Peace is a Town Ready to Burn

( Tasting the ash of our material dance )


A Northerly: flatulent stranger from out
of Melbourne, lets out the untamed secrets
of the ready Elements rage.

Its furnace wind blows hot off the dried-up
Inland, portending Acts of God in thermal force
that pushes at all loose human ways,

all tied hanging at the ends, all made things
grabbing into the deceptively sought human
havens – the peace of an inside world.

Out there, beyond windows, outside this
tooth surgery’s waiting room, already the Electric
Poles are ready, wanting to fire dance

hot consummation. A melt wax of column cypress
trees shows the materially-rigid poles how,
breaking columns of taught straights,

Warmed to an elastic bending of heated force
the licorice-line of the insulated wire softens
to a dripping pipe of flexible tar.

The windmelt gets a grip on wide insulated wires,
now swaying, cross arms of the braced Power pole wriggling,
straining on its bolts, ready to arc materials down.

The starter flickswitch is on ready, sounding
in the wind’s engines; blast jets aloft in wide formation
invisibly blitzing raw summer’s sky.

Houses harboured on the power grid go all at sea,
bobbing on hawsers hanging at air-conditioners wired
in wind flexing thin biceps like spent whips

while a wrought iron cross on Christ Church stands
bravely, unmoved, facing north like a martyr above
the church tower’s roofed pyramid iced

with a lid of roosted steps of dry pigeon shit:
Listen! I hear a cooing: “Calm is guano accreting,"
and: "Peace is a town ready to burn.”

A red music of flames, exciting torch of its quick
relays will soar up, blare out, and run, run, run
when everything material catches.

Our teaming readiness to join the refining waits
a single spark - a match will meet- opening dynamic
doors to a wild-gone city fire, readied to dance

the good oil of our combustibles, off floors of a citied world;
the consuming fire-steps are printed daily in papers
by flash-pointed signatures of coming flame.


21 Jan 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia