Start with idealism. Ends always trump means. Gain power. Hold it tight. Become cynical. Break promises. Retain power.

You’ll have many friends, until the end.

You’ll leave.

Or they will.

Aren’t all leaders destined to be replaced?

rob walker 13/09/15

I wrote this liwuli last Sunday at our poetica poetry workshop before Abbott’s demise. It could apply equally to the (then) prime-minister-in-waiting Malcolm Turnbull – or any leader, really.

Prime minister Tony Abbott and Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull attend the UN International Women’s Day Parliamentary breakfast at Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, Mar. 03, 2015. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) NO ARCHIVING

A new poem published on the Blue Pepper poetry blog.

I started this one more than ten years ago while on a package tour of the UK. (The minister was real!) I’ve only modified and completed it in the last few weeks.

Thanks again to Justin Lowe for promoting so many Australian poets.

Adelaide’s online newspaper Adelaide Independent / InDaily ran this article of my poetry and Satura Prize win yesterday.

Yesterday I attended a fantastic workshop run by Singaporean poet Joshua Ip on Asian poetic forms at the SA Writers Centre. Josh came to Australia as part of a reading tour through the Griffith Review, the Brisbane Writers’ Festival and swung by Adelaide to deliver his one-off workshop.

Mike Hopkins has already done a brilliant job of describing the workshop so I won’t bother! (See it HERE.)

Thanks Joshua for enthusiastic insight and instruction in forms of poetry (many of them unfamiliar to me) and the opportunity to see and hear your unique work. (We swapped poetry books of course!) I hope to work with some of the forms and hopefully produce some publishable work over the next few months.

You can see Joshua’s website HERE.

It was a great honour for me last night to be awarded The Friendly Street Poets’ Satura Prize for best poem in the annual anthology. The 39^th annual reader titled Silver Singing Streams (ed. Kalicharan N Dey and Geoff Hastwell) contains poems of a pretty high standard – so I’m especially humbled that my poem a clarity of smog was chosen by this year’s judge Mike Ladd as the pick of the bunch. Congratulations to all the other poets who were shortlisted.

The Satura Award celebrates the late John Bray who was a tour de force for the first twenty years of Friendly Street.

Read the poem HERE.