IWD 2015 in Asiotrailya

Rainbow Beach Despoiled

Gawdess save us from elitist wankers,
corporate executives and merchant bankers
boasting swimming pools and private schools,
swanking white saviours, all the right neighbours,
property profiteering, negative gearing,
life’s a long beach posing with boat and 4WD
for collaborators whose feminism screams
upward mobility in the patriarchal tree,
if you’re rich and white, the Grabbits don’t bite
no worries about wealth inequality,
in this lucky country of opportunity
they’ll spy on them but never on me,
pass the glass, celebrate the short history
of the brave settler women of Society.

March 2015

Related Links

All Feminists Are Created Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

A History of International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day has a revolutionary history

“The idea that working class women have more in common with their boss because she is woman than with working class men is criminal and absurd. Gina Rinehart’s call today for a big dose of Thatcherism in Australia highlights that the essential contradiction in society today is not gender but class. Gender itself is a class construct.

The bourgeoisie and those women who have positions of power in bourgeois society celebrate the day precisely to paper over the class differences and to give the impression that becoming a boss is what liberation is about.”

Diva Parachuting

parasites feast on underbelly
of fevered daily news cycle
self-dissections in smelly
articles whiny and spiteful
try hard toffs from dullard spires
slink to fourth and fifth estates
scribbling vanity in slimy mire
farming twitter with their mates
waspish handmaids of plutolatry
shrouded by capitalist carapace
bear bitter fruit from tortured tree
white stockings hold the winning ace
paratexting regurgitated paratext
pile-on, pile-on, bullies, who’s next

Jinjirrie, May 2013

Poem – Multiplication

Moonrise at Twilight with Eucalypts

Multiplication

my liberation is a prime number
indivisible by misogyny
the boot on my neck
also crushes the workers
chose me first
so long ago
that which frightens
must be controlled
in the child’s face
he recognised himself
unsubstracted from bliss
exponential substitutions
a calculus of thundering heavens
waves, winds, sun and
a surfeit of constellations
yet the great moon mystery is intact

Jinjirrie, January 2014.

Victim Diva

Betty Boop Banalitytabloid burnt offerings
grovel to my dictates
shock horror twerking scandal!
if you could ask Elvis,
would he not say
my heaving gyrations
transcend colour, sex,
class and race?
your acquiescence
in this rotting pop corn age
my attention-seeking militates.

tread those egg shells lightly
i throw down each day,
my name writ smooth and broadcast,
to remain in orbit, you must obey.
i have no allies,
only competitors in crimes
of appropriation,
fickle backslappers –
fans are not fans who disagree,
my privilege is to make decrees,
blogged, statused and tweeted.

form inverted Vs,
witless adoration fuels
my trajectory,
that dance i made my own?
there’s nothing new under the sun
that has not been borrowed or
stolen in show biz
from non-white cultures,
just ask Elvis –
from above i may watch,
so twerk your tail feather
and coyly brush your crotch.

yet this sympathetic magic
can never transmute you to me –
are exploiter and exploited,
voyeur and object,
entertainer and entertained
on the same branch of the tree?
trust me, this industry enslaves us all,
i need you more than you need me,
get busy, buy my song,
pity me, and dance my dance.

Jinjirrie, October 2013.

Focus on elite individuals and their manufactured victimhood serves as a bait and switch – instead of challenging the structure of capitalist patriarchy, we are baited to participate voyeuristically in the divide and rule show enabled by the ruling elite and their oppressive structures, especially the media. There’s something to be said for the Australian tradition of tall poppy lopping.

It benefits the ruling capitalist patriarchy if women are seen to be attacking other women, if folks are absorbed with their own gripes and not on the structures of oppression. The ‘meritocracy’ divides, rules, disempowers and kneecaps the coordinated class struggle.

Poems Of Domestic Revolution

Tenant from Hell (from Other People’s Lives)

He cares not for mundane semiotics –
weeks of encrusted dishes mount,
all year I’ve begged the bludger
to wash the house,
sombre as my roiling mood,
disdain for stains and smudges
curses my brain.
Mould seethes from wall to ceiling,
the rot’s set in …
devolution is inspiration
for deconstructive brilliance,
cadging appreciation
of Lacanian castration.
Ragged spiderwebs in corners
mock and spin since he moved in,
from nights of carousing toil
empty cans pattern the yard
with post-structural foil,
laundry unspeakable with foetid heaps,
garden weed-festooned
like his scruffy tangled beard,
I, or is it my ego, struggle not to weep.
He clicks the remote for the footy game,
derisively philosophizes Derrida,
oblivious to temporal flames.
Someone has to clean it up
and I guess it won’t be him.
His mind’s immersed in existential
anguish of being, not doing,
my discomfort his convenient exegesis
to carve another tidy thesis.

Jinjirrie
July 2013

Domestic Inconsistencies (from Other Peoples’ Lives)

I

She made me do it, didn’t get the hint.
Simple things change. It didn’t feel right.
There had been others. I owed her no reason.
Too old, too bright, too cosmic,
her song had ended.
She came to take her furniture.
After all I’d done for her. I needed it.
She stood her ground.
Her quietness incited,
inviting me to strike.
The barbed truth prodded my hands
to encircle her neck,
clasp her thin body and throw it
like a curse across the room.
Who would have thought
she’d be so light. I didn’t mean to.
She bounced off her old table,
fell against her lounge,
head cracking.
I nearly laughed, pushed her from my house.
Hurled her bag after her.
She provoked it, this matter of perspective.
Everyone says there’s always two sides.

II

He dropped the blade on our love,
smiled when he dismissed me.
Kept my furniture. To compensate for
all he’d done for me.
So I visited to ask for my heater to keep me warm
now I was alone.
Like Anne Boleyn on the block,
my head in his hands,
across the room I flew,
ricochetting off the table against my old lounge.
My head rings still.
Once he called me his gentle rose.
Excuses are words, not blows,
not the black petals on my body.
I’ll extract the thorns,
release the angry pus in private.
Everyone says there’s two sides and
asks whether I provoked him.
I stood my ground, wept,
now weep no more.

Jinjirrie
April 2013