recent stuff by allan boyd - antipoet

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

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

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 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