eat enough of these green ants
here
and even if you were to die
somewhere in the bush, it
wouldn’t
be from scurvy. this tree
they’re on, a type of melaleuca.
koori
kids suck its flowers, you’ll see
why. taste one stem to tip and
bless
the morning. you see?
when I went walkabout those ten
or
twenty years, I’d see
a melaleuca near a billabong and
set
to meditating, still as, oh
the permafrost used to be still,
and I’d
contemplate Being
flayed of its ornamentation,
like a paper-
bark down to hard wood
but also ornamented with
everything
Everything – trees, no trees
green ants, no green ants, seven
billion
ashrams, all possible.
the emptiness of the outback
reveals
in time, a grub, a speck of red
dust to be infinite. do you
understand?
when I tasted of the ascorbic
acid, when I sucked of the honey
flower
Ishvara also tasted of the acid
and sucked of the honey so loved
by our inner children.
yes I do, one son and one
daughter
but they were taken.
my neighbours – this is when I
lived
in Far North Queensland –
“expressed concerns” to the
authorities
never to me, about what
made a parent good. I
home-schooled,
kept their hair long, their feet
toughened. we ate in a way the
Great
Mother could in theory let her
whole brood eat. we lived for
her wisdom
but broke no laws, looked down
on no one. were they hungry
sometimes?
listen, hunger is a pedagogue
worth listening to, Atman and
Brahman
coalesce on an empty stomach
but my kids were never hungrier
than any others
because by hunger they really
meant malnourishment. they took
away
my kids on the picket-waves of
malnourishment. I prepared them
for life
as it is instead of inbreeding
illusions heaped on Illusion –
clothing, food
fuel, money, timelines
more than life, death, and the
cycles – I
taught them how to take water
from the ground, how to walk for
days without
fatigue, deliver dingo pups
need little and surpass. I
taught them to round
out the vowels in their AUM.
I took them to Portland, Oregon
to see grandma.
they were round, they read
like professors. they were
blissful kids
and I was a bad father.
well of course I fought – I
fought with this charcoal
beard here, this leather-skin, these
fatless ribs of mine. was that
battle winnable?
when I’m up the peninsula
I’ll see them. if you were to
see and hear them
you’d know I won the war.
fifty-nine kilograms
when last I weighed myself.
that, I believe
was in 2004.
but you’re really asking
something
much heavier!
and I could tell you, I do these
tours, I live like
this for an audience. you’d
believe it. a festivalgoer, I
could say, doesn’t
listen but worships
the names on the lifestyle
notice board
cuts the city
to be a weeklong disciple, where
credulity
and discernment
are one, where you’re either in
the lotus
position or unholy
maybe even “square” among folks
your age.
I teach bush food
as its foraged and eaten in The
Middle Way.
I hide the grace in green ants
because receptivity and
gullibility collapse when
you speak of the spirit or the earth.
there’s no line, horrifyingly,
to demarcate them.
I teach at these festivals
which some may call pernicious –
drugs
and fossil fuel power and all –
to the cause, wreck the bush,
quarantine
our magic from the cities
relegate our magic to the realm
of holiday
for one reason – the alternative
sounds our death knell. If we
listen we survive
and folks here, whatever else
they might want, want to listen
and love.
here, suck another flower –
you, me, the sweetness –
everything’s Ishvara.
and the very same laws that govern
this beautiful melaleuca's
growth, remember
rear hearts and hurricanes too
your sweetheart's eyes, that
poem you're jotting.
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