“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.

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Yana Bystrova, *Archer as Two Sumo Wrestlers,* 1993

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