ashed right-wing angels
confident as professional
sportsmen on a World Tour.

To Talk of Flags

The flags fall like large, hollow,
monochrome leaves, said Ritsos, but
this isnt Greece. How can you talk of
changing flags as blithely as you
would a marriage? When we fly the flag
its as label to proclaim attitude,
and rightly so, too: the Remembrance
Day Parades, Expansionism, other
peoples wars; the main street of every
country town at the dying of day lights
up the Unknown Soldier & the long
lists of the Dead written in lead. No,
these things will always hold, rung up
once yearly, regular as a poker-machine.
Change flags, to acknowledge what? Whose
domestic honour, what custodial deaths?

Words to Lure a Ghost

An exiles soliloquy

Henley Pub? I am one year from
your death, and a mad mile from your
achievement twenty or so years
down the track. I think you may have
killed a few of us off, brother,
who rejoiced
in your thicket of sorrows. Jim Baxter,
if a cabbage tree marks your spot by
the river,
I am glad of it.
After you went, we were too eager
for another Apollo, and the laurel
was tossed from
hand to poetic hand like a hot kumara.
Most dropped it. A number were swept
by the winter river with the eels
into the Underworld.The God Love
and the God Vengeance sat down
in a burnt out warehouse to share out the
small morsels
of pain.
The poets are playing hide-and-seek
with each other in and out of marriage.
The sharing is done.
A southerly
whistles up over the gun emplacements on
Brooklyn Hill,Jim, scattering
the unposted Autumn leaves.

Christmas

Under the mining operations of
the moon, continental drifts of cloud
collude and a pelican scaffolds
the air. In cities, bricks sweat. We
are blinded by the rush to live;
keep it moving, says the sense of loss,
our common language. The information
Super Highway informs to inform
supra clicks the instinct. Hold on
screens survival. We are built upon
reflection; under the arch of the railway
see the conduit flow & steady in the
round. A piece of hill lights up and
beneath it shadow so shakes the net.
Hear the sheer drag of scythe on metal
the shunter makes at the curve of the
viaduct while, with elongated wail, rolls
three spoil-wagons to the hollow hill.

Emblems

1. Adam

A lamp passed behind a perforated shield;
s