When prison poets grow old
wanting respectability & morning opens out
west through Streeton country
to abandoned mock-heroic gold towns
& funfair Jerilderies,
the yellow-spreading patchwork
of decades-old airfreshener,
& rail-lines & swamps—turning state’s witness
against all the retaliatory landscapes
hung from high horizon-lines
like meatworks carcasses—
perched stool-pigeonesque
among the anonymous eaters
of fish-&-chips, steak sandwiches & souvlakis—
shoulder to shoulder
muttering of the bad times,
obdurate as a muddied green-brown sky
of invaded peripheries:
ideally there would’ve been
no witnesses to metaphor’s death,
but these aren’t ideal times.
Intended otherwise,
the poem becomes a coded sum
of unaccountable things,
confessing with artless force
to lifelong inadequacies—
nor is the sunset it fails to describe
the candid or faithless picture you’d expect,
but spills out across the flat
the way words do
after a sentence in solitary confinement,
as if to take in everything.
Louis Armand is the author of the novels The Garden (2020), Vampyr (2020) and The Combinations (2016). His poetry collections include East Broadway Rundown (2015) and Monument (with John Kinsella, 2020). <www.louis-armand.com>
