They take death as their bride

Wrench-snatched from the rapacious hands of slow to start
Imperial Germany, Imperial England Victorious gave
To ever obedient Australia this tasty morsel of colonial
Land. The Trust Territory of New Guinea.
And Nauru Pleasant Phosphate Island, a second morsel to be savoured
And shared joint exploitation ANZAC & England. Captured, bypassed
Wither on the vine. And abused by the great torn up emptied.
And in 1989 Australia was sued for damages done to the island;

Islands placed in our trust as a token
North East quadrant of sun swaying dreams.
Bird of paradise dancing warriors, emerald snails,
Fruit bats and friar birds. Crystalline
Wave against wave, shore against shore
Ruinous trust curse, for us and our children and
Our children's children.
Bismark blood and Ironbottom sound sea
Not enough, never enough to compensate
Slaughters of Flanders and the Troad.
For the damage done to our desires.

And Little Billy told Wilson and Goerge
and all the rest “
Strategically the northern islands
(such as New Guinea)
Encompass Australia
Like fortresses.
They are as necessary
To Australia
As water to a city. “

And the ruling bourgeoisie more and more seeks salvation in fascism.
And in 1942 when the inevitable war with Imperial Japan came,
A handful of diggers and a radio tower on Manus.
Air raids and bombings and then a landing, and the diggers
Dove into the bush, destroying all the could not carry
Private Coker commented
"A hand-grenade,
and run like hell,
did the trick!"

And fighting the jungle and malaria.
Lieutenant Palmer
(cited for the Military Medal)
“He was unable to walk for several weeks
For severe septic infection on his arms and legs”
“Weakness due to several attacks of malaria.”
SO
They carried him out.
And Lance-Corporal McLean
Took command the four man patrol &
Found the Lutheran Mission firmly
In Japanese hands. So they beat it out of there
Fortuitous, heavy, jungle obscuring rain
And the relentless beating sound
Of rain rain rain pounding covered the retreat.
Through swamp and jungle and cutting grass
And illness and starvation, and then on boats
The sailed the IJN cruised sea
And overland and over mountains
And final hope home Cairns in May.

The ruling bourgeoisie are trying to solve The problem of markets
By enslaving the weak nations,
By intensifying colonial oppression &
Repartitioning the world anew by means of war.

Finally February leap year day 29 1944
Diggers and Doughboys crawling up the Solomons Islands
And the Trust Territories landed Manus Island.
Guadalcanal, Milne Bay, Buna, The Bismark Sea, Lae,
Rabaul, Scarlet Beach, Kokoda. Diggers and Doughboys.
ANZAC sad sack dog faced privates fought with
Bayonet and machine gun and flame thrower and demo charge
And grenade and shovel and cannon and aircraft and bare hand.
And the things they saw and did died
Broke them 1000 yard shell shock stare.

Crawling mud, roaring insect, snake bite green hell jungle.
Pushing back venal bestial racist fascist
Anti-comintern ideology. Rolling back the fascist
Offensive. Manus Island attacked, and shortly recaptured.

Well, now time passed and now it seems.
Everybody's having them dreams.
Everybody sees themselves.
Walking around with no one else.

Dreams of a land without the others, dreams of an end to history
And end to the stresses and uncertainties of capitalism.
Dreams of an obsolete discredited ideology.
Old man old school old timey dreams of controlling the external.
Dreams that somehow it will end differently, that we can close
Our eyes and everything will somehow be all right.
Fearful thoughtless dreams, relaxed and comfortable.
RATHER -

Fascism is a most ferocious attack by capital on the mass of the working people;
Fascism is unbridled chauvinism and predatory war;
Fascism is rabid reaction and counter-revolution;
Fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people.

And now we can imagine on this very same spot -- wild eyed
Dare-death opium and hunger fuelled banzai attack
Shooting from the hip and shouting loud the Japanese Marines
Fall upon the position. Hacking and attacking and striking out
In all directions. Indiscriminate. And after the smoke and noise
Littered broken bodies of empty dreams the result of lies, a cynical
Grab-lust for power. Unbridled chauvinism. Rabid reaction.
Predatory war.

And then, as if a final spitting in our face
Historic irony, it was here, when we almost half-believed
In a new world, in a better world,
In a world that does not resort to war
And endless horror.
It was here on Manus
In 1950 Australia held the last trials
Japanese war criminals.

And did those geebungs and dubbos, did those inner city hooligans
Signing up for adventure, signing up for their first pair of shoes,
In fear and bravado, did they, shivering in their watery slit trenches;
Did they do all this, so much waste and horror, did they liberate
The camps so that now we too can have camps?

Suicide and Revolutionary Action

If the wealth of society declines the worker suffers most of all, and for the following reason: although the working class cannot gain so much as can the class of property owners in a prosperous state of society, no one suffers so cruelly from its decline as the working class.

Let us now take a society in which wealth is increasing. This condition is the only one favourable to the worker. Here competition between the capitalists sets in. The demand for workers exceeds their supply. But:

In the first place, the raising of wages gives rise to overwork among the workers. The more they wish to earn, the more must they sacrifice their time and carry out slave-labour, completely losing all their freedom, in the service of greed. Thereby they shorten their lives. This shortening of their life-span is a favourable circumstance for the working class as a whole, for as a result of it an ever-fresh supply of labour becomes necessary. This class has always to sacrifice a part of itself in order not to be wholly destroyed. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 - Marx

I suppose I should start at the beginning and say a few words about myself, and how it was I came to write this thing. Then I will lay out some of my thoughts in a breathless run-on sentence sort of way. After a bit of this nonsense, I will, knowing that the point of philosophy is to change rather than interpret the world, attempt to offer a few utopian suggestions. So let us, as they say, crack on with the confusion.

One Sunday Father's Day morning I fired up my browser and looked at various news articles to find out if we had gone to war while I slept. Pleased as I was that here was no new war, I continued scanning the news and read this Fathers Day article in the SMH.

Being at least passing familiar with Churchill's black dog, I felt it to be my civic duty to add my two bobs worth to the table. Even if this petty amount will not allow me to buy a nice dinner, or even a bottle of wine, my small donation does at least allow me to partake of the conversation. As much as anyone else; more than some, but less than others, I feel I have the life experience to talk about this subject. Not as a professional, nor as one trained in these things, solely as one who has lived a life and met many people, and as one who has suffered with depression.

In The Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens offers, what seems to me, to be an appropriate quote for this discussion. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it. So too with depression. It is becoming a bit of a fashionable ailment to have these days.

So fashionable indeed that every other football player and retired Liberal Party hack brags of their fight with depression. So fashionable that there is talk of a cultural epidemic of suicide, while simultaneously there is much soft and muddle-headed talk about the main group killing themselves. That is the group of working-age men.

But what does this mean, who are these working-age men? There is a hint perhaps when Brendan Cowell says "It wasn't until I escaped it (it being his boyhood home of Cronulla) that I went whoa, hang on, that's not normal." This raises a question as to what is normal, a question far too vast to be answered in this article. More importantly it forces us to face the question as to who is killing themselves. Maybe it means that working class men kill themselves at a higher rate than others.

In the Telegraph newspaper, discussing a match between the Sharks & the Roosters, we get this "you’ve got a working-class team against the golden boys from the Eastern Suburbs.”

So if we find the Telegraph describing an area as working class, knowing how fearful the press is about even acknowledging the class nature of society, I think that one should take notice. So let us take this as a basis. Brendan Cowell mentions that he knows at least ten suicides of friends from his days in the Shire. He then states then when he escaped he realised that this rate of self murder was too high, it was not normal.

I too came from working class neighbourhood and I too can point to a similar number of suicides, and attempted suicides among my friends and friends of friends. Sadly my career has not been a success, so I have never escaped my working class heritage, so I may often a different viewpoint.

