Confusion in the Ranks

A central-city club on winter's night.
Brisbane.  Queensland.  1993.
Sketches of Bobby Sands
and pantheon
smile benignly from one corner.
White brick walls drip Medieval pennants.
Green lino, small stage, plastic chairs.
Candles stuffed in cheap wine bottles
squat on every table.
Hungry young fringe-dwellers speak earnestly
to the barman,
a grizzled, grinning, revolutionary.
A gaggle of hippy poets enter the club;
spar with the teen-age rock band.
(Light entertainment for the troops.)
The crowd swells with curious students;
snubbers of authority,
misfits and do-fits,
dreaming their anarchic dreams.
The club president announces a rally to see
the highest-ranking member of the ANC
ever to be flown
downunder.
Enthusiastic cheering from these eager spear-chuckers,
who loathe the thugs in police uniforms,
prefer their thugs from Ireland and Africa.
Art sleeps with loaded pistols.
Naivety dances with death.
Poets scream to pierce the distracted crowd,
now drunk on Guinness and rhetoric.
The adjacent building is a disposal store.
A sign on the window proclaims:
"Guns and Ammo Available Here Now"
Irony jives with ignorance
under a Gemini moon.
In the land of the Queen.
In the land of the Koala.
In the land of the roo
and the fist.