The Wrong Address - a prose poem anthology

Dates and times and places are daisy chain links for the accountants at Armageddon, and detective story tellers. For the rest of us, life is a more approximate affair, full of sudden holes in memory and meaning. The act of recalling faint echoes into ink is a shameless deception on the self. Yet I crave this spurious integration of a created past. Is that so unusual? The tale is written in a kind of rough prose-poetry. It has a voice. Rake it around the tongue, but like any spice from faraway places, taste only a pinch at a time.

About and about whom truth stands: this is an autobiography, a file of personal memorabilia. All persons, objects and events are real. It is a reality however which lives in the writer's own exotic brain. Aggrieved spirits and beings with any sense will say that it's all lies. These lines are irresponsible to every purpose, excepting only the pleasure found in language.

Thorold May
Melbourne 1995
thormay@yahoo.com

Tarawonga
Springwood NSW, 1956

Sassafras cut easier than gum

But burnt worse. My steel wedges rang

At short sharp violence from the barking sledge hammer.

A world-weary ten year-old, I sweated and grew biceps,

Violating the tough old fibres of fallen timber :

Learned the dry, astringent smell of freshly lifted bark

And sniffed the soft layers of life on death

At the core of rotten logs.

In sparse mountain bushland west of Sydney

Our home had grown on hope, and little money.

The first stone was cut on-site,

Crow-barred from leached sandy soil and cracked, split

Shaped by a blasphemous hunchback, reputed mason

Paid in whiskey, fed on possums newly shot at night

As they scampered, natural thieves, about the campfire.

Each great block of yellow sandstone emerged

From a hundred million years of rest

Into the clear dry furnace of bush air,

Stood with an ordered multitude at the founding

Of the first house of William May.

I am born of an elemental man.

My father would be patriarch

Of his clan, created from his seed

Housed in his dwelling, fed at his hand

Defended with his anger and commanded at his will.

My father's grasp was hard, his face hawk-tough,

Burnt and beaten craggy by the Mask-maker, yet

His blue eyes on a clear day could capture us

In a merry troupe; the kids expected

When dad rolled home from the pub, to get an update

On his pantheon of heroines and villains

Disguised for our simple, credulous gaze

As truck drivers and bar girls -

The caste of an Australian Ramayana.

We shared the tale, told without fear

Of daylight denouement, mythmade hour by hour

Until, riding within this brocaded panoply ourselves,

My family came to pity

The drab trudge of ordinary lives.

Luckily for the foundation of empire

My mother believed in her man and proved

Perilous with a block hammer against the cunning grain

When stone and fate resisted sweat and tears.

Country girl, city brat, a patch of bush scrub

Where each scented drop of luxury was wrung

From thin pay packets : I remember being dirt poor

And cherishing rare treats - a chocolate

A threepenny piece picked off the footpath, a strawberry

Or a peach (only one) maybe once a year.

Not that we were hungry - there was meat

With fresh green beans and buttered potatoes

And after-dinner memories,

A new web of stories for the old day.

Our world wobbled, its weekend axis

Jumped the coastal plains of short dry grass

To mountain scrub; gruff Mary

Delivered us with bumpy grace.

She was a family member, this vehicle

Adopted, honoured, abused,

An ancient and amazing bitser, sacrilege

Of a nineteen twenty-seven Willies Knight coupé

Cut down with a hacksaw, coachwork rebuilt

In masonite and hardwood painted grey.

The lady's mighty, slow-revving, twelve-cylinder power plant

Had been transplanted by a boozy mechanic.

Now a geriatric with bionic innards, her tired bones hid

A racy 1948 V8 Mercury engine, improbably grafted

To a five ton truck gearbox. Father wrenched her

To death-defying speeds,

But could find no brakes to care for.

He crashed her into crawler gear in desperate moments

And clung like doped spider

To the heavy steering wheel of dovetailed spruce.

Mary built Tarawonga.

We quarried far down the valley sides

Heaving rock onto the Y-fork of a tree trunk :

Cabled it to the old car's awesome crawler gear

And let her loose across the tufting grass

Solo at a steady five miles an hour,

So that forgotten one shimmering Saturday noon

We caught her over the next rise

Patiently climbing a farmer's fence.

Slowly an imprint set itself upon the earth,

Heavy sandstone foundations, a vast fireplace of cut rock

That you could sling a hammock in. My axe arm

Would curse its maw for years to come. Topsides

My father's craft began to lash commodious gables

Of redgum and oregon, with lingering attention

From an inner eye, and rich invocations to the deity

If one of us, clinging to scaffolds

Barely fit for blind cats, dropped a piece of four by two

Into the clattering abyss.

