Sunday, July 31, 2016

Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers — a poem


By John


Graphology Chronotype 21: Desecrations of Place by Pokemon Go and its Soldiers


The new colonialism
eliminates or integrates
the water’s edge. The Avon River
is replete and despite the chemical
run-off it can’t quite process,
birdlife is rife along its banks.

Perched in dying paperbarks
spoonbills eke out nesting plans,
and sacred ibises preen
themselves with optimism?
A problem with me using this term?
Really? Try the trampling-under

of birds and riparian vegetation
as the eye of the telephone
mediates the real world
into digestible auguries: and where
a rare white swan swings
its neck, a Pokemon perches,

scowling and grimacing.
Trodden under, this nature
of encounter, this exercise
routine to coax emergence
from the caves of gaming,
this tracking of each and every

cybernetic soul, this savvy
that marginalises non-participants
and swallows tales of capitalist
liberty with addicted gulps,
is a travesty of seeing. Too blunt?
Each step into privacy,

each sucking of another’s skin,
each moment of worship interrupted
and over-ridden, each threshold
crossed to gather location
to conquest, is the theft
of reality from non-participants,

all sucked into a vortex of deadlife.
The sacred ibises preen with optimism,
believing, along with spoonbills,
that they will nest and raise their young,
and see what they see with their own eyes.
Violation of geography, absorption of ‘outdoors’.



            John Kinsella


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