The Trumpeter Drake's Tale

THE DRAKE'S TALE

Donald Trump, a man duck born in Queens
Didn't care what the p.c. thought that means
But went ahead and said whatever he thought
Spent his excess wealth: an electorate bought;
Outbid the pundits and cartooned the Greens.

The Grievance Bearers

THE GRIEVANCE BEARERS

They come like i-devices, pre-loaded
with grievance, heavy-loaded with many grievances
as if these were the default
applications of the many human souls bereft
of their main connection.

They come, a whole population loaded with
so very many grievances like
people well balanced to black humour by so many chips as if
epaulets on the shoulders with which
they shove all others of prior functionality aside.

When the grievance bearers dominate we will then have
our right democracy of full grievance!
as if this becomes us; as it does, a malfunctioning cellular growth
budded out of who we thought we
were - once we lost the way back to acknowledging

the primal grief.

The Enigma is Care-Born Hatred

THE ENIGMA OF CARE-BORN HATRED

Too much cure; pampering, a too
Lenient we, too great an application

Of care; it's like saving antibiotics
Overdone by granting too frequency

Creates biotic Resistance. So
This climate of the therapeutic,

This capital comfort is what foments
These home-grown self-hatreds

Breeding a murderous terrorism:
Out of some deep viral helix that

Screws in like biopoesis; the Black
Holes of that unplanetary gravity

Hid beneath the ordinary conceit
Of our fatal human inadmission

Wabi Sabi Recipe

WABI-SABI RECIPE


A burn-used
beaten
wok
of mild steel
left
a long time
unwashed after
rinsing
so it is now rimmed
in rust
making red
silhouettes of the last stir fry
over
the stove's green gas flame
like a meal print
long set
and gone cool by now
and then thrown with the scatter
but unfilled
with half a dozen blue mouldering
slices
of dry curled bread
seeded
with multigrains
that would grow if they had not
been baked
like no restaurant plate
and yet a surprising
catch of
the here and now of the vegetative eye
with its last residues
of lost
domesticity.

* * *

Oscar Winning Performance

OSCAR WINNING PERFORMANCE


The old split log fence pickets are bone set awry now
like teeth spavined from a long clenched elder jaw

still performing a millennium-championed function
as they yet keep the passing cattle and asses at bay

though more by habit than by putting them to test,
but the line they kept so long is now braced by trees

whose backs yet thicken to these inclement weathers
as much as the bark blocks anything like ears in want

not to hear passing speeches at the Oscars, to remain
deaf as post and pickets do and quite blind to celebrity.

Lost Man

LOST MAN

He went inside, maybe to clerking,
Or accounting, and lost himself in slippers
And nibs, in seconds, the clocked meal
Times, and his moment was lost, his time.

He went to the office, that soft opted
Occupation, as if to keep his hands clean
Of the dirty world, and not only lost himself
A man, he lost direction, his spirit potency.

A search was led by Major Hemingway
Big and game up wild gulllies and razorback
Ridge in the uniform beige of jungle gear
Portraying its every proof expedition manly

As he retreated to the bottle, one he'd lost
Or the snuff and laudanum of pretend divinities
With artifice of prophetic mantles to be a seer
Burnt with the self needling of his bought office.

Anti-lost men appeared like the Lawrences
D.H and T.E. both of whom went to the wild
For primitive vitality, its Acchilian limelight fame
And disappeared in the deserts of their unmaking

Women decided men, lost men were to blame
And so joined them lost, losing gift of parturition
In officing herself as man, as if the bifurcated soul
Of the carrot was not yellow in fork-tongued retreat.

* * *
Only the man of earth, poor man, salt or peasant
Went to the sky and sea, to earthen furrows as always
To keep the wolf knocking, the lion roaring at very doors
Toward which lost man kept throwing away his keys.

His Finest Operator

HIS FINEST OPERATOR


His daughter Kellie left school pregnant
and came home
with the little girl like a surprise daughter
he and his wife
loved like their own and when he had to
tow the excavator
in the yard on the home farm one day
Kellie came out
to drive it and enjoyed the hydraulics
in steering so she
asked him to show her the whole gammut
of lever twist and turn
and within a week she was out on the job
doing the demolitions
by driving the backhoe excavator. It was
a fine thing to watch
the feminine way she had in bringing
a chimney down and
soon walls and rooves were cleaned up
under Kellie's hand
as if swept clean by a proud housewife.

An Issue With Parental Warmth

A PROBLEM OF PARENTAL WARMTH


A hot child psychologist says
that just eight minutes a day
of really devoted warm love can be
enough for a child to thrive

So we must have high regard for such a cold
neglect-trained girl who often bought the alteration
by lighting a literal fire at the foot of their bed
to get her self-absorbed parents' attention

But of course they
charged her a repeat arsonist.

A Dream of Socrates Outside A WIndow With Children

IMAGE: Phoenix, Plato and Socrates with Child



A DREAM OF SOCRATES OUTSIDE THE WINDOW WITH CHILDREN


Socrates came to me with birds on, else
Flying beside
And a throng of youthful children hanging
On his every word
Strewn with herbs and leaves and flowers
Like pages
Torn from some young and ancient speech
And he said:
"After infancy now they take them, take them all
Into a room
And allow them to scribble, draw pictures, to colour in
Or to paint
And only much later to describe in writ words what
It is out
As if the room and window like the page defined
The world
As if the eye and the ear, the lips and tongue know
Not a cosmos."
"Whereas we always taught them outside, without frame,
Out of doors, else
On wet days took them up through the whole great palace
To show them views
From every quadrant of the compass, of what was danger
To guard against
Or grace. They learnt the aspect out of every possible window
But especially to see its frame."

