The Fog of Freedom

(Incident in an Outer Suburban Park at Night Time)


A low fog of distorted sky
in the bush park after 3 AM
Fudges a streetlight shine
among re-growth gumtrees.

And the halo of the highway halogen
blurs its eyeless-coward-yellow
into the shadowed creek recesses
of remant bush-wetland rises,
where an unminded flotsam
of loose teenagers ramble
to the smoking of fat grass
about thin sixteens of years.

In a freedom of nights being
now taken out of bed,
Out of the fenced and gated
detachment of their lives,
As if no parent back in
the shrouded night’s shutness
In the damp-dreamed houses
of streets near or far, bothers
About them enough to
be getting up to asking after
Where they are or waiting up
to find how they are.

Huddled in the fog
along tarred bikepaths, like a shadow
Heidleberg school of scenes in these
after midnight landscapes.

With no camp, no clandestine fire
to circle as a centre,
no satisfactory or temporary hearth
to gather round.

Just a wandering darkness
picked out in red joint ends
As they knock marijuana shoulders
and elbows each.

Then a female, stranger -
an older teen or 21stC adult? -
Screams from the scrub, comes
falling to broken wings of knees,
a waif curling into a foetal ball
before them, frenzied, not breathing,
choking up in fog, coughing liberty
as if wanting some other, frothing
grief, wailing hoarse abuse, incapable
of focus on a conversation.

Her distress sows discord
like the inarticulance of a kicked fungus,
let loose in the night,
poisonous in its stray uprootedness.

With a gaggle of teenager help
she recoils into higher vegetation
And only with the arrival of
a quartet of police does her
banshee wail settle to curdle
in a sentence that they can hear
and understand:
‘My ex-boyfriend took my mobile phone!’
Said as if she’d found, and lost,
a key to one of those houses.

The female, quieted, eschews
the arrived medical ambulance,
Wanting only to go to a free friend,
begging someone's mobile to call for a lift,
but failing, she accepts a prisoner-like lift
up-back with the police.

The other squad faces the teens,
now perched suckpipe-free
and smokeless on the edge of a BBQ,
like daybirds liberated from night trees,
like daybeings freed of a darkness.

And freely commands them,
binding them like public parents:
‘Now Go Home! Go Home.’

Said with more passion and bother
than the ones at home.


26 August 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
Bayswater, Victoria

Socially Secure Arithmetic


Official unemployment only shows
Itself as the viscious niggard, when
It thinks in you: you’re hostage!

As if, as your confidences are
Taken by all the paperwork:
All your Confidence goes.

Am I reduced to this? That
Question keeps begging, begging.
Worse: that b-word asks: Apt?

Yes, you had your transports!
But as your old vehicle goes
Off the road, you try… and fail.

Life becomes arithmetic: the
things you can’t do multiply,
and things you can subtract.

Unemployment only just shows
Itself economic rationalist, and then
It counts you! - a wedge statistic.


7th October 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

Being Left Behind


Being left
behind when
your loved ones fly away,
travelling to places you’d like to be
and in their company
each step you make afterwards
is useless,
remembering the finality as those wide doors
shut you
on the wrong side.

The duty free shops have no attraction then
and along the airless airport malls
you bounce on sweep-worn sheen,
an alien among greyer aliens.

The outrageous price of the monopoly-run
car park grinds your pocket in your teeth
and, as you yearn unrequited, not now
for the noble, but for any exit
through those bilaw-hoops of grey ups and downs
that rise nowhere, you loose all sense of direction,
and only happen across the way again
in regret by remembering true north
which was the way
the flight out went.

so as you approach the first lit
intersection, you can’t decide
which way you want to go
indecision cripples you, your
accelerator foot looses its strength,
you dawdle off into the left lane
paused between non-take-offs
in non-acceptance of this
spirit-grounding

Then, you realize
that a rapture has happened
and you weren’t in it

And that, for your departed,
the universe is much increased
while for you the dome has shrunk
the walls are closing in, the grey roof’s
come down

your evening is yawning open
your tomorrow is a pedestrian repetition
of the mundane again,
your steps are leaden with the dull
ache of regretting that one step
you did not take

and this is hell.


29 March 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

Apology To The Future

- for my grandson

I’m sorry, so sorry. I saw
our imp-selves lifted up
-and this selfish meanness
- as it was happening... I
thought there was too little ‘one’
could do about ‘it:’ -this loss of
our holy beauty of being, the failure
of our mere private integrity,
of being a united people. I saw
the last days of social belonging,
the last of public joint commitment.
I tried, tried so little. Did what
I thought I could. Risked little.

I see, now, I was too much a robot
of the problem, thinking in that ‘one’
demoralized math of the time, even
with my solo finger in the dyke
– slave to that head-born head count!