A final migration in Mary parted us

From the sand hills and the ocean,

From a fibro shack in a horse paddock

Inherited by the ghost of our pussycat -

As the old bitser, piled high with furniture

Whined and rumbled onto the highway, pussy

Leapt howling out of a cupboard drawer,

Argued with gravity for an instant too long

And hit the bitumen in a technicolour farewell.

Now it seems (so long ago), that somewhere on that trip

I crossed a line from first childhood

And knew too much; while my parents passed beyond

Those early springs of tireless possibility

Where Age could not find them :

We came to Tarawonga, "meeting place of pigeons",

To shape a panorama of heroic dreams

Within the raw bounds of our own hands.

The Painted Path
Bridge Road, 1960

These houses knew their place,

Federation red-brick with a porch

And painted path, a handkerchief of lawn

Out front to face the ordered world with.

Three generations had defined Bridge Road

For the credit agencies, the postmen and the politicians;

Each fifty-foot block marked off a television

On hire purchase, three letters a week,

Two votes for promises of a lucky country

To give the kids a start in life.

Dad had sworn never to live in a street

Where backyard paling fences walled a grey horizon,

And a good shouting match would bring the cops

Before the local wildlife lit into the scrub.

Within three months of our hijacking a mortgage on suburbia

(compromise along the road to fame)

An ancient lady on the downwind side

Had died in search of quieter havens

While spiders, unmolested for whole epochs

Of arachnid history, held urgent consultations

On mass migration.

May's renovation machine didn't muck around.

We assaulted Federation decency's florid brick complexion,

Pock-marked her with a sparrow-pick

And plastered her white like a whore

From a Japanese print. The gaping mouth

Of a toothless porch glittered at the street,

New glazing made a sunroom from the dusty porch,

Dappled with shadow, bamboo blinds to keep us demur

From garbos and the clattering trains.

Coming of consciousness is coming of age;

While the house transformed with unexpected possibilities,

So did I; through that decade of the fifties

The landscape of mind slowly found its definition

In light and shade; the half-grown century

Was about to discover rock-n'-roll,

A milkshake stop along the highway, unvalued

Before we earned our seeing eyes

And knew (though dared not say) that there are journeys

But no destinations.

Somewhere there's an old snapshot in a drawer,

The artless memory of a box camera, it shows

A gawky kid with big ears and nervous lips, still growing,

Scarecrow in a school blazer (royal blue)

And long trousers that later stopped too far above the ankles,

Already without style, lacking faith

In the big promises of being on the road

To Somewhere. But caught forever

With this phoney stereotype, there I am

Pasted by an accident of time and place

Onto the backdrop of a federation house

And a painted path.

Double-income families hadn't quite arrived,

(No wife of mine will work, He said),

Yet H.G. Palmer's suburban stores offered easy ways

To sign away tomorrow and tomorrow.

Came a day when I was sent (quaking)

To the street-corner phone with a message

That mum couldn't pay this week

Sorry mumble good-bye.

And His liquor bill was getting steep,

So there had to be another way to make a quid.

Why not try for mystery we thought, foreign bodies

In a room to rent : mother fussed

And they sent a lady out from the university to check

For gentility and bugs; an assurance

That that getting to know you Australian style

Would be etched with refinement in the margins of Asia.

The girls from Kuala Lumpur and Surabaya

Were to think with nostalgia of Sydney bathrooms

And the culinary daring of sago pudding.

Yvonne was all angles with funny teeth,

Wendy had puffy eyes, loved maths, hated exercise;

Sharifa Ini seemed to shed hair

Around the house like a moulting cat,

And giggled for no special reason;

All pretty normal, misshapen human beings,

Their minds tuned to harmonies in a tropic night;

Alas poor resonance for the jam-tin twang

Of a kid rung in on rafferty's street rules.

What could I do, smitten at fifteen

By exotic creatures, "university students"

(U-who's ? No tag for that one in Holden country);

Imprinted like a plastic duckling for all time,

My hot imagination nursed an image of the perfect body,

Chinese girl in a cheong-sam, honey-dew skin,

The toss of her long black hair, pert fringe on an almond face,

The caress of her cool slim fingers

Like a ripple of summer grass.

The wretched truth didn't matter, dreams will be dreams.

My vision of the Australian woman thereafter

Hung on the handle of her shopping trolley :

Blotched pink mutton, parcelled and bulging

Out of a cotton shift, her cheerful insouciance

As de-sexed as a jumbo carton of potato chips;

Unjust, absurd from an unlovely owner,

But the tides of passion don't play fair;

My heart was condemned to exile.

