under the setting saturday sun
we speak truth
and stand in solid sentence
can you sense our veracity?
our molten lava reality?
as we spin these rampant words
into vacant spaces
dripping rapid-fire syllables of eloquent syntax
into open mouths
and brazen faces
listen, as we sell our sins
to gods and masters and lovers
so walls of paper can burn
and gravel can hurt
or build concrete
and smashed locks can break fences
and stripped cyclone from solid steel
are hammers to shape us
and in unison we sing the lah lahs
and the blah blahs to the rah rahs
mmm mmm uh uh ah uh
and we all make jokes about the politics
and kill all the nouns collectively
and as we sit
and laugh
in pain
under the setting saturday sun
we speak truth
to liars and killers
and haters hating
and data-miners mining
and cryptocurrency defining
and real-estate deciding
as all the sad millionaires
sleep in credit cars
in shopping centre car parks
hiding behind the homeless bloated trollies
camped on white-lines on bitumen
over sacred indigenous places
but
shoving our waste under transparent plastic carpet
and books of perfect faces - like
on all my insta-bases - like
unable to climb an old-growth forest – like
degraded - like
in a comment – like
or a filtered selfie in the centre-link foyer - like
as children self-hate in detention centre islands - like
just
out
of
reach
we
grasp
and we punch verbal heads like inedible potatoes
before pacemaker cabinets shuffle in 24-hour cycles
and members groan in unison about pensions
with superannuation the size of suburbs
because your governments
hate losing every xenophobic argument
you vote for us
and we lock them up we lock them up
we lock them up
you vote for us
and we lock them up we lock them up
you vote for us
and so we write our songs
on keyboard screens
or rendered hectares
of recycled, reused plantation timber
and speak them politely to you
right here in this room
right
now
and under the setting saturday sun
we speak truth
because poetry is our violence
our strategic passion of the powerless
to kill all kings and patriarchs and gods
to strip control
from those with the biggest guns
and the bluntest uniforms of governments
that
we did vote for
we did vote for
we did vote for
and yeah man, look!
i’m an ironic white-man
a middle-aged wadjella
wearing white man’s clothes made in china
whinging up here
drunk on white man’s
middle-class stolen-wealth land
making poetry jokes
about children held in captivity
because every war breeds
both victims and survivors
and as the climate slowly shifts
and the ice melts us
as we shout out about how
homophobic sportsmen
should just shut the front door
and yes yes yes yes
yes yes yes
this is another fucking poem about poetry
inside a slam
inside the walls
of a broken poem
under the dying light of a saturday sun
on noongar boodja
and we speak this
this molten truth
to you
and we speak louder to those with weapons
and to those of us who can still speak
we stand in broken cages
here on microphoned stages
and we listen
under the setting saturday sun
we listen
speak!