A metal beak opens: rewriting history,
hairpin maneuvers of flight, sparrows
nest peacefully inside a dead motor.
The sparrows work, a little sunshine now,
as the morning pours anti-freeze green—
cows luxuriate in pastures of lush grass—
Red Bull and every ocean’s water displacer /
aerosol lubricant known to man.
Clothed in heavy metal repairs,
Dali wears an AC-DC t-shirt—
Sharlene, his sweetheart since school days,
gives counsel to the broken-down.
The radio chirps:
‘Putin wants peace; Zelenskyy’s a dictator…
We’ll make Gaza the Riviera of the Middle East…
Make America Great Again.’
A relic sign, VALVOLINE OILS,
harks back to the golden microphone
and an Australian shock-jock’s cash
for comment. In old age he’s diagnosed:
a bi-polar motor; and an ethanol addiction.
This year The Golden Tonsils’ poems,
read at his State funeral, to lubricate
the world on its axis. For old time’s sake.
Conscientious as an outhouse dunny,
the unmistakable sound of the hoist going up
and down. Our local Member sits fat in the parliament.
The radio plays AC-DC’s Highway to Hell—not quite Banjo,
the junked pentameter of a paddock’s rusting car bodies: no rhyme; no reason.
The farmer pumps sky-rocketing fuel; turns a blind eye,
a Dirty Dingo sticker on the windscreen of his white Holden Ute.
Dali’s mechanics are of an Australian ignition,
blokes I’d trust with my soul at the motor of war.
Malcolm the sadhu, jata-dreadlocks down to his toes, walks in barefoot
with the sunshine… A mountain of cast aside, untouchable tyres, reach to the sky.
The end of the Earth is one billion fast miles, a faraway day:
a naked young woman is poured over a canary-yellow Monaro.
Born in Nipaluna / Hobart in 1976, Tim Slade writes from an old tin miner’s cottage on unceded Tebrakunna Country, north-eastern Trouwerner-Lutruwita / Tasmania. Slade’s poem ‘Living Skull’ was the first to be exhibited at Dada Muse, Australia’s largest collection of original works by Salvador Dali. Slade’s poems are widely published and broadcast, including by ABC Radio National, Margaret Reid International Poetry Prize, Australian Poetry Anthology, The Weekend Australian and Island. His debut collection The Walnut Tree was longlisted for the Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry, as part of the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards. ‘Dali and the Department of War’ appears in Slade’s second book of poems, The Wave of Life, to be published in December 2026. Website: https://tim-slade.jimdosite.com/