by LOUIS ARMAND

MORPHOLOGICAL FORECAST

a movement which stops short of conversion:
the long night is followed by alarming

disappearances-strange machines gather 
on the periphery ... wind machines, drought 

machines, fire machines-the floodplain
stretches out like an open intestinal tract-

the excrescence of rivermud & red soil
as incipient breakdown reaches outwards

in a metadiscourse of geographical re-
distribution-"internally fissured realities"

stark & membranous, a landscape of dismissed
objects posing as moratorium on the

intentional fallacy-articles of faith rend-
ring inoperable chemical bodies or

hamorrhaged in utero & downgrading
the imagined self as neurasthenic, symptom-

an assemblage whose elements are co-
alesced through disposability, synthetic 

& modularised as natural extension of 
the aberrant idea-though what stands for 

permanence is no more than seasonal flux
reduced to sinecurves, stationary & op-

positional wave patterns cut in the weathered 
sandstone, bordering the inland 

(like) a shoreline out-distancing itself & trans-
figured through margins of error-other

variables-counting back in a monotonous
obsessive derivation ("events casting their

shadows before") to the incipit vita nuova
written in calcinated flesh & crows

hanging over the corpse-to-be, like inverted 
commas describing its solvency 

(c) Louis Armand, 1999
Published in Erosions (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 1999)