The photograph at the top of the article is a pixelated, black-and-white image of the two people who carried out Australia’s first Christian fundamentalist terror attack.

Poems live in complexity and negative capability. That might be an old school way of thinking, but I’m a believer in it.

Fortunate are those who live with that fire, who can live while burning / That sort of heat that burns and burns.

His utopia erases us, assigning us to the ‘sinful’ category as if the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are black and white. Nothing I write will change his mind. The most my writing can do is illuminate the shades of gray.

When they wage war / they might forget that people are not numbers / to collect or keep like bones / to dehumanize / to take away.

Tonight I will use the word apparently, its supposition and its calling for doubt which might give us puzzles after puzzles to solve.

The woman who will never hold her child. The child who will never know her mother. The nurses and doctors that will never again bring life.

Moving away from military means of counter-terrorism to creative arts-based means.

Each time, one of the few to survive – he starts again in a new land. He becomes another foreigner, not accepted. At worst, he’s despised. The best welcome he can hope for is suspicion and contempt.

The impassioned call to arms raged through radio static into their home and his father and uncle were gone, north. Coercion is unnecessary when a perceived ancient foe is at the gates and propaganda is your daily bread.

Leave me with the crumbs of my values / They mean more to me.

You have to listen, he was not spreading immorality, son, he was keeping you alive.

Today the targets run in small and smaller. They're locked out, told to snatch some air, move those legs and arms, wage your playground wars; just don't jump that ditch, don't cavort with that crazy kid Kyle from that house in the trees.

Now politics was everything. Everyone was drunk on nationalism; high on vague, expansive ideas that didn’t stand up to any sort of sober scrutiny. But then again, they didn’t need to.

The words play across memory again and again, always so clear that he finds it hard to believe he does not hear them spoken aloud, although he tries to hold onto this knowledge – it is the least he can do. So little of the here-and-now remains steady, these days.