No-one offers appropriation

of the physical. 
I won’t
sit myself in the chair,

lay my hands on its arms

watch the shackles click shut

panic, as the hood is placed

                          over

                                 my

                                      eyes …
*
They say don’t start with political poetry

that’s like opening up too soon

in the front bar of the Braidwood Pub

collared by assumptions

of what the regular means

when he says there’s no riverbed for that

bottle of red in a brown paper bag.
*
I think I would think of the small birds

who have visited me out of interest

southern emu wren, scrubber, blueys,

yellow robins, the fire tails.
Picture them hopping by my feet

pecking up crumbs of panic.
I listen for the burr of fast wings flying in

to roost in the darkness of fear.
*
My kitchen-sink understanding –

the way he swivels the Stop Go sign at work

and twists his schooner in that quiet corner 
we all look up 
to the TV and the hooded boy

strapped to a chair in Darwin.
The regular says, that is no way

to fix a broken boy.
He doesn’t say, the riverbed was a flood

of artesian prejudice. I pour

two glasses of red,

its drowning within reach.
*
This is what I torture.
I would rather it be me

than an itty bitty bird

a hood tied by tiny string

around its feathered neck.