Now I do not want to be seen as criticising Mr Cowell, as I do not know him, but I am sure that his heart is in the right place, I am sure that his actions are situated in an environment of great affection and love, and an equally great loss of sorrow for his departed friends. And for the sake of this essay I am happy to agree with him that too many people are dying. This is more an attempt to view the situation through the prism of class consciousness.

Rather than mentioning smoking pot as being a contributing factor let us look deeper. This is not to say that drug and alcohol dependency has no part to play in suicidal ideation. But from where does this mass addiction arise? Knowing how aggressively the enemies of the working people promote a drug and drinking culture among working people, one can rightly ask how great a role do cynical business people play, how much do multi-millionaire beer barons, rewarded as they are with knighthoods and other awards, generate this epidemic, this culture of self harm? This is not to say that they have produced this crisis, but one again may rightly ask if they are doing much of anything to help stem the tide of young male self harm. For the commodification of alcohol, and therefore alcoholism must surely play a profound role in the deeper, structural causes of suicide among working age, working class men.

Watching on DVD the charming, bittersweet Woodley series with my children, this sad, lonely, dejected character seemed to be a symbol for my thoughts. For the hero was lost after his marriage had broken down. Forced into poverty, our hero was then compelled to take a menial, soul destroying job. Dressed in a humiliating costume, he had no choice but to travel the streets of the city, handing out leaflets. Alone and isolated, having lost control over his own life, he was abused and ignored by the passing crowd. In the end it all became too much and he stood on the bridge looking at the reflections of the busy city on the inviting surface of the Yarra River. Contemplating ending his life. For the sake of the series he, at the last moment, remembered the love of his child and backed away from the abyss. As reality differs greatly from fiction would he not, in real life, have jumped? If he did not jump, would his life not become a endless drudgery, devoid of hope, and the chance of long term happiness?

Many studies into workplace stress point to a simple fact, that it is not working hard that causes stress, it is not even overwork that causes stress, rather it is the loss of control that causes stress. It is pretty much true that the lives of working people are identified by having no control. We are told to be at a certain place at a certain time, we are not allowed to eat, or even to piss or shit unless the clock allows it. Our lives are controlled by other people, and there is constant uncertainty due to failures to meet arbitrary KPIs. Even worse poor decisions by management will result in large numbers of workers in an enterprise being let go in an attempt to solve a problem that they have not created.

In a world were to be poor is the unpardonable sin, were visions of wealth and power are pushed into our faces at every turn, in a world were all that matters is money, in a world based on exploitation, in a world where the short term profits matter more than the training and extending of the workers, one has to ask, not why do so many kill themselves, but rather why do more people not kill themselves.

For the ones that fall by the wayside, for the young men who buy into the false ideology of the strong man, for the ones who live dreams of football heroics and nothing more, egged on by zealous, vicariously living parents and equally zealous, heedless of the future coaches; life becomes a bleak world with no future and no hope, life becomes little more than a five day grind dulled only by mindless entertainment, and a weekend of binge drinking. Equally for the soldier sent off to foreign lands to kill or be killed, and returning home to little of no support from the war mongering old men who sat out the bullets safely in air conditioned bank vault offices, it is not so much that governments do not spend enough time and money and effort on mental health, although this is part of the problem, it is much deeper and simpler. They, the ruling class and their allies, do not care about poor working class men and women who have no money and therefore no power.

To paraphrase and extend Aristotle -- we all, by our very nature, take pleasure in learning things, in gaining mastery over ourselves and the external world. This changing the external world to our image is what gives us pleasure. This mastering pleasure could come through work or through art or raising a family, or even from our hobbies and interests. When this natural desire, this natural right, to become full members of society is denied to large segments of the population, when their heads are filled with fear of the other, or with vain ideals of getting rich, many will fall and be ground down into the dust, or like the raisin that withers in the sun.

Maybe in a world with no future, in a world ruled by fear and the love of money, suicide can be seen as the final cry of the heart in our heartless world, maybe suicide is the only way left for people who have nothing, and who have no future, to gain some measure of mastery over the external world. Lied to and molested by churches, cynically abused in the quest for power and then discarded by politicians, slipping through the cracks of an underfunded and unappreciated education system, scorned and reviled by a vicious and hateful media that loves success, and abominates failure, what is a poor boy to do? Maybe we should see suicide as that final cry of NO that says I would rather die on my feet than live the rest of my live as a wage slave, under debt bondage.

Of course it would be wrong of the reader to think I am calling for a mass outbreak of suicide, or that I want working class men to kill themselves. Indeed I would wish the exact opposite, for the cure for isolation and despair must surely be action. For many, however, this is not even an option. Since the good old days of Reagan and Thatcher the rulers and ideologues of our current crisis have not only smashed the working class organisations, but more importantly they taken from us optimism, they have destroyed the very idea of the co-operative spirit. So the “working age men” who kill themselves are ones who have been left with nothing and with nowhere to turn. Force fed images of success and manly pride at every turn they have nothing to fall back on, they have no vision for the future. Little one so many fall into the grave prematurely.

I can understand how this article can be seen as offensive, can make some upset. I am speaking, in an informal, mostly anecdotal manner, based on my experiences with depression and suicidal thoughts, and the observations of those whom I have met over the years. I have left out a myriad of possible causes of suicide, I was only wandering around some of the motivations for suicide. In my investigations I have chosen to focus on social economic factors that could lead one to self murder. There are many more issues that have not been named in this article, for this is not the place to enumerate all of the potential causes and triggers of this drastic solution. I understand how this topic may bite with some and cause anger or sadness. That is not at all my intent, like most things my intent is to make sense of the world as I have experienced it.

So what I would like to do now is to offer up some suggestions that may help. First off I would agree to more mental health spending and all those official, bureaucratic sort of solutions that people love to talk about on chatty, vapid current affairs shows. As to the medical, chemical solutions I can only say that I am not so keen on having a generation of young men taking anti-depressants for the rest of their lives. As I am not a doctor so I am not able to comment much more on that aspect of the suicide crisis solution.

I do know that, like the junkie who comes out of rehab and goes back to her old life with her dealer boyfriend, and her crappy housing and her lack of a job and future; or the prisoner released from gaol, set back with no support into the old habits with his old mates, so it is for those who attempt or even contemplate suicide. The crisis averted, the system moves on to the next crisis not able to give the patient the time and effort required.

There is no sense in “curing” a patient, if like the junkie or criminal, they return to same quiet desperation, if they return to no job (or what is even worse than no job, a mindless one-sided sort of work) and no future.

So what needs to be done?

In no particular order, but set out like a list for rhetorical reasons, I have some practical solutions. Maybe not practical in the way a small government, free-market accountant would think of as practical, but practical in the sense of realistically demanding what it is we all should have from life; that is impossible freedom and everything, the entire world. Firstly one must look into education. When Plato wrote of his utopian republic he spent most of the book discussing the need for education. True progressives have always known the importance of education. For education is the royal road to success in a capitalist society. Short of being born wealthy or having some extraordinary good fortune, education is the key to work in our current and future knowledge economy. So access to quality primary and secondary education and affordable high quality child care, as well as access to free tertiary education is the bare minimum for reaching the worthwhile goal of halving the suicide rate in ten years.

In our society of over production and mass consumption it is now possible to cut hours of work to no more than thirty hours a week. People should not have to work any more than two or three days a week, while food and essentials can be made effectively free. Workers who are sick or injured, or mentally disturbed should not be treated as thieves first and humans a distant second. While I do not have the figures at my fingertips, I would be willing to believe that all the fraud against all the dole offices in all of Australia would be significantly less than the seven billion dollars in profit the CBA made last year.

