On the death of Rupert Murdoch
eviction returns in a state of damage—
the aliveness of terrain even as it burns.
time is a product of error / strange attractors
loosening the grip in pastiched alienisms—
one depthless surface on another
depthless surface. the unloved characteristic
goes to extremes / to claim worlds beyond quest / ion
pulled from background check / to be the thing
that can’t be anything else / running through all of it
this reeling dis / possession / before / at the outset
the rules of State / an unstated con / stitution—
once “given” emphasis, wordlessness
becomes a birthright. to fake, entice, propel
e.g. the senses / concealment inserts small
fragments / vivisections, paranoias—
complex increments of police / of punctuation
being a matter of “life & death” in deepening
planes of near autism / possessive is nine-tenths
living &/or dead / please describe
in a manner befitting / e.g. extinct, perished—
what’s aggregate by brunt of saying (?) / why not
insurrection (?) / cunning wheels machining the line
to stay warm burn metaphors or the
illusory representation of / politics
& hypothermia & pvc / one stage direction
fits all / the law how indeed a pig in shit
Ain’t the just life
(comedy everywhere you look)
even the most public suffering is lived in private
joy, humiliation, which gives it the appearance
of a twelfth-century fiasco / a barricade in a
trap-street / a new decade learning to walk upright.
count to four & already victimhood becomes you
its atavistically high cheekbones / borrelitic eyes
like a hard-bitten caravanserai with the skin
of sacrificial goats / or world-beating incest
in a helix of squid-ink / bird feast primitive /
telling of empty spaces only you can see, sacred
to creatures you cannot / their universal taboo
speaks solely to a universal fact. parting the seas,
an event from an occurrence / a distinction
from senescence / a periphery from its periphery
in transient real-time, construes the baroque
anguish of second nature suicided by proficiency
or weird shrink-wrapped neurotoxins of deep-state
Godzilla revenge circuit / how forever poignant
the death of a whistleblower laid at their feet
Chicory is proof of life’s perseverence
this ersatz death by viral delivery plan such hyper-gothic suns
make anguish their daily meat in skies adrift in black pollen
their little fleurs du mal disporting timelapse naked or frozen
in scrupulous attitudes of respect for the cosmic master plan
but we must breathe more than ontic metadata (the situation
couldn’t last the times were unbearable) oh how even a bouquet
of misery gives tarnish a new face & god something to live for
Louis Armand is an Australian author living in Prague and is the author of the poetry collections East Broadway Rundown (2015), The Rube Goldberg Variations (2015), and Synopticon (with John Kinsella, 2012), as well as numerous novels and critical books, most recently Glasshouse (2018), and Videology (2015).
