Author: admin

She Walks in Beauty:

A Villanelle

She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright.

Crashed relics of their vanished might
meet the gaze of stranger’s eyes
She walks in Beauty, like the night.

Presenting idly to my sight
from the skirts of Paradise
And all that’s best of dark and bright

Shining through the smoothest white
in the scarce believing eyes
She walks in Beauty, like the night

robed in radiance of its light:
mountain-like, through those clear skies
And all that’s best of dark and bright.

I soar along from left to right;
In her who lives, and him who dies.
She walks in Beauty, like the night
And all that’s best of dark and bright.


The Combed Thunderclap, 2014

Remixed works:

She Walks in Beauty
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The Bride of Abydos
To–
Cain: A Mystery
Parisina
The Island
On the Star of the Legion of Honour
The Siege of Corinth
To the Earl of Clare
Euthanasia

- by Lord Byron

[Sex is driving college girls berserk]

Sex is driving college girls berserk.
They don’t pay farmhands well enough.
I love the costumes and hate the music.
This may be wrong, it is hard to decide.
Besides, they say, you’re beautiful.
Everything that is not consumed rots.
There is a good deal still to play for.
Don’t cut flowers before they bloom.
This, of course, is a trite example.
We do not keep order with sentiment.
Therefore my position is just fine.
I need some meaning I can memorize.
However, the type was never quite to hand.

Reply with your comment or “like”.

 

from 555 by John Lowther, 2014

Algorithmic approach:
Text Analytics

Remixed works:
Civilization and its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud
Please Don’t Tell Me I’m Beautiful, by Jane Devin
L’Homme et le Sacre, by Roger Caillo
Alan Sinfield, in Cultural Politics
Cultural Software, by J.M. Balkin
Line from Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
The Relativist Fallacy, by The Nizkor Project
Lover I Don’t Have to Love, by Bright Eyes
The Average and The Normal, by Peter Cryle

[Everything is condensed sunlight]

Everything is condensed sunlight.
Books are just dead tattooed trees.
Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

I don’t get mad, I have people that do it for me.
There aint no special dead, there’s just dead.
This could seem paradoxical, but it isn’t.

It’s there behind the door.
It’s either white or black.
It’s my way or the highway.

That’s the picture — killed instantly.
Sometimes things just got to play hard.
Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup.

Everyone’s half and half.
I don’t have a fucking clue.
One finds oneself fallen.

from 555 by John Lowther, 2014

Algorithmic approach:
Text Analytics

Remixed works:
Energy, Work, and Thermopolitics, by Levi Bryant
Books are just dead tattooed trees, popular Tumblr meme
The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
Line from The Wire, Season 4, Episode 5
Line from The Wire, Season 1 Episode 13
Line from High Anxiety, by Mel Brooks
Hélène Cixous, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics
Undoing Gender, by Judith Butler

[We eat chocolate eggs because]

We eat chocolate eggs because chocolate eggs are brown and
brown was the color of the wood of the cross on which Jesus
was crucified.
I could swear that my mini-lop has been wagging his tail when I let
him out of his cage in the morning and make him his bunny
salad.
There are certain ways to tell if you have herpes however and ways
you can identify it as the cause of discomfort.
So-called “disposable” fashion is affordable fashion.
In a race between a rock and a pig, don’t varnish your clams.

 

from 555 by John Lowther, 2014

Algorithmic approach:
Text Analytics

Remixed works:
“We eat chocolate eggs”, by Eddie Izzard
“Animal Luvr” on Yahoo Answers
How to Tell if you have Herpes, by Mack LeMouse
“wisemint” on disposable fashion
Dilbert comic

Prayer Against War

A sturdy chapel
of adamant invalids
& insomniacs,
so photogenic,
only to have
danger follow,
though never easily,
that’s the art,
almost child-
simple flowers,
one standing,
one leaping,
against a dark blue ground,
as a small bird
evolves for hours,
days, weeks,
painted & scraped
to the point
of collapse,
pinned, unpinned,
repositioned
& pinned again,
whatever it takes,
slivers, puncture marks,
for fragile & rough
doves to fly up

Howie Good, 2014

Remixed works:
Wisps From an Old Man’s Dreams,
by Holland Cotter (NY Times, 9 Oct 2014)