That Christmas holidays it was time, they said

To learn the work that real men do,

So putting the periodic table and modern history

Safely on a shelf, I got a job stacking oranges

For Joe. His Sicilian fruit shop lingers

With its aromas of cantaloupes and onions,

Stale sweat, fresh flowers, meatballs and tomato sauce

Waft in the chemical cracks of my brain.

Fat kind smelly Joe had style, a lifestyle

Entirely complete, from the pasta and eggs

Floating in olive oil at six a.m.

To gunning up the stout red Bedford, a slow trip into town,

The cavernous, clamorous market

With its signs not to spit in four languages;

Old friends dawdled at each stall..

How much are grannies and Tassie spuds today ?

You took your time over the texture of greens,

The crunch of carrots only dug yesterday,

The velvet skin of every peach.

The boy (I, the boy) ran

With towering barrow loads back to the Bedford

And around noon we'd make it home

To Mrs Joe, and the boy would be banished

Sent to wash the spuds

In an old bathtub up the yard.

There is a trick of seeing, of blinking down

An elf, a cloud, an empire before it gets away,

And on the crest of new perception

Suddenly past logic is a dream :

My days are populated with ghosts,

I am their only medium of exchange.

Perhaps in Joe's Sicilian fruit shop, the first turning

Slipped out of sight of the painted path,

And houses became colour patches of memory,

Moments of rest for a waif

Fated to wander through the oblivious worlds

Of H.G. Palmer's Hire Purchase Company, cantaloupes

And Chinese ice maidens from a tropic night.

Traveling North
Australia 1962

This is the true tale of an epic journey. In 1962 my family made a doomed trek across a vast continent in search of a dream. Our family was financially poor, but rich in hope. My father was a carpenter. The dream had sustained and united us right through my childhood. Then one day we came to the end of Australia, and our dream collided with time. We lost it forever, but to have lived that trek and the years which came before it made us what we were - something special in a down-at-heel world.

Howl metal, vibrate my bones.

God, where is he taking us? The road swirls

And whips; gravity heaves the truck

Down, the razorback plunges

With its paroxysm of jungle

Waiting to suck the searing rubber, tear us

Off this sliver of bitumen.

What is the old man doing? Hell

The brakes! That's it, something wrong...

What a way to go, sacrifice in a red garden chair.

So all our futures have arrived; family dies on mountainside,

Youth found under refrigerator on back of truck .. it's slowing

He's smashed her into crawler and the gearbox is screaming,

Hold us hold us Bedford .. shudder, that's it ..

Don't break up old girl ..

We've hit the rise, it's gonna' be okay.

A cut brake line, our moment of transit

Out of control, almost, saved by wit and desperation

For living out the dream. Such a dream to live by..

Traveling across the years of our lives

The power of mirage has saved us

From plain surface reflection in supermarket windows;

Our words have swept stream upon current,

Time upon mystery.

And far into the memory of hope five lives hurtle

In this red Bedford truck

With its high-pitched canopy like a prairie waggon :

Parents and a babe are packed in up front

Catching the drama, a roar of engines, near misses,

The breeze, hissing rain, birds rising in alarm,

While out of sight and mind a girl

Crouches on a precipice of questions,

Insecure as the bouncing truck tray; her brother clings

To the slats of a lashed-down garden chair,

His vision framed over the tailgate

In an arched horizon of the long road back.

A time past, when the rainbow snake roamed

My unspoiled valley

Supreme with promises of things to come,

Stories that shimmered fell from my father

As he shaped and brought the speech of heroes

To our house. But then one day

He went north, we went south

To winters, stony paddocks,

Warm pungent milk from uncle Shorty's cows,

A village school in pine trees.

Travelling north, father was gone.

The Catalina flying boat whined, bellowed,

Hurled him into cloudbanks : invisibility

Windowed with brief letters, hints ..

Wide shadowed bungalows, engulfing vegetation,

Downpours, earthquakes, Chinese trade stores,

Rank cigarettes rolled in two foot tubes

By dark men painted bright.

And always his singing hammer on corrugated iron,

The carpenter burnt, buckled in the savage sun.

They shipped him out, I heard it

A lifetime later, for hunting with the blacks,

Shooting birds in head-high kunai grass

While the master-race sipped pink gins

In their fan cooled club and sneered

Until he cracked, by their standards :

Lay calmly on a grassy bank, set the Lee-Enfield

At a deadly range

For the contract foreman's bungalow

And wiped its gleaming roof

With good-bye kisses of hot lead.

Adrift from New Guinea, southbound

At five hundred feet, afloat on air again,

The great bird rocked Billy May gently,

A glint of sun on its wings,

As he fingered silver cutlery, wine in chilled glasses,

And a promise floated in between raw worlds.

The islands of paradise were way below,

The stupendous Australian barrier reef

Strung in green and gold on a turquoise sea :

To this he would return.

