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
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
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
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
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
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?
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
so i said: popped a pretty pristine piece a paper
in my polyester pocket n pulled out a political poem
said poem – poem
shoulda stood still on the side of your slippery street
spat out some syllables and said poem – poem
let’s lift the lying lids off labels in the ladies’ aisle
let’s call it a little lesson in local linguistics n say
poetry saved my life
like a tank-top jesus in a sidebar feed
nobody told me there’d be poems like these
two-minute rhythm rants
stiletto phrases
many many many many words on stages
so we let loose
all the stunning words
we spin on stages
inside locked and gated poems
like metered pages
another word stack
packed back to back
behind another word here
in front of another word here
beyond another word here
beneath another word here
yet another word here
layers of lines here
this big list is a poem here
a rhyming dictionary of chronic fictions
of autocratic conniptions
with tight noun light attacks
a language of clenched fists
running verbs we spat
