‘Give we the hills our equal prayer,

     Earth’s breezy hills and heaven’s blue sea;

I ask for nothing further here

     But my own heart and liberty.’

Emily Brontë


Ask everything more of layout under pressure.

Ask for depths outside and maybe beyond sacred texts.
Reconfigure ‘peace accords’ in glyph-take from deficits

filling out coupons and decorations of hope — elope
in weather maps and tracking, diagrams and divinations.

Ask jam sessions to reconstitute your faith, to make
the dried stalks — wicks — of long dead orchids

to act as spectrometers in the shade of eucalyptus.
Ask more in circulars, gravity-fix of personality,

all those making monsters in snippets of bushland —
such machinery sits in sheds, comes out, deletes

a stretch of flooded gums, returns, settled down.
Ask further of here, ask to shed skin in quietude.

Think of how friendships can kindle in old gaols —
exhibits: chain & ball, inducing of claustrophobia

when that’s a self-parody of the absurd: walls
already closed in, ticket of leave revoked in

striated light, and even back then gerygones,
pardelotes, prelates, roisterous mating song of rufous

whistler. Even then, as if, prayer for asking
to reset, play it differently, or fait accompli?

Never. Not in the hills of production, selfsufficiency.
Correlate a sea in the eye-drought!

What screech of epiphany dismissed for love?
We ask more under cloud where burn comes

fast and shockwave is no application — too
easy to see the disposition of incongruity

is setting up an image, phytochemical symbolism.
Why ask to ask more of core beliefs shed

when stress levels rise? To whom, and why?
Knowing more of lore than one should, it edges

under display, but can’t be plumbed, scrutineers.
A leisure of worship, a relief of granite and clay,

of laterites fines to spread out as tracks to London
or Rome or even an island like Singapore. Television

reception is poor, and that’s to be written as pyramid.
Here, further, out, nothing. Here asked of, a satellite

photographs as firebreaks glare, veins of geometry
leavened: heat signatures of all life, the beetle

we are surprised by (wherefore?), echidna gone
now from dead log ripped open, termite-less

city fallen out: after the event, the spiritual glossary?
Travel to define a feather’s curve, it’s readiness

or unwillingness to wet or dry, precise place
of arising. Could be said simple as flight,

with interference from all directions. So,
allot this fragment to that erosion,

this banging on about the same old thing
to that poisoning. Some of it, honestly — epigene

you can’t see grammatically, can’t add to programme.
And a loop in a signature doesn’t guarantee

cross reference, any more than echoing out
into marri flowerings makes ID — tinted snow

over hill bristles south of here, indeed indeed!, so
overwhelming that we’d believe the bunker-busting dozer

parked — snuggled — behind a few of them for over
a week now is contrite, pulling its head in,

lying low till (at least) the glorious palaver
of opening is over. Then down down down

into copyright and colonial overture of Underworld
idiom, a pew a cushion to kneel on, yank out weeds

in the old way (visions of ancient relatives?).
Ask more of a subject than an encyclopaedia

can offer you. Ask rubric and antiquity and transmutation,
ask gnosis and eitic/n-eitic/heitic/t-heitic & glory barbs

(a thumb is infecting from being scratched pulling caltrop).
Sore. Prayers lugged to carry you via — no way to obtain

lift when said and gone? Stirred in dust and residue
of manufacturing? Really, ask for more than shoot to kill

take aim at your denial of scorched earth? Your — us other:
‘You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky, greenie punks?’

says the funny fairground fella, all pukka on Twitter.
We mean — commonplace, common prayer in league.

Such power quickfix laugh model stand-up massacre mirror.
It’s all in the splurge, the burst of ‘information’. Lamentations

are lamington drives to collate a backlash — the seedbank
(genetically modified) of moralising calls out moralists.

Pitchfork realism in tractor loveland, we bow down
and take our rolling back of vegetation on the chinwag.

Wagtail does its watching, don’t you worry. No fear!
Ask everything more of layout under pressure.

Ask more, ask more of jam sessions ask more
of nature descriptions ask more of annunciations

of erasure, ask more of art therapy and sacred texts.