The Battle of Northlake Road

“If we don’t take action now, we settle for nothing later” Zack de La Rocha

Your Mum swims with polar bears before heading to Beeliar
she has a square blue patch pinned to her blouse
she joins us watching an Empire collapse
our leaders with their misfiring synapse
nothing makes sense, their actions don’t add up,
this bulldozer inside bush in Coolbellup.
The protectors are more compliant, more attentive
to the rules than the State is,
good luck keeping keeping them to their word, kid.

But this is the Premier’s hamartia
after the E.P.A. failed us in the boardroom
the frontline is now the courtroom
the camera pans, a human dolly
as locals clang the fence in rage at this folly
and colonial cogs churn out arrests,
after you’ve lost patience to peacefully protest
the cops will knee cap you, threaten violence
as the bulldozer rips apart animals silent.
Dust correlates to root depth, the drive-belt gravity,
the trunk incision, upper management depravity,
with each frame the forty metre tree falls.
Slow. Gargantuan. De-metabolic.
Who knew Barnett’s buddies were this shambolic?
A thousand media views to each frame,
hundreds of shares, likes and vitriolic blame
into the night and to the next day you truncheon nasty trolls
while on Malvolio dried blue tongue lizard skin rolls,
the now empty vision your friends see on their computer screen
oh echo chamber, oh deaf ear collective, listen to this:

your xmas presents won’t capture the war
the trees have with the bulldozers, blades score
the soil until the top is too light, the muscian’s play,
you pause the video, Earth-Shattering,
cockatoo scattering, drowning in mounds of dead balga trees,
the smell of lost oxygen, the fronds that no longer flap
these fallen stakeholders, you call this democracy,
the precondition to being human is hypocrisy
they say ‘the road will be built, you’re wasting your time’,
but I’ve seen the monk doused in petrol
so we’re here to document the fall
and after the machines have left we go in with stitches,
every surgery a lesson to future witches
you don’t need gas to have tears in your eyes
when your friend John is too shocked to cry
too confused to take notes or offer sacrifice,
too bewildered to even think, we know we’re born
of a broken Environmental Protection Authority
who can’t even follow their own policy.