A Feast Before the Dance
123, 123 bodhran beat.
1659, 2022. Cut, then eat.
Counted down, take what’s took
this ceremony is an open-air abattoir
just another hook.
Farmers & Wiccans choose the same field for butchery.
Listen to the Priestess…your fear is a flute
Gods hollow you out
until you are the flute.
These trees have heard howls.
We are born to slip…
viscera, just sprayed everywhere.
A friend of the band she loved his growl
but when Desmond tried to join in,
was told this was Women’s Violence.
Science detests salad. Oxygen sucks.
If life is a bit too real
then switch to reinvented energies.
Word got out to the parishioners —
complaints begat correspondence.
But our cheerful butcher has no need to read encyclicals
will wrap the fillets in them…
those sheets catch the blood, hey ho
while hard-working Pagan hands absorb the ink.
McCoy Dialectic
Amens & bad phlegm
Jed gets all prickly round the blood.
An academic called it feudin’
but when there’s never peace
how can there be war?
The cousins caught up on numbers…
round & round on 8 impaled on 4
just can’t tie down a 3. Jimbo retains a taste for piroshki
he argues endlessly with Loretta
over home-brew baijiu.
They’d say capital & power tools but
that sounds all wrong. Ma gets annoyed —
K won’t pick a gender. I’m onside, respect.
Cousin Phillipa has a touch of colour
all issues long forgotten
until we were reminded.
No longer camouflaged we hear her
& her laughter is stronger now.
Of course, there remains an issue.
The original fight was over money.
When money became authority,
some of the gentry had quibbles
so talked at the working class promised
to save them from their abysmal lives
that quite a few actually liked.
We McCoys been fighting them Hatfields
so damned long it’s kinda what we do.
Have we gone too far? There are times
I dislike the kin I love
& we’re splintered.
All those big quibbles
as we feed the fighting.
To stay McCoy.
reality is delicious
ask the machine
while blood-fed eyes & minds wander
there’s a stolid Truth hangs about
arrived from the air to palladium & nickel
whipped in a loose electricity
then hygienically sealed in plastic
the net trawls those fat juiceless fish
along with broken oars
a few trolled bodies
stupendous floating islands of refuse
It will all be good for me
i was told
Wand Chalice Book & Blade
Down in the clearing
The first ceremony was a bass line unrehearsed, raw.
That second was a pen, that only pretended
to be carved from an unbled dagger.
Aging women & men have little use for maidens —
it’s about the spells wrapped in will.
A faun quivers. Mothers are not worried,
women’s business is open for some men
when gender will soon be forgotten altogether.
Because these ropes were weaved by xians.
Sure we were burnt
but that blaze was also a kind of worship.
air, fire, water, earth, & aether
Down in the clearing
Pallid & exhausted, skyclad well’n’good but it’s freezing.
Imperatives nest in the tree hollows
anti-colonial transgressive bush-pagan post-logic open-air.
Up on the ridgeline
the moon squats unreadable --
squints down upon six humans there’s
stars bacteria leafloss
plunder nesting death.
air, fire, water, earth, & aether
Down in the clearing
Six small humans have their call
amongst all the calls
The fire is lit
forest thanked
as if those fallen branches now aflame
are a conscious offering.
There are few rules
almost laughable.
Kate thinks it’s spiritual jamming.
The ridge was its own project
over eons.
Two lovers join
dark & holy as the loam
rut upon this bed
of autumn leaves & ink-stained paper.
air, fire, water, earth, & aether
Down in the clearing
Feral cats come gather
engrossed in those cries
upon which humans build a marriage.
They are plucked up by the witnesses
& thrown into the firepit.
Sacrifice. Ecology.
So fringe it all fits when nothing fits —
we’ll save the planet
then dance a little.
air, fire, water, earth, & aether
The Porch
Back again at your place
where even the rubbish is a revelation.
You pick up the instrument
oldest habits stop being habits. We collaborate.
Teachers said you couldn’t concentrate
“dumb but pretty”
there’d be a husband out there someplace
or job at the chicken factory like your mum.
A luthier I once met explained the crazy patience
required to get those curves, how imperceptible cracks
are landmines waiting
to explode all the music years down the track.
Harmony is so damned hard
anyone can reach it, but to maintain that connection?
Plus all our lives have cracks too, you’re
still in the industry
though it’s been a while between recordings so what.
Hey — we’re both grandparents now
(worried for the world)
& have laughed already before our second drink.
We sing together.
You hated the stage
could never flick that switch
where one becomes another entity up there, subsumed.
Two famished magpie parents land on the balcony.
Beyond a few rules of beggary
there is no interest in humans or a future.
A stormbird pair arrives downhill
to wreak havoc in the trees.
Your yard bleeds into the National Park
& this is a day without fences.
There is so little time left.
Thankfully it, & us, are worthless
thereby holy.