In the same way that poetry ossifies as it moves away from song, so too psychology turns to stone as it ignores and moves away from the class struggle. As important as the sexual urge is in development of the self, so to the urge to work and gaining control over the external world is of equal importance. If one sees the concept of Eros as being greater than the sexual urge, if one understands Eros as being the generative spirit, than one can understand the need for an understanding of class struggle in psychology. Further from this one can see that the role of medical intervention in the suicidal crisis must be something more than getting a person to a position where they are once again content with wage-slavery and debt bondage, with alienating their labour as an end in itself. There is no reason to save someone from suicidal feelings if they are not going to be supported, if they are forced to go back into their poor suburb, back to insecure working conditions, forced to rely on their own devices, and treated like so much refuse that can, and should be tossed away.

Whether it is the soldiers used and abused in imperialist wars, or the unskilled worker, or the single mother, the support should be there and it should be ongoing.

Will this solve the problem completely? No it will not, but with a shorter work week and a more democratic workplace, with greater education and broader training, with proper and on-going support society can go a long way to reducing this tragic statistic. As this would cost money and require effort, sadly in our world dominated as it is by greed and short term idiocy I am not confident things will get better.

shadows and sighs

Long streaks of early morning shadows
Fall right to left across the paddocks
And they shrink each time I turn my head
To look out the window, clear and windy.
Overnight the wind howled and groaned.
And I thought, no one happy until death
Can the dead be happy? And then my son
Said, be careful for what you wish for.
What? I was just thinking, well I thought
About spiders and they are creepy
And then I thought about this cartoon
And it is a bit creepy,
And the moral of the cartoon is
Be careful for what you wish for

And I was reading from the Oxford
Illustrated History of Greece
And the Hellenic World.

Child? Why do you cry?
Why is your heart so full of grief?
Speak now! Do not conceal!
These things in fact came from Zeus,
After you prayed.
Arms outstretched.
Palms up supplication.
You prayed all the sons of the Achaeans
To be hard pressed, huddling sterns of ships.
Wanting for you, suffering shamefully.

With deep sighs and groans swift footed Achilleus spoke
O my mother, all these things have been granted of Zeus;
But what pleasure is there now that my love has died?

My Years of Freedom

Some I entered a short story contest for Adult Literacy - using the usual arts bureaucracy sort of language the contest was '...for the creation of exciting, inspiring and challenging stories to support and encourage adult learning, and to highlight the fact that "It's never too late ... to learn to read".' I did not expect, but would have welcomed the cash, to win. And here you can find out just why my story lost.

---

By all accounts Charlie had led a hard life. He was born in 1965 in a
small nothing of a rust coloured falling down town in outback
Queensland. His Father worked as a truck driver at the local coal
mine. He worked long shifts doing dangerous work. Over the years the
stress and the drink took hold of him. One day the thunderbolt
struck. He was promptly fired after causing an accident on the work
site. Having made a bit of cash, betting on a horse race, he was well
and truly drunk at the time of the accident.

Charlie's family was forced onto relief, onto the dole. The family's
average everyday rural poverty was transformed into a desperate
struggle for survival. As the amount of money coming into the house
lessened so the threats and the bullying and the violence
increased. Charlie hated living in his own home, he hated living in
fear, but mostly he hated the fact that he was too young and little
and so could not protect his mother.

One small mercy was that Charlie's father would spend as much time
away from the family home as possible. He would try to scrounge up a
demoralising days work here and there, often getting paid in rum or
beer. Maybe helping a local cocky shore up a lazily leaning
fence. Sometimes going off to help muster cattle, or digging a trench
for an irrigation scheme. To make ends meet his mother grew
vegetables, and looked after some of the local kids. His father would
shoot feral animals, cashing the pelts in for the bounty the state
government offered. The children gorged themselves with thin rabbit
stew on such days.

There was never enough money. There was never enough food to feed the
growing children. There was never enough of anything. Whenever
Charlie's dad had more than a couple of bob he would shoot off down
the pub to drown his sorrows; in the selfish manner of the weak men
with families who drunkenly wallow in self-pity and self loathing. One
long humid steaming summer days eight hour long drinking session ended
with a fist fight. Inflated, ranting male drunken froth pride wounded
over some trivial slight. Charlie's father was arrested for the king
hit. A punch caused by nothing which in turn caused the victim to fall
with a sickening thud. The back of his skull shattering when landing
on the stone guttering of the footpath in front of the local hotel.

Before the sun set on that day two more isolated rural families were
plunged deeper into merciless poverty due to that one single,
mindless, drunken punch.

Before the father left the family home, before he started his stretch
in a cold hard cell, he had got Charlie's mother pregnant. The
pregnancy went well in the first trimester, nothing beyond the normal
nausea and aches and pains and cravings. With the terror of the house
being locked away, it was like a dark storm cloud had dissipated. For
Charlie it felt like the first rains that break a desiccating
drought. The heart lifting sensation of the cooling wind carrying the
smell of the coming rain. The far off rumble and flashes of
lighting. Charlie's mother seemed as happy as he ever remembered her
being. She had more time, now that the demands of her husband had
disappeared, to spend on her children. She would often be found
working in the small vegetable garden round the back. She could be
found feeding and fussing about the dozen or so chooks that a
neighbour kindly donated to the family. The kindness extended to the
effort of building a chook yard from old bits and bobs found around
the property to protect the precious birds from the senseless blood
lust of the dingoes and foxes and wild dogs.

And then one day, a month or so before the due date of her child
everything went wrong. The drought breaking rain become a raging
tempest. Charlie, being the eldest of the three children in that small
rusty dusty house, tried his childish best to save her life. With no
telephone, he yelled at his younger brother to run the mile and a half
to the nearest property to get help. By the time assistance came
Charlie was already hugging his dead mother, soundlessly sobbing
without end, unable to even articulate his grief. His little boy tears
mixing with the dark deoxygenated blood that poured without stopping
from out of his mother. His little boy innocence poured out of him,
tears and snot and sweat mixed with the blood that searched out and
found the many tiny cracks and joins in the hand made floor and
dripped onto and mixed with the rusty dry dirt so full of the
heartache and betrayal of the history of this land. His breathless
brother sweaty and covered with dust, his infant sister sitting in the
blood, slapping her hand and crying for reasons she was too young to
understand.

It would be decades before he saw his sister again. He never spoke
with his brother again after that day, the younger brother had been
killed in a car accident.

Needless to say that with such a shocking start to life Charlie had
very few chances as he grew into adulthood. He was separated from his
brother and sister. They were all sent to different foster
families. Not knowing where his siblings were, Charlie was shuttled
from agency to agency, sent to a series of unsatisfactory foster homes
and brutal or indifferent schools. He spent most of his time angry,
fighting with teachers, fighting with the other students, fighting the
bullies, preying on the weak. He banged his head against the brick
wall education system. So the young Charlie, alone in the world, was
overlooked and misplaced and eventually given up on by the
system. Soon he was not bothering to show up for school. He had
dropped out of school more or less completely by the time he was
fourteen. He could read a bit, but only with difficulty and he was not
able to write more than his name.

At a young age he, like his father before him, found himself locked
away in the a cold in the winter and stinking hot in the summer
Victorian era prison. He had tried to rob a bottle shop. He was
arrested when an off duty police officer unluckily entered the bottle
shop at the time Charlie was demanding of the publican's nephew all
the money in the till. Charlie was twenty five years old, and he was
stuck away in prison. He had lost all contact with his sister and
brother. He had refused to even speak to his father when he was
paroled, and Charlie's father was only too happy to ignore and reject
his troubled son. Charlie no longer even knew how to get in contact
with any uncles or aunts. By any sort of reckoning, unless something
was to seriously change in his life and quickly, he was destined to
a life of poverty, drug abuse and petty crime, and most likely an
early death.

