Tryptamine skies and the forehand backhand falter
in earth’s revolutions, sun hoisted and tugged back.
So drops the flowers of acacia acuminata, pollen bundles
collated by green ants in the sunshower of letting go,
so receptor so inhibitor so serotonin flux to make season
where equilibrium is a callout and electron magnetic pulse
threat hypes the peninsula, that endless war to play out,
and antagonist to antagonist, paranoia to paranoia, threat
level to agonist response on & underground, compensating
in swing the erratic orbit that still operated within length,
the full stretch of the tether. And so the hoaxers exploit
the traumatic with mock sympathy, but not necessarily
those hiding behind constructed identities who want to speak
out of the frame, would never defame or appropriate the wood-
swallows’ astonishing and rapid fly-past, where from all these years
out of the picture we make of where the ball forehands
and backhands, is missed and tangles – mirror image of semantics,
deployers of speed but not trapped in the archive’s manipulation
into epochs and the big pharma watching over opportunities
of medicating the world’s wobble, the iodine pills – maybe maybe –
I could never take, just to take a personal instance which matters
not, really, but I am holding up one half of the game, an analogy
of hemisphere thinking over water supplies for summer,
and the trajectory of symbols that write out specifics of those
who dwell outside the corporate, outside the dwellings
made to hold us in tight, and the transports between. But leaves
and bark of the jam tree powder under the sun and I breathe
into my hay-fever matrix, and make psychological response
I am not used to, fitting neither map or mucous membranes
in this geography I can only draw and label in my sinuses,
and maybe, just maybe, my synapses. We play for the act
of playing, sharing, as physics lesson with no profit –
no winners, and we will never default across to the lies
of naming ‘totem tennis’ when we know the stripping away
of rights that comes with product placement, the jag,
exercise, correcting the angle of hands & arms to meet
the angle of the revolution, the play, the play of ants collecting
with jaws pincering and holding, carrying and releasing
underground. But not into silos, not in a military
sense, for all their soldiers patrolling beneath
the arc, the swing of the ball. Totem tennis.

Artwork © Florin Gorgan