| amoniak (for keston sutherland) ________________________ what it means to be terminal; the survival instinct, as smokescreen against future entrapment--immune systems of the body's counter-reformation, defining a conduit of amended experience, bathos which is its lowest point--the reflection of a face eroded by sarcasm, ambivalent life- forms translated through the cut hole of the iris--to arrive through out-takes & escape manoeuvres at the underside of knowing--"it" happens that way, benumbed anuses stuffed with headlines & political cant, bleached of all substance--an engine beating through the floor: 6 a.m. leering out of medicated sleep--the mechanised semaphore, fixed to the vertical (sign for remission); quantities of expired adrenaline collected in jars "at varying intervals"--someone arrives, performs the necessary operation: there's time yet for the plot to thicken, to assume a more uniform consistency ("the little enzyme they've discovered"), even if the end itself is unavoidable tangier postcards seven months waiting for that ship to come in. cold water hotel rooms, nights blank as a blank cheque. stretched out on the floor with arse up to be fucked. dead mosquitoes moths flies piled up under lampshades. the landscape is the usual one, beige on beige. a scratched record on a record player in a dusty cardboard box / a landscape in a scratched record cover--what will be today's line? rinso lactose saniflush, nothing is too dull. watching the patterns on the wallpaper. grey flowers & black dots. an eyeball-through-the-wall look joining up all the discarded present tenses. a fool's errand. then the telephone rang. I CAN'T HEAR YOU I CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE SAYING halcyion days ... picked apart an hour. insulin. dredged up a present of raw meat--man cannot survive by word of mouth alone. the thing he carries, a brown figure (resists illustration). the difficulty to think there are not windows enough, opened out from under their burden-sapless trees in autumn. particles of exposed sky floating like the first hundred flakes of snow. a cloud in which a voice mumbles-iit is pain that is in- different to the sky. ubiquitous factory chimneys the scent of them still hanging heavily in the air "naked of any illusion"--the dawn-wracked analgesia which is all irony & mock promise listening to the boot-trod canticle of minimum wagers, trash cans upended alarm clocks--each one equal to memory against the westwardness of everything. the bare-facedness of what fails & revives. no subterfuge or lucid souvenir of nights distinguished only in the strangeness of human hair, in eyes the colour of dollar bills. nothing which is contradicted by what takes place on the outside forests of woodgrain vinyl. monochrome. like a photograph enormously enlarged, the features are lost, out- scaled. bearing no relation to when, beneath exteriors, the pleasant & vicious landscape of our fatalistic surmise ... barring excuses. it isn't a place where you can use a map text © louis armand, 2003 |
| louis armand malice in underland |
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| melbourne: textbase, 2003 isbn: 0 9578114 7 0. 96pp www.textbase.net available from shakespeare & sons bookstore + abebooks books.louis-armand.com |