'Taxpayers think that looking for work is just as serious a job as actually working. Looking for work on 'the dole' is not an optional activity but an absolute requirement. After all, if you don't turn up to work you're not breached, you're fired.' – Senator Amanda Vanstone, 11 March 2002.

'Life is not a rehearsal. Make every day count.'

 

 
(i) The Working Wall Hall of Fame
Ben – telesales

Priscilla – full time study

Annie – wait staff in a five star hotel

Redhoune – taxi driver

Anthony – factory worker

David – singing telegrams

Victor – building fences

Misbah – fruit picker

Barbara – call centre consultant

Arun – fruit picker

Baldwin – Public service exam

Mark – security guard (lapsed)

Scott – process worker
 

 
(ii) Generation Next
Mendel, the world's

first geneticist monk

(so pre-Dolly)

breached by his Archbishop,

his sexual revolution of peas

forgotten, his bees

too ferocious

& his papers fired.
 

 

(iii) Grand Old Dukes of York

'When it comes to atoms, language can be used

only as in poetry.' – Niels Bohr
The genes are strung out.
The New Holland poets,

the long extended chain

of metaphor, identity, rhythm
split into two camps soon

after colonisation – landscape,

the unconscious, the symbolic.

The two-helix camp & the three-

helix camp respectively

(so Seussian butter side up

versus butter side down!).

Strands of words twisted around

each structural may-pole.

Neo-Boetian cultural objects

always come in pairs; thongs,

meat pies & tomato sauce,

even poetry wars. A spiral

staircase of ascending/descending

obligatory forms.
'When they were up they were up

When they were down they were down

& when they were only halfway up

they were neither up or down.'
An oracular cell division

of Murray/Tranter proportions.

New Holland poetry caught

in an Anglo-American stoush.

Mincing words with the best(?).

That magic dichotomous number again,

those poets with PhD's/MA's/MFA's

& those plain old worker bees

shut off from hive diversity.
All poetry is genetic fancy.