for Rick Harsch
Being alive was supposed to be some sort of achievement, like when you were a kid & they gave you a certificate just for showing up, but it didn’t feel that way. Picture Earth the moment all the screens went blank. One moment a fine fiasco, the next, the complete absence of it. Pretty soon, you wldn’t even know what the fuss’d been about in the first place. If the fuss wasn’t just what the mind threw up in a peristalsis of aftershock. Retrospection waking in the middle of a robot performing CPR, its eyes like blackhole photography, beads of sweat glistening on grafted collagen redolent of ancient TNT. You were floating in an unspecified volume, a pair of lungs under the sea. Intimations of tranquillity only after. The terrible convulsion of that first influx. All that time lying dead with yr eyes open. Not a mechanical proposition, the doors of perception, etc. As if yr eyelids had been burned away by the midnight sun. You knew something was over that wld never be again. Consumed by the silent dark envelope. The abominable void. Now floating, a disembodied eye, some morphic drone in place of yrself. Of yr nonself. The way “I” suddenly shrouds itself in an aura of impossibility. I am the thing that isn’t happening, that cannot happen. “I” has no traffic with mere disbelief. The impossible is concerned solely with facts. Like being dragged bodily to the execution chamber, only in reverse. By inhaling, I undo millions of years of evolution. A surge of cosmic feedback fans the darkened synapse into flame. They’re speaking, yes, they’re asking my name through a loudhailer. Thunder & nothingness. I am Roar in the key of zed, hahaha. I am Number, cycling on the monitor suspended halo-like above my head. 64. 59. I am Electrode Mesh. I am Saline Solution. I am Intravenous. Once a portal onto immensities, the screen has become a site of immense sadness. I weep. For my children & for my children’s children. For all the enzymes & mitochondria. For all the hypochondriac spasms & Hippocratic ectoplasms. I & my nude encephalograph sing of hot nights in Panama, Suez, Bab al-Mandab, the Straits of Hormuz, Malacca, Timor Gap, the Northwest Passage. Latex hands sooth the aching flesh with scented petroleum. I am Brent Crude at $200 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate. Dubai Medium Sour. I am mud honey & molasses. I am gold $5000 per ounce. I am Global Fuel Crisis, Waterfront Workers Union, Boycott & Divestment. I trip the light fantastic of all radioactive isotopes. The sickness that flows through me is the sickness of humanity, borne, flung, swollen, heaved across ocean & continent, atomised, embolised, symbolised. I am Pandemic by Stealth, creeping under the City, through sewer-dreams spewing from its toilets choking in airconditioned sleep. I am the cluster munition, the white phosphorous, sarin & mustard gas. I am Refo Man. I am Exodus, the shattered army in retreat, the shambling undead. I am Diurnal, Zoroastrian, Lunar. I am the terror & absurdity of War that makes you weak at the knees, yr sphincter malfunction, yr guts heave all over those nicely polished Florsheims. I am that Omnipotent Being colonising the universe, simply to infect it with fear & greed. Ecce Homo, motherfuckers. Well, I had a sense of humour once, too. Someone turned the AC/DC on & now it won’t stop. We’re playing doctors & nurses. They’re shining lights in my eyes. The pupillary reflex. I’m cranking it up in a 100,000-capacity stadium. Y’ve only got one shot at this, they said. The three Rs. Recall, Repeat, Resolve. The only way to survive the Test is to act in good faith, but they keep shifting the posts. Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be. A bed with railings along the sides in a room with barred windows. There was a forest here before, now there’s a car park. This is where the off-switch used to be, now it’s an advertisement. I’ve seen a million ceilings flash past on my way to the Big Operating Theatre, without ever getting there. Drones swarm all over me with their swabs & sprays & catheters & ventilators & cardiograms. I just want to breathe, I want to know nothing about any of this, I don’t need another competence. When I wake up I don’t even want to be here. Here where nothing exists. Here in the arsehole of nowhere. I’m sick of Artificial Intelligence pretending to be me, I’m sick of pretending I’m a sentimental AI. They shld’ve let me finish the job. You brought this on yrselves. Like revolution, a chain-reaction is only as ineluctable as its weakest link. You want me to put up a fight? Do yr worst, at least do something creditable. Time runs out, it hasn’t stopped running out from the moment we first met. You cld learn things from Time, you cld learn not to drown. Time is more than the sum of its parts, it is also the sky, it is also unseen things of molecular cleverness. Quite a show, eh? The squinters squint, the glass podium suspends the cloud-conductor’s grimace. A raped encore clarifies the scenery. How formidably y’d prosecute the innocent, given a bridge out, given some leeway. I’ll lie here till the clouds swallow the sun. Till the scum & algae of my too too solid flesh meet the black immiseration of the dead eye’s meniscus. The headlands weep & I weep with them. Hello. Who are you? I’m here but I’m not here, too bad. The world with its curtains drawn. Lights on in the genocidal termite mound but no-one home. They speak a language thankfully I don’t. More & more it’s like this & this is happiness? Someone’s idea of, at least. Why still here falling flat on yr face you clown? It’s callous to go on playing tricks, showing off, rubbing the deadman’s face in it. Even after the bones are cold, stone cold, a shivered stone under shivered water. And what light beyond that window! Regard the fly trapped inside the pane. Wing-hum & buzz like precious codeines. Oh how the ear sails through the air, as the fullstop comes to rest as if meaning it for once. As if the breath streaming out shall never stream back in. For I am the hole punched in nothingness, it says. It says.
Louis Armand is the author of the novels Lungfish (2026), A Tomb in H-Section (2025), Vampyr (2020) & The Combinations (2016). He is the founder of the Prague Microfestival. www.louis-armand.com
