hover, its speed.

At fourteen I walked the rivulets. A pilgrimage. Late harvest.
I cut my teeth on a washtub bass line shimmering like a centipede.

Spirits filled burn piles on the beach. Smoke and salt infused
the fuselage that hummed the lunar music six strings received.

Shoulda quit you on the shoulder, G, singing backward alphabets
of sky. Fingerprinted, you thought they made your fingers bleed.

—Gregory Pardlo
—found in Digest (2014)

[full poem archive]

Strands #4
“Don’t do it!”
💡🔵🔵🔵
🔵🔵🔵🔵
🟡

Given the whimsical word I started with, I’m OK with the result.

Wordle 992 4/6*

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Just realized I can add significantly more to my Brainwaves from the Grave (placeholder title) collection of videos if I create some audio tracks. I can record on I-5 twice a day. Maybe even get a recording of a road rage incident if I can’t keep gellin' like melon or however that went.

Clark County teens have long made pilgrimages to the fast-food chain with the so-called In-N-Out Challenge. Before locations opened in Oregon, adventurous teens would leave right after the afternoon bell, drive to the then-closest location in Redding, Calif., get burgers and T-shirts and then drive back before school the next morning.

And now Seattle area kids can do the same to Ridgefield out east. We live in the future, man :)

Source: In-N-Out to open its first WA location in Clark County [archive]

Is academic bureaucracy the worst? Or at least the worst outside of the feds? It sure seems to be, mostly because precisely the wrong people end up in most leadership positions.

📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00324 ◊ "Thinking" out loud ◊ Bob Hicok

”Thinking” out loud

There are people who want to remove plants
they call invasive, as if nature craves a pedigree,
and people who want to remove people they call invasive,
who prefer faces in cottony shades, but the woods I know
accept whatever seeds blow their way, and New York
looks and sounds like the world, and if anything
deserves to be a snob, to suggest who or what
needs to be excluded, it’s nothing, since nothing
was here first and has dibs on the universe. Then God said,

Let there be light, and then the big bang said,
I am the light. I dunno, I wasn’t there, but it’s something
to wrestle with, isn’t it, that we’re children of zero,
of zilch. Kind of makes you humble.
Kind of makes you want to scooch over
and make room for the next moose or loosestrife
or rose of Sharon, the next Muhammad who’s tired
and needs to take a load off, get a job,
send money home to children he hasn’t seen
in a year. The democracy of life

is that plants and people thrive
wherever rain and sun grant root, until death
dismantles our rise and shine into usefully
equal bits. Existence is a slob, full of mess
and clutter, wonder and wander, and the one thing
I’m purely against is a purist of any stripe
or feather. I know: so what if a poet’s upset.
But I’m also a flautist, a plumber, a starer at stars,
washer of cars, a befuddled and muddled example
of human consciousness, that weird weed
that’s taxed the world more than added to it,
in my mumble opinion. If anyone has to go,
it’s only everyone you are, or could be, or know.

—Bob Hicok
—found in Southern Review (Spring 2023; Vol. 59, No. 2)

[full poem archive]

📜 New in the Commonplace Communiqué → 00059 ¶ from Twenty-Two Short Lectures ¶ Mary Ruefle

WHY ALL OUR LITERARY PURSUITS ARE USELESS

Eighty-five percent of all existing species are beetles and various forms of insects.

English is spoken by only 5 percent of the world’s population.

WHY THERE MAY BE HOPE

One of the greatest stories ever written is the story of a man who wakes to find himself transformed into a giant beetle.

—Mary Ruefle
—from “Twenty-Two Short Lectures”
—found in Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (2012)

[full archive]

There’s a new beta word game at the NYT called Strands. I enjoy it and should be a lot better with the next one. Have you tried it?

Strands #3
“I gotta dip!”
💡🔵🔵🔵
💡🔵🔵🟡
🔵

📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00323 ◊ God, Diagnosed With Dementia ◊ Beth Oast Williams

God, Diagnosed With Dementia

You know he forgets names,
where he left the keys.
Some days floods cover
land he says would never drown
again. He hears my prayers
then asks me to repeat,
calling it a refrain. I abstain
from meat and wine for forty days
hoping to reset my soul.
I try not to use my lover’s name
in vain. And yet I curse
the man who forgets my birthday,
forgets to pick up after the dog.
Senescence is such a sonic
word I hate to discover
its meaning. I hate
every diagnosis that dares
doubt to double over,
bruising bare knees.

—Beth Oast Williams
—found in Invisible City (Issue 5)

[Note: my apologies for my inaccurate formatting of A. E. Stallings' recent poem. You can read the poem with the proper line breaks in the archive.]

[full poem archive]

Well, that’s not cool…

Wordle 990 X/6*

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