Wednesday, December 31, 2014

THE SIXTIES: The 1960s ?




THE SIXTIES: THE 1960s ?


Decade drawn in dissembling rainbows & counterfeit, counter
culture, psychedelic drugs, pop music views and the soft disease
of surreality in flower power and sweet watermelon wine!

A valourising of cupidous paedophile Eastern flouters
as gurus, of dropping out, of speaking in parenthesise,
the championing of Communists like Mao as if benign.

All while we knew Mao Tse-Tung was starving out
murdering and shooting 78,000,000 fellow Chinese
communist citizens of China from 1958 to 1969.



Image: Chinese victim of Mao's Great Famine during the 'Cultural Revolution'

BECAUSE YOU APPLAUD ME



BECAUSE YOU APPLAUD ME


Because you applaud me, I cannot
speak to you. Because you would applaud
me I cannot tell you a thing, not a single thing.
Because you are so ready to applaud me, my tongue
sticks to the roof of my mouth as if it were wet flour
that makes dough on my palate. Because you are
so bent on applauding me I am struck dumb. I am
quite silenced by your too loud applause, because of
your will to clap every true message away, the prophecy
that I would bring, that would become another mere talent act,
is untold, unheard, unsaid, and the gut-wrenching declamation
that I would to decry, is deflated by your suffocating applause,
by the squeezed airway of your applause, the divined message
pricked down by that gregariously crowded applause, and, so
because of your self-willed negating applause, I have nothing
but thoughtless bubbles to say to you.


WDK @ November 19, 2014


Image: 'North Korean conscripts voluntarily applaud their Great Leader.'

You Who



YOU WHO STONE


You who stone the prophets, or else lounge to ignore
them in disdain while they live, but when dead, then
heap up a mass of flowers in prodigailty on their memorial
and after raise whitewashed stones in their honour as
if they were one of you, your own, as if you were like them.

How could you be who have refused the road, the dry miles?
You who could not bear in any share of their word scraping.
You who could not even hear, would not try to use that tongue
- as if it was an organ, a finger so coloured, so foreign, so
strange, that all pride in yourself as unprejudiced is lost?


- WDK @ 17 December 2014

Portrait of The Farmer As An Earth Artist





Portrait Of The Productive Farmer As An Earth Artist

- (for Tony Phillips of Birriwindi)


The artist walks out to be in his studio, to his long-lasting
big work, he comes from the door of his dwelling, changing
to tough boots at the porch, it's in these he comes, a vehicle
carries him, comes to the vast canvas, to the work, and what
is it here that he does? He pauses as if out of time, he long-looks
in a green ochre and brown study, like an even-handed judge
coming slow to the weighing for making a report, yet suppressing
the shout for what this work is becoming. He frames his eyes
with the gesture of one hand, in the old sign language that many
other earth artists could understand, to select of a vast landscape,
of this large paddock of new-sown lucerne, for it is this of which
his night dreams consist, this which the day-dreams paint verdant.
It is the work of these many years of lifetime. It was two years
ago that he found inspiration here to let the land go fallow
and then, with the rank gouche of poor fog grass high as four
winds rippled it, he ploughed the pallette knife of his tractor
through its bulk, it was him threw it down, disced it under like
burying the old dead bodies that would feed an idea of these
small leguminous leaves, this bud, this beginning of a deep
rooted crop, this turning of earth a rich leafy full production.
He steps with care across its scarified brush strokes, crouches
with care for booted feet between its shoots, and reaching down,
he crumbles the clods of earth as if it were living treasure.


WDK

Sheik



SHEIK


All sheiks are self-styled sheiks.
Every Sheik is a self-styled sheik.
There is no ordaining authority.
The words self-styled that are
used to try discredit one who
came out, rogue, discredits all.



My Country (In Bonds)

"I love a Red-Taped country
A land of Bureaucratic forms
Of miles of yellowed triplicates
Of Green Papers, Digital norms;
I love her vast Proformas
Her Documental artesian sea
Her proper channels of terror
A queue at the desk for me."