His luck, however, was about to change. Who could imagine that a stint
in prison could be a life changing and life affirming event? As luck
would have it he was housed in the same block with a tall, strong,
handsome and charismatic aboriginal elder. Not many of the prisoners
knew his real name they all called him 'Goanna'. He laughed his rusty
rough as the outback eroding dust laugh when questioned about his
name. 'Everyone calls me Goanna, cause I used to like to fuck every
woman I met. See the goanna has two dicks, and all the ones in my mob
they would say I fuck like a goanna. Name sorta stuck. One day I met
up with this nice white girl, she was sweet, and we had a good time
together. Until her racist dad found out about us. The bastard was a
local cop. I was eighteen, and she was only seventeen, so the bastard
did me on statutory rape charge. That was years ago, but if you are a
black man and you catch the eye of the police, well let's just say I
have been in and out of gaol ever since.' He slapped the green
custodial painted walls and laughed. 'This place is my country now,
and this mob is my mob. Eh?'

One day Goanna, who was also a member of the Communist Party took
Charlie aside. Standing over the younger man, he said, "Mate. Blokes
like us, we're shit, our lives are shit. We're shit. We got nothing,
we got nothing in our past, and our future is more of the same,
eh. Past, future, present it is all fucked. We just got shit, eh? Our
life is a constant struggle everyday. You just wanna drink and drug it
all away eh? You only get one chance. How do you think you can make a
better life for yourself, eh?'

Charlie thought, and after a little while he replied, 'We gotta get
ourselves a whole heap of money, I reckon.'

'How you going to do that boy? Eh, how you gonna do that?' Charlie
mouthed words, but no sound came out. 'You gonna rob a bottle shop, or
a bank? That will just bring you back here.' The silence of Charlie
was answer enough for Goanna. 'Books eh. Books are the weapons you
need boy, books are the tools which will allow you to build a better
life. You want me to teach you to read?"

Charlie thought for a moment, He remembered how mother would sometimes
read from an old tattered fairy book to him at bedtime. She had wanted
him to go to school, to stay in school. Who knows how things would
have been for me if she had lived. I owe it her, to her memory. 'What
the fuck have I got to lose, I've got five years in this shit mound,
what else am I to do with my time? What the fuck else...'

With Goanna working with him and urging him on, and picking him up
when he fell Charlie quickly built up his confidence and
abilities. And soon he made his teacher smile. When the screws found
out what was happening they saw to it that Goanna was moved to a
different wing of the prison. Charlie tried to write him letters, but
his spelling and his handwriting was atrocious, and his grasp of
grammar was not much better. So he redoubled his efforts, it was not
enough to be able to hunt and peck at the words and struggle to make
sense of sentences, he had to gain fluency. He had to work
harder. After a few months Charlie was able, with pride, to send and
receive letters to his friend and mentor, Goanna.

I first heard this amazing, inspiring story in an interview with the
local ABC radio station on the National Day of Literacy. Charlie spoke
with passion about the story of his life. I felt the need to track him
down and hear his story and to write it down. He was joy to be
with. We had many long conversations. Charlie, not his real name,
would not let me use a tape recorder, or even to take shorthand
notes. I would franticly scribble in my notebook after our
meetings. So there may be mistakes, and misquotes in the story, but
even it is not exactly the story of Charlie, there are plenty of
stories of men and women who have overcome the odds and turned their
lives around. Almost all of these positive results were the result of
education. Charlie is but one of many. Granted more people fall by the
wayside, but we can feel a certain reverse schadenfreude when we are
able to hear about the victory of the true battler.

I will leave the final summing up to Charlie. I have done my best to
accurately capture his words.

It seems absurd to say, but those years in prison were my years of
freedom, the time when I was most free. I devoured everything I got my
hands on. I attacked learning with all the hunger of a sailor in a
knock shop after a long stint at sea. I read the Bible, a book which
was easy to get in prison. I read tattered, battered dog eared and
smudged old westerns, I read the letters to Penthouse which circulated
around the prison uni like currency. The Salvation Army officer who
came to visit us got me copies of classics like Plato and
Shakespeare. I stayed off the drugs and the harsh gaol house grog. I
got my hands on a dictionary, and using Malcolm X as my guide I copied
out every damn word of that book. How much I learned from that effort,
I can never say, but it was my infinite university in a small
room. All the knowledge of the world can be found in a good
dictionary.

With my new found skills I became a hero among the prisoners. I was
able to make a few dollars and pouches of tobacco, to earn some prison
respect by writing out letters for criminals to their family. I wrote
heart felt love letters to wives, girlfriends or boyfriends. I
modified angry replies for Dear John letters. I also wrote letters to
lawyers and social workers. Too many times I found that the prisoners
often drew the short straw, as they were not able to read, and so were
not able to fully understand the intricacies of the cases against
them. I am proud to say that I was able to help quite a few of these
sad broken men, many of whom were suffering from mental illness and
should not have been in prison. This lasted until the authorities
understood what I was doing and how I was helping the inmates. For
many of the cases against them were weak, and being ignorant the
accused ones were able to be intimidated into accepting gaol terms
that they did not deserve. The prison staff used the fact that I was
able to get my year twelve diploma as a weapon against me and my
fellow inmates. The governor organised for me to be paroled early. It
seems funny now, but I was sad to leave the prison, I felt I was doing
good work, that I had found my calling.

I was thrown back into the world, with a new set of clothes, and
$75.40 in an account that my 'wages' for prison work had been
deposited. After a few months of confusion and despair, caused by
adjusting to being free and at not seeing my prison friends, I roused
myself. My life of freedom began by my going to the local library and
pouring over records. Soon I was able to happily track down my sister,
and sadly I learned about the death of my brother.

I enrolled in and graduated from the local university. Now I fly
around the world and I work talking about the problems caused by
illiteracy, and advocating for prisoners rights. I have a family and a
future. I will try to instil a love of books in my children. Goanna
was right, books are the tools we need, the tools that can allow us to
lead the life we want to lead. Books are weapons that allow working
people to fight back, not just for ourselves, not just for our
immediate families, but rather for all of the poor and vulnerable and
oppressed the world over.

---

I am in the fortunate group of people who are able to read and write. I learned to read in school, as a child, so I have no real understanding of the depth of problems for those who are not as lucky as I have been .

I do know that for years adult literacy was a very important goal and organising tool for a revolutionary proletariat. Too important, I think, to leave to the arts administrators and the beauacrats and time wasters at DEEWR, but that is apparently our fate in the current age.

Not, as I said, being unable to read, on hearing of this contest my mind at once jumped back to the half remebered fragment of a reading of the biography of Malcolm X. He spoke of reading the dictionary in his time in jail, and transcribing all the entries. This was the revolutionary edge of adult literacy I had in my mind when writing this piece.

I leave it as an exercise for the reader as to how well, or how poorly I hit my target. The winners can all be seen here.

Alone

---

On her own, on the small satellite
Orbiting around gas giant Jupiter.
Planet spinning, patterns swirling
Rusty red brown hydrocarbon colours.
Flashing glowing gathering lightning
Deep within the roiling endless clouds.
An accident on the mining site.
The others all dead, communications down.
All on her own, alone on the dusty
Frozen boulder. And Jupiter huge fills
Her vision, fills the dark radiating space
Sky, glowing a false light from the far off sun.

Colours of the planet. Echoing
Of children's over excited, uncensored
Direct from young brain to hand to paper.
Children's crayon drawing wild and free.
She thought of her loved daughter's drawings
Her son's bouncing bounding rolling walking.

Her husband, tell him I love him very much,
He knows. Echoing into the void of space.
Tears well up and blur her sight, smearing
Colours like the child's chalk drawing
On the pavement, after a rain storm.

She composed herself, stood herself up straight.
And said aloud, to no one, I shall go
On my own terms, at my own time. I will not
Allow random accident, liquid chance
To dictate to me. I shall decide myself.

She lifted the metallic UV blocking
Shield, unscrewed the holding screws.
Epamerai, she half recalled long
Ago Pindar verse, things of one day.
I stand for my own will, for my own self.

