pollution

entry wounds

Are we all
reeling from
entry wounds making us
cruel and childish
under
tyrannical sunlight
revealing harsh
vulnerable
undergrowth
almost no one knows
how to enfold
the gum-studded, ragged blossom scrub
without smothering
in the cognitive dissonance
of landscape
as I fumble funeral tissues
prop open the doors
and let it all flood in
the ugly bits, the bush smell,
death and decay
awful, is it snakes
or something putrid
in the corners and car parks where
care factors set to
magnificent complacency
hold the indifference of
poisoned fruit in a possum cage

Concrete

So we’re worried about the bridges now

don’t trust the men who built them

or just men

in general

suck

don’t they?

but we’re still driving across

in our cars

that men built

those same ones.

not exactly the same ones but

sort of

the polluting ones

where they fiddled the books

or the sensors

or the stats

to pretend

they weren’t so bad

after all

but they were

still.

And what about the Maldives

sinking beneath

the waves

of plastic

we made

one more long-haul flight

and I never take

a plastic straw

these days

just sink into the bedrock

of sandstone and granite

can the two mix?

blonde and dark

a fizz

you know what

the best thing I heard this week was?

that the heart and lungs don’t know

the exercise you’re doing

but the limbs

they know you’re running

you’re running

Photo: Claire Doble

Bigger than Texas

the earth will take back

in heat and ordure

the shredded plastic bags

and bottle caps.

unbeautiful bits of nature

pond dust, saline scum and

damp piles of leaf and blossom scrofula

look like horror

brown-shiny beetles and chokey cockroaches

creep slow on sickly stick-legs

they take back the dirt

one insect footstep at a time while

seahorses attached to Q-tips

and seagullpigeons in rubber bonnets

are not raging like us

they merely persist

hoping to discover

that rubbish-island in the sea

the size of New South Wales

(because it’s bigger than Texas now)

– must be terra nullius for them

This poem was inspired by the novel Arkady (need to get back to polishing up my own dystopian story one of these days!) And also somehow by Singapore (pictured), a place where the lush fecundity of nature mashes with the nasty detritus and pollution of human industry.