The Rapture: Australia Undone

  A Prayer-Sonnet for the Penguins of Phillip Island O gentle Guardians of the southern seas, Watch over these small souls in formal dress, Who waddle home on paths the moonlight sees And nest in burrows far from human stress. On Phillip’s shores, where ocean winds still sing, A new-made threat now rides the human hand; The needle’s point, the syringe’s offering— A vaccine’s risk upon this fragile land. Grant strength to wings that dive through cooling waves, Let no untested serum pierce them through; Preserve their colonies, their sandy caves, And keep the little ones from harm anew. May nature’s way, not man’s, keep them free— Protect these penguins, Lord of land and sea. Amen. Who amongst the penguins will have the courage to stand up for the vaccine injured? Unable to sell their MRNA vaccines to a sceptical public, the Australian government was now mounting a major campaign to vaccinate all the penguins on Phillip Island. They would claim success no matter how many they kille...

  The attempts to kill him had failed. Again. The gangsters, and those strange liaisons between them and the authorities, driven partly by the daring grasp of power, but mostly by money, wound through his life once more.  But here we were. In a survival kit. In survival mode.  And the horizon was full. And the necessity to survive hung strong. Beyond the borders of the village where the spirits had ordered him to take root, beyond those borders of swinging doors and empty rooms and abandoned dwellings, beyond that border of terror and enlightenment, beyond fear itself, lay not safety, not the comfort of the lords and the royals in their distant castles, but something even more remote, more terrifying, more all encompassing. And so humanity, and all those who sheltered within her, all those entities which stood within that all encompassing notion, humanity, they took their time, they had been through cataclysms before, they had been through the death of entire species, the...

  There he was then, with a head full of voices he portrayed as waking dreams, although that wasn't exactly it. Those calm, teaming with life scenes of thriving lagoon filled landscapes gave way to the soaring cold of mountain air, a whistling defeat, a million voices drowning in their own blood, all too aware of their own bird in a storm inconsequence. So he let out one vast sigh, as everywhere, backwards and forwards, outwards and in, gave way to a mesh of everything, everything connected, everything contained in the one.  Yet he knew he had been cut off, or had cut himself off, from his own kind. The mood in the country, that would be Australia, had soured. A defeated population was finally speaking out; but were apparently powerless to fight back. Robbed at every turn by their own government, lied to constantly by the political class more interested in their own welfare than that of the general population, the voices came and went, some of them decent, most of them carnivo...

  Live each day like it's a whole new life. Anon. They were in a rush because the world was in a rush, those Watchers on the Watch, those military analysts and aficionados of the obscure, the oblique, the little known. At times the ancients were like a bubbling brook, rushing by, pools of images forming and disbanding in a panic as they rushed towards the sea, or in this case a cataclysmic future. All life on Earth. Atomic War. Reality had overtaken science fiction. No one could have made up the story of the Iran War, much less the Covid drama which had now settled into established fact, the conspiracy theorists having been proven correct all along. Again.  Most of it passed in some other world far from here. The teenagers with their children in the beer garden. A life, another life. A thousand years ago. They tried to distract him. There was nothing to be gained. He remained invisible as best he could. The swirl, that ancient swirl, which had nothing to do with wisdom but wit...

  The guns were loaded, the knives were out. The derelict buildings on the outskirts of the village were even more desolate than before. The level of betrayal, that one human, one Australian, could do this to another, to others; he remained, he must admit, naive that these things could be. But they were. The crows circled in swarms above, signals of evil; of death.  And always, always, the ancients called. He had rarely been human, in all this times, and that saddest of sad pterodactyls, her chicks having died, her partner of so many seasons having failed to return; the last of her kind. She huddled against the cold, having pushed the dead chicks out and over the cliff edge. And she stared out at that bleak wasteland of ice and storm. And she knew. They had been betrayed. They had all been betrayed. The gods were not kind. And her partner was not coming back. She died of a broken heart, like so many before her, and so many to come. NEWS The Australian Security Intelligence Org...

  It's complicated enough as it is, a Watcher on the Watch declared of the many schemes now circulating. The ground had shifted. The ancient regime of ossifying officers were finally reaching retirement age, their figures and their health disfigured by long lunches and bold camaraderie only the most blatant grifters could survive. Much had changed since last he was here. The randy, newly married police officer who liked to sleep naked had moved to another suburb, the grief stricken, heartbroken woman tending for her cancer ridden husband had also moved moved on after he died; bereft she never recovered from his loss. Whether she went to an old age home or to relatives he could not tell; but suspected institutionalisation. The mood of the country had soured. Once upon a time, seemingly now a lost era, ask an Australian how they were going they would tell you they were "good". "Yeah, fine," was about as low as that octave went. A musical note of optimism. Now they...

  They had been preparing for a Black Mass, there in that humble place. Evil was, evil did, it truly stalked us all in those strange times, with talk of nuclear war in the Middle East, all the major prophets and prophecies predicting the End of Days, and a strange, eiry fatality which overtook them all. What can you do?  Horizons shut down, ambitions closed, a periphery was built around all their dreams. Everything became minute. Humans survived as their predecessors, Great Apes, Neanderthals, had once done, in remote, inaccessible valleys far from the world's centres of powers. Massive burn marks, scorch marks, from that screaming horror that was being inflicted on us all. Like animals since time began, well time began on this planet, they sheltered in place. There was no beginning. There was no end. The cloud showed us how it was done. Everything that was happening now, the evolution of super intelligence, had happened before.  That was why they operated in those massiv...

  He had discovered a new hole in the front room where his passing "meth head friend" had stayed for a few months. Holes in the wall. Holes in the floor. Dents in the fridge door. Electricity bills to pay.  What was that? The price of loneliness. Someone had been severely bashed. Someone was in hospital. Someone was nowhere to be found. These were dangerous days.  Those days, those images of the past, lingered on; the throat slitting in ancient forts, the medieval armour, the tough times, the candlelight; the rough love, for expectations were low. Australia? Australia was breaking apart into enclaves of rich and poor, into ethnic enclaves. While the resident population had been entirely, one hundred percent betrayed. And the indigenous the left loved to bleat over, sanctify, mumble respectively and apologise for the actions of colonials 250 years ago, they, too, had been utterly betrayed.  While billions, billions and billions of dollars, were wasted on mad bureaucra...

  Something terrible had happened to someone he knew, he assumed it was C, the crashing out crash landing meth addict who had come knocking at his house, homeless, and had stayed until he started smashing holes in his walls and yelling, shirtless, at the neighbours at 3am. It was lonely up the hill some days, well, most days, and he craved company, normal human company; and as always envied those villagers in remote mountain enclaves, people who grew up knowing all the people around them, whose identity was admired in those tiny hamlets, surrounded all their lives by the majestic. For it was in those remote mountain places that humanity, or a type of humanity, virtually a precursor, would survive. Bashed, some would say deservedly, the madness that overtook that poor man, now hospitalised and in extreme pain, showered through his distorted memory. He had no idea if any of it was true. His head could not be trusted to tell the truth about unseen things. There were too many operative...