She lifted the helmet, letting the bitter
Cold thin cold emptiness enter her lungs,
She let the endless darkness smother her.

---

Some people may see this as an apology for suicide or euthanasia. I
suppose in a sense it is, but more importantly it is a paean for human
freedom. The other main theme was of course the still horrible
statistics concerning industrial accidents and deaths.

pic comes from http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/images/browse/jupiter/jupiter.jpg

Dream Factory Manifesto

---

How can we speak of a dream factory?

Socialism?

Capitalism?

Classless Society?

What are our dreams? A better life, a life of co-operation, of working together.

What is a factory? A place to work, where things are made. From Blombos Cave to the Apple plants in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, we come together to make things. Man woman young old black white. Work is what unites us, the coming together to work. Work must become play.

Even deeper work ((think elastically) and the complex of changes (social and physiologically) and feedbacks involved) created us.

Does work create language? Have women always done the bulk of the work? Did women create language?

Factory from the Latin factor. a maker, a doer, performer, perpetrator, one who strikes the ball.

We need to turn away from the dystopian narrative. We need to create utopias - we can write of utopia and mock the plutocrats.

Thomas Moore brought the word Utopia into being. The idea is old, older than the name, think of the utopian farces of Aristophones. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pisthetaerus chases away the poet, the town planner, the inspector, the oracle peddler, the law mason.

Pisthetaerus becomes like a God.

Utopia; what is the meaning? It could be outopia - no place, or it could be eutopia, good place. Does it matter? Moore gives us only utopia, teasing us or misunderstanding? Culture arises equally from the fact of not remembering the quote correctly as it does the note perfect recital.

Tales and myths, or so I am told, are powerful emotional tools that pass culture and morality down the ages. Let us not pass down the morality of our parents, of the police man, or an edginess that actually dulls.

Reject bourgeois concepts of conflict in literature! Let us build to our own climaxes!

I am not naive, but I seek to become naive.

Johnny Rotten sang "There is no future", it was implied but not understood, unless you make it yourself.

He also sang, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme." Let us write, let us spew, let us draw, let us extrude, sing, scream, paint, cry, act, shout, perform, build our dreams. For ourselves.

No more tales of junkie lusers - realistic and gritty as they may be, they only reinforce the power of Kapital over us, they only reinforce our alienation.

Reject the cult of violence and death. we are, our children are fed a steady diet of death, let us say enuf. Choose (as George Michael quaintly said) Life. Real active live work, as opposed to the concentration of dead labour.

Work going back the generations - something done, deed, action - weorc, worc, werkan, werk, verk, warc, werah, werk, gawaurki, vareza, ergon, orgia, gorc, verziu, vargas, vragu, waurkjan, wyrcan, wrikan, wrecan, yrka - and PIE *werg-. Also an urge, THE HUMAN URGE.

Do not be wishy-washy.

If you want to be cynical, do it properly, give up all wealth and possessions, live in a wine cask, do not eat meat, and see the knife as your friendly doctor.

If you wish to be a skeptic, again do it properly, doubt all things, even your own thoughts and experiences. Walk with friends who will save you from the cliff.

To create to make to do to act to play to dream. To struggle to win.

Be realistic, the graffito spoke to me, demand the impossible. The Dream Factory. The space where we build our dreams. A place of work and struggle.

A lifetime of compulsion. A dream of play. Two or three days a week at most, maybe a week in every six. Child care at the work place, schools serving breakfast and lunch, helpful police men and women dressed in natty grey uniforms with pink piping, passing out condoms, and directions to lost tourists, lovely and unarmed.

Philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Is not art a mode of philosophy? Is not art a love of wisdom, a way of interacting with the world. The point of art is to change the world.

The Dream Factory

As all people in all times of human history, we live in a new world,
a world that is changing rapidly. We live in a world where we are
surrounded by a glaring contradiction. A contradiction that the
various media savvy pundits and interpretors of the world fail to
mention. When they do attempt to face this contradiction it is only to
belittle and expose their own confusion.

What is this contradiction? That all things are made socially, but are
appropriated individually. (From the Latin meaning not to be divided.)
So all things are made socially, but not to be divided.

What does this mean to me? It means that the world is drowning in
wealth, yet I have to struggle to pay the rent. Google reports the
world GDP to be some 63 trillion dollars! And yet this wealth is not
to divided. How far would even one trillion dollars go towards feeding
the hungry, clothing the naked etc.

But even more than the things of the world we have created, even we;
our very selves are socially created. In a world dominated by fictions
of individualism and Robinson Crusoe stories it is sometimes difficult
to see ourselves as socially created products. But of course on the
most superficial level we can see we are born of preexisting
parents. The beginning of the production process being the production
of other human beings. And so much flows of this simple fact. All
language, all history, all economies, all education is a huge process
to create human beings, to create individuals. Sadly for the great
bulk of these individuals life is lived as a commodity. Not as what
they truely are, unique, real, actual human beings for in the some 4
000 000 000 years of this earth that strut and fret their hour on
the stage.

We are now in a world where we are on the cusp of the fabled 'Brave
New World', a world were energy can be drawn from the sun, from the
wind, from the heat of the earth itself. And yet too many argue that
we should never change. To my small position it seems that the
opposition to renewable energy comes more from a posture of not
wanting to give up their power. With solar for example people can heat
their houses, run their computers and more without the need to buy
electricity from the large corporations.

In this coming world of super abundance we must fight for a new order,
a new way of doing things. We should fight for socialism, a new type
of socialism were we understand that socialism must be the dream
factory.

Some simple demands we must make that will take a long way forward.

Free education for all. Education is key for anyone to become the
person they want to be, it is a right that everyone should be able to
go as far as they want.

An immediate cut in the hours of work. Solving the problem of
unemployment, and underemployment. This will allow people to work, and
to contribute to society, while also giving them the time to be able
to fulfill their love, love of family, love of knowledge. From a
Christian point of view all people are equal before God, and are made
in Her image. If this is to believed than why are some allowed to die
in the gutter, while others roll in incredible wealth. From an atheist
position there is no afterlife, we only have what is in front of us,
why should so many suffer and die, never to get their life back? Why
should this be allowed to continue just so some lucky few get to
increase their wealth?

Equal rights for all people. Nothing more needs to be said.

In this way we can edit Lenin to raise as a banner, Democracy plus
solar power equals socialism. True grassroots democracy. Democracy
based around where people live and where they work. No one should be
forced to give up their legal rights when they clock on to work. Many
people despair of the current political crisis, but many then turn to
the lure of facisim and dictatorship as a way to get past the
crisis. Many seem to despair of democracy, and then cry out to lessen
democracy. But of course falling into a dictatorship is easy, it
allows one to keep their head down, work and shop and all will be
well. However on the side of socialism we can only offer years of
struggle and hard work, years of vilification for an uncertain
goal. But this goal shall be the dream factory, shall be a world of
expansion and personal growth. The begining of history, not as the
right wing pundits will say the end of history.

As all political failures are failures of imagination it is important
for use to keep in mind that we need to create the dream factory.

Klutotechnes

Homeric Hymn 20 - To Hephaistos

---

Sweet voiced Muse
Celebrate with song
Hephaistos, famous
For his cunning devices.

Along with flashing
Grey eyed Athena
He taught the groundlings
Glorious labour.

Formerly
They dwelt
The hollows,
Of mountains.
Like fabulous monsters.

And now:
Thanks to Hephaistos;
Renown for his arts,
They learnt
The many skills that allow
An easy life. Maturing
The cycles of the year
With their own families.

Be gracious Hephaistos.
Deliver prosperity and wealth.

---

Hephaistos was the Greek god of (for lack of a better word) technology, artisans, smiths etc. Technology being from a Greek word techne. As a noun it means art, skill, method of doing things, including soothsaying. It also has to 'bad' meaning of cunning. As a verb the meaning is pretty much the same, to make by art, to execute skilfully, also to contrive cunningly. Hephaistos is described as being KLUTOTECHNES - famed for his skill.

