Unmanned

Excerpt

Cultural Misappropriation

is that what I hear you cry, citizen? If a delph-glazed moon with its O so delicate pattern pans over Holland, flat as a tack, it also comes by way of the Antarctic circle right to your doorstep in equal measure. If the sun clamps its golden torque on mosque or synagogue, pa, cathedral or sacred site, does this endorse any one people over another? Is it your wish to head off the cultural bandits at the historical impasse, citizen, by placing a patent on your mana? Beware the polemicists who define and so divide, who aggregate authority unto self where before lay none. Symbol becomes the circumference of time & custom. It is not the thing itself, but the beautiful echo of a peoples harmonic which cannot be bounded nor weakened. Here lies the camouflage that protects the ancient matrix, the silent memory of our bloods journey & sound leads you to it.

Word Maps

1. Down By The River

Of the brain, mushroom shaped as bomb blast, we project the image to fact; up river from the torrent, amongst the calmness of boulders, the angler shadow-casts looping the steady surface for the archetypal fish whose leapt arch anticipates t but the headwaters are held greyly back by a concrete-net on this dappled and uncaptured urban afternoon. He deftly flicks & spools back and forth from channel to channel.

2. National Park Holiday

If you go into the woods today you will be part of a task force moving in line-formation. You will allow that the plastic yellow tape which cordons off select areas does not imply a Sacred Grove. If you go into the woods today, disinterment, not picnics, is the order of inquiry. The Vegetable Kingdom remains thoroughly documented and every species is accounted for; some of whom are human, or parts thereof.

3. False Idols

It was always wood, wood along the way, and exits went from grove to sacred grove till deeper wood lay beyond the Roman shield and sword; that, though, belongs to another picture book. The lyre-bird mimics the chainsaw and Birds of Paradise spit chips. Along the Hume Hwy. east of Eden, a concrete Mountain Ash dubbed Yggdrasil boasts a wide-screen computer enhanced vista: an arrow-straight monorail running from Uluru clean through the Olgas.

4. Surveyors Party

These twin obelisks which guard the southern entrance to the Great Sandy desert, though partnered to a sun fiercer than anything Egypt had to offer, preside over a millennia of flat emptiness, and attest to the prowess, not of indigent cultures, but the engineering whim of the LAND BARONS who pray that one day, these too, will invoke an air-conditioned resort for the rich to dwell in, amongst hydro- mythological fountains, playing endlessly over sacred-site motifs.

5. Got Ourselves A Convoy!

Hi Ho! Hi Ho! But theyve been laid off. Round Oberon, the town spirit flat as a plank; then fury knots in pubs. The big rigs aim chrome cowlings at Canberra, Convoy! through the ring roads to circle Parliament House wagon-style. Hey, you cant knock it: logging by generations for generations have trod them down....