Amnesty Echidna Manifesto
Among fostered overtones
they skip the elegy
and wonder if the Wet is written
down like sinusoidal spirals
in the cosmology of specimens--
pages vigorous with nostalgic yearnings,
as the question is asked--that Amnesty
need make commentary
on a "civilized" Australia?
From the fat of denial
secreted milk oozes
onto the membrane
of the pouch, like Frank Thring joking
that he'd make a tobacco sac
out of the bush ranger's scrotum,
as spines erupt and the music
of weaponry is struck
by musing policeman, as there's
no way out of borrowed text
and the fossil record
is but a single external opening
focussing sex and excreta,
this the profit, the artefact
and its market, depositing eggs
and suckling progeny
on milk; and this a dialogue
of singing and witnessing
over the poem's anatomy,
as if other factors have crept
into a consideration
of an echidna opening
Meat Ant mounds
with inspirational claws,
deeply snouting and colluding
and outing cases of fixed-format
languages, conferring heritage
only after the fact,
as if it matters, as if subentries
to an apparently neutral hibernation
are of the place, like naming
names and collecting data
from "I've lived amongst them"
observations: in the lock-up
they observe "primitive" objections,
knowing better in their justice,
making comparisons, saying
"like an echidna" she bristled
against the "apparent" rape--
the Ombudsman declaring
as bold as Achilles
that he'd take the day,
forgetting always
that the murky water of the Styx
hadn't covered his glowing skin
entirely, and that in those parts
no-one had heard
of that river
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