Graphology Chronotype 38: holding hands - a poem by John Kinsella on Chevron in schools

Graphology Chronotype 38: holding hands

The Western Australian School Curriculum

recognises the course run by Chevron — ‘fossil fuel company’ —

for high school kids to study ‘energy’. The zenith

of the unit is a camp at which students

tune futures and burn the midnight oil.

Global partnership. Local inflections. Prosperity.

            John Kinsella

Australia Attempts to Thwart Nuclear Weapons Ban

By John

So, the world at least makes a gesture towards a complete ban on nuclear weapons, and Australia, reactionary state par excellence, opposes it.

Beneath the dissembling, the reality is that Australia acts as an American stooge to retain a 'nuclear deterrent', wanting the US to maintain its nuclear weapons in order to protect its sphere of influence, of which Australia is a major component (like a jigsaw puzzle). This is an obscenity.

As further uranium mines are opened in Western Australia, the jigsaw puzzle becomes paradoxically more simple and more elaborate at once. The ouroboros of the nuclear cycle at its most vicious and absurd. The land is stolen, the land is appropriated and remade in the image of power. Some indigenous groups do deals (many struggle against this) because they fear losing all control and all sustenance from their land if they don't.

The state and mining companies peddle lies about the nuclear cycle being healthy for the biosphere.

The basis of the modern state's power comes through direct control of or vicarious participation in the atomic cycle. Humanity and all other life is threatened by the farce of the nuclear industry. And Australia, in attempting to block and frustrate a move towards a nuclear weapons-free planet, however small the first steps, is a disgrace to humanity and life itself.

This is the tyranny of the so-called majority in Australia. It is a bullying state using the big bully to carry the weapon while it serves in as many ways as it can. Micro-aggressions of an aspiring bully that has a lot of experience in its 'own' backyard. Australia positions itself for the knockdown round. Disgraceful.

Graphology Chronotype 34: Parking Refugees -- a poem by John Kinsella

by John

Graphology Chronotype 34: Parking Refugees

Wilson’s parking — ‘Expensive,

don’t you think?’ Yes, close kin

of Wilson’s of Nauru. Security.

You know, where victims

are guilty and sex crimes

are as the case may be

and the Minister says

what’s what about self-

immolation. Security. Private.

And privacy of a sort.

They have many locations

in the city. Each lot

a kingdom. Your cars

in their care. Security.

Underwriting the Island

where no man, woman

or child can be entire of itself.

Impoverished, bought off

by the Australian

Government, sub-let

to Wilson’s. Fire sale.

Big island little island

what begins with I?

Disconcerting?

But don’t worry,

Wilson’s is watching out

for the silent majority

right here where cars

need somewhere to park.

Security. Your cars

in their care. And anyway,

how many cars could they

fit on Nauru? Diversify.

Security. Living space.

            John Kinsella

Vegan 30th-anniversary poem by John Kinsella (Graphology sequence)

by John Kinsella

Graphology Chronotype 24: Fantasias on Veganism (on the thirtieth anniversary of my veganism)

(i)

I lift the word cadence but improvisation is Bottesini’s

            different calenture, differing application

            of eating utensils: one model

            serves all

this interview with materials used in making an instrument

            the tip of a pool cue

all of it concrete

            variations

remember those ballet shoes you had made? — non-leather

            to dance with the troupe in & out of the wings

or gut of that doubling

I hear and integrate

what to do with, where to go

this Fantastic Voyage via

philosophies adapted to the way

they want to live    ‘They’

belonging to philosophies,

not the life story

(ii)

Not mentioning the craft of insectivore weebills

            so small

staying on track between wattles

in a high wind — you’d think they’d be tossed

and buffeted and dashed on the granites

knuckling through this fast-eroding hillside

but no, they are intact   complete   and don’t need me

and my inherited subjectivity, my wilfulness as they pinpoint

Not mentioning their craft, their particularised

strength to make landfall, line-of-sight

flight to branch on neighbouring wattle

would be to close out web of myth and facts

that might or might not catch all

            as full disclosure

and though no person you know eats weebills

there’s autonomy beyond your ken

and walking into the wind —

            shirt a tattered flag

without denomination —

is cross-referencing, an experientialism

hunkering down against

the ripping sou’westerlies

(iii) Ontologies Dreamed like the Benzene Molecule — an Address, of Sorts...