As a nod to the reality of the type of work, Hephaistos was lame, walking with golden leg braces he made for himself. Robert Graves says that smithies were often made lame to keep them from running away, I do not know enough to comment on this, however I do know enough about the harsh reality of hard manual work to see the obvious link. It made be hard for us to understand, but metal working would have been seen as something much like magic for the ancients, agreeing with Arthur Clarke's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Some say that Hephaistos was the child of Hera and Zeus, while other tales have him born parthenogenetically from Hera alone. Either way the child was ugly, and in embarrassment Hera threw him from Olympus. He lived under the sea in the grotto of Thetis (later the mother of Achilles) for nine years. Later Hera was reconciled with him, and he returned to Olympus, and given Aphrodite as his bride, who later cockculed him with Ares. In revenge Hephaistos made a strong net of golden thread capturing the illicit lovers, and causing much laughter among the other gods.

Hephaistos sided with Hera in opposition to Zeus, and he was again cast out of Olympus, falling for nine days, landing on the island of Lemnos, which in antiquity was the site of volcanic activity. (Later the island was used as a base for the ill fated Gallipoli campaign in 1915.) After Zeus relented in his anger Dionysus was sent to retrieve him, and getting him drunk her brought him back to Olympus on a donkey, this being a popular scene in Athenian vase paintings.

Hephaistos shared a temple with Athena, as she was the goddess of cunning in warfare. Some suggest that the name Hephaistos means he who shines in the day time, while Athena was a moon goddess, with the owl as her symbol. Every year, on the last day of the Pyanopsion (in November), there was a joint festival, where the Arrephoroi, young girls (aged 7 to 11) set up the loom that would be used to make a peplos for the statue of Athena. The festival was also in honour of artisans.

Erida - Goddess of Strife

---

A couple of paragraphs from the Iliad. Two sections where we see the external nature of war. Of how the feelings of soldier are manipulated by larger forces. In this case the will of Zeus, but let us see it as a metaphor for our society, where War seems natural and opposing your neighbour passes for society. I used more words in these translations, as it was important to create some context for the passages, as we are only dealing with a few lines out of over 15,000 in the epic.

Book IV of the Iliad, Strife and Fear and panic stricken rout arise with Strife and discord. A love of the sound of battle of the clots of blood. She spreads discord and strife among Charming Ilios and the Danaoi. Strife starts off little and then grows; until, with feet striding the land her head is in the heavens. And I am reminded of the blood lust of my fellows and the generals and politicians and the perverters of language, and the mockers of democracy and how we must honour our dead by keeping the wars going. So strife feeds on strife and storms the very gates of heaven, suffocating in blind remorseless fury, the children of the poor.

I am sure one who is smarter than I am will find a deep misogynist strain in Homer, and his feminising of discord. As for myself, I struggle with simple translations.

Book 4 starting line 439

Some are called forth by Ares, some by iron eyed
Athena. So arises Fear and panic stricken
Terror. And Strife who desires cruelty,
Sister and concubine of Ares destroyer of men.
Small she is, to start, armed, but soon
Her head rises to the heavens. Across the land
She strides. She spews strife to all sides
Equal, as she goes among the tumult,
Increasing the lamentations of men.

---

Book XI of the Iliad. Those who feel that history is made by great men, and that history appears as a series of wars and violence will find much to hardened their positions by reading this epic. It seems to me wrong to discuss the Iliad with modern eyes, as the poem seems to me to be denying modernist ideas of free will. In the beginning of book eleven the Achaeans have suffered badly at the hands of the Trojans, and many are dejected. It is the plan of Zeus that the war continue. He sends Strife down to the encampment and she screams and fills the hearts of the army with hatred, with love of battle, sweeter even then the thought of going home.

Book XI starting line 14

And then Erida rose to her full height -
Eyes dripping blood. She called out great
And terrible. Penetrating into the hearts
Of the Achaeans. At once war become
Sweeter than going back in the hollow
Ships to the beloved land of their families.

---

Can we see our own throwness in the works of Homer? Torn asunder from our beloved land we are captivated by our supposed freedom. The power of Capital toys with our lives, in a similar way to how Zeus toyed with warring Greeks and the Trojans. He set them to strife and even goaded them to second effort when they began to falter. This was his plan, Zeus wanted to depopulate the Earth. War was his answer, and it was only too easy for him to find willing accomplices in their own extinction. As it is only too easy to find today many who wish for war, and forsake multilateral solutions and worship at the cenotaph. Empty tombs of the empty lives of our dead, honoured by old men. Or as Lenin said there was no crisis from which the bourgeoisie could not escape provided the working class was prepared to pay the price.

We are not as superstitions as the ancients, but we still sacrifice our children on hard stone altars, praying for a wind that will blow an invisible hand onto our scales, allowing us to fight our enemies, and to gain great wealth. It is, of course, wrong to see Capital as a supernatural power. Yet for the vast herd that roams the land having no understanding of what drives them, no grasp of simple history, of how the world became this way, having nothing but disdain for the workings of the scientific method, knowing nothing of the intricate web of interconnected wealth which builds up the foundations of everyday life, and of thought itself, they act and move as if controlled by far off gods who drink and love and mock the tiny ones who live not a true human life, but rather a shadowy passing of time. Lacking above all curiosity and imagination.

And yet both the Gods of the old days, and the Wealth of our modern age, are nothing if not our creation, the common structure and therefore the common inheritance of countless hands and hearts and minds.

---

The image is Achilles getting new armour from his mother. He is going back to war Why? His friend was killed, and the only way to honour his death is to add to the pile of death.

War and Anti War

---

I was reading an only moderately interesting book about the Trojan War. Among the cliches of a conflict of cultures and the battles of East and West, I came across some good quotes from out of Homer.

So like a good little geek, I had no choice to look up the original, and make a stab at translation. Mucking around a bit with what I ended up with, lead me to this two little pretend imagist works posted here.

These lines are Odysseus speaking to Agamemnon. Things are not going well for the Greeks. Odysseus lets his captain know that this is the lot of soldiers, and they will have to fight until they die. He seems to be pointing to the cruelty of the gods and their callous disregard for human life. Maybe we can see the gods as standing in for the historic and economic forces in our lives, and how it can seem to the unexplored mind that war is natural and a normal part of life.

When in fact we all know that it is possible to end war.

---

(Iliad Book 14.86)

This Zeus has assigned.

We are to endure,
From insolence
Into grey age,
Painful war,

Until we perish.
Everyone.


In this second quote, Odysseus is even more clear as to who should wear the blame for the war. It is clearly the work of the gods, and Zeus in particular. He seems to see the war as a toy of the gods, and the death of the many as being of no importance to the deathless ones.

---

(Odyssey 14.235)

Along this hateful path
Far sounding Zeus
Led many
Knee bent men
To their death.

---

The image depicts the battle about the body of Patroclus, and is from a greek vase. More can be found here
http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Images/BattlePatroclus.jpg

A free and frank city

The Suppliants: lines 399 - 408



Herald:

Who is the ruler of this land?
To which one shall I announce
The proclamation of Creon?

He has mastery of the lands
Of Cadmus, since Eteocles
Died under the blows of his own
Brother Polynices, outside
Thebes of the seven towers.


Theseus:

You begin your tale
Falsely, stranger,
Seeking tyrants here.

Not for us the authority
Of one man, rather we are
A free and frank city.

The people rule and are ruled
In yearly turns. And what's more wealth
Will not grant you the most, for even
With the day labourer are they equal.

---

Theseus killed the Minotaur. He became one of heroes who brought the Greeks into the light, into the world of the city.

I was struggling my way through the final chapter of "Politics in the Ancient World" by M.I. Finley, when he quoted from the Euripides play "The Suppliants." Anything to have a break from the arid style of the former Master of Darwin College, Cambridge. And anything in these dreary days of apathy across the Angloshpere that speaks to progressive ideas is a boon.

Knowing that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and with more enthusiasm than fluency, I dove into an attempt at translation.

I used ruler as opposed to tyrant in the first line, as I wanted to see this brief exchange as a critique on our own democracy. Euripides himself was both a supporter and critic of democracy. This is as it should be, criticism and self criticism. I thought it was important to use the world frank to describe the free city of Theseus. The phrase in the original is eleuthera polis, which means free city. I thought I had to go deeper, as it seems as if free is a heavily loaded word, one which means many different things to different people, one that over the years has lost some of it's lustre. A few of the synonyms for eleuthera included free, liberal, open, unencumbered, open to all, as well as my final choice of frank. One of the positive features of Athenian democracy was the idea of frank speech, even if only in theory. A citizen who was to speak before the assembly was expected to speak truthfully, including being truthful with themselves. This what is meant by the motto "Know thyself." How much this was actually followed in daily life I dare not say. Australians only have to look at their own mythology of mateship and the fair go to make their own conclusions as to how moderate and self aware the Ancient Greeks really were.

Beyond the 'woolly' idea of being able to speak frankly in the assembly, this simple exchange allows us to sneak a peek between the curtains, into a window on Athenian democracy in action. The people rule and are ruled in yearly turn. The citizens are expected to rule, to take an active part in the actual running the government, as well as debating and voting on policy and strategy. Ruling and ruled in turn. Beyond what we learn from Euripides, we know that Athenian democracy included payment for work done for the state, as well as the use of lotteries to allocate positions. Citizens were questioned before they took up their appointed roles, and reviewed at the end of the yearly appointment. We also know, if only negatively from the constant complaints of the literate aristocrats, that democracy in Athens was for a time extended to the lower classes, the rowers and the day labourers. Side by side with the well born the day labourer was expected to speak, and his speech was expected to be heard. Again as to how equal the assembly really was, I dare not say. It does seem as if the sheer expense of the political contest, as well as the large size of some electorates, act as a ration card for political activity by the great majority of people. Lotteries also seem to have an advantage, in that it would be harder for positions to ossify, as they do in our current regime. Lotteries and fixed terms form all positions would end the idea of people being in parliament as a career.

With the current impasse in politics in the West, any idea that extends the ideas of democracy is worth thinking about and discussing.

---

Pic from: http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/gallery/theseusminotaur.jpg

Devonport - Deloraine - Conara - St. Mary - Bicheno

Driving through the North East side of Tasmania. Too many of these poems end becoming anti war poems. It sucks that I have to do this rock drill anti war thing.

---

Early mourning shill
Scent of wood fires.

Meander on the Liffey
Bloom home steam Manchester train falls.

Counting the possums split open
The green verge of black road.

The influence of the city extends
Into the smallest one dirt horse town
A smut on the graph of the highway
Out here Coca Cola rocks the forest.

Salting about juice annoying each other
Mother confused by friendly service.

Ravens feasting the spilt open devil
Thin black ribbon between train tracks and river.

Strange distorted faces out the rock wall
Fallen over trees dressed in raggedy moss.
Green blue waves glimpsed random holes of trees
Alongsdide the ocean Break o' Day.

All these hamlets little towns we pass
New South Victoria Tasmania
It matters not, we see the same stone ghosts
Pale and cold. The sorrowful digger rifle
To the ground slouch hat head down grieving
Immense chasm of grief a generation
Lost or more accurate thrown away.
Est e Forge. How can we? Remembrance.
We do not even remember the whys
And wherefores. Knee deep in mud built trenches
Alongside a young man his bottom jaw
Torn apart eyes rolling in terror.
Epiphanies staring across a chasm
Of grief and sorrow. Fourteen Eighteen
A generation slaughtered as if the world
Is too small to share. Sent home to forget.
As if one can forget the brave young ones
Shrieking in terror in the mud and lies
Entrails spilling lungs searing of poison.
Home to a lack and shell shock and the dole.
Home to the same parties and policies
Home to the pimps and whores who grew so much death.
Lest We Forget! There is not enough to share.
War to build more more war and more destruction
Greed and cynical anti communism.

Into East Devonport

---

Into Tasmania, looking around East Devonport

---

A pot of beer
A pint of port
In this old port town.

Gusting shreds of rain squalls
Round and round breaking the quiet.

Beach of rocks and rain water flowing
From the streets across the sandy flats
Constant rattle hymn of ocean waves
Teen age lairs of empty condom bottles
Three yellow black cockatoos mock ignore
The two running screaming laughing children.

Cement factory looming and noisy
Fright herds in away the capital
Engorging never stood and never will.

Staring dog on a leash blinking blackness
Quenching ocean constant thrilling roar
One two ten seconds one two ten seconds
Repeating red warning lights charnel
Estuary beckoning beacon sign.

And the ship as tall as a carpeted
Apartment building as wide as a parking
Garage lifted and lofted bounced about
The humbling power of the ocean
Scouring the shore land mixing vital
Minerals into the vast salt soupy
Briny krill wash of the great sweet mother.

Scorpio descends uncoiled shiftless clouds
Binary night of day long showers.

Long low sorrowful bass wail blast
Of industrial ship rugged up against
Bracing blasting wind cold ruggedly
Merchant sailors rough rugged hands calloused
Torn knuckled and Bolsheviki hands
Arthritic and abused and thrown away
Aside hands. Maritime Workers Union
Hall monument to past away sailors
Sufferers chapel. The first radio
Southern hemisphere transmission.

East Devonport Bowls Club painkilling
Into the night innuendo laughter.

Flashing tough spectacle images
A disordered mind remote control
Lumping from scene to scene advertisements
Con you into thinking you're the one
That doesn't smoke the same cigarette as me
Drunken druggist compelled control
Mod urn of piled spectacle over priced
Vaccination and accusations
Hung parliament of transported agreement
Let all parliamentarians go hang
That wing should only exist to support
The out in the street wing not the back room
Loitering wing of well paid communions.
The disordered mind twists and mash up turns
This is our left wing wight sad to say.

The young boy toss throws one eon smoothed rock
My young son into the shallow puddle
And the dog chases pounces upon
Unable to purchase a bite smooth
Worn rock over time and he struggles.

Piddle paddle puddles reflect
The incandescent houses the city.
Long low stentorian great ship groans
Thunder heave hoes into view and I watch
As it sail shudders dissipates long way
Into the jet ink black cold uncaring
Night of enhancing jet black ink cold night.

The wind rattles and rustles and whispers
And thistles the aluminium frame
Skeleton plastic construction work place.

Bonza bait for sale
Lapwings chitter chatter
The golden rain night.

Disappointment

Capital tends to corrupt and demean all things - in this we have sold our house to get away from the ownership society, which was nothing but a right wing con to take our money from us, and to make working people too fearful to revolt, and to try to make the concerns of the ruling class the concerns of the slaves.

---

Death comes when the tide is low.

Morning of disappointment and delay
Family sorrow and disappointment.

Mud babies made mawkish delays
And confusions of names 
Placed into the homeless
Busted penniless womb.
An embryonic effigy.

Child of placental error
Mother of freedom.

Always must one smooth away
Impressions left of sleep
And never musty messed up
Pick up that which has fallen 
Nor shall one ever eat any beans 
Or pulses or expose irrational numbers.

One must break from heartier costumes.

Disappointed at the flooding 
Of the tides 
    Pit of the stomach
    Homeless
    Helpless.

Living in spare rooms
Living on kindness.

Diptera.
A large black fly buzzes
Erratic kitchenware.

A wilderness of disappointment
With the present state of affairs.
Disappointment with the sexual act
Disappointment even with the ocean.

