I didn’t connect regardless
how much I participated, it’s a vocab thing
though not to do with skills of expression;
                                        ejecting bullets
from the breech, freezing whole carcasses
of home-slaughtered sheep, the contradictions
roll the same roads, and families
still come to visit:
                    crops in the bush, sullen days
coming down off bad speed, scoring from the old bloke
shacked up with teenage girls,
                          his bull terrier
crunching chickens;
                 a flat in the city is a deal
that can go either way, and the economics
of the paddock are the call-girl’s profit;
                                      the ford fairmont
runs against the speed  camera, and blind grass
poisons sheep — sightless like the minister
amongst his flock,
                the school teacher,
                                  the father
who won’t let his son play netball because it will turn him,
like an innocent bitten by a vampire, into a pervert — or worse —
a poofter. Outside, you can’t know that those
who speak in short, inverted sentences
always have fences in  a state of disrepair,
                                        line length
and wire length are directly proportional,
eloquent subdivider of land, intensive pig farmer,
will let nothing in or out, though the space around the pig-shed
is large and open, mainly used for hay cutting
while all sons play Guns ’n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction,
timeless classic... apotheosis, serrated road edge
where a termite mound astoundingly remains intact: there
are no generics, no models of behaviour.
                                    It’s not that my
name is a misnomer: it’s who owns 
a particular conversation.

"Redneck Refutation" is reprinted from The New Arcadia by John Kinsella. Copyright © 2005 by John Kinsella. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.