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.

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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

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Into Tasmania, looking around East Devonport

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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.

Port Melbourne - Bass Straight

Crossing the Bass Straight in a big old boat. Closing in on our goal.

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I knew we were meant to be together
For we, know what I mean, hate the same things.
Timidity of the capitalist class
Fearful any changes to the flow of cash
And yet rushing salivating to follow
The path finders pushing to over
Produce then equalising back to fear.

What is rational for the individual
Becomes irrational for everyone.

As the down steady rain pelts the earth
Bogging the grassy dirt and sliding off streets
Of hand made bitumen tiny rivulets
Form and all find their way to the rivers
And creeks and streaming brooks embracing filling
The ways of water and constant the water
Rises and over flows the normalising
Banks the constraining banks the confining banks
Slowly at first cautiously searching for low
Spaces to explore and exploit until
With an unstoppable rush the water
Overflows and scours the riverbanks
Filling all depressed places eroding
The sides destroying humbling all
In the path sapping houses and neighbourhoods
Entire towns tossed apart and denuded.
Even so does the capitalist class
Rush into the low places where money
Can be found where gain is to be made
Regardless without thought irrational.

Pretence of inner city living
Gazebo in memoriam ANZAC
Bronze brick subscription great war diggers
Home to homeless barefoot avoided
Encrusted black single feather headband
Failures of our rulers. Discarded
Cast aside abused ignored soldiers
The incurable widows orphans tossed
Onto the pigsty scrap heap the shadow
Of fabulous wealth of endless theft.

After two hours or more crossing
The calm wide light encircled bay
Dreaming of maybe ancient encampments
Forty thousand years ago and the Yarra
Slowly meandered a flat dry plain
Hunters and small gorups built and spoke their tales
After the ice age after the ice melted
The sea rushed into the rip filling shallow
The land hiding the encampmetns the middens
And the meltiung ice caps the rising seas
Recalls Utnapishtim or Noah's flood
The strong waves of the ocean bob cork
Towering ship large apartment building.

Black sky black ocean cloudy starless moon kiss
Pitching and yawing yawing and pitching
Slow and anaemic steady breathing rolling
In unison sympathy with the gentle
Sleep rhythm breathing of children snoring
The slow tidal rhythm of countless lunar
Cycles the long sonorous song calls
Hiding massive southern right humpback whale.
Dread the fear that any time I would be pitched
Off tall second floor scuppered bunk bed.

Hiding in plain site thick working class beard
Searching out quiet herbal smoking dream.
Saints win clinking glasses and television
Sing soggy scraping knifes and forks on plates
Slave coast titans claw back a surprising
Come from behind win o'er the southern storms.

The black dog alone in rowed kennels
A middle aged dyed blonde women sings
Popular disinterred love silly songs.

Shuddering ship
Vibrating engines
Resonance
Shuttering ship
Radiant children
Dissonance.

Bairnsdale - Sale - Traralgon

More travelling through Gippsland Victoria quiet and nightmare dark history and i can never wake up from. like a vampire it infects me and slowly drains me dry. from a letter written 1846 by a squatter Henry Meyrick. the quote was found on wikipedia.

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can be met with … I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging … For myself, if I caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog, but no consideration on earth would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom whenever the smoke is seen. They [the Aborigines] will very shortly be extinct. It is impossible to say how many have been shot, but I am convinced that not less than 450 have been murdered altogether

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Gloaming growling wind
Grey oligarchies
Solitary

Barnacle sale paragons

And what is the great bourgeois dream?
Nothing less than something for nothing
Gold from death from tossed aside lives
Sleazed extorted used discarded.
The great alchemical dream of gold
From base nothingness. As the chairman
Of the Chamber of Commerce admitted
In the Fin Review, I chanced to glance
At one pot clouded Friday afternoon,
In fact we resent paying wages.
Worship of the criminal
Of the strong man who takes what he wants.
Something for nothing. To diddle
Staff out of money to offer poor
Service at best to place the onus
On the outsider the customer
Anything else. Enterprise translates
To pure theft and nothing else no honour
No social good no care no forward.
Something for nothing. Something for nothing.
The bourgeois dream taught to our children.
Climbing the ladder of aspiration
Living the life of ownership
We have lost more than optimism
Grasping after wealth after things
We have lost the cooperative
Spirit for the home owner lives in dread
Fear of it all failing crashing down.
And this fear makes all weak and confused.
Something for nothing. Responsibility
Falls to the individual
While producers laugh cashing cheques
The hungry are allowed to starve
The weak are thrown aside those who are ill
Deserve to die they are not pure of heart.

Asbestos lead cadmium coal
Let the workers chew on that
Let the workers spit out gold.

Is this how we are to teach our children?

Compassion suits the poor
Greed is the strong Christian man.
The world is too small to share.
When uncle Toby was vexed
And his dinner spoiled
From a simple fat buzzing fly
He let the fly out the window
This world surely is wide enough
To hold both Thee and me.

