... it’s all dramatic: the world becoming shapes. A mound in the mid-distance, already sub- merged, those clutching the roof turning to barely blotches;

The cockatoos are cameras / with legs. They weigh washing lines / down the middle.

The violence the colony must use to naturalise itself, to vampirise its vitality in acts of dispossession/accumulation, is one that — when it is not converting land into material — must frame violent resistance as a fundamental break in its monopoly over life and death, over the land.

Death is the ultimate stamp of value. It was invented to sell arcade-like 1 Up repetition to the home market. To read politics in videogames is to learn to read necropolitically, which is why gamers don’t like politics.

I know you can hear, I’m talking directly / to the power socket, the transparent plug / each copper wire visible, like a bisection / of brain, pineal gland folded, a queen / around a void, the nest hovering around / them.

‘This again?’ and ‘why now? Why not years ago?’ are the two questions raised in each new translation of a non-English piece of Western Canon. There’s an understanding—of course a poetic cycle like the Duino Elegies is incomplete in English, there are endless new readings—and a simultaneous sense of wounded pride/suspicion: what was missing the last time around? What were you concealing from me? What are you concealing now?

It begins for the same reasons: spark, air and ready material, grassless under conifer. You study a wax diorama of the soon-to-be Antarctic jungle, ornithischian dinosaurs—eating a plastic fern—named after Qantas; you’re exhuming the bones of an Airbus A330 beside the Pteranodons,

as in not an event but the unspooling as in not working from definitions a new state to declaim “ok, this is normal now”, but conscious of hollowing, the dark souls of sense data a wasp’s nest growing in the walls

Over a table-surface the lampreys of fingers subsisting on air and nothing. They erupt into sentience as all things fossils admit them as honorary sediment at the seabed and their hands pretend