Ali Znaidi
A Brief Historiographical Study of Pokémons
All the world is a PokéStop, and all the men
and women merely Pokémons.
Pokémons hunting each others.
When you make your entrance into life,
they give you a name, in fact, a game account.
Then you create and customize your own avatar.
Once created, your avatar is displayed
on a map using your current geographical location,
in fact your identity.
This world is a PokéStop.
You come here and collect items,
in fact, hunt items and other Pokémons.
Focusing on the game, you get lost.
Thus you forget about that agonized ant
in that nuclear plant, that candle between
the havoc wrought by an earthquake,
that toddler’s sandal in the mud; that scandal.
Go/ogle your prey! Go, go!
After all, life is a game, a competition,
and all weak Pokémons become the game.
This world is a PokéStop
where utopia and the abyss become interchangeable terms.
Focusing on the game,
you view your prey in augmented reality mode
on your mobile device, in fact, on the bedroom of your eyes.
Go, go! Nothing is totally real. Nothing is totally virtual.
Go, go! Everything is a game.
Don’t forget that the word ‘game’ is polysemic!
A Chimera of a Rainbow
When the body loses its GPS
the sun’s rays seem almost redundant
& the words & the scars.
The experience of loss is something akin
to a bohemian taking a bite off the rainbow
despite the lack of dental hygiene.
Colours only find a home in his migraine
like raindrops in the rain song.
—Nomadic representations of a body,
or an imagination of a silhouette?
Center? This is not a center.
—There’s nothing special in a navel.
At the edge of the sky,
there’s another chimera of a rainbow.
Ali Znaidi (b.1977) lives in Redeyef, Tunisia. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014), Mathemaku x5 (Spacecraft Press, 2015), and Austere Lights (Locofo Chaps: an imprint of Moria Books, 2017).