60 Second Scream

By Christopher Michaels

For Remembrance Day, 2005

This is about war for Anzac Day, Australia's memorial day for an heroically lost battle during WWI. It was written about the feelings of during the 60 seonds of silence at the 11th hour, on the 11th day of the 11th month of 2005.

A landscape of sienna skeletons and barbed wire

Tears at my flesh in the silence of sixty seconds

A trumpet enters my ears and my body screams

As electric charges trace a path across the abyss of history

Through stories that immerse me in a sea of bodies

Bound by youthful blood and the folly of a romance

That hides the agonies of loyalty

A bird’s call through the city’s drone

Draws me to a bush graveyard

Where the stones of memory are dissolving with the surrounding town

The last few ghosts of this dying icon fight back the weeds

Of invading fantasy when reality is a shell hiding by the seashore

A shot echoes through the cliffs of alien lands

Native blood spurts from the chest of righteousness

As children chase freedom through surrender to old men’s certainties

While uncertainty is one old man crying tears of rage

For his uninvited survival

The clouds of forgetting wipe away the trivial pleasures

That hid hands stained with the helpless struggle to hold back

The blood of history

The fingers of desperation toss the coins of fate

Until they fall on the eyes of parchment faces

A line of crosses build a wall of sad legitimacy around rosy dreams

That try to hide you from your fertiliser destiny

The children of empty wealth

Walk weighed down by the nostalgia for courage they can’t see in the mirror

As dates coalesce into ages squeezing the adequacy out of their bloody hearts

And wishful thinking opens them to the justification for warrior sacrifice

A middle aged man throws words of horror and grief

Out into the emptiness that lives and awaits

Why Easter is When it is

The date of Easter is changeable because it is one of the only Luna Celebrations we have left. Halloween in its pagan form was originally also a luna celebration because it was the northern European Autumn fest, it was Eastern's opposite number which obviously is Northern Spring but Christianisation blew that. Halloween also was a New Year at one time as well because it originally represented the confrontation and cleansing of dead and other spirits just as the Chinese do it their year change.

Easter is also the only hint left in the modern era that Jesus was a Jew, something of an embarrassment for many Christians, because it is still based on Passover, one of the most important holy days in their Luna calendar. So they make the date for Easter this way: it is the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after March equinox (when day n night are equal between 21st n 23rd depending on the year). So the earliest it can be is the first week after that date and latest is the fifth week after, depending on the coincidences. As we saw between this year n last it can jump around quite a lot. We, in the south, are still trying to figure out how to cope with the seasonal differences so we have harvest festivals like the Royal Easter Show in Sydney - which in the the North would be in October (OktoberFest being a famous example) designed celebrate the ending of the preparations for winter - it might be said that Australia's festival season the Adelaide, Melbourne n Sydney' mardi gras are the closest we get to Autumn festivals. The Sydney Festival is more a mid-summer festival, probably there for commercial reasons because the city used to empty so thoroughly in the summer businesses wanted people to stay around so they could keep trading. Then we have the spring festivals in October n November, the most famous being the Melbourne Cup, but there are those in local communities across Greater Sydney and other cities (being a Sydney Person, sadly, I'm not up on whether these kinds of local festival are common across the country, though there are spring races all over).

Australia's seasons are too complex and too subtle compared to Europe that it's harder to figure out what and how to celebrate the seasons. Also being very urban nature's grosser time markers like the solar cycle, the year and seasons, have gradually become less important at the same time we started our invasion/settlement. City living separates us from these cycles.

Fresh Face Boys.

Constructive comments by Tess

© 2004

How dangerous the naiveté of fresh faced boys,
Heads full of arrogant dreams,
Testosterone hallucinations of
Power, immortality, violent selfishness.
The music of aggression cries for instant perfection
Their sweet feminine faces calmly call for the death of the past.
Ignorant intolerance, a weapon against empathy,
Leaves a path of righteous decimation,
Leaves death strewn fields,
Kills the flower of idealism,
Leaving them standing alone
Their souls battle torn.

Guitars rage against meaningless living
Adrenalin screams for a warrior's adventure
The decay of the civilised heart dishonours their passion
Twisting it into violence.
Their eyes are lasers dissolving one generation's hypocrisy
Giving it a pious new form,
Until the years seem like an avalanche
And the prison of the ordinary brings them to humanity
Their faces tattooed with the search for a meaningful death.

Love waits in their primitive hearts
Waits to strip away their armour
Hoping they will stand naked in the darkness of its forest
A cooling rain loosening the power of their loins
From the drums' hypnotic rhythm
Their imagination set free by its subtle melodies.
Will they have the courage to be alone in its earthy smells?
Can they stand the sunlight
Of an anonymous death in the city?