here iam, but am i here

Obviously my life has been too even, too easy too nice because I haven’t written a rant on here of late. Or is it just my lack of internet at home who knows but today I have the right combination of period induced angst and poverty induced boredom to facilitate some diatribe or another. So what be it, usually at this time of the year its Australia day but this year it flicked by without a cringe worthy moment, well that’s an absolute lie, there was howard and his drive to change the way history is taught in schools there was the girl who called me a little aussie trooper when I gave her a cigarette, she was wearing some of the flag, I definitely cringed then and then just the idea that out there in the great blue yonder many an Australian was drinking hard, listening to “I come from the land down under” and purposefully denying any thought of what and why nationalism is and what and who it speaks for and who it silences. The great mass the seething writhing population makes me shudder more than cringe. Give me a flag I’ll burn it. its always the war veterans that they wheel out in outrage when someone burns a flag, like to legitimately talk of symbols of nationhood then you need to have been maimed, shot at or killed some other in the name of your country. To know it ,to love it, is to fight for it, well I’m fighting for it, the good fight, the fight in me to love it despite of it, despite the rottenness at its centre, the blood at its feet, the bones just centremetres under the surface.
I love a shamefaced country
A land of sweeping blame
Of stolen land and children
And old forgotten shame

I love it for its beauty
And hate it for its pain
This land of no asylum
Where only white does gain

Forget the past without glory
The man with eyebrows says
For only the war of stories
Can pave our future way

So hold a candle for our heroes
At Eureka, Gallipoli and in sport
But forget the lives we traded
For land that was never bought

For this is past says the eyebrow man
Too long gone for us to wear
Blame or sorry or a black armband
Because now this country’s fair

I love the fair go country
If one should actually exist
I would go myself and live there
For this sure as shit aint it

So maybe I did have something to say about Australia day. God bad poetry and me we just cant let go of each other.