Saturday, May 30, 2026
Western Civilization, or Whatever
A single prayer can change everything
On-court or off-screen or even at the
Fast-charging autonomous vehicle stations
What blesses one blesses all
With every new image-sharing platform.
A hotwalk through sustainable living
Can spark sparkling waves of gorgeous unrest
Enlivening the down low
Like the final hours of early bird savings
Randomized and double blind.
Bring your own hype alerts
The wise will seek acai
Counterinsurgency baked in
The right coverage is waiting for you
Consult your chatbot.
Monday, May 25, 2026
Warning: Poetry is Not a Safe Alternative
When writing about the knuckleheads,
Ancient skaters landing tricks on the flyover bridge
Tattoos and graffiti swirling a new anime,
Forever with an eye toward wearability,
Risking it all for the clip,
I’m most comfortable amidst decay and desolation.
That’s why Southern California is my go-to place.
You can tell, right?
The Swiss philosopher of yesterday is now
The modern Hollywood power player.
Large scale crypto currency schemes,
In the middle of the gutter protection boom,
Plastic sphinxes, Romanesque estates,
Absolutely deadly, if you know what you’re doing.
And who says it don’t pay to be poet?
It’s the gnarliest.
Shaping words down by the beach.
Curating an audience segment at a
Golf course community in the desert,
Crews working in trees.
It’s a trip how the shit works.
No wait, check this out.
Dude on the pier said he just got out of Pelican Bay.
I pointed to the troupe of pelicans flying overhead,
Asked if they were his friends, had given him a lift.
He didn’t think it was funny and wanted to kill me.
But because I’m a poet, he let it ride
This once.
Sunday, May 24, 2026
Sunday Lit
In My Craft or Sullen Art
by Dylan Thomas
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
The three books pictured came to my attention again totally by happenstance, I wasn’t seeking them out: the two novels, translated into English from in one instance Spanish and in the other Mandarin Chinese. (Doubly curious: the Mandarin Chinese novel is about translators.)
I source my books from friends, from the media, from the public library, the friends of the library, the little free libraries, and the random book sale here and there.
Reservoir Bitches is kick-ass hilarious and furious; Taiwan Travelogue is languorous, delicate; (How did the translators do it? What must the original have been like to them!); Things as It Is is clear and enchanting in all its original English.
Reservoir
Bitches, by Dahlia de la Cerda, 2022
English translation
from the Spanish by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches, 2024
Things As It
Is, by Chase Twichell, 2018
Taiwan
Travelogue, by Yang Shuang-Zi, 2020
English
translation from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, 2024
Saturday, May 23, 2026
Randos
EARNINGS CALLS, EMBER CAST
Like fanboys stacking messages
On phones in the Aughts
The bees are back
Curating clips today
Had to smoke them out
Last time.
OTAKU NUMERO UNO
Calls himself the “Car closest to the loco”
Beloved, iconic, unforgettable
Nothing less than ardent, relevant, and deliverable.
CROSSWORD CLUE
Yogi’s pose
Asana, true
But squat
If you
Know baseball.
COUNTERFEIT BILLS
Both of them
Billy, the youngest
GOAT, “Kid”
There in New Mexico somewhere
Whilst up in the Dakota Territory
It was Wild Bill Hickock
That Annie Oakley said
Bury me next to
And got her wish.
A SENSE OF PLACE, AN EPIC JOURNEY
A kind of deep-tech startup ecosystem
Thirty percent more freshness
And often performed separately as a concert work.
© Copyright
2026 Randy Stark
Randy Stark’s Amazon Author’s Page
Friday, May 22, 2026
And Then They Came for Our Phones
Scrap metal apartment estate.
Zero and E-Z.
We can’t even forget for ourselves
Let alone remember.
An evening of Journey.
Here’s the red snapper.
Where’s my boning knife?
Where’s my mood board?
Only the smudging white sage prevents the
Rats from eating the shoes off our feet.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
7:45 p.m. Mountain Time
Clock this said the acorn squash
My twenty-point plan is a hundred already
It slays, it rocks
Via biomats and brain taps
Red lights and cold plunges
I went around to all my friends’ houses
And I told them I said
Always know that I love you
You mean so much to me
So let me go ahead and
Capitalize on big team big flex
Invert the neocolonial structures
Seize a forward line of defense
I feel an archdukedom somewhere shaking loose.
Friday, May 15, 2026
Here's a Little Thing I Call
GETTING IT OUT OF MY SYSTEM
“Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836.