MY COUNTRY (IN BONDS)

- after Dorothea Mackellar

The love of wit and freedom
Of soapbox speakers in a park
Of ordered dissent in gardens
A Magna Carta that you mark;
Patriotic scenes, heartfelt mindscapes,
Permanent streams, emancipated skies
We know of, but despise all that
Our true love is otherwise.

I love a red-taped country
A land of bureaucratic forms
Of miles of yellowed triplicates
Of green papers, digital norms;
I love her vast proformas
Her documental artesian sea
Her proper channels of terror
A queue at the desk for me.

A long commute each morning
A slow commute home after dark,
The off-white walls of buildings
Our gravy-train hero: the clerk.
Sound of paper in an out-tray
Song of files slotting into place
The life that produces our pay
Efficient use of office space.

Heart of our report, this country!
Her pitiless soul caught in paper
Sick at heart, but surrounded
In cool shade by the skyscraper;
So, when daily dark clouds gather
They have far worse to fear;
The loathsome public servant,
The bureaucrat - shaking a spear.

Heart of the country, the office
Land of the officious excise
Strong love for corridors of distance,
Flow charts ‘neath curtain’d skies;
After the demanding letters
Watch for a notice to rationalise,
The thin wedge of lettered whiteness
To dulls wits and tranquillise.

An obedient-hearted country
A willfully standoffish land
All who are not enslaved by her
So few like to understand;
Though earth has many a splendour
Wherever Australians may die
Give me a death certificate to fill out
A cremation form as alibi.


Image: Death of A Husband, 1958, by the late Australian artist Arthur Boyd.

Name-Droppingly Prejudiced

NAME-DROPPINGLY PREJUDICED

We'd become so name-droppingly prejudiced that
after the meteoric calamity fell on us many grouped
up so as not be anywhere near Allan Jones even
though he was manning a rescue boat while a
following of others formed a sort-of joint drown vow
with Sarah Hanson Young in the wave-flood water,
even then up on the ramparts an every-woman for
herself coterie stood by Julia Gillard in contradiction
of it all as if some ideal was coming to the rescue.



Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The New Leaves


LEAVES OF GREEN

The new leaves of the ivy do not
look around testing air for danger,
they simply burst forth in joy like
Christmas presents torn from their
buds in soft tissue-green naiveté,
full of such vim of sap and bounce
and do only slowly harden up tough
in their darkened gills and yet it’s
all of it that foments the poison.

27 December 2014

Brendan The Bringer


BRENDAN THE BRINGER


Every day for six days Brendan
rises at the quarter to two AM
has a fast coffee and walks out
into the night whether it's bright-starred
or overcast goes around the corner to
the side street where he parks it
and climbs up like a night pilot to
the lit cabin of his prime mover
- a Mack truck rig with doubles, two
trailers full of skim milk powder
or it might be full cream from a dairy
processing plant down at Koroit and
he throws the switch to start those
big pistons moving till it fires like a
small volcana of laval rumbling, the
call of just this one engine among
the many that throb along our dreams
and only rarely wake us to perception
and then not to give any real thought
to the weighty tonnes of this great baby
freight of extradited mother's milk
which Brendan will bring hurtling
down the truck-tyre-spooned state
highways where silent owls flutter
towards the depots and the ports
of the cities where infant food is
vastly consumed with small consultation
with the cows which Brendan passes
as he, quietly as it can be done, eases
the big rig into bulk motion and racks
the stick up a piano of gears to turn the
music of those trailers in many milk tonnes
out to slowly pick up speed like it was
a sort of precious metal until the delimit
signs end and then the riffs break into
the whole theme as the music swells
as our night rocket is speeding in
like a sleeping babe snoring by
with trusty Brendan at the wheel
towards all that crying need where
the money concentrates where the
money congeals for a bringer's reward.
When he has delivered his load
Brendan turns the truck about
and goes the opposite way on
the very same road indentations
till he gets to Koroit to fill up again
with powdered milk and so drives
the rig back home by late afternoon
spends small time with family going
early to bed so he can wake again
to take the load at quarter to 2 AM.