Why was I in conformity?
to that labelled cut of cloth?
to what really didn’t matter?
when I was raised to courage
biblical enough to know how
by an inspired one, with a just few,
hosts of enemy can be put to rout?

I know! I failed.
Failed to engender enough faith
to lead with the brave and right.

So I saw roads swell to this
bloated soul-snarl. Saw outdoor
villages empty for shopping centres
as internally-built as prisons.

I grieved, uselessly, as I heard
that germ of our traffic subdividing,
multiplying like an amplified virus.

I saw the land concreted down
and paved with developed intentions,
the creeks piped to a fascist music.

I saw education become graduation,
debate, ideas, in abdication; saw
people let the Masters in Business Rule
gladly, as if that was learning! Saw
flow charts become virtual rivers for
future drought; saw suburban universities
swelling with Orwellian sustainabilty
courses; saw Religion become a fertile
prosperity cult! and spirituality become
a party balloon. I watched as demon
fisherman of the souls dressed normally
as a businessman in its suit and tie.

I was raised in earth, seeking divinities,
but I let the mass common-low culture
overwhelm me, let this dense conformity
cower me, for shame! Curse this bought,
this shopped-for shame, my son,
my scion! Curse this comfort, this
skein of our satisfaction that is drunk
too merrily as it rots our souls.

Courage be on you to grow in truth
and stature and find anger in
my dust to fight this enemy occupation
of our lands and souls. And when
I die, lower me that day
in no cute Lawn Cemetery, but put
my flesh in a public box and declare
me a Missing Link, the Link
of the Devolution from devotion
to decadence, then preach a hot
sermon against mere seedy being,
mine or any other. Be inspired
as the Avenging Angel at the last.

Preach of the reality of Death and Dying,
of the saints who set example in brave lives
to a brave dying for the cause of truth - as
the seed for the germination of
the other world in this one, to sprout
the bravest words of transcendence
out of the garden of your soul.


31 May 2006- Jan 2007 © Wayne David Knoll

After School

(with a nod to Richard Jefferies for ‘After London’ 1882)

I go up the street
and the young people grouped
round mandolin and guitar are trying out
lyrics they have written
while waiting outside
a venue for scripture study
They have taken imprecious metal
from their body flaps like last
ablutions before their song

I ride on the bike paths
and the young people
having abandoned tags,
yell out their ideas as they
whitewash the overpasses,
abseiling off bridges on rope slings,
preparing to write intelligent creative slogans
like their ‘Something Beautiful is Going to Happen”
in witty readable graffiti
on the clean slate of this old concrete.

I get on trains
and the young people
nod hello to me, and
instead of cadging a cigarette
say, “Mister! Can I read you
my poem about Billobelary.”
While listening, I hear one of the girls,
not plumbing that telco-sewer to gossip, but
philosophizing on her mobile phone.

I go to the hall tuition room
and the young people
run out before I’m in, saying:
‘Tell us the Lydian story of ‘The Song of
the Unnamed Queen’ again
… with a puppy grin of excuse: “because
Melanie didn’t hear it.”

I visit the library
and the Young People
are poring over classical histories and sharing
classic incidents in juicy plums they have found:
Melanie from the Odyssey,
a farmboy from Hesiod,
young wits from Juvenal.

The Future of Youth… maybe,
in Iceland, Falkland, or Poland ?
or
when Secondary School in Australia
is abolished.


2 March 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

Media at The Big Black Hole

(for Kerry Packer versus Phillip Adams)

That Big Black Hole
of the Prince Of the Air
is limitlessly small.
In it, vision shrinks till
only the media, the shell of things
can be seen, just the transmitted pods
with the seed of life eaten up
before each could die
into its potency.

Where Phillip Adams
wears his black outside,
blackwashing the conceit
of his title win in the bout
with the whole;
his much ‘pitied friend’ Kerry Packer
was more brutally honest, for
Kerry loudly declaimed that what
he had was a big black
hole inside.

Adams then had the perspicuity
to called Packer a damaged man,
and, this was said in glib temerity
as if he wasn’t, as if we all aren’t.

The reason why Kerry Packer saw
nothing when he momentarily died
of that renal meltdown,
was - nothing changed.
He had seen nothing
beforehand, just as he saw
nothing when he came back.

When Kerry died his inner hole
didn’t die, it stayed with him.
He saw no heaven,
just as he did before.
He saw no hell
just as he did before.
What did he expect
coming from a black hole?

But he knew its sign years before,
for he lived in the hell of that black hole
- living on as the nothing yawned.

He only saw what he expected
from black hole to spreading black hole,
-the amorphous black and ravenous
gaping hole which only the yielded
up embrace of an upright self-dying
last post of a cross can fill.