Misty foggy clean evening tide
Osiris to my right hand side
Saggy telephone lines beside
The wide highways black glinting
The oncoming car headlights.

Slack sloughing Orion to the front
And off the my right side.

Mimic English names Avon River
And you can guess the rest.

The telephone is out of range
The petrol stations are all closed.

Late rising lazy old dying
Crone wan moon mother sickle.
And then I read Malcolm died.

Into Gippsland - Orbost - Bairnsdale

Further the trip from Canberra to Hobart, crossing Gippsland Victoria in the night. Nothing, empty rolling hills and trees and road trains.

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Nothing Really Matters.
    Burst into tears.
Beautiful.
And the children.

Thermal wing spreading 
Slow circle raptor.

Flattened tree artefacts 
Of previous weather.
Flash flood knocked 
Over down the trees.
The small river bed.

Man's calming hand
Of productive rolling
Distance.

Sapphire Coast
Cherry Lane
Old Dam Road
Yellow Pinch Dam
Cabbage Tree Creek.

Tin woodman rusted solid
Wise old timey farm
Machinery. Engine.

Pink rock face cutting
Burning orange scar
Eight hundred and fifty
Million years ago
The iron rusted out
Of the ocean
Deposited here.

Bald Hills
Gipsy Point
Sandpatch Point 
Pambula
Mallacoota
Glissando.

Clichéd looking
Fishy typecast
Matey crossing
The pub side
Of the road.

Dead fox. Clues of ocean
Gaps of the forest trees
Quarantine Bay 
Thirty thousand dollar
Fishing contest.

Constant changing sand islands
Mouth of bay river.

Two ravens shiny
Fly lazy over the highway.

Falling over porch
Verandah house
Faded peeling.

Park mocked outlet
Bored youth tedium
Rural life boredom
Idiocy. Past Bombola.

Constipated olive drab pained
Tanks burnt up strictures
Off the ground.

Timbillica dark lyre bored gully
Dreamy blue
Gray and white
Rapid change
Settling son.

Spit and instinct mortared
Ant hills dart dash hilly
Road side radiant city.
Hobble muddle this dance.

Kangaroo & wombat
Yellow warning sign
Dinted and abused
Teenaged air guns
Fifty kilometres more.

Victoria Empress of India
Queen of England, this exotic 
Land named. And Canada
And Africa and gentle they 
Lived a land without religions
A land without ownership.
Hard and even brutal but 
Never in gathered mobs 
And given weapons and told
To kill or be killed to make
Greater wealth for the already
Wealthy well to do well off. 
Not the lash nor the stock
Nor the gibbet nor the court
Nor the brothel nor the clap
Nor the bible nor the bottle.
Not even influenza. 
And so 
Defenceless gainst gammon veterans 
Of gaols and ships and wars
The brutalised the psychotic
The rational the learned 
The hypocrite the religious.
Naked against the white man
A tragedy still not acknowledged
Naught but jeers and contempt.
A nation afraid to look 
Into the mirror called history.

Farmers burning heaps.

Genoa
Mallacoota
Wilderness Coast.

The GPS says the next turn
Ain't for some 180 kilometres.

Century old trees burn
Infected injured crying out
They are weakened and so 
Fall over scattering younger
Trees levering out root balls
Exposing to the light and air.

Here the fires were more recent. 
The earth is still black. 
The trees are still.
Still whimpering in terror.
If one is quiet one can hear
The silent fear as the wind
Rustles the leaves.

Axeman's track.

Sunset stop.
Truck stop.
Truck driver coffee 
Slop shop selling bait.
And for the truck drivers
It don't have to be nice.
Just get it in ya
And back onto the road.
It is a form of rationing.
Not like the coffee 
Served up in fine china
For the lawyers
Or accountants
Or doctors
Or politicians.

A pair of eight pounders
Desert rat sandy drab
Lest e Forge 39-45
 
Xmas decoration
Road train lit up
Articulated trucks
Power hurtle highways.

Bonang
Marlo
Newmerella
Andante
The Snowy
Swan Reach.

Kioloa - Bega Valley - Eden

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Moved from Canberra to Midway Point in Tasmania - wrote a series of poems about the move, thinking about Ginsberg's Fall of Ameria - Poems of These States So I called them Songs of This East Coast. Not as good as Ginsberg but hopefully you will like 'em. This was updated and extended. Maybe for better, maybe just to be more pretentious.

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Kioloa - Bega Valley - Eden

Sunny days and half moon nights
Redundant tree left on the flank of the navvy cut
Bright iron rust red wound wound scar rots and crumbles
Into damp dust bits of chiseled hand. Slowly eaten 
Slow death realizing life of moss and lichen and fungi.

