“The vilest writer hath his readers, so the greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.”— Jonathan Swift, 1710
The last relief of the routed
is the political lie born out of the discarded pundit’s head
and licked into shape by the mob.
We know this.
Last night’s location monitoring
occurred as flood
looped through circles
in a velocity zone
swollen with fascists, cardsharps, chatbots
and capsized trucks – the river’s banks like the central banks and the databanks
giving out, the too-narrow road
washing away,
Trump’s face followed by a dead dog
followed by the L.A. Dodgers in a PT boat.
Pull the other one.
None of this is among the hidden things,
but all of it is among the sacrificed.
The rains, deadlier,
the river bursts, its powerful motives
dazzling the crowd hoping for short madness
as the waters, rising
along the long brown path,
dislodge masses of data,
determining the parameters
of the next convenient catastrophe.
They issue bonds for this now.
Specific words, specific people.
Crushed rows of candy.
Targetted collection and attack.
The value-optimised bro moments of the engaged
and the enraged will never stop
Walt Whitman from singing
of an America still unquerelous
in its short skirts and congress boots
holding a baby in one wearied arm,
binding its limbs with the other,
lighting the pyre and raising the knife
as a cascade of kill lists spill into the lake and feeds
and over the falls
in unknown and improbable proportions,
symptoms and consequences
channelled in the boiling swirl
of gravel and timber and mud towards
the gently dipping beds of code
at the braided river mouth behind the delta front,
outflowing deposits merging at the lobe
with social media logs and phone transcripts and match-three whales
in the slower-moving waters of the evacuation zone.
…whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing…
so said Walt
because everything else is inside,
permanently identified and compartmentalised,
we are told, algorithmically,
by encrypted messaging applications
and released insensibly out into the oceanic
or up the oak stairs to the bedrooms,
or down the stone steps to the cellars,
to the laundry room that once was the music room,
and a century before that a stable, and before that a river stream,
but even before that, the first thing,
the self unseeing but the eyes opening
to the reversing pterodactyl alarm of a construction-site truck
as most days, as all days, as always, as more always.
There is still the other thing, that damnable Whitman thing.
Pure artifice!
looping into or out of the new circles
but more obvious because familiar in, for example,
the painting by Yana hanging through the crawl of night
at the foot of the foldaway bed
on two screws on the exposed brick wall
in the living room,
and by the cracked light of day
on two hooks
attached to two chains
on the foldaway bed’s cabinet,
two positions, it seems
end pieces of the encoding,
the bed not so much folding as lowering or lifting,
an up, a down, or an away.
No one understands why we sleep here.
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
So said Sam,
but no painting has been handled more frequently.
Lifted every morning off its screws
and onto its hooks
and every night off its hooks
and back onto its screws.
I’ve spent more time looking
at it than any other
object in the universe,
it is
undoubtedly the most hung
and re-hung painting in art history.
I’m looking at it now.
If I were to close my eyes
or turn away and try to describe or sketch it
from memory
[reflects]
from what is left of memory
I wouldn't be able to.
My brain is no longer built for such things.
It can still determine patterns,
but these are now primarily based
on what I thought and felt,
who I loved,
where I went,
what I ate and drank,
at what time,
and to whom I talked and how often.
I like this one. A fine and necessary rant!
Killer poem.