Now the last line won’t irrigate
Dog-jawed ministers pant on camera
wan half-rhymes
filling dry channels
like droplets shaken from a child’s flask
In tour-of-duty heat
a neat tie
may be a metaphor for resolution
If only the lack of a definite article
before ‘country’
didn’t make them stammer so
Meanwhile the press’s compound eye
hallucinates a Chinese-invested coal station
mid-stream, when mid-stream is simply an illusion
of a liquid past
something the doctor asks you to save
in a bottle
Some poets have forgotten
to ask what it is
they are burning in the grate
On a cold night I am one of them
– the coal-fired heart
the pathetic revenge of the powerless
bringing paper fuel to the table
to burn and burn again
Is this all that’s left?
The restive recitals
the pained nostalgia for trees and rivers
that comes after trees and rivers?
Contemplating this dun catalogue
makes me tired
as if I had walked
the salt bed of the Murray from north to south
dragging my plastic pen
through the silt like an ape
There is nothing I want to save in a bottle