Breathe in
in the Land of Telegraph Poles
and you’re lead.

A hot post
extrudes through your backbone;
staked out for dead.

The blue of your jacket’s
enamelled;
I’m fused to a tree.

Two tin men
trammelled
in Meltdown Country.

Kelly and Sergeant Kennedy, 1945

The Creature’s Morphology

What did they ever give us?
Red, white, blue.
Where’s altruism’s warm hue?

With their chrome red horses, dun land,
polished wherewithal,
colour-coded system,
brass religion.
As good as them
under the tinge of skin.

To hold possession
under colour of title;
I’ll take tit for tat.
Look, your horseflesh,
now it’s mine.
I’m no respecter of fences.

Kelly and Horse, 1946

What The Land Told Us

Colour of camouflage;
acid wash on this joke
from a chromatic hell.

Yellow slashes, sharp hue of glass,
fragments, edge and crust,
the bottom of the primary pit.
Not meant to live like this,
a pretext.
Eyelids crack under the blue.

The crows will come picking, dressed in blackest value.
My blazing head’s going underground;
I’ll wait this saturation out.

Kelly in Bush, 1945

Mesozoic Territory

The stiff constable holds a white
note for his rescue.
Chrome yellow death.
Round his retracted head,
red poppies, yellow daisies,
blue-white baby’s breath.

Three interaction charges
that characterise what?
Some unnameable quark.
Green grass will turn Saturn yellow,
feathers in the wind.
Black flank of horse or man become dried-up leather.

My river’s course has no water.
The glare of death, silicate.
What’s that sulphurous breath
that wilts all moss-life?
We’re rotating here
with the dinosaurs.

Policeman in Wombat Hole, 1946

DNA

Kelly’s a good name.
Brightest value.
Paint it on emporiums.
Thought mine would go on for aeons,
a timbre of sound
in these annelid hills.

A different turn of the screw
and there’s my double-helix flashing.
Survival of those
with the built-in will;
but there’s a white fist in this sky
which squeezes and crushes.

Ignominious blue.
Can’t stand watching myself blinking out,
quicker and quicker.

Kelly, 1946