Then, he, spoken for
closer to that Kingdom,
chose to die, and Kerry Packer
secretly went to his last
broadcast Boyer-lecturer’s Christ
whose relayed Peter
blessed him at the brink
of the small hole it took
to bury the unspeakable
earthly remains.


24 Feb 2006 © Wayne David Knoll

The Wood and Stone Petition

On the 2nd of June 1849, my great great great grandpa C. Erdmann Jäckel, a tischlermeister (cabinet maker-joiner) with 210 other settler of 'New Silesia' in the Barossa Valley, signed what is now called the ‘Wood and Stone Petition’ lobbying the South Australian Governor to take material from Crown land to build pioneer homes. Though Erdmann soon had to leave his trade, and learn to farm, his family fell into distress which saw the death of his wife, his children’s mother. When he re-migrated to the east of Melbourne in 1853, where he could practice his craft on town houses built with gold rush wealth, he did not trust to this mastery, but kept to a hard-won providential life, with a small farm, cow, vines, orchard and hives at Boundary Road: a freedom practice many of his descendants still practice, or remember.


With hands in flesh worn to touch, but no ready money,
with families in health to provide, but no ready homes,
with rich mentalities, with skilled hands to use, but no materials,
I, Erdmann Jäckel, with my compatriot New Silesians
of this Barossa Valley, on the North Gawler river, petitioned
the then Governor on the 2nd of June in 1849 in a plea
to obtain wood and stone from the wastes of the Crown.

Finally, the Governor’s reply came with a breach
in the prohibition, - as if this was permission:
‘You will be allowed to remove dead trees.’

Those dead hardwood Australian trees are hard near to
a Prussian blue Exit signature inked at last on the too-easy writ
of dense legislation; and me, a tischlermeister, able to turn
the finest wood into even finer interiors…in a time of bark
huts, free-stone cabins, of wattle and daub, of unceilinged,
newspapered walls! Interiors? What use was dead wood?
What use was I? I lasted few years, then took ship for Port Phillip.

So, the fine fancy of lace-wrought wood in Victorian
gold scrollwork on front verandahs of Melbourne,
or the timbering of Hawthorn-brick homes does not answer
as well as a table, a chair, a bench seat, nor a shed roof, but there
in the wilds of ‘The Nunawading’ my mortises and dovetails made
fine hives for honey, my joinery made a prize cow bail, a water barrel,
a wooden home with verandah post and beams for vines, and my coffin.

Now, 157 years after my day, I, Erdmann Jäckel, the Earthman-builder
whose rustic bones underscored and spokeshaved what has become
suburban-Melbourne’s rise, am not blind to you, who still have hands
of flesh, much compromised to a world of paper resourcefulness,
in a mortgage shuffle of paper skills, good at the too-easily printed paper…
I petition now for you (and for your freedom) to ask for wild wood and stone
against many a signed paper, to foil a death-pledge of documents
you hold in the bought-surround houses of your night.

Give a Grace for Wood and Stone! Gnadenfrei -free grace
always will be what matters most for a signature writ
in the all-weather building-blocks of cultured simplicity.


July 2005-Jan 2007 © Wayne David Knoll

Getting an Obfuscation


Thought I was studying a diploma of education!
And bought the 2006 teaching textbooks.
Then gagged trying to read them.

And I am slightly literate! I returned them.
Not worth buying if they fail the readability test.

Yet, the pain is, I have to know them to pass.
Is this the self-styled educator’s ordeal,
the testing ground of strained intelligence,
where I pass if I fail?

Fail to reject: ‘Education outcomes’ where I would say: ‘learning.’
Fail to reject: ‘school achievement behaviour’ where you could say: ‘learning.’
Fail to reject: ‘experiential skill areas’ where you could say: ‘skill’
Fail to reject: ‘various indices of effective behaviour.’
where you could say: ‘learning’ or ‘skills.’

Is this the word-car’s crash - on education’s dingaring road,
The pile-up of dud and plastic language into a traffic jelly
A commuted stupidity A word-snarl that convinces willing idiots
to crumple up to abstracts as if to be seen in profundity…

Achievement becomes abstract riders on abstract nouns
in our mind’s death sentences, convoluted with crippling
injuries of syntax, in complex clauses
that would render us less significant, or stupid.

Call that an educative menu? Just mouthing the texts
I get the foretaste of retchings I don’t need to digest.

A sick empire’s tailors spin up
insubstantial clothes.
This time, not transparent, but
stupefying, obscuring…

The obfuscators? why do they do it? making
teachers for school with those long periods
of subservience to the institutionalization
of our obfuscation, being idiot conformisers
who turn freedom on the loom of confusions
into this conformity, this slave obscurity…
this ignoble, obfuscated slavishness to form,
a yet suave unintelligentsia.

