Tuesday Poem - 'Skyshow' by Toby Davidson

 Skyshow

Fireworks now and fire worked then, as long as it sparkles

we'll claim Bethlehem. Bottled sparkle, served on buildings

rains forty stories down on mounted police as they baton-charge

youths, including at least three Darrens I saw tearing each other

to garn fuggun gah-un as their girlfriends screamed Darren, Darren

and more joined in cos it's a free country of battlers you can't stop

the music feeling no pain punching headfuls of shirt with a smoke

in one hand pissing green and gold darkness from an old semi-naked

twist top shrapnel wound … I'll never forget the bloke who told his

opponent Ah pull your pants up, mate before socking him straight

in the chops. To summarise: we are a noble people, unable to bear

ourselves without booze, if we can't blow things up we just fight

for the hell of it, our national day is a crucible of destruction,

and I want to go home, I just want to go home, but this is where I live.

 
Note

Skyshow: In Perth there is an annual Australia Day fireworks display set to music by a commercial radio station.

Toby Davidson and I will be doing a gig together in Canberra on June 9^th at the Gods, so I pulled out his book Beast Language which I had purchased after hearing him read for the first time at Hares & Hyenas here in Melbourne. I hadn't quite finished it – the one hour train ride home from Flinders Street to Carrum is not quite long enough to read a whole book. So there's quite a few sitting there in the almost-read pile. And Beast Language repaid the effort to finish it off and knock it on the head and choose just one poem for the blog and then shelve it somewhere between Adrian Coleman and Bruce Dawe. It's a bit of a goer, his first book. As Judith Beveridge opines in the blurb – 'Toby Davidson never lets the dust settle.'

http://fiveislandspress.com/catalogue/beast-language