Multi-Miners & Co. present Ned Kelly
as they’ll bring you the world’s end
unearthing the end of the world
without knowing where to
bury it—ah
inside glass, is it?
like Ned Kelly & Co.
panning & sluicing for
gold tailings— that’s mining
& the iron plough softening
in orange wood coals &
nailed & shaped into armour
front piece, back piece, headpiece—
they were miners who dug iron & legend.
Armour could have been asbestos
if Multi-Miners & Co. had known in advance
about the pub fire at Glenrowan.
Imagine the commercials!
Perhaps Ned Kelly was crowned
or, with his headpiece, crowned himself
king of his own Victorian republic,
leading legend off in all directions
when Multi-Miners & Co. said they
buried the crown after his capture.
Since 1880 they’ve all been after
that bulletproof iron crown—
the hopefuls, the get-rich-quick &
the dead, including Lasseter.
Multi-Miners & Co. urge them on.
Lay on the legend, they say.
Have Ned coming up out of
a lavender-pink dawn mist
like a robot joined by a
production-line of robots
who then disappear into history
& only history. But keep Ned coming
the Multi-Miners say, keep Ned
coming down to the railway line,
two pistols firing at random—Ned
tilting to & fro along sleepers of
bullets of cartridges of dynamite—Ned
endlessly rocking, endlessly reeling
too slowly to be human
too slowly not to be human—Ned
man & iron man reeling
along the conveyor-belt & on
towards tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow.
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.
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Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
