recent stuff by allan boyd - antipoet

Under Western Skies

21 Mar 2021

This poem performed and written for the Perth Poetry Festival event Under A WA Sky: An Evening of Ecopoetry...

Sacrificial for WA Heat 2 2020

09 Aug 2020

This effort smashed together in about 30 minutes as bit of a fun sacrificial poem for WA Heats Australian Poetry Slam...

Judges

I stand up here
Fist to the skies
With a microphone
I advertise

those lives matter

03 Jul 2020

Kaya

From the loungeroom
To the boardroom
To the war room
To the courtroom
I can’t breathe

And Black Lives Matter
because all life shatters
With a bent white knee
to your throat

Whose lives matter
Black lives matter
Noongar life matter
Yamatji life matter

In custodial boxes
you suck back thick toxic dead air
On a sovereign stolen land

Get that sweet capital taste
of constructed race
That deadly sound
of the undefeated oldest culture

Gallipoli Crescent 2020

25 Apr 2020

At the driveway helm
We are concrete pontiffs of war tales
Thanking them like Jesus
For standing up to the force
Of lead and copper ballistics
744 metres per second
Piercing collective skin
On crosses they hang us
Dissing the myth
In the dark we wait for
Someone to tell us how to behave
And the hot wet shadows of home
Wake us in trenches
Of race hate, of capital empire
Of dysentery and gasses
Then lest we forgot to lean
On the Hi-Lux
The Cerato hatch
The Hyundi Ranger

tongue

05 Apr 2020


Bontage

01 Mar 2020

In the beginning

He said: Its criminal

There ought to be a law

 

And we rock the Canning like its 1974

This 10K sonic bitumen strut

The screeching rhythm of ourselves

The stench of rubber burnt on tar

Diesel, petrol. Denim n tats

Escort reds tucked into

Rolled up t-shirt sleeves

A Monaro bicep flex

 

We strut as one huge rock-star body

Into the wide-open road

We are 10 metres tall. Bronze

Black ripple-soled desert boots

White volleys. And if you want blood

Unwritten Letter to the Dead Gods

27 Feb 2020

On western coastal plains
In torrid haze we sit
and weep
Into the dusty mouths of dead gods
Under the star maps
And gnarl of banksia
We once told woodland stories

In the stunning scalpel
Of urban shadow
We watch brittle corridors
Dissolve to bitumen
And pale corrugated colour
A red tail melody - kaarak adrift
In the grey smudge of fresh trainlines
White tails search for suburban hollows
That squawking heritage
That rhythmic degradation
An underground extinction

scattered landscape

20 Feb 2020

Though we are anchored to our mental shores

Uninsured at the Boranup breaks

Telling stories to the wardong

Songs to the unsafe terrain at our feet speak

In beats across the blatant sky

All mud and pindan

All meat and muscle

All bus stops and diesel fumes

Airports and Stadiums

And all streets always end in circles

Return to the sturdy vessel

Bags stored in uber boots

Fire sticks and smartphones crackle electricity

Our apps meet in the western humidity

Heads float over the unwritten landscape

Uluru Statement from the Heart...

26 Sep 2019

As part of our Perth Slam introduction each month, we acknowledge the Wadjuk Noongar people of the Swan Coastal Plain. We also make a point to support the “Uluru Statement from the Heart”, which was released in May 2017 - 50 years after the 1967 Referendum. What is it?

take 5 - remember

12 Sep 2019

this is not a poem
this is not a song
these are all the things
we did when we were young
this is not my story
this is not my tongue
some of the following is true
only the words have been changed
to protect the poetry:
do you remember
when it rained poems
all those wasted tomes
lurching from spent ink
on generic paper
our new bodies
designed by automatic tellers
all the fake news
and invisible words
trained like stunning systems
on the shadow shafts

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