MANHATTAN

To first see Manhattan go to Staten Island even if your Russian taxi driver groans with gulag desperation.Tell him you want to catch a ferry and when he says,"What! I take you to city direct!" Give the bastard as good as you get: New York style, blunt non-negotiation.

First sight from St. George across the water: a distant urban mound; a city that seems dense pressed on little ground; the south port metal curtain to a deep spread town.

ALL ABOARD! ALL ABOARD!

Sound of commuters; sound of crowd surge past camouflaged soldiers; sniffer dogs; flury of newspapers; the chant of an umbrella wielding street vendor, "if you pass me by, you won't stay dry;" moving stuff; looking to trade; looking to make a buck; looking to move up, upwards; 

crossing water: vertical emergence.

Close closer now and all the crowd bristled in response; a sideways glance: that outstretched arm; that flame; those Ellis Island huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the clamouring cacophony of myth and hope and industry piled high and all above your head.

 ALL ASHORE! ALL ASHORE!

To first see Manhattan use your feet; take a hike along the slow reveal of canyon streets; see light bathed glories framed by dishevelled nights; the shuffle of the nowhere; dark spaces that bite; take accidental corners that reveal street vendors, pocket cultures, negotiators making deals; that rich real that surpases all the myths. 

To first see Manhattan is to see what a city is.

OCCUPY POETRY

It's time to occupy poetry,
out in the streets, under canvas;
words could be bread baked
and free broke and gnawed
at a raggedy feast.

It's time to liberate poetry
from obscure, self-serving
elites, so it can spill out into
street chants through the fuse
of the ordinary.

It's time to reclaim poetry
as common wealth sounded
in heart beat; life given over
to word dance and the rhythm
of marching feet.

ON BEING A MAN

Thin lines hold that hairline fractured thing,
so tentative, so far from the man-up roar,
broken before and held together now,
stitch stretched and questionably convincing.
To be a man, to be fallen from the myths,
to be broken, not invincibly whole,
to be deep bruised far from expectations,
secretly lost in a bewildering world.
To be a man, to be a channel of tears,
worn raw to  strange sympathetic symphonies,
moved as much by beauty as by pain:
stitch stretched, breaking, impossibly reaching.

VAN DIEMEN'S LAND

Country, my country,
you tidal claim me and I am not alone;
earth leached into bones,
my soil heart sings you. I am all rock
because of you, all wave tug rugged lost in you;
far from you, never apart from you,
country my country.
I see flame light across the waters, flickering
grief across the waters: black sentinel all still;
wife killed by a butcher's knife; tribe bled
close to nothing. What have we done,
o what have we done,
country, my country?
Mountain speaks, river speaks, highlands
murmur down through valleys deep;
the crest fall wonder beckons still
and years cannot beat gravity,
country, my country.
Sing islands, sing rivers, sing choir gums,
rain splattered crowd of watchers sing
the wisdom claim that stakes your full possession.
Country, my country,
still in the deep root heart of me,
the south wind brings the fury of the world
and I am lost without you.

TWO DEPARTED MEN

The two men met their maker
somewhere close to Gundagai
on a misty stretch of highway.

I arrived home to hear the news
from a boggle eyed, vague Irishman
who delivered it like a joke without a punch-line.

I drank straight whisky
to reassure myself that I was alive
but it didn't beat the chill inside me.

The younger man would have read
theological themes in the mangled wreck
and the gritty particularity of his dying.

The older man would have just sighed
and muttered some melancholy phrase
with his tremorous voice crackling.

The funeral was a clamorous affair
that would have caused the younger man
to lay down with a migraine.

The old man would have gathered it all in
and squeezed it into a tiny declaration
that it was nice and the people were good.

They are buried under dewy grass,
on the outskirts of the city,
brothers in the shadow of a chapel.

PROPHECY

I dance with the beast I do not name
of meat and bones and righteous rage;
a mean eyed, angry stamping thing
that shakes the floor and makes ears ring;
that stares down mediocraties
and rages for ascendancy;
a herd stampede through all my frame
that leaves me weak and near insane;
a force that gathers up its words
to pound those flimsy dubious worlds
where I have tried to take a seat,
contained, while others dumbly speak
their flimsy surface rhetoric
that sets me dancing with my beast.