A thin new young shoot struggles to the sun
Smooth young growth raises holy sun embracing
Tendrils twisting out dread stump dead heart
Magical wood over full vigorous life force.

Young big capital town couple exorcise
Annoying cash card buying and celling
Love new day sun dog walking dawn and dressed
In like mien them that weak heard parlay hard
From top to tail poseur. Two flitter boys scouting
On by past and stop. Query and examine
Mob of kangaroos round floret emerge.
And the locals despair mostly their need.

Black burnt slated serried gum trees 
Resting cows black on curds and whey grass
Vine and creepers out of control.

Day dream word flow spewed disorderly mind
Too too many as that possum would say 
Adjectives to disturb flowing ideas
Allowing gain of prizes and praises
Pound for pound swimming burnt and piled high
Slabs of ply upon ply interconnected
Images punning on board joke grouchy
Variety. Disoriented mind.
Accreted images growing coral wise
Turning back upon itself again again
How long the coastline? How long a piece of string. 
Constant flux and change the coastline moves each day
With the pulling shape of the sun and moon
With the winds and waves. Pointing peninsula
All islands and blocks of land in constant
Change and constant growth and regress. Even
The way to measure changes the shape and size.
And the mountains erode and the hills erode
Turn into sand and dirt and rolling down 
And the waves scour the shore and tree fall
Into the tidal swaying sand rub forming.  
One connection to encounter one more
Firming tap turning of random collage
High speed global digital network village.
And then back home to begin again again.
Forced mental state transformed into a lie.

Corrugated chicanery runs
Schoolboy sick from calico visioning.
Mottled cows knee deep mottled weir
Brown and white. 
                 Knee deep of beer stained ochre
Hathor desirous of killing all
Drunk with slaughter too drunk to stand
Sun encasing horns murderous mourner.
Drunken mother sleep. Rainy sun showers.

Uterine matrix of land and sea.
Oyster farming bogs knife sweep scuttle.
Egrets mating plumage white brown regret.
Fiddle pint roofs. Dust clods destroy weeds.
Old propped up frame farm buildings fading down.

Bell miner chiming forests.
Temperate rain forest.
Turquoise water menstrual mud flats 
Interzone play of here and now.
Puddle of ponds. Ducks and bitumen.

Patterns of leaves through light
Falling seizure on dot and dash
Drowsy and nauseous afternoon
Rain eroded flanks of hill 
Gully scars smoothed over time.

Infinite perspective
Objective scar high tension
Lines receding vanishing point.
Retinal eye burning green. 

Alchemy

Thrice great Hermes - Linear B from Pylos - TIRISEROE - Magic is closer to science then religion is. And fairy penguins rule.

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Magic investigates the world
In a way the religion does not
Alchemy transmutates Chemistry.

Naked they worship transcending
The fleshy world of the sinner.

The beach surf fisherman pulls in his line
Thoughtless the hook snagged a fairy penguin
Struggling bird reeled onto the cold wet sand
Dear children distress animals in pain
We hurry along smooth stones to gather.

On closer inspection the surface
Is covered with countless
Cratered a miniature moon
Pitted with thousands fine
Three or four larger
Diagonal scratches.

A monkey quails.
I fall asleep
The living room
Floor my daughter
Thumb in her mouth
Special corner
Favourite blanket
Rubbing her face.
Eyes shut.

The trees have eyes and the trees are dancing.

Rising falling Doppler car pitch
The constant roar of waves
Crafting sounds pencil on paper.

Strange broken sleep
In strange bedrooms
Loud whirring and humming
Trucks and cars and trains
In new bedrooms.

Just past the round about
The War Memorial
Crows squabble the eyes
A dead kangaroo.

A fine mist
A dead cockatoo
On the traffic island
Mist fell on his face.

Can one die of mediocrity?
Is such a thing even possible?
To die of commercialism.
His cigarette hissed
Contacting the surface
Rain gathered puddle.
Mist beaded into drops
Grey flicks of his hair.
Whiskers on his face
Constant fever thinned.
There are flecks of mud
On the hem of her white
Muslin skirt. Black blocky
High heeled shoes.

Misty gum flat ridge lane
Woolshed community hall
Thin windy weedy mist
Reedy creek snow gum motor
Cycles thin misty covering
Mountain top hiding between
Here and there. Twenty dollars
A week at least on postage.

Green wide valley spread out
Beneath rain soaked hill rounds
We followed emergency crews
For miles in the rain the sedan
Into the guard rail the ute
Into the tree. Small crowd gathered.

I write for myself not for publishing
To arrange a range of thoughts
To formulate and experiment.
To publish to repeat is in a way
To ossify mind forged manacles.

Yellow plant stacks railway sleepers
Shadowy ghost rodeo wind turbines
Far off misty ridge line water tanks
Shades of green after drought breaking rain
Outcrops of rock moss and lichen growing
Orange bright cuttings.