All or nothing,

The break point, the parting.

No more putting off tomorrow now.

It is Christmas, nineteen sixty-one.

This year I finished school in a weary Sydney suburb,

Quarantined as "dux", drafted

Head prefect (h'-who?), still a stranger

Kicking at other people's gateposts.

But now

Here at toe's end is a path, a beginning :

How is the dust on your shoes, hombre,

And the bedazzled light in your eyes ?

The dream will change, it whispers,

If only I can see

Above the eyebrow of hard roof-lines

To that ancient rainbow snake again :

Gaudy arch of supreme promises

In the shimmer of mist falling

From the walls of our valley.

Is today written with the quality of passing ?

Pedestrians drift in hypnotic shoals :

Who amongst them knows the high wire

Of sudden self-awareness, the vertigo of teetering

On the very edge of escape ?

Which of them cares ? Looking into the flabby faces

I abandon them, step through the facade,

Burn off their narrow strip life of shop-fronts and carparks

To embrace the grey sky.

In wasteland at the city's outer reach

I crush the rough vigorous grass underfoot,

Impatient for takeoff.

We've sold the house, tarted and disguised

To New Australians scratching for varnished memories,

The crumbling brickwork of old Europe ...

And have camped for two weeks above a Chinese restaurant,

Collecting pungent catalogues of souvenir aromas.

In a pub yard below the Bedford waits,

Lashed shipshape, loaded to the gunwales

With everything in the world we own and dare to keep.

The caravan, flash with new paint, rocks astern.

Later, in the winding miles on miles

To the ends of a rugged continent

That van will pitch and smash its chassis to a tinder,

But on this first brave, tremulous day

Our waggon-train moves out unmarked

By the city's self-obsession.

Here is a festive season tale, brushed in water-colour,

Rich tones blurred, warm afternoon summer rain in torrents.

We cross the Queensland border already intoxicated;

Our dry Southern vision is numbed by potent green

Canefields, banana groves in volcanic ochre soil,

Lush wild undergrowth at every verge.

Ancient obelisks, the Spyglass Mountains, are anchors in time

Against a gunmetal sky

Where Tyrannosaurus Rex surely sundered the landscape

With tidal savagery, the trick of an eyeblink gone.

Now picture the blackness of a tropical night,

Gaslight in a steamed-up window, faint outlines

Beneath some hint of spreading branches, shelter

From heaven, for this is the Deluge,

And a close encounter with Christmas Eve. Very close

In a sixteen-foot caravan with ankle-deep mud by the door.

Dad is checking out the local wildlife in a pub

While mum and the kids find time to drift,

Solace in pretended sleep

Where each untethers a small island of private space

Between bunk's edge and a plywood bulkhead,

Floats behind the roaring wall of water...

And away.

Later there are scrapes and thumps,

Muted swearing, a new weight on the bedclothes

Explored with cautious toes.

At daylight we are reassured and bereft :

Santa Clause has called for the last time, we know

That night we lost permission

To be just kids at home.

Then gradually in a haze

Between cloudlight and rising dust, our trail beam,

Our vision, our fragile hope diffuses.

Maybe it is the platinum blonde with mauve eyes,

Selling buns in a lonely crossroads store,

Who is the sentinel to raise alarm. Her coolness.

Outlanders are not welcome. But it takes a while

To notice the swift stiffening glances

At our truck number plates, the generosity withheld

Against them southern intruders. A casual contempt

Which takes money

Without touching the hand that holds it.

We haven't planned for a battle of minds

Amongst the bouganvillias.

Times are hard,

Jobs as rare as a 1930 penny.

In the tatty caravan parks, just outside the lamplight limit

Of peeling coastal towns

Folk stand that stance of "those who are took"

And know it. Shallow anger, a shrug

Old sandshoes shuffling in the damp paspalum grass,

A tired slap at mosquitoes.

Their hollow eyes size up our rig :

"Going north ? Ain't nothing north mate".

For each drop of petrol scrounged

To satiate rusty Holdens and sputtering Vauxhalls

Their desperate, blindfolded quest leads south.

Bang ! Swerve. Shudder. Bang !

A rhythm of destruction that owes nothing to rock-n-roll.

Bang ! Stiff bodied, this truck.

The caravan barges left, swings right

Like a cantankerous elephant in captivity.

Already it has wrenched three towbars

And now the superstructure is tearing

With a rasp and crackle at each lurch.

What have we done ? Is our hubris so great ..

This journey seems branded

For torture by a crescendo of collisions.

The continent wrinkles on its eastern edge

With a two and a half thousand mile frown,

Cut to wind-worn bedrock, ancient and unyielding,

Giving a meagre sustenance to low shrubs,

While on the gully ledges wiry gums and sassafras

Survive leaping summer scrub fires.

