Stu Hatton



art in the age of digital reproduction


though who uses anything
for its intended purpose?

a poem may be fluked?

graffiti on t-shirt / speed
of its questions

‘i like this intrusion’
(quips the milquetoast / lost
in customer service country)

‘killing with kindness’: the phrase
becomes a regular

those still bossing bones
the old way

beneath mesh
of q & a, demography, i.d. burial

how to ‘decouple’ mind, shut
off audio / dissolve?

think a shut eye = sleep?

detector vans roam
counterfeit nighttimes

&/or
wrapper-rustle in abandoned cinema
kindles warm front in Wernicke’s area



the inadequacies of everyday discourse

Walled by packaging. They don’t know how else to function. City at sea. Aromas of coffee and oranges, maybe – but aren’t these purely ‘for effect’? They skipped through quarantine in their white skin, talking of wealth protection schemes. Mismanagerialism of ‘Australia’. The seekers, the thrillseekers, and the marketing flacks. Bio-markers of legal tender. Send in the loans.

*

There seems to be no way of unwrapping this ‘gift’. They are unprepared for silence. A city far to the right of its people. Pockmarked from an early case of smallpox, perhaps. The most virulent strains lie dormant in the backyard. The search item ‘Australia’ was not found. The power tools, the robocalling, and the killswitch. Bio-markers of astral fallout. Send in the clones.

amor fati


begin anywhere

working backwards from
                                              this low
                               (for example)

(no matter how dumped,
                               how misty
                you've played it)

expect some
through-thought
                               will arrive

a shuttle/shifter,
                                         e.g.:

‘let’s go somewhere
crowded, I feel
                     like a lot of people’

*

dropper,
drop through the city

nameless,
nearing no completion

‘nothing I would
                               or would not change’
in this weave/fabric



otherwise


wants a new form

formation
of what might be termed ‘ungrounded grounds’

… further heterotopias?

here we are, suffering in language

error of taking the dominant for the universal

other crossings being possible?

what’s the wild boar so
wild about, after all?

& what counts as
food, as sex, to this tribe?

where the system is vulnerable, wearing
protective gloves while sniffing fruit

corpse with limited functionality: false,
but not only false

the university a department store

fearful of positivities, of being ‘taken in’,
but and and but

as if rome might ready itself for such a fall,
reach agreement on the mourning process

it is no doubt forbidden to take
shots of these waste-grounds

miasma (persuasions, dissuasions)

‘we see no connection’ quips congressman
to network foreign correspondent

once you’re talking on this channel you
no longer know what you’re talking about

things were about to get physical, then
he hung up

have you a war name?

an instability commutes to another code-zone




Stu Hatton: poet & editor, Melbourne, deep end, random plantings, etc.
 
 
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