So, my ethical veganism becomes your ontological

categorisation to offset your own convenience store

of locality to qualify the ecology you know is right?

            Property settlements. Pay-slips.

Factory farm of belief as if it needs to fit your system?

These human dualists drawing animals into the realm

of human compassion, the imposition of separateness!

Flexible templates of locality. The beautiful

hypocrisies of text. Friends and loved ones

will always believe up to a point, or stage

their compassionate interventions. Agency

of each cell is beyond the networks of agriculture,

the grain plains of the Western Australian wheatbelt,

the utility of kangaroo-farming? The factories

of agronomy? See, I can oppose the out-of-kilter

of the plant-based — as much as you can oppose the factories

of animal production and still excuse the use of animals.

Delineating consumerism’s many faces. Threat of nirvana.

            Fetish of communication.

The interweaving of predators to tell a story,

to sinew experience as declaration.

No ecology is above what makes it sounds like an instruction.

Am I suggesting this? Am I ecology as definition,

an ontology of pantheism in which animals walk their way

because humans moved away, told stories

of human and animal selves separating and morphing

            and separating? Our rhizomes?

Kernels and husks, germs and ears of grain. The plains.

This tree arm, the rings of my tender body shedding.

The space about ‘food’ in the mouth:

light trapped in darkness, pockets and cavities

of air and darkness, the watery universality.

            Pure as the driven –ism. Re-

framed as signature terminology. Reference

in any contemporary discussion of veganism.

This infiltration of self. Of self-justification.

            Wholly holy ouroboros —

snake eating itself a dream invented to fit

the new mode of living. Here in the West.

(iv)

The choice

is made

and was made

outside product — each fad that means

fewer animals exploited and killed

is good; but we must

be wary of the product

that brings down

the ecosystem, feeds the state

which will eat animal and plant,

vegetable and mineral,

with an insatiable appetite,

shit out the planet.

An example? Palm oil?

Jungles are cleared

for the sake. These vegan snacks

can mean the death of so many individuals

that the term ‘species’ (as in extinction)

is the only collective noun

that is translatable

here.

So ‘product’

packaging of planet

will salve only desire:

ontologically or otherwise.

And all product is local

at this point, and that.

A mirror.

            John Kinsella

Land-clearing in Queensland: resist the exploiters

By John Kinsella

It’s not adequate to be aware of environmental horrors; we must act.

There’s a report in today’s Guardian newspaper on land-clearing by farmers and pastoralists in the light of legislation brought in by the last conservative Queensland government. This clearing is so extreme that it should be considered as a crime against humanity (which it is).

These rapacious land manipulators are even violating the destructive laws in place, and going further. And for a land owner and vested interest to claim,

‘Firstly, I state that this country’s greatest environmentalists are our farmers and our graziers’ 

is mockery.

I don’t need to draw analogies; its absurdity speaks for itself. True, you can get some farmers who are more land-care conscious, and, say, crop with a mind to the ecosystem in which they operate. But by and large, anyone engaged in land-clearing in a country already cleared to bare bones has no environmental credentials at all.

When we read this, we are getting closer to the truth: it’s a business...

‘What we are doing on our properties is taking proactive expensive measurement steps to protect the long-term health of our environment and the viability of our business. We are doing this through the practice of thinning using the current vegetation laws to restore our land back to its original open woodland condition, as much as we are allowed.’

They see the land as theirs to abuse. A tyranny of occupation, a state of war against anything living that doesn’t serve their business model, has been openly declared.

These acts of violence are part of the matrix of terror we silently endure, keeping our heads close to screens and gadgets, engaging with the outside world through Pokémon Go. We are part of an absurdist play of our own writing.

Will we act? Maybe this time — how about it?

Step outside, embrace the earth, resist the exploiters, show that non-violent resistance can bring positive change. (Can poems stop bulldozers?)

Write about it. Tell others. This is no incitement: the evidence is there for you to come to your own conclusions. But take a look, consider, respond.