Canowindra

Canowindra (pronounced Can-noun-dra, not the commonly used
Can-oh-win-dra) is an historic township located near Cowra in the
central west of New South Wales, Australia in Cabonne Shire.


Captured by Ben Hall and his gang - the story says, to show contempt for the cops & troopers. But let us imagine a bit more - let us imagine that the Hall Gang captured the town in an attempt to create the First Lachlan River Valley Soviet.

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Late it was in the day, the bright sun
Setting off flies and floating soil
Spring Summer melting slide into one
Each other framing ceaseless toil.

Bold daring-doo this was the brashest
Dance ever sung in New South Wales
A cloud of horses to raise more dust
Blinding covering the sands of tails.

The one lone duck taken in the increase
Stampeding horses screaming voices
Not one hurt marched into jail the geese
Open a new world with our choices.

Benji strode jet a steed flame red eyes
Killed a half dozen mounts or more.
I would not have, with out me mud pies,
Believed, Flash Gilberto. Sure as sure.

Riding stride for matching stride always
Rode hard straight razor totin' Red Biddy
We have your town and we will for days
More are coming something like thirty

She rode back and forth, impatient
Stepped her mount, wild valiant colored
Chestnut wind burst with dust and urgent
She laughed not boasting - you're captured.

Our hero steadied his horse, sat tall
So he could well be seen. We will not hurt
One of you. We know you have naught to steal.
We have thought, It is time to invert.

My friends and I, under the milky way,
We cose for sleep, doze of a better
Break up all the things brought to the day.
An equal share, not all to the banker.

So I want 5 stout men with Jacky.
And men who are good on back with Toby.
Spread out! You know where there are tracks
Allow quiet raids of squatters bounty.

The rest will stay here and open
We will the telegraph office,
The bank and we will hunger dampen
With these few head we duffed joyous.

Start feast cooking. See here we are paying.
Red Biddy let fall a splash of money.
The sun light falling the coins, playing
Bush lives so tiring and dreary.

With a rushed assent the town's people
Set off to work preparing a feast
To out do any of the town's bridal
Parties - more food, more stout, deeds unleased

Consumed in the great fire the people made
All such documents destroyed - both here
And on the properties. We will lead
The squatters from morning to sundown

They still will only know one thought
Ownership, they will not give up the land.
Now falling into hard times we are taught
To move forward means to make the stand.

Twilight

An old poem (written some 5 years ago) i guess it is about the war on terror.

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The twilight exhaled
A sexless sorrow

But our leaders heard
Only meaningless rain

Wealth devoured the obese
Commuters carried bombs

Infants were born grew and died
This infinite war

Laws hammered the lonely fire
Intensified the endless war

Sorrow floated the sickly wind

Butterflies

I fell asleep on the grass in the afternoon - the hot sun on my skin. And then i woke up...

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As he slept
He felt a fluttering
Of butterflies.

Butterfiers

Summer wind burns wide the wood lands
Lightning fire flames oily tops of trees
Racing all before - desolate gales heated
Embers ballon tumble the heavens - whirling flames
Cyclones of orange, of red, of blue, of yellow
Blinding smoke bursts alight
Flame jet jutting from trees
Shadowing the sun - darkening the earth

Crowning curtains of orange flame rushing skywards
Dancing from tree top to tree top clouds of flame
Parched black blankets of ground - death gives life
The heat opens the hard casings and the seeds fall
Times are a burn makes what it needs and rain falls

(equal death life)
> true

His true Penelope was Flaubert

"What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book
about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be
held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth,
suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the
subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible."
Gustave Flaubert, Correspondence.

Substituting poem for book, I find this quote very liberating to how I write. However some may say this is a very bourgeois manner of
writing. Setting myself up a straw man for the sake of this
argument. Let me try to explain how I oppose this idea.

One of the definitions of the word bourgeois is one whose interest it is to support the status quo. It is this usage of the word that is of most interest to me in this exercise.

It seems fairly obvious that the ruling classes control language and
that they use this control to entrap and downpress the working
people. One of the uses of language is the relentless demand on the
narrative flow. This counterfeit river that flows from A to B, that
moves from rags to riches.

Life, however is a much stronger stranger than this simple narrative
arc will have us understand. Language creates consciousness, and it
follows that this bourgeois hegemonistic control of daily life and
culture controls and moulds language and art to suit their own ends
(indeed this can be seen as a definition of hegemony).

It is this bourgeois control of language, and therefore consciousness, that creates the mind-forg'd manacles of our oppression. It is these manacles that we must self consciously over come and over throw. For it is precisely this mental slavery that causes the great mass of working people to think that without God there is no morality, that without work they will have no identity, that without coercion there will be no happiness.

Language, a poem about nothing, a poem that hangs with no support in
the void. This is what I am striving towards, this is what John
Kinsella and Tracy Ryan refer to when they say "every poem we write
should be a form of resistance, an act of linguistic disobedience."
This is what will allow us to write "beyond good and evil", this is
what will allow us to move beyond imperialist ideas of ownership and
coercion.

Time, history, relationships are the matter of literature, and in some ways literature is greater than nonfiction or even philosophy, for only literature can talk about how life really is, how life should be. Time is not, history is not, the straight and narrow journey from breakfast to lunch to dinner, rather it is the dream distortions of Finnegan. History does not have as its horizon the simple Aristotelian unities of the television studio and of market based book publishers, but rather a deeper understanding of history and relationships can only be found in the convoluted signature of Shandy.

I write, as do all artists, mainly for myself, but also for self aware proletarians. I write in a way that is often called pretentious. (A label I am happy to wear, for to be pretentious is to pretend, to play, and if a poet can not play that what is a heaven for?) I write in a way that allows me to survey all of the history (natural and human) of language and appropriate for my art all 'that which being seen pleases me'. I write in a way that, in defiance of the petty academic poetry cliques, is not direct nor aimed for 'working people' (all of which is code for banal and trivial). I write understanding the unity to be more than a mere harmony, but rather a complete interpenetration. I write in a manner which says proudly, 'let the common reader be damned'. I write knowing that the artist is meant to be something more than an entertainer.

Polish Nail Polish

An attempt to create a literature about nothing, a work with no reference, that hangs spinning in the nothingness like the earth hangs in space with no support. His true Penelope was Flaubert.

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Skyup hisses evergray
Sometimes early sumfin oily
Rede reeds brushes of banks
Lending reeds rude of windie
Reeds on board bandy banks
And the reedy thin swampsweep
Of the streaming creek.

Teamroads meat odors

Cry crying cry again
Swamps weep and bubs bauble
Bible spittled ruler
Of the bubblebile crier
Town ways sunnydation sedition
Sunne day addition sedative
Sedation.

O' weave willed reckoner o'
Wounds of whorlds of
Whirlygig girlish giggle byte
Pterabyte of lambing flight
Terror bite of effing tea
Heat the rode jack off the lamby
While brauny glasses of winteressa
Tumble down ads foggen my eyen even

The Change

We have to
believe in.

Dig it! Live it! Love it!

a quote from

http://poetsvegananarchistpacifist.blogspot.com/

..as poets, every poem we write should be a form of resistance, an act of linguistic disobedience. States murder more than they protect.

Dig it! Live it! Love it!