Harmonies of this astringent country are in my footfall

And axe hand : I understand its laws

For my people have mostly dwelt

On an apron between the mountains and the sea.

But at Capricorn's tropic latitude, Connor's Range cleaves

Almost sheer to the Coral Sea

And wet breath from the South-East Trade Winds

Feeds a green profusion in the deep ravines.

Rich and poisonous for the unwary;

We don't yet know this face of nature.

Our perilous unbraked rush to paradise

Is meeting with the ordinary terror of the earth.

Turgid broth laps the beaches at Mackay,

River mud from short sharp streams,

Trapped behind a travel poster reef.

Someone forgot to mention that before,

Or speak of the missionary who ran screaming from the surf,

Aannointed with nerve poison,

Trailing invisible box jellyfish tendrils,

Dead in three minutes. I put my flippers away.

North country, you love us, you love us not.

How shall we choose ? Bowen

Dry as bleached bones, her bays limpid,

A dozen shades of blue and green. Ingham

Nestling in the sugar fields

Under a brooding mountain, wreathed with summer storms ..

How you charm and puzzle us;

Vignette of gentle muscle-bound Italians

Gathered by the hitching rail of a collapsing barber shop.

Cairns sprawled in languid avarice

For the tourist buck that's gonna' come, they mutter,

Just as soon as them buggers in Canberra

Are exiled to god's gulag archipelago.

At some midday nowhere point, lost in rank grass

We run out of road,

So as north as north can get

The expedition stops to study its navel,

Scratch its damp hair, prickly with heat and insects,

Wipe back the rivulets of sweat.

Should we ask after the Vision?

Or wonder who's paying for tomorrow's dinner?

Let's find our new address.

There is a shack to be had

Standing into the sea and the sky

On a headland at Port Douglas,

A one-pub town made famous in the Dreamtime,

By vanished gold;

Now every owner of an elbow on the bar

Has a movie-set tumbledown house

Waiting to be discovered by visiting millionaires.

Meanwhile the mayor, gorgeously attired

In dirty cotton shorts and his birthday suit,

Loops a fishing line around one big toe

And drops his bait

Into the shifting reflections of the bay.

They are waiting for Godot at Port Douglas;

The stingrays wing lazy as V-bombers

Under the movie-set crumbling wharf.

Sydney town, nineteen thirty-three :

Empty factories, soot-stacks silent, dead;

Rusting steam-boilers; queues of desperate men.

Mitha's boys got threepence for luck

To buy lunch with ... enough

If you skipped school

For a trip by tram

To the very edge of promised lands,

Where new paling fences swaggered,

Pegged the land developers' momentary horizon.

Highways now bandage the body-bulges of suburbia there,

Geraniums struggle in concrete pots

Where my dad hunted rabbits through scrawny brush,

Set bird traps, became free.

New Year, nineteen sixty-two.

Billy May is at the end of his track.

His small clan waits, saddens.

Seventeen years the hammer has sung,

Joining and shaping,

Crafting shelter for strangers,

Building the maker out. For when they tidy up,

Polish the windows, pay off the slaves,

A carpenter is always on the street.

And now this small, angry man

With arms like iron hoops, and towering pride

Is trudging from door to door

In paradise without an admission ticket,

In the deep North where southerners have no rights,

No friendship, and boom times haven't arrived.

Naked we came and naked we will go :

No place shall be called "Our Home".

I put the dream away.

It is, after all, a time for surviving.

You there with the pointy ears,

And you of the insouciant beak, yes you too

Lounging with your tail in your pocket :

What do you mean by it ? Being alive

On a day like this,

And as for the cheek of you argentine ants

Counting breadcrumbs without permission,

Don't you realize that my jackboot

Is about to crunch you to a cipher ?

Seventeen in 1962

Nundah, Brisbane – 1st Job

(for some it is the 1st love that defines them, for others perhaps a 1st job …. )

The wait was over, the growing done,
Just the filling out to come;
Time of promise, time to fear,
Gangling seventeen.

First job, be-clerked, minnowed and shoaled
With the eight o'clock tide, be-tied.
And the manager, Minikin, said marry yourself
To the company, boy-man to be made;
Tuck in your shirt and swear
Here will be done as your elders have done,
Let all debtors be blessed, amen
And wipe the smirk off your face.

He watched them parked, bum to chair
Head to harness, ear to phone,
Smiling brightly right on cue.
Selling paint was the mission here;
Salesmen had all claims to glory.
He the sludge, untouched by praise -
Add the numbers, count the hours,
Keep you head down boy!