Tiny fish school 
A stream and flow
The tidal pale.

Washed up 
Vomited out
Ejected the sea
In her smooth white hand
This white smooth piece
Of pitted whale bone
Vertebrae elaborate 
Of design and texture.
Pouted sand pitted a silent
Terror of months years decades
Held cold dark pressure.

The tiny child hand
Reaches the wet sandy
Beach explores both
Nose and tongue.

Loud lout snore thing 
Shifting of gears
Top to bottom 
Snoring snares 
To catch unawares.

Fancy 
Dreads dance up on
My mind creek 
And crack dissipate.

Tinkling stars of spirits
Annotated parade of tourists
And their dogs.

Cyclone

with the kids at the beach, thinking how full of crap are the theists. how bereft of
imagination are there small brain pans which can not conceive of millions and billions of years of evolution slowly twisting turning the world into the one we see now. the grandeur and the depth of the universe, the smallness of our existence. am i to really belief this is only 4000 years old? but how can one argue when it is of course satan who planted fossils to cause us to doubt.

---

Low tide as clouds of sand rise the wind
Whirling across the face of the beach.
Dripping of wet sand warm from my hand
Clear green soda bottle transparent waves
Roll swell and fall onto the slabs of black
Basalt millions of years ago laid down.
High tide and I recall a childhood tale
From Flinders earliest fossils found
How the thin fingerling of cyclonic
Rains sauntered far flung Carpentaria
Down the rising gulley wadi dry creek bed.
Crashing the water flows over the rocky
Tableau blocks, actualises countless
Tide rolling and surging back timeless
Tiny rivulets of miniature fractured waterfalls.
Constant like this for millions of years.

IWD

Next year marks 100 years of International Woman's Day. The text of the poster says:


"8th of March is the day of rebellion of the working women against kitchen slavery
and "Down with the oppression and narrow-mindedness of household work!".


From a recent report by Australian Bureau of Statistics:

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show that while woman have taken on more paid work, they still do about two thirds of the housework, while men do two-thirds of paid work.


or as was written in 1844

"The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women's progress towards freedom, because here, in the relation of woman to man, of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation."

From the Sydney Morning Herald today:


In a separate study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Australia lags behind countries including Rwanda, Sweden and Cuba and is on a par with Afghanistan, coming an equal 32 in the percentage of women holding lower house or single house seats in parliament.

---

Soft Blue

the bus the botanic gardens the recent rain. and sum idears i have bean kinking around - a type of cinematic flatness & the multiplicity of aspects. the object alone.

---

The unschooled children squeal in delight
At the copper tarnished eastern water dragon.
Intent on observation she splashed the water.
After recent rains the plants green riot grow.
Piecring sun absorbing new green growth colour.
Yellow tinted spreading open simple rules,
Red shading around the edges, best for acute
Angles of twilight morning evening. A leaf falls
Mute on the floor of the elevator. Rich, almost
Indescribable, green the listless shiny shoe gray
Invested carpet. One single leaf repose.
And the bus stopped and three passengers got off.
One young man boarded. Endwise of three passengers
Bump jostled shoulders the novice. And turned sudden
In anger, greasy dirty look thrust, knife quick flash.
Mournful mother her face away in sorrow
Eyes open of prominent tears and trouble.
Flat white clouds too thin to puzzle the sun.
Hooded long hair. A nod and sits. Did you seee that?
Flowers rising from ocean flows of comet chaos.
Howled kitchen faults across a wall, grappled Da.
I told him to get off me. To get off. You fat fuck
I said, and he kept wailing on me. I had my knife.
Brightly coloured rags of commerce flutter red yellow
Green beads of water on the blades of grass blue.
Terrible as an army with banners. Mist shrouds the gully
A place gray of shadows and damp quiet darkness.
Triangle torso scratched into the burnt brick wall.
Acquitted. Mental problems. Could not remember.
Damp down gully, childhood prophecy episode.
And it was five months fuck around with remand and bail.
In the end I got off. The old man slouches makes himself
All homewise and invisible wholesome chews around
Poured aggregation canyons of efficiency.
It was the style. A grammar of disturbance.
At the time. Fought in the kitchen. I took my knife
Out its hollow. If you do not get off; let me leave,
I will open this. Stick it in your gut. He backed away.
Tales of chemicals prescribed and street bought.
So they called the cops and I had to go to that place
Behind the old library every week, it was...
Near the old school? No the other face. Oh yes I know.
Had to do a pee test every week. For six months, I had to...
What, for drugs? Saluting feeding the beggar birds
Two buskers play guitar, a fountain, fast food
Cooking, cigarettes, short denim pants. The old woman
Drags her tartan sundry trolley and curses, the old
Man uses his cane to activate the traffic lights.
Tried it the once, it was too intense, I gotta go...

proletarius

proletarius, literally child producers. the ones; in ancient rome, who had no wealth, only their children. proles -is means children or offspring. so regardless of what you think, it is what the great majority of us are, those who have no wealth, and who need to work to allow the reproduction of every day life. i know if i do not work, i will after not many weeks be seriously in the poop.

---

The proletarian leaves the house
And drives alone, or maybe takes 
The bus. Engages in small talk.
How is the Weather? Today is 
Tuesday, almost half way through the
Week, I hope it rains. And into
The office, the factory, the shop,
The hospital, et alia. Cocooned
With noise or barriers alone
The proletarian does an
Alloted amount of work within
A well measured amount of time.
Inequality of pay comes 
About due to the supply
And demand of specific skills
Of the individual worker.
Some are worth more to the bosses
In one particular place and time.

In this manner human, social
Activity is carried out.

The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette

Was looking after the little girl (soon to be three) on a damp cold wet early spring sort of day. (woke up to the baby crap of the century!!) we watched a short doco about this painting on telly. i was thirsting for an opportunity to be even more derivative - and so this is what i came up with.


The location of the beer garden in the painting is very near to where the French army buried the many massacred after the suppression of the Paris Commune.


The painting itself is an attack on all that came before. The very idea of painting outside, the way colour is used (there is no black for example), the eccentric perspective, the play of light. It is a very radical piece, and one that does not mention the squalor beneath the surface, the poverty of the lives of his models. Renior was concerned with Beauty, In this way he was able to forget the many dead buried just near this working class locale.

---

The afternoon yellow light sun 
Falls through the trees, through
The leaves, through the thin woody 
Sprays, the strong wooden boughs 
Dividing and quavering the light.
The afternoon light yellow falls
On the corner of the table, 
Flashing an emerald green. 

Ambiguous sunny Sunday afternoon
Of carefree dance and sparkling
White wine like electricity garden.

As the crouching stalking domestic
Cat follows and chases the small 
Brown mouse or twittering yellow
And gray bird, until she loses 
Herself in the thick scrub and 
Wild grasses of the set aside 
Nature reserve. As the young child
Chases the bouncing balloon caught
In the light breeze, or the teasing
Wagtail, until the child loses itself
In the wild grasses and thick scrub
Of the reserve over the fence.

Even so do the dancers of late
Afternoon carefree yellow
Sunlight youth forget 
Themselves,
Their day to day cares,
The endless listed payments,
Pointless busy work waste.

Even so 
Do beer garden dancers
Forget themselves,
Their history.

The Double Thunderstroke

The US Army works with Hollywood to 'advise' on war movies. Stallone met with Kissinger and changed the tone of Rambo movies. And on and on it goes, and we all know how it turns out. In the west we want to be able to do what we want when we want. We mistake this for FREEDOM. In the third world our individualism leads to negation to the point of death.

---

The epitome 
Of bourgeois glorification
Of the individual
Reaches it's direct opposite...
    Total contempt
    For humanity.

In the cinema,
A one man army
Kills without feeling,
Without restraint.

Made actual.
Millions dead,
Sent to the grave.