Rhythmic Algae, or Just Another Echo Chamber
all is phantom / all is style / all is lit in the echo chamber
another risen moon on turbulent waters
in the metrics of the current all the feels talk as one
you are right in the chamber’s green pitch
mimicry / words haunt like nets you are wrong
in the echo’s hyperreal feed where twisting dolphins remain
abstract / proud of their sex in cobwebs
that bloom & fade w/ amazing punctuality / fluidity
a smooth green tide a look of innocence & disorder falls up
the present drops / lives in de basement
of a sea-green sky so damp so massive so rapt
in the echo chamber’s dark garments in the fretwork
rapidly acquiring the intolerance of belief
in the echo of the echo chamber’s meeting-place of dissemblables
is another chamber / it is equally vain booming
from bank to bank / the sun is green / memory’s rhythmic
algae / among the chamber’s disconnected figments
dank links jam / refracting the eternity of all things i pass thru
echoes like a small boat on an unknown sea
so unequally of clay & diamonds / granite & rainbow
in the echo chamber’s shadow climate
you are all of the above & all of the below:
Apropos of Nothing / I
(A Pathetic Anti-ballad)
just got woke from an internet coma / the Trump-era
boom in erasure poetry / critics call it
Frankensteined / but who is Doris Cross
making connections w/ she re
cognised her body / it’d been cut up & shared
round London teaching hospitals the poem narrated
by a ghost / Twitter & beyond
will persist after he’s gone / as for my feet
i got offline this morning totally
numb / as if they had been rent a part
involved w/ the idea of leaving things came stealing
perverse pleasure drives / we are surrounded by
every thing / that which is / is being / or is to be
the trunk of a tree / the music for it
fate gives us denial / a Hood / peace broken in two
pieces / allowed her to squeeze all of her ex
traneous material incl. emotion from this
swampy lake of indecision & obliterate the language
of the drooling one-eyed alt-right
deeply polarized / quite decent-like & chary
i logged back on to FB / did a bit of blackout on myself
& the bodysnatchers came for me again / “like literature”
Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and author of Rawshock, which won the
Grave Leven Prize for Poetry 2012, Jerilderies, and most recently, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press 2016). He lives in Sydney, works as a teacher, editor, & etc.
marrickville pause 