They put him there one sultry day
And shrugged; did Benson err?
He always got the numbers right, that man,
And chose the boy for brains, he thought,
Or marks at school, or maybe his big ears -
It didn't work ...
For brains are apt to think, and thinking dream;
And boys are apt to drown
When tides of years come in upon the man.

Nine months he watched the numbers drift
In spiky, ink-stained lines, and wondered
This boy-man, what thin life
Could come from cans of paint; could almost understand
The fleeting pain in harried salesmen's jokes,
Or pale Benson, boxed in glass and brilliantine,
The dour mentor, office manager and guide,
Rushing to his Baptist god for hope.

Was this all? Was this ambition's end?
The bleak routine of cataloguing days
That fled on unmarked feet? Should he court
And marry such a fate, then marry
bed and breed with some slim, simple-minded girl
To pass on the ledger's pen before he fell?
He wept. It had to stop.

The wait was over, the dying done;
Just the killing of dreams to come.
Stripped of promise, stripped of fear,
Armed with doubt, he snarled
And slammed the door. Threw the dice,
Picked up the card: it shouted
Break out of jail !! Be damned...

Psychic Dramas
Canberra 1965

Luxury was assigned by government ration :

One bed, single, a vinyl lounge chair, green,

One small desk inscribed with memories,

A wardrobe and a mirror on the wall;

You could edge in sideways,

But push-ups were a squeeze;

It all came cheap with creeping cold,

With an early morning sensory assault

From industrial disinfectant in the shower block

And thick quantities of shapeless food

For bloated public servants.

We were chosen (not THE chosen),

Picked by playing a game with triangles

And some psychologist's notion of logic;

Marked with a code of spurious certainty

That presumed us intelligent but docile,

Suitable ciphers to anointed clowns

In for a grab at fame.

The grey containers, fibro rooms

Strung like toy boxes along bare linoleum corridors

Were an escape from indirection to certainty,

The cafeteria tables to which we were tethered,

Australia's version of the iron rice bowl,

A great reward for being born lucky

And if you were smart, one day -

ONE DAY, the ultimate, a chauffeur to open your limousine door

And drive you three miles to work.

The Plan however, like all things made by committee,

Lacked charm or asperity; it needed a ratbag

With two odd socks and hobnailed boots

To kick it in the arse...

Well, no. The padded rear of that species,

The one we nick-name The Majority,

Will always seek bed and board

In exchange for the gentle favour of serving,

Pleasing powerful men and women.

My spirit was at fault, a rebel in paradise.

But heroes crave admirers

And for such brave sentiment the body was weak,

A traitorous affair of trembling lips and mechanical twitches,

A chaos of corpuscles

That seemed to work from their own power source :

Some auxiliary generator with a fault

In the voltage regulation. The great engine of reason

Steered my cool and disbelieving eyes

But how could legions fall to such command

While every muscle screamed terror and retreat ?

At twenty the wild, the strong and the free

Lend a mantle to romance, but I was no visible model

For the Marlboro cigarette ad' man on his chestnut filly.

Each bumbling superior and fairy floss slip of a girl

Thought their worldly power had crushed another wretched creature

(... how illusion corrupts us)

While my inner eye stripped their rituals

One by one.

Listen Huey, I said, forgive me my body,

And I'll forgive them the old school tie and powder puff.

But God being indifferent to multilateral trade deals,

Humanity and I persisted blindly side by side,

Tending private fantasies.

Actually the Eye in the Sky could tell you

If it deigned to talk

That the scene was different altogether.

Moment to moment, passing the butter

There was a camaraderie

Bequeathed by the grace of isolation;

A whole generation of gals and guys

Flown in from the cities of the coast

To bunyip country, to the imagined real Australia :

Crows on fences and paddocks

Infected with a concrete blotch of buildings

They called the nation's capital.

The important things,

Saturday night parties, quick flirts, hard drinking,

Marriage and babies in the suburbs,

Proclaimed these folk sane enough to shuffle manilla folders

Between Monday coffee break and Friday down the club.

I felt like a dingo in a chicken coop.

Alive! Now there is a state of genuine pleasure,

With frost in the grass, ears tingling;

When warm blood wins over biting air,

You know that zap smiles and vacant farewells,

The minutiae of looming embarrassments,

Are a trivial pursuit.

It was time to leave, time to grow.

Strange how we find our rewards :

The crowd's roar of approval

So precious to the inner psychic dramas

Of each Schickelgruber toeing a chorus line

In his Threepenny Opera at the office

Could not capture my skeptic's soul in the end;

Already I was apprenticed

To ranging across untrodden territory,

Hard, solitary journeys,

The poetic life of a boundary rider.

The Wavering Moon
Burton Street, Kings Cross, Sydney 1966

Was there ever a mouse

Leapt over the screaming moon ?