Image: Milk Factory, Koroit, Victoria

Hue of the Fantail


Hue of The Fantail

Grey fantail, the hidden soul who sits for less
than seconds as if the very mortal tree branch
was stuck with fresh-mixed epoxy cage-glue,
for all its wings are a career, proudly professed,
with the acrobatic live witness of its wide tail fan
ready for all four dimensions to be gyred through.

Australian Bark


AUSTRALIAN SUMMER BARK


In their time at the shedding of the outer bark
the gum trees wax colourful and swell out with the
hue cry of a summer of drinking up all the spring
to bedeck themselves in flags & pennant ribbands
in flying streamers of curling, twisting tree leather
shed of upper limbs as used-up innocence goes cracking
to falling like floats strung in the summer parade
where the arches-n-bows of harvest bark make neckties
of the bole in its firm buttressess as it were a god
or a icon of one, a great upthrust spire to one.


- 31st December 2014




ScienceAlert

Why do Eucalypts shed their bark? It turns out the trees expand in the warmer month, but their bark can't stretch, so instead it peels off in long strips. This also helps to remove pests, and reveals the beautiful mottled patterns underneath.

Images and information via Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment


WARMER WEATHER



CHANGING WARM WEATHER

The sun shines as it did;
high summer cloud wisps
up like summer cloud does;
as a birthday candle breeze
puffs the green leaves aflicker
and aglow as if a mind played
with a gift of light just like it was
another morning of the world.

31st December 2014

WATERTANK


A CORRUGATED IRON WATERTANK

A corrugated-iron watertank is unlike a beach
of sand where the tide has rippled up the skin,
for the galvanising breaks up the light in shards
like a platoon of silver-curved swords thrust out
above inside shadow, each glint of light on edge
is sharp as the dry dapples that hold the water in
strengthening a guard arm in the arc of flow-through
as the metal swings its left hook and its right to
join hands in unspilt victory drink on the other side.

The gradually diminishing dull-echoed rungs were
the grim ladder rungs with which our grandparents
climbed up out of the droughts of summers past
each pewter-coin circle of stored rainwater a pool
of common use to be meted out by a careful glass
so even a dish of washwater carried splashless out
was lipped across a lettuce patch as dose in salve
for green stuff in the palate, it rung of no idle cream
familiar of beaches: frugal priority had real draught.

Monday, September 01, 2014

PINK MIST


PINK MIST

A land of dust and gravel
has a daytime pink mist -
a treachery that grows instead
of trees, in a coward's plastic-war
as a clever demonic hatred
digs a tomb-garden of harm,
designing not a green landscape
but a scarscape, of that plant
stock grafted to the ground
with the wiry seed of an
Improvised Explosive Device
(IEDs), of that seminal
genus a destructive orchard
grows of a sudden as it is
the like of watered by, say, just
that one stray footprint, whether
the tread of Afghan child, a
mother, or a soldier, for even
in any just close by, with
a plastic melt in nuts and bolts
for as-if blades, this fruit
gangrenes to rot in an instant
that peels and dices,
amputates legs as well as feet,
makes cripples of whomever
is there, of whom is near, or,
else, if it be a prime detonator
whose inadvertent tread
braved into barrenness,
trips the germinator, that
dread trigger, a last trip wire,
and goes in a blurt to gas
reacted to parts so small,
the risk-facing squaddies
call it pink mist.

- WDK


- based on the broadcast British BBC One documentary 'THE BOMB SQUAD, Episode Two- Rod's Team - - [After a missile strike kills an insurgent laying an IED, bomb disposal operator Rod and his team are dropped into the area by helicopter to investigate. Captured on helmet camera, we see what Rod sees as he is standing over the bomb, which could kill him if he makes one wrong move.



