hello, so here we are now
huddled for this tented voyage
never ready for blunt-faced
rock star poets to speak
like main street pastry
sweet calorific word-units rained brutal
all yr fat thick metaphoric
les murray-style stanzas
spoken lines and maybe munted rhymes
here in this sacred semiotic space
hills n hills of rows of fine vines clarified
harrowed like hashtagged hashtags
a margaret river narrative
not even a weed in sight
and poetry is dead again, woke
n poured into glasses like weak jokes
and cigarettes, coffee roasters
and eighty-seven-dollar chocolate and cheese
and the baddest naughtiest ice-cream
born from shiraz cabernet dreams
of bastard vintage and political vinegar
and germaine spoke
like jesus and god and the spirit at once
in the wake of equality
a loveless dead sex
like uncles, fathers, brothers, men, boys
they loved even worse by the ones we love
banal sex in a 5-star marriage
sex is not always a broken penis, like unoiled guns
and cricket bats and knives and failure
and crimes against the state
and microphones dropped and poems dropped
and voices dropped like nooses
here on this stage
and i stood inside a football at easter
in the blinding southern st kilda sun
for either jesus to come back to life
like john snow came back
and knew nothing
and yet you, my friend, actually
know all of the things, mate
stolen bodies, stolen children, stolen words
and i sulked in the shadows of them
at anzac dawn
a shrine of woke remembrance
to gigantic television screens
deep inside the coldest cryptic concrete bunker
and forgot about fire, about poetry
that they all died without glorious clarion
limbless, pissing and shitting
in mud, blood and blood and blood
and bones scattered crude from cannons
screaming for all our beautiful mothers
or came back in a deathly silent gaze
or crippled in the acrid rancid smoke
in a chaotic ordered haze of stupid bullets
arms ripped to shreds
up n over the trench
a carpet of skulls and hearts
a torso of blood scars
i stood silent
like, waited for it
to hit me
and it didn’t
because lest we forget
we actually forgot
to remember
not to do it
again
and i am a man
a dead poet man
a middle-aged man
privileged, fat
white fucking man
a Wadjella man
in white man pants
in a white man shirt
telling you
that Noongar culture
is intrinsically more valuable
than a continental seasonal calendar
from kent, brighton
and the isle of wight
that makes no specific sense
to koolbardies and chiddy chiddys
in Boranup and Wooditchup
or the dark caves and coastal surf violence
of Boojarah noongar booja
n give us the new old names of things
to tell more real stories
in south-west tents
to new people in old mans skin
that six old seasons live here
are better than four colonials there
and here we are now
deep inside the death of poetry
and so, with money to burn
we drip n spill words into this
voyager dirt
a flinty aftertaste, some bulk tannin
of contraband novels, short fictions
truffle encyclopedias
best-sellers, worst-sellers
written solo in cages
and all the simultaneous
consumers of our text
in the same space
right here right now, hello
if i could sing i would
and the song would be sung
bold like an anthem, the first post
a stunned nation of anarchists
who can only vote for politicians
and burn poems written in cells by
australians of the century
australians of the decade
australians of the year
australians of the month
australians of the week
australians of the day
australians of the hour
australians of the minute
australians of the second
australians that have no happened yet
and we thank them all vociferously
for dying in unison
in bloody chorus
on nicely fonted posters
in transperth buses
because the end of times
is right here right now in this tent
can you see it? mate
look, this man here spitting syllables
into another white wine region
because the words got written by hands
and fingers on keyboards, pens, pencils
crayons, ochre, scratched onto rocks
in silence
and yet we speak them
in groups, in teams
in empty white noise
because poetry
is not dead yet
we speak ourselves into
prolific existence
we push poems into you
into your face
off the pages
into the air
the salt and eucalyptus
of this southern sky
these poems are for you
and if you breathe them
you wake the dead
you woke the poems up, man
because you hear them
here
in this tent
the poems are not dead
this poetry does not reject you
these poems may reflect you
this poetry will inject you
these poems will infect you
are you ready…?
Allan Boyd (aka the antipoet) March 2019
…
NOTE: This piece was written for, and performed at, the 2019 Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival, where a handful of Perth “Slam” poets and I were invited guests. We performed our stuff to a packed, lunchtime audience - immediately after Germaine Greer’s talk on her definition of rape. The event, held in a huge white tent, under a gigantic Australian flag at the Voyager Estate Winery, was a few days after Anzac Day and a few days before the 2019 Federal Election. We were chauffer driven to the gig in a new Jaguar – or may have been a Benz…
MRRWF Website: https://mrrwfestival.com/2019-festival/authors-presenters/boyd-allan/
BIO: Allan Boyd (aka the antipoet) is a Perth-based poet, writer, musician, sound-artist, organiser, educator and anarchist - performing (and pontificating) activist poetry and art experiments at myriad gigs, events and festivals in WA and across Australia since 1995. He hosts the monthly Perth Slam; is the Australian Poetry Slam WA coordinator and is currently undertaking a degree in Cyber Security at Edith Cowan University. He says: “FUCK SHIT UP!”