Hey Diddle,

Please give me my pants dear..

Let me go you ovulating milch cow !

Hey Diddle.. hey Diddle,

Are you a man or a mouse ?

She roars again.

The plywood partition

Between our lives buckles like broken knees,

Groggy under the bovine moon

Of Saturday night fever,

And decrepit paint flakes into my instant coffee.

I see him sometimes on the stairs,

Narrow shoulders hunched

Against the pain of the world,

Clothes threadbare, pale unshaven cheeks,

And feel ashamed

Of shaking with silent laughter

For twenty-one is a heartless age;

Yet year by later year

His shadow is at every turning

Like an ancient mariner

From the realm of hidden fears.

Dress our sad-sack

With four stars and a baton :

Watch him incinerate a nation

To salve his bedroom wounds;

Give him a pen to embroider and craft

A searing novel of self-justification;

Have the kindness to give a quid

For a bottle of cheap sherry,

Let a bloke sit in the park...

Can someone amongst us be free of scorn and pity ?

Boy !

They let me breathe the frenetic air,

Yes sir!

Serve God, buy ice creams for the editor,

Split copy as a hopeful in waiting.

See life sonny,

So you want to be a journo'?

Promises

Massaged with vague smiles:

Have faith in those ice creams.

Oh yessir,

Nine quid a week on the Daily Mirror

And the big-time's coming kid,

Soon, real soon.

Are you a mouse,

Mickey the ears, Mehitabel shy,

Unmasked to the wavering moon ?

Hey you !

Lick crumbs and scuttle to unwholesome places,

Bed down in scunge, hunt for dank cracks

In old city walls :

Room cheap for sober gent;

You pay your tithe to some faceless predator

From a leafy suburb,

Merry with children singing.

Hullo lover,

Show you a good time ?

Know my byways, wend and beckon,

My harlot mistress, Sydney-town,

From bed-down at Cockroach Crack (special mister)

To the Mirror's tumultuous presses.

See our exhibition of faces in the street :

Roll up ! Waxwork ladies, clever gents,

Recognize your dreams of wine and roses.

Was there ever a more timid mouse

Tripped over a fallen moon ?

Hey sexy !

Blink back reflections that whisper,

Glitter in the shop windows

Of army disposal stores up Oxford Street.

Pose in the mind's eye with clever tools,

Bayonets and bush jackets, working girls,

(Get it off honey),

Old aerial cameras, bodies that you covet

For barefoot engineering in the dark.

Flee to morning, haunt clear bright caverns,

The arched iron cathedral of Central Railway Station,

Refuge to pilgrims, sleepless men,

Where homesick Italian migrants crackle and pop

Bizarre electrical non-language from loudspoken turrets

To grandmothers down for a visit,

For here in greeting and farewell

The country shyly meets the city

Over a custard tart and milkshake,

Sticky sweet.

But daylight is an intermission,

Unnatural to creatures of the driven, silver moon.

Got a light mate ?

G'dday Kath.

Coast's clear babe; legs away

In the showroom doorways of dude mile,

Where hard skinny girls,

All lip-stick and mascara eyes,

Tremble, step out

With cruising Johnnies on the lam,

And after the late shift I say g'dday

Then pass,

For she's missing the high rollers

And fears her keeper.. Watch it kid!

Yar, keep yer pants on

And Mickey the ears does too..

A neon night blazes forever, pulsing

Like the promise of Shalom without her veils.

See that swaggering skyline:

Everything for sale and steal the rest

The hustlers wink

As de Lacey quaffs a schooner in one gulp

And slips a bold hand under the barmaid's skirt,

Though she wails Rack off ya creep!

We pity the boobies blowing their dough

For a loveless flash of tits to music ...

Well, who'll swap delusions ?

Your shout Mick of the ears

And pass the sodden ammunition.

It is a mirage though, this Moulon Rouge

If truth dwells where our dreams are.

The screaming moon and Cockroach Crack,

Whores and neon sighs, mere painted scenes

To the real drama of our hearts: Freedom !

(We don't yet ask from what ..)

Freedom is a five shilling paperback world

Of apricot evening light

Beyond old Steppenwolf's secret door;

It is romping with forbidden Lolita

While the Lady Murasaki shows me all the ways of love.

I am a catcher in the rye ..

For how can life compete with art

When glory is a wheelie in an FC Holden

And breathless chivalry comes down to ..

See ya Kath.

The Émigré
Oriental Bay, Wellington NZ 1967

Heather, dashed yellow, sky bright

Falling blue, hill slips faced with moss,

Thin wooden houses like glued matchboxes

Stacked in crooked tiers to applaud

Their men in from the sea, and now

Her giant engines have dropped low

To a growl; the liner slips to haven.