THE BOMB SQUAD - Episode Two - Rod's team



* * *

Saturday, August 30, 2014

CREATION CALLS

CREATION CALLS

- August 2014

Creation calls with its enigma
Seduces with colour, with its curve
So that a cry of a single creature
Singes the heart of our equanimity
As if it is all of more than this


THE WORLD TEETERS ON A BRINK


The World Teeters On A Brink - photography by Eric Johansson

*

The World Teeters On A Brink


The world teeters on a brink
As crops lines crest off the family-farm
Mindless tides pull in a flood roar of change
The world teeters on a brink
the old farmer falls, his strength disarmed
The sustaining pattern loses its heritage
As the world teeters on a brink.



Friday, August 29, 2014

RAT-RACIST

THE RAT-RACIST

- 29 August 2014

'Racist' the accuser calls you a name
As if 'Accusation' will auto-defame,
Leak you of history.


But more common is the 'Rat-Racist'
Who conforms, without basis,
Without any glory.


Then, casual, with extreme prejudice
Pimps to sell-out, like Judas'
In ignominious story.

Monday, August 25, 2014

A HUED CRY AGAINST THE HUE AND CRY (after the riots, the looting, violence, in Ferguson, St Louis)



A HUED CRY AGAINST THE HUE AND CRY

(after the riots, the looting, in Ferguson, St Louis)

"We need to stop talking about race"- Morgan Freeman

Colour is a black kettle
Colour is a red herring
Colour is green with envy
Colour shades into gray.

Colour is purple prose
Colour is a blue joke
Colour is liver yellow
Colour is a white out.


Friday, August 15, 2014

A WARBLING


A WARBLING


A single note reaches
you at last, follows through
the verandahs and painted
weatherboards like your
mother once called you,
sung your name and you are
three years old again yet
far older, further, although
memories of that magpie
you told your kids of warbles
in the rain as if the liquid alerts
you to unsung remembering
of games you chanted for 'her'
using clinking glass as marbles
in the old harmonies she joined
like its was some ritual warbling.


W.D.K.



A TOAST TO THE AS IF LIFE




A TOAST TO THE AS IF LIFE

- by W.D.K




As if Idi Amin never did those gross things
to Uganda, and so much Africa did not copy.

As if the year Zero never began in Kampuchea
with ideas as legacy in library shelves of skulls.

As if Gravrilo Princip was not full of hate & worth a statue in
Sarejevo, as if the politics of rancour, of resentment

was a thing of the past, as if the hate of unforgiveness
was not at work in the world like a feral virus.

As if we could all play life between the kerbs,
with footpaths and bins and letterboxes to

get out of where it is our neighbours go. As if we can
go on tour all about & out of it with just money.

As if you never ate sausages or chicken, as if the veal
rennet in your life's cheese was grown on aspic.

As if Darwin wasn't bombed. As if the 2nd world war
in Asia & in Timor & PNG & the Pacific never was.

As if Argentina was a truthful State, as if Uruguay were
good sports. As if Egypt was a place of justice.

As if the Palestine victim story was not told & did not arm
with many guns & kill & kill long before 1948.

As if the Suez crisis was any legitimate
anti-colonialism against its engineers & builders.

As if Pakistan's Islamist creation in separation
from India is not a perpetually violent tragedy.

As if we really lived in this world on call,
as if these cafes and those booked dinner tables

really were the watchtowers, as if the right rock
music made any difference, as if right attitude did.

As if what we do is no living concern so much as
the progressiveness and acceptance of attitude we take.


* * *
- 1st draft 30 June 2014,

Australian Eastern Yellow Robin



Australian Eastern Yellow Robin

Like an unheard idea of a rare fruit with wings
they droop from bush branch and tree trunk;
yellow robins that ripen of the grey dull winter
with sweet sun close as family members
in the sheer cheer of a bright-eyed harvest;
they flit here as if they complete the cryptic
mystery with darts of feed-found intelligence.

- W.D.K.

