(or "Some Father's Sunne")
He'd john donne all he could to help with kevin bloody wilson's knighthood campaign, he would later say, leaning back on the sun-faded formal living room arm chair, wearing a smirk as his face screensaver; and a tshirt that said "24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case, coincidence?"
The seat itself, far less impressive than his daily sloganed garb. Seats and arms and sides, all brown-leathered and cracked, divided by droughted river-bed wrinkles. His own neck the same, scorched from more than several summers on stages, at carnivals from the pacific to the penrith hills, pulpits of town halls and milk crates of shopping malls. All spots that would take him, via battered carriage, left to right and reversed at day's end. All ends of parramatta road, the clogged artery of sydney. Speaking where they would let him, saying things they didn't want him to. And always unprotected from the hateful gaze of passes-by and under-protected from ultra-violent rays of decades passed, that racked up points of cancer-level significance, burns burrowing into his bloodstream. And, later, only a bit later, highwaying up into his brain, and killing him, they would say.
But now, alive, prepped for speeches at all stops of Westgate and further west to Silverwater, sometimes even breaking from the left and right regularity of Parra Road, zig-zagging south to Sutherland or further to Highlands Southern, and north to Silvertail Country, Curl Curl and smaller, insignificant spots without names, just spots, geo lat and longs of several decimals at turnoffs on the Wakehurst Parkway, those bushland backed single-digit settlements, where kookaburras and kook-minded locals wandering down from remote huts or less to hear him, Reg Barrows, connect dots between Donne and Kev, and flash visual aids alongside for the proper punderstanding. Pics of Donne and Kev and sometimes others of history, scanned and projected onto screens, television presentation slide or the framed printed image he carried around in the back of his utility. Reg preferred the latter, always, being simple man of simple stuff, always.
Symbolic in his wares, sloganed often, true, but simple nonetheless; tucked tees into jeans when formal, singlets (still tucked) when in casual mode or the celsius tipped thirty plus. They were his rules.
Reg had clearly, visually, paid little mind to modern times, both with fashion or more significantly, with his beliefs, watching or ignoring the evolution of a wider class chasm formed between haves, have-somes and have-nothings by access to inter-networked discoveries of late-80s, through nineties to millennium. Decades of which, he, Reg, stayed focused instead on his self-created campaign trail, his life's work. That is, the firm held belief that poetry remained mankind's last remaining refuge, the final evidence of a pure, classless world, obviously.