Louis Armand and John Kinsella

Protologistic Poem

We begin with a massage from our sponsor…
Standoff TV lights on the upper floors —
a test mug to make records / Long Bay
sell-out seasons from here to high green
rummage on risible artsop, pacings
& shitcan oratorios. Time-biding on raw-
backed streetside, canticles roar —
the no-hoper who got his shiv in,
up to the balls in it — beggering the question
of cathlegion or copster / I won’t say —
day remains of cession, staged for soft bucks /
tecke in spoke; tormand —
laying it on the line in renegade
night-stand hopes. Girls with lampshade eyes,
tessellating traffic signals; or
stagger anew into this misshapened day
labourers mopping up the slops,
panhandlers, bellhops, the whole
chorus line of rent-by-the-hour latex cops /
dead-end alleys / sewer grates and
de rigeur NOIR — coughing up another 4.00 a.m.;
or someone rings in the fix on the poet
fingered for a hot shot — but it’s not much more,
just the Chelsea gimmick, wishfeelers out of
thinktank drive-thru, hint of byway
and hotel where no room for travellers
tugs at The Dream: you know, the door
for breakfast, the car finned in the park,
microwaves and shuddering blood,
set plays and rhythmagistics,
fat in the wastebaskets, refridgerettes
of dinky-dink drinks / scoping out the fall
off the wagon you came in on — all they have
are Ninth Ave memoricide, trash parked
on top of trash parked on top of trash /
gunning for the sale pitches, sex mannequins
and Rusky tycoons panhandling on the runway;
putting the V back into Prada; putting the V
back into the Boeing corporation,
to Pynchonaut minutemen — call it
love on the meshback strip, agency clones
roughnecking in the East Timor of our
syndicated dreams, eating the moochers
as they look in from the street, the scat houses
busy as footlockers, rear-actioned, one bad
granny smith upsetting the applecart. Pretzels
heap contagion, heap a radioactive
sheen over the arms bizarre, bearding the
latest crop of Cuban émigrés, another vote
for the white elephant in the room.
Who would say so without feeling
uneasy, a castogational, a constitutional,
a mem-shift, a lapiscurdle, a bushwack,
ramdink, a pastoralnak of centralisms
lurking in erstwhile presidential watercloset.
Breaking down the national fortune cookie,
the words we take for granted — hey,
you might know a meaning, but I don’t,
like the best words left out by Dr Johnson,
so eager for the Oxford degree.
Blow hard, die soft. Why not
estrapade, why not adoxography
made adaxt? Easy, collateral
and not beat up coinages. Keeping GOD
in tactical reverse — what worth the paper,
what printed on? Channelling
exoplanet hydrocarbon fun-for-all
hyperspace Exxon Valdez: think
Klash of the Killer Tykoons, think Plan 69
from Jurassic Jerusalem, think a wax stratosphere
you link from: mining the n-dimensional
RAM of untrammelled sleep. Played all over
I cuss the latent ribalds, but that’s
character hackle, deficit, miming lung-
collapse in slapstick edge-of-space
sit down come-what-may. Our urgency is
post-out: desperately seeking solution.
Silicon blogspockers, beaming it
point blank like zeroine. We come up
clear on the search front, leanings of hungletes,
what you don’t know fading in fast
in rearview smart-bomb-up-the-arse target practice.

Poem by Louis Armand and John Kinsella from
their forthcoming collaborative poetry collection Synopticon

Louis Armand is a Prague-based writer and visual artist, whose literary and critical writings have been widely published in journals such as Ctheory, Triquarterly and Culture Machine. His recent books include Literate Technologies (2005), Event States: Discourse, Time, Mediality (2007), Solicitations: Essays on Criticism and Culture (2005); and Incendiary Devices: Discourses of the Other (2006). He is also the editor of Contemporary Poetics published by Northwestern University Press in 2007.

John Kinsella is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays and prose — several of which have won literary awards. He is the editor of the international literary online journal Salt and the founder of Salt Publishing. His work has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, and Russian. His most recent book is Post-colonial, published in November 2009 by Papertiger Media’s imprint soi 3 gold. John Kinsella lives in Western Australia.