Nobody. Nobody “looks upon” a river. Nobody in Late Capitalism has the luxury of a meditative hour when time is money amidst the logistics, the drops offs and pick ups and obligations and to-do lists and appointments and trysts and assignations. We build bridges across a river, ride boats on top of it, kill fish and flora by dumping into it human waste and labradoodle waste and viruses and bacteria from storm water runoff, the cides of pesti and herbi, plus gas station seepage, septic system seepage, construction site seepage of aluminum arsenic, nitrates, copper, lead, uranium, magnesium, manganese. Nobody looks upon a river, unless maybe a dead body is floating by and catches peoples’ attention and has them on their phones (and for a minute, not for a meditative hour). Let’s bring ourselves current, shall we? Besides, the flux of all things cannot be contemplated. The flux of all things is too cold. The flux all things goes hard.
---Randy Waldo Stark, 2026
Saturday, May 9, 2026
Planet On-a-Stick
Kinda doowoppy
Electropoppy
Dubsteppy
Afrobeaty
Dancehall-ish
EDM-y.
You know, speed doom
Lone actors radicalized online
Call from that number you’re dead
Or militants, separatists
What the K-9s find
Officials warn.
It’s so funny like
Day after Earth Day
Defense chief killed
Guard fatally shot
Two dead in clashes
Then the “all clear.”
Friday, May 8, 2026
Floor Exercises
Rethinking my wardrobe for next season
I need to get with my food group
Cool kids with Tool tee shirts
Leveraging legacy frisson
With neural waveforms based on
My likes and preferences.
Charm meets ease, trenchoat to kicks.
Flashing on them pussyass times
When light footprints was considered virtuous
And if it’s true as Lacan says
That all desire is based on a sense of lack
Although the jury is still mostly out and
Down the hall to the left
Much depends upon hitting Send.
Sunday, May 3, 2026
Field Notes
“Inspiration is a state of collection, not creative dynamism. One must allow one’s vision of the concept to settle and clear. I do not think any great artist works in a fever. Even the mystics get to work only after the ineffable dove of the Holy Spirit has already left their cells and is losing itself in the clouds. One returns from inspiration as from a foreign country. The poem is the narration of the voyage.”
---From Deep Song and other prose by Federico Garcia Lorca, 1932, translated from the Spanish by Christoher Maurer, 1980 (emphasis mine)
I've continued on my sometimes purposeful, sometimes serendipitous trip through literature written in languages other than English (and again super kudos to the translators).
Purposeful: the Lorca book above and a classic New Directions reprint that arrived in the mail today, A Season in Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud, 1873, translated from the French by Louise Varese, 1945
Serendipitous: these four fell into my hands:
Good and Evil, by Samanta Schweblin, 2025
English translation from Spanish by Megan McDowell, 2025
The Old Fire, by Elisa Shua Dusapin, 2023
English translation from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, 2026
The End of the Sahara, by Said Khatibi, 2022
English translation from Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson, 2026
Waste Tide, by Chen Qiufan, 2013
Translated from Chinese by Ken Liu, 2019
Plus these bangers:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, 2002
The Intentions of Thunder, by Patricia Smith, 2025 poems
It’s been lit the past couple of weeks reading wise.
Saturday, May 2, 2026
Doing the Whole Trad Wife/Frontiersman Thing
Part I
Like two and a half years ago
Bed, t.v., moonlight
Sound of a dirt bike way back in the hills
We were watching the Olympics that night
Long story short: coat, shoes (beloved labels), ER.
Swiping is now my life
That and sustained mobilization
Reveals replace show and tell
My large language was too big for the overhead bin
So I always have to check it.
I needa update my priors
Ropes as I learned them are gone
My brands are non-responsive.
Outfit and make-up inspiration unavailable
Non-Op cars covered by weeds in the yard.
With all the recent going ons
It’s not reasonable to think at 2x speed
It comes down to Ctrl Hi viz hi rizz
How to attend, how to watch
How to exit out.
Part II
Hello oh hi, no, I can talk
You’re going to the Horn
I was just there
Educating Yemen’s Houthi rebel dog parents
On what their pet needs.
Like I told a Shih tzu owner
Try these hip new twists to 5-star experiences
And when combined with magic
And a couple of eco-friendly cheat codes
It’s what people do in movies.
I call her Assassin
That ass’a ki’ya
Ran a photo of it through AI
So hot broke the goddam model
Caused a data center to explode.
But she dumped me and
I’m sitting here looking at Tanker Tracker
Tryna stunt my depression
Higher than a mockingbird on loquats
Mogging upper-level crazy on X.
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