I am a reader, an educator,
seeking education, and knowledge
of mankind in truth to stay sane, so I turn
back to books
as readable as Thucydides who wrote
in 408 BCE:

“as the result of these revolutions
there was a general deterioration
of character throughout the Greek world.
The simple way of looking at things,
.. so much the mark of noble nature,
was regarded as a ridiculous quality
and soon ceased to exist”

Now that book gets me a noble education
With the others I’m getting an obfuscation.


16 March 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, Victoria

On Anxiety Attacks

[ How am I - How are you? ]

How are you?
I am not very well
oh - what is it?
it is the emotions
oh
it might be a nervous breakdown
oh
it could be anxiety attacks
oh - what happens?
emotions drown me
oh - what is it like?
feeling tidalwaves over me
oh - what feeling?
- being this cracked
- this poor, this broken
- grief at the good which died
- fear of rejection again
- love for my nativity land
(a country made nouveau)
- grief at our lost assurances
- anger at the neglect
- pining to be loved
- grief for how we are
- homesick for dinkums
- despair in our cowardly leaders
- disappointment at pretence
- afraid of experts and statistics,
- chronic love of small beauty,
- of hopes unrealised
- of vision undone
- impatience for faith to come
- too much thinking - I cannot do
- too much feeling - I cannot shake
- my unrequited soul
oh - what effect does it have?
it cripples,
oh
it knocks me for six
oh
washes me out to sea
oh
or else it opens a chasm beneath me
oh
and inflates my fear of heights
oh
and I frieze as if in vertigo
oh - are you okay then?
Since I am not obeying it:
not bad, no.

30 August 1999 © Wayne David Knoll

1. Fillbaskets
- circa 1956

['Northumberland Fillbasket' raspberries were one of two local native-born Wandin and well-known varieties which my great-great-great grandfather and pioneer, Edward Hunter, bred and grew in his wholesale nursery, till they multiplied across the Yarra districts; -the other sort were called 'Hunter's Perfection.' Hunter took up land there in 1866 and settled at Wandin Yallock from Heidelberg in the early 1870s.]

Before our biggened dam was bayed into the bottom flat
with excavations made by my mother's brother's dozers,
there used to be a patch of raspberries, in close to the creek,
[it is all flooded now, the memory is sprinkler-dripping leaves],

generation-tall bushes which grew in rows close-spaced as a careful pedigree
which the horse and tiller could fit, to exactly cultivate;
and in my first toddle of waking, going years of hot summer in
familiar bounty, prized at picking time, into shade for the cool,

I went among ends, invents of ingenious rows, being in, not doubting,
a scion basking in a born inheritance of life and nurture
as if all creation had been improved and named for me
-life which had been decided, bred and nurtured until then

-from Scottish border shires to the fertile Yarra Billanook-

where my own cornucopia basket could fill, warp and weft
like muses strands, for even these very raspberries were
a bloodline inheritance, first cultivated by my own ancestor;
-plant-breeder, and rootstock of faith in the parish,


-pioneer immigrant going native to Wandin Yallock red-lands
who planted and bred for his future native sons;
-Methodist elder, first Shire man, public Christian:
Ted Hunter, -in Australian nativity, my grandsire times three.

Fillbasket! Like an outlasting providence;
this was one nameable strand linking back,
a milieu of cultive nativity outside my blood:

I heard the adults say the ancient name
like a familiar litany of life in practice:

"We're picking the Fillbaskets."

" We got a good pick off the Fillbaskets."

" The Fillbaskets are still bearing well!"

like songs woven in the air
voicing this place as my place;

as if raspberry plants were an attendant angel host
giving the present of circumstances
in joyful nativity.


* * *
7 Dec 1996 © Wayne David Knoll

First Published in ‘Studio: a Journal of Christians Writing Albury NSW 1997

2. PermaCultural Hunter
- circa 1996

In Memory of my great-great-great grandfather, Edward Hunter -Born: 1817 Longbenton, Northumberland, England Departed 1852 on 'The Emigrant' from Sunderland to Melbourne, Died: 1895 Wandin Yallock, Victoria, Australia.


In Yarra Valley Lilydale,
outmoded in late decades,
from being

the horticultural
people's country town,
Limil shire village,
Melbourne lime supply depot;

to being sub-urban
a vegetating rank-growth
of suppurated suburbs!

Edward Hunter,
My horticultural forbear;

-like a plant
long-loaded after bearing

lies in wait
in his century-outlasted grave;

for,
though now unsung,
his Lillydale can still be read
in the cemetery,

speaking good
as he once spoke
in Council

counsel engraved
deep in his tombstone:

" There is no death!
What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life Elysian
whose portal we call death. "


7 Dec 1996 © Wayne David Knoll

First Published in ‘Studio: a Journal of Christians Writing Albury NSW 1997