DIRT ROAD, BELLADONNAS, FENCE & SKY


DIRT ROAD, BELLADONNAS, FENCE & SKY

A dirt road, belladonnas, wire
fence and sky
A path leads out by grass, cut
or falling down;
as our past has gone by, who
wonders why ?
but a few like bulbs of the
pioneers re-grown.

- W.D.K

Thursday, August 14, 2014

THE SAND OF EMOTION - (after a homily by Pope Francis)


THE SAND OF EMOTION

- (after a homily by Pope Francis)






The sand of emotion is good
for adding in aggregate for use in
a cement that makes for concrete.
All you need is a working recipe.

Try '5,2,1' for starters, say, that is,
five shovelfuls of gravel, (it must be
real stone, a crush of the rock), then
two shovelfuls of your said sand of

emotion, even if you must break it
from the languid beaches of feeling,
or smash it of the hourglass of time,
plus one shovelful of lime cement.

Mix well with enough water in a barrow
or a revolving drum mixer and
you will be able to lay down a path
that will firm up to a walk a future.

- WDK - July 2014

WHAT'S HAPPENING?



WHAT'S HAPPENING?

Bare twigs touch the cold underside
of the moving sky, fearless of its weather.

A wind gust huffs like panicked moral outrage
in the wintry ash tree, and falls breathless.

For all of three minutes not a visible bird
lands in your own window's quadrant of sight.

Yet a raw noise - crass sound - reaches ears
without earplugs: unseen crows read the news.

They report the atrocities of a gang of blue wrens
wreaking havoc among a swarm of undeclared midges.

The crows claim that when singing blackbirds cease
performance they kill earthworms in carnivorous silence.

Now a honeyeater sits on one of those bare twigs,
having ravaged all the honey from today's flowers

And sings.

- W.D.K. 12 August 2014

AT THE CHURCH OF ST JUDAS AND THE POOR


AT THE CHURCH OF ST JUDAS AND THE POOR


At the Church of St Judas and The Poor
Take off your boots all shoes of common trade
Leave a mask for street parades at the door
At the Church of St Judas and The Poor

At the Church of St Judas and The Poor
No altars, make no grand churches anymore
Nor practices in blood or body, none of war
At the Church of St Judas and The Poor

At the Church of St Judas and The Poor
An endless parade of philanthropy redeems
A finery, a fashion, all made to be as seems
At the Church of St Judas and The Poor.

At the Church of St Judas and The Poor
We criminalise those who judge, compare
We take their wealth so we can give a care
At the Church of St Judas and The Poor.


- W.D.K. - 1st tentative draft 9 July 2014, more to come...

NEW HOLLAND HONEYEATER



- by WDK

As if in a time of shared grief, as that much
tragedy unites, the seer-sprites remind of earlier
Australian links to the merchant seafarer Dutch,
come to the call of a New Holland Honeyeater
(Phylidonyris Novaehollandiae), that mushes
the currs off correa flowers & bottlebrushes
a mere bird in gumleaf shape, in pied camouflage,
appears but a moment before our passing cage.
'Tch Tch Tch,' it calls in alto as a sung sneeze
nothing at all like a 'Tsk Tsk' of hateful scolding,
more like affection's daily call to pets for cheese,
a thing almost grand-parental, old, enfolding;
as if a 'Tuck-in now', only pointier and sharper,
like a chook calling its chickens only higher
up the tree, the striated, beaked visitor of flowers
works honey of all the tweaked daylight hours
with sun-bright gold in quick flashes of its wing
and a 'Tchuk touche' at day’s end and beginning.

Every Minute, Every Minute



Every Minute, Every Minute

Every minute, as if yours is minute,
an Outrage far worse than yours
is done, or just was, or soon will be.

Which would show that such dire
things are all too dangerous to keep
as pets or hobbies; else set match for fire

and make genocide as you emote.

- W.D.K.

