We are wild and raw for it
Here, in a blazing land,
Sand-burning beaches,
The low colossal sky,
The slow fading of our evenings into night.

Night, when the lapwing calls the world home again
And out of the bay the white gulls fall
Into the ocean, the sea's crawling surge,
Northwards, by currents temperate
And tropical,
The long winding range
That loses its footing in the coastal flats,
In the desert's vast and undulating stride
We are wild and raw for it.

With a sky so blue that you could fall forever
And falling, never fall so far as into its red heart,
Its pumping core, and the majesty
Of bodies skin-tight, raw and moving
In this distant nether-world.
Where the real world ends, our hearts
Plunge fountain-flow into the dance of dreams,
We hold the dancer close, we spin,
Star-tipped and wild beyond the clasp and call,
Beyond the river's bend,
Beyond the treeless hill,
We are wild and raw for it.

And the very last, the endling,
Caged in the sunlight at Beaumaris Zoo,
Tired of the poking and the prodding
Paced out of existence into history,
Into emblem and icon
Legend and label,
On to things protected by copyright,
Footage and fable,
And the internet's electric jungle,
And into that great white emptiness
Of extinction,
That giant ship which we are building,
Stacking and storing,
Fitting and filling,
Recording into the grand voyage
Of oblivion.

I am caught, crucified,
My hands trembling, extended,
I clasp for these walls.
I have lost faith, in the night,
In the tight embrace of love
My back is broken.
Prepared, for this crooked bed.
Prepared, for the hounding face of time.

All my words fail, out here on the edge,
In cataracts pronunciations plunge
Onto the rocks of shattered sounds,
The meanings call and drag,
Unable to explain the inexpressible you,
The mental scraps congeal,
The ten thousand half-attempted lines
All erring, marred,
All leaving me here alone again
In the insurmountable anguish of love.

And these men that made the land,
That wove their dreams with dust and dirt,
That needed death to know the flower,
Men of the corrugated country.

Men of bones,
Propped in the rusted windy ruins,
Who watched the movement of the birds
And bartered life with sky and earth.

Men of the drought's bare-cupboard cradle,
Biblical through plague and famine,
Who struck the water in the stone
And fought with flesh to swell the soil.

Time's weathered toys,
Who sought a garden in the sand,
Where the withered streams of the dry season
Flowed with flooding summer rains.

Men of the dark deserted spaces,
That masked their ruined stars with drink,
That fed the shadows with strange desires
And drowned the broken plough with tears.

At this deep pool
Where no light is reflected,
Where small birds come
Clinging to the vine
Amongst fallen logs and silences,
The crush of leaves and the rot of years.

At this dark edge
Where now unassailable trees tower
In a brief clearing,
At this still centre where the wreckage lies
Of river's breach and storm's rage.

Here at the heart.

Where once the workings of long-ago men,
The wild, roaring, toothless ones,
Desperate and dislocated,
Their fierce eyes blazing through dark,
And bodies by day burning through timber,
Cut sunlight in shadow
And nation in nature.

At night the boys go hunting buses,
Tight-lipped eyes
Loaded with anger,
Gun-barrel arms
Tattoed at the shoulder
And quarry-stone cocked in their hands.

The finger-high boys
Of corner-store cool,
Snarling boys,
Drinking the dark and unloved spaces,
The public places,
Where they have ****** both grog and girl.

They've flogged the stolen cars for fun
In third gear up Spit Hill
And disappeared in the Wallaby Grass
As the sirens wail
And the cars burn.

Footpath foul round cul-de-sacs
These branded boys
Have made their name,
And window panes
Have felt their bitter
Forceful curse.

And tonight the boys are hunting buses,
In tobacco-black suburban hollows
They're taking aim
And will sleep
Smiling
Once the **** is made.