8. Continental Shelf Co.
I officially declare the millennial Poets Symposium on the Age of Inner Space now open: Welcome to OCEANISM. Poets are required to be proficient in submarine mythology of an exploratory and Cousteauesque manner, able to identify myriad life-forms luminescent yet undiscovered (except, perhaps, for the Vampire Squid) at depths unsounded, in sea trenches unknown, free, hopefully of maritime wrecks & missiles from any epoch; whose task it is to float lines at once filigreed as plankton, filtered as sunlight.
9. Three Cheers The Militia!
What plays us back - death? That this worlds a stage and we upon it act to revolve the scenery with our yearning: and while the syrinx play, panic rebounds to the dead cry: ET IN ARCADIA EGO from the walled garden and far wilderness. O desert! O armour-plated sun! Under a scornful wind the madmen bellow and tribes cower amongst the rubble, caught in the sound bites & grabs of war: Tibet, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Iraq, Burundi, plus the boys in the hills back of Montana.
10. Video Conference
Like a hurried geology that arose out off glasshouses came the skyscrapers; meanwhile, History cut a swathe through the Natural World and architecture strove to regain it. Lost to the familiar, Age moved us out of living memory, unlike those tribes, the autochthons who saw the earths infancy still. Let us go, you & I, to re-invent the damage and call it discovery, to uniformly lift up our cry in schadenfreude, meek before Great Cities that bend as fenders to the glare.
11. Crow Country
A field of wheat, a paddock of stubble, the chafed dust-cloud staggers the pick-up at distance, the Rock of Ages rises over Plainville: pop: dead serious. No hermits, only the bowing pumps facing west for oil. Family photos hang easy next to the semiautomatic in each clapboard. The Long Horn Saloon boasts the one rule: NO SPITTING. NO STRANGERS. The hard hats passed round every Sunday and the big fists knuckle under prayer & flag real righteous like.
12. Hills Of Home
Greywacke mostly, & fat pale clay where I troubled the hills about Wellington (Brooklyn-west) that you dug through to reach China as a kid out-the-back of our place. The gorse gully and yellow flowers, black seed-pods bursting in the summer heat. Down you went past broken bottled glass to the untouched cool clay hoping any moment to pot hole up into a paddy field through the earths centre. Every failed dig stayed a secret from adults, forever.