When The Pines Sing Best

WHEN THE PINES SING BEST


Where the dark pines came down is
When the pines sing best, still fresh
As the men sit round opened sky and drink
Hot sugared tea after in tin pannikins
Like bit-heroes slaking a battle thirst


The axes stood shining on their handles
As the two-man machine-saw ticked off
In slowing time after the muscle pitted
At the wood with pine resin oozing out
Of log cut limbs, trees diced off of saws


Cooking a blade-released timbred aroma
That hung on the air like last wind song
Was breathed in quick as the men's voices
As they told tension lean stories of trees
And out again in their sighs and guffaws.

Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus

-MAP: Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus, by Joean Blaeu, 1663

ARCHIPELAGUS ORIENTALIS, SIVE ASIATICUS


Unsettling as is to know I was born and bred in the unmapped blank
Of unknowns on the Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus of 1663

Drawn in the Dikelands by the Dutch master cartographer Joean Blaeu
It's yet humbling for daydreams in a treasure map of might have beens:

Such as the great river of Australia that filled its inland sea
Where the floating islands of reeds carried villages of elder men

Out to the fishing roads where the annual hunt for bunyips
Set fires in the boats with which they hypnotised bunyip eyes

And lured them back willingly to unsecret their impossible cry
From the off the map loneliness of our undrawn Ultima Thule

Where the wait for lost companion men is still a borderless yen
As we yet explore its bunyip reaches, find advent in its mysteries.

A Bulldozer For The Peace

A BULLDOZER IN THE PEACE


Peace, philosophical peace, to tell
The truth, is in no way adequate
To our desire, as we grow up caught
In it; bypassed like most the world,
So we rush out to every passing action.


For the loaded log-truck's downhill braking
Squeal or its ten-gear changes climbing
The other side that breaks the oppressive
Valley schoolyard stillness. It knives inaction
That is a burden to us, the too great weight


Of bland existence, the long littleness of life
As it is otherwise, with its ignoble oppressive
Compromises, its bog earth duty, its unsung
Drudge wrangle below uneventful hills or skies
Investing weather talk to pass for conversation


A bulldozer at its dam-build rip and earthmoving
Is our breaking peace's happily vivid terre-a-theatre.
If a tree falls far in the forest the local boys will
Be all ears to the axefall or chainsaw wasp-hum
Tolling out before its watched and welcome crash.

Felt Soul Is Nothing Spiritual

NEITHER GNOSTIC NOR AGNOSTIC


Felt soul is nothing spritual! Based on feelinghood
Agnostics most veto what paganising gnostics seek in
Rushes of ecstasyhood
Out of a felt skepticism or born of felt need for sensation
Taking Christianity misunderstood
In their youthful want to see humans in some future Eden
(Without the murdered brotherhood)
As if denials could wish an arrested juvenile idealization
Out of its unlikelihood.

No. It's neither! Christian faith, come of outside Revelation
Is no feel good,
Nor its antithesis. Not base feeling, but real failure of doubt in
Those annunciated rude
Visitations, not much but wrestled epiphanies, angel sword dreams,
Calling to a manly hardihood
As asks too much, is taken in reluctance, even by great women,
Often to that saintlihood
So unearthly and otherworldy you might be right to call it alien.


* * *

The Ungreat UnAustralian Undream

THE UNGREAT UNAUSTRALIAN UNDREAM

To me a gobsmacking thing was blatantly on display
best (or worst) at the tea or coffee urn
in my first job with the all male crew for Statewide Land Survey
when kept officebound at Victoria's Forests Commission
in a way tenured office worker's sniped their inneundoed say
and minute's teabreaks took its hour's turn
for these dull comfort seekers and all-consuming power players
stupified by accepted ininitiative, devoid of imagination,
got to show gross contempt for what it was that they got their pay
as if work undone came to earn
that much more value for its rattle than anything achieved in a day
in rancour towards any attorning
fast-track or skill to expedite bureaucrats to generous fairplay

so I well understand the early 30s attraction of the New Guard
to the ex-soldier returned from WW1
on finding the value of time-servers at the sinecure's hurdleyard;
like keeping knowledge and a sum
of an inheritance or its news from a man needing word
to set up again and to run
a business or a trade, a way to make living, undergird
a life. It was as if a whole generation
of tenured employees were snake-aphids, time servers, public-turds
and no public servants, them who shun
achievement for small pleasure of power percentaged by the third

in doubtful awful hindrancing
rather that helping, impedimental freeloaders, bastardised burdens
in the body politic, myrmidon
parasites sucking the sap of their home tree due to be forfeited.
Like Eric Campbell finding a
'missing man', taking initiative, revealing on interviewing him
just what it was had been done
to him by his own best advocates, them he thought chosen
to advance his interests on,
and who he then left red faced as fools found out albatross;
a boss who then said: "You returned
men are a very unsatisfactory lot and I wonder that we
have anything to do with you."

those Anzac soldiers we laud for their ingenuity and initiative,
men who learnt to discipline and to lead
just like the do-anything wit to productive fruition of neighboured rural pioneers
whom the urbane parasites bleed
as if their smugly kerbed and curtailed faux-suave yet pathetic little lives
culminating in weekend barbies is all we need.

* * * *

Answering School

ANSWERING SCHOOL



One of the biggest flaws in school
Is that teachers are such underlings.
Thinking needs fresh mental tools
Given to questing, not pat answering.