BLACK FOX CALLS

BLACK FOX CALLS

Every Midsommer before a murder
the night is riven with black fox calls
tho' no vulpine reynard is ever seen.
Each blind sky echoes darkly further
as a vixen cry rings out again and falls,
the music of incognito where evil's been.

-W.D.K.

GOOROOK (AUSTRALIAN MAGPIE) SONG


GOOROOK (AUSTRALIAN MAGPIE) SONG

- by Wayne David Knoll

Light washes dark sky with its call out
For a first word as the song of the birds.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.

The tree necks a break for the hard weather
It’s branch offers a table to cling out a wait.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Here’s heaven come after traversing hell
Phew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the sky we’ll go.

A ladder-climb up the sky beats an air drum
To mount joust and not lose to proud eagles

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.

For pied-birds rent the air owed the gum-trees
We pay a life-lease in a death-pledge of song.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.

A dive writes on broad-black with a chalk-edge,
In winged claw at knife-point as swoop bloods.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Here’s heaven come after traversing hell
Phew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the sky we’ll go.

The wires of human-kind are bow strung
To be tuned by us pied birds of great airs.

Hey hey sunshine that comes after rain
Hey heaven come after traverses thru’ hell
Pheyew, rip rip up the fabric, here we are
By hell, zip zip down the world we’ll go.

- July 2014


*

AGAINST THE SKY


AGAINST THE SKY

See, a yellow-flashed New-Holland honeyeater
atop a wintry tree
Calls its arch of throat out - as if something
in the world is listening.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

FOAM



FOAM

"It was Andy Warhol who did not say: 'Everyone will have 15 minutes of foam.' "

Foam: it's a word like a soft summation of an era. In that time
human-kind grew foamy. Men and woman then sort of bubble boiled
in the liquid that had leaked out of them, a fluid of time-weakened wills,
and they were foamy of feeling and bother, foaming in their minds. As
full of froth as a roast gossip. as if blown by the currents into foam, soap
of their wash-up, suds of their watery fall. The sud-loops of their music
made foam in the air. The bubbles of their cartoons grew to be slogans
erasing with foam all manifesto or pattern that made the plumb-house.
People were mad with foaming melodramas of imagined politics, they
frothed at the mouth with words of artificial outrage, mooning the foam
of false words in artificial anger. A foaming world went mad of foam.

People dined on foam. The crowd themselves became a sort of foam.
Anxious as bubbles, amoeba-split in heart & mind as hubbubs of foam
after the breaking waves of their decades. Foam was them and foam
became them. The protests were placarded in foam. Sex boostered out
a thing of foam. People foamed up with sex, imploded like filmy bubbles.
People dyed-up, lint-minded of dirty laundry, foaming in cyphers of wash.
Letters turned to foam. Intelligence puffed up and blew like clouds. Light
bulbs glowed with steam. Telephones rang like a sea of foam, gaseous
spheres of mooning. The world bubbled to froth and blew with fickle orbs.
Off-white foam like polymer boxes their food came in, in their foam cups.
Foaming like a content of their cups, a shake froth, their melt-heart's
leftovers, their dissolved head's content, their diluted soul's essence,

foam.


27 July 2014

Sunday, June 15, 2014

WATCHING THE GOOD INTENTIONS, WATCH



<

WATCHING THE GOOD INTENTIONS: WATCH

(after the unchecked depredations of Boko Haram, Nigeria & Isis, Syria & Iraq)


Watching the baby good intentions so cute
at play in the lab-zoo of their own making
this heart fails me, more, as theirs do not,

for I observe the use of seeing-eye dogs
to sat-nav a wisdom of this repeat history
that mind-slavishly trusts its still-lying maps,

which paints the faces of the children, or
which makes music in benefit concerts, or
cycles across lands of emptying value, which

tours the globalised countries of the saved in the
ruined fact of damnation,and denies it, as it runs
to be fit, and does not foretell the carnage, not

of a dawnless day coming, the brute day of the locust
to come, the days of scavengers and vultures already
hatching like weeds in the bleed-lands of our neglect.