| LOUIS ARMAND 5 POEMS from an unpublished collection, entitled killing time |
| DEXTROSE cut-out figures, from right to left in the shooting gallery: lunch of cold meat, salad--the weather is "changeable," marked for replacement naked in the back room: stringing up papier-mâché heads, filled with sand-the holes left unplugged, barely contained--no mystery encroaches on the game at hand ("can see what's on your mind"); the body is weightless, at intervals which are no longer temporary--suspicion of returns, could increase into a madness: the hidden laughter of canned goods, dis- played in serial revenance, infinitely identical-the others have been removed from the chain of being: an escalator which leads upwards through incarnations, to the only available checkout REALISM & THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF TRUTH what is unavoidable: each time we looked the table was still there, & the ship's moorings, & the glass domed terrace--when they took the photograph in geneva, it was never returned ELDORADO HOTEL laid out on butcher's paper--instruments of boredom like re- engineered plotlines, gone sour in the heat-the flatness of a terrain in which everything has evolved horizontally: sick at the sight of it--"birth, decay, the ephemeral"; a door for breathing, a table outlined heavily against a wall--lowering the temperature by means of compression: skin red on both sides--a drain pipe is leaking, a pool of rust water which threatens at any moment to become a flood-questioning the occurrence leads to no explanation; the taste of insecticide carpeting the tongue (as "preventative")--rehearsing the evacuation procedure, in the cold light of statistics, averages, standard deviations--down payment for the nights which are yet to come & those which aren't DEAD JOE who believes me shall behold the man gone stiff in the frozen ground, up to the neck in it--had suffered, once, lifetimes at the end of a long fork; there were no excuses--spent time on your hands & not a said word-counting the squares in the dud signal pattern, trans- mitted along nerve strings, or trapped in the broad daylight of x (its banality is vitrifying)--the swooping movement of tv cameras, keeping to the facts--the long night of the soul in a forest of slot machines: hungry mouths in which humiliation demands an unequal share--& the lidless sinister eye that confronts each in turn, waiting for its number to come up CRANACH, A HOROSCOPE mid-afternoon, snorting blood up the nose--vienna full of shut windows, extinguished weather: a spotlight mounted in the sky, oozed like half-digested fruit--the dark perishing eyes of magazine covers displayed on a stand; what's yours now is one too many--the dealers in sangfroid watching through rearview mirrors, laced with amphetamine: the fire exit stuffed with bodies, sunken back to hands feet mouths--abandoned costumes knitted from loose threads, told of unseen idols (created in fear longing willfulness)--raining stones in a city of glass houses, walls riddled with holes where everyone can see the cretinous brides in their blonde wigs & artificial teeth, singing lullabies to shut up the dead © louis armand, 2002 |