the poetry is gone. if you look for it you find that it is gone. the poetry. those big ones. the production machines in factories. i hear you say that i have got to be kidding and, the quietness of your face lends itself to a poverty in the heart greater than what can be written in my book of longing, but i tell you the poetry is gone. i dance with the pen and paper and my footsteps are traced in ink and a long running history of misinterpretation and confusion. you furrow your eyebrows and ask, you want me to understand movement as conversation and, i tell you that the poetry is gone. i have only a few words to tell, those that have rise up from eternity, and i cannot recall them now sitting upon the grey waste of matter encased in bone. i look into the reflection of your face it has a pleasant symmetry that recalls forest springs and pine regrowth plantations. without a whisker of sensitivity out of place i can see that you feel every movement in the air and the slightest change in ambient temperature. i am still playing with the adjustment nodes on the geiger meters trying to get a reading from your reactive surfaces, you run out of patience and run out on me. you start digging around for an oyster card, but i tell you the poetry it's gone. you have got the guitar and typewriter and the ear muffs in the trunk an dyou drag them onto the bus and tell me that you need nothing more on this run around the island, we sit in the dead centre where i put my back against a tomb and wait. you tell me what it means to be australian. you tell me poetry isn't gone. you tell me that you are losing yourself on the way down and there is no need for the metro, the mobile, the internet or the junk circuit. the weather is warm, the sun is shining and the forests of parramatta are at our feet. i don't knowya, sister, but we're just trying to find poetry and, if you can tell me a little bit about it. but she is already stepping away picking over the next thistle. and you yell that's a dead one yeh yeh they go dancing in the shadows. and she turns and makes an impotent gesture caressing a beard that isn't there. it reminds me of a babe of an oboist in high school latin class in those days where the poetry was there and i tell you know that's it gone. you tell me if we could just confirm the impossibility of the ticket we could get through the door of ms le president and there where no one is uninspired and nothing is too hard to read as to be unstandable where text settles like dust and rests directionless in an oxygen rich environment there is still poetry. in the name of a baltic spirit from the canyon of the soul, in the name of the separated from difference and indifference and non indifference to difference, i tell you the poetry is gone.