A warming from the land, caress

Of flower gardens carried on the wind

Stir an old memory,

And breached by long cold Tasman swells

We stagger reborn before breakfast, laughing,

Touching shoulders to be sure, stamping on the deck

With new arrogance

As the clamour of the waking city

Comes out to greet us.

Upturned faces by the wharf, a young girl

Trips from Renoir in swirling white skirts

And her black eyes catch mine

Before the sun passes. She is gone,

They are all gone, washed

From the painted decks; lolly papers

Dance tiny polkas on the quayside

As I shoulder the old suitcase,

Still brave at twenty-one,

Step away at last

To say "hello world" with that ingenuous hope

Of the very first émigré.

Sweet and sour this town, strange and known

Like a trick of the mind, the gargoyles wink,

Suddenly displaced from another time

Once understood; vowels pop in the air

Reshaped, novelty fruits grown in moulds,

But really the same old flavour.

A niche is here somewhere, must be,

Waiting for a tramp.

But this noon it's luncheon á la park bench,

And I have to say g'day Queen Victoria,

You've made it too,

Anointed with verdigris and pigeon lime;

Now trolley buses snap blue electric sparks

About your tiara : that's recognition.

Wonder if your ladyship liked fish 'n chips too ?

He is slumming in a downtown bar,

Bug-eyed sunglasses poised to sweep the demi-gloom,

Intent on the hunt,

Avaricious for shopgirls in fishnet stockings,

But the vamps are away, trying for sophistication

With coffee and gâteau at Chez Nous.

Bombed out, man got a bob ? Where you from anyway ?

The jukebox gulps my coin. Clunk.

These boots are made for walkin' in, it wails.

Anywhere mate, heaven or hell

But Sydney by the latest accident.

Bloody Aussie huh. An original leper.

So that's why the place is deserted.

Buy you a beer.

Even goodtime guys have to pay the rent..

It'll do, a hole for now :

His spare room is musty with damp air;

One pallid window blinks

In the shadow of a dripping cliff.

The old house itself must squat,

Humiliated and despised

Amongst a brash younger generation of apartment blocks

On the harbour promenade by Oriental Bay.

Vicarious splendour is our ambiance.

Like jealous lovers we learn to spy

The coming and going of gorgeous yachts;

Their sleek, low-hipped hulls are pure coquetry.

Willowy marconi rigs flutter and tease; sailcloth

Smooths with a cat's paw, unbuttoned

As a woman's blouse, billows and sighs.

I have fallen amongst bus drivers and musicians,

Radical chic revolutionaries : subversive on Sunday,

Workers by Tuesday, playboys come Thursday.

The resident band in a lucid moment

(not flaked out on the carpet)

Debates a poet's aptitudes and bows low

To offer training on the musical triangle

With long-term promotion to a tasseled castanet.

Ambitious for the big-time though, craving

Real money on Fridays

I plump for a job with musclebound ladies

In the thrum and hustle of Victoria Steam Laundry,

Established 1912 at a thermal spa,

The plaque says.. but our history is a day old :

New country, new future, new face if you dare,

New friends to test your mettle.

It takes a laundryman, connoisseur of dirty shirts,

To make an anarchist.

Let's set the scene, we want your vote.

Figures by the stage steps now, a murmur,

The crowd stirs.

Close up, a crush of shoddy tin chairs, frayed carpet,

Cream plaster columns smudged with small fingers

(the owners already wanting to go home).

All grandeur is far above

In illusion, where cherubs and bunched grapes gather

About the ceiling cornices.

The Prime Minister hovers

Absurdly revealed, pink packaged flesh

Stacked on platform shoes for height.

Behold !

"Lediz end djentilmen" the voice booms

In electrical decibels, "ez yu no...";

Ah, now there's the rub.

If only we knew. One thing is certain ..

Subconsciously I assemble the morpheme

And with astounding lung power give it birth :

LIAR !

The cherubs flutter in their cornices.

A hush, the voice stops, caught in delictio.

"Ev..ev niva bin so insulted", it pouts

And crackles off in a huff.

The hive swarms, buzzes, a policeman looks severe.

C'mon Huey, next act.

Bring on the dancing girls.

There it is, our checkerboard of nights and days

Almost complete, as the pieces, peasants, politicians

Move in closed squares, black on black,

White on white.

For a moment my ghost is here again,

A balmy summer evening

Near the stone wall at Oriental Bay,

Eyes dancing with city lights, and lovers,

And the turning tide.

Can you see me, just out of reach,

Wistful, about to pass you by ?

Working Christmas
Harris Street, Ultimo, Sydney 1967

The place was jerry-built a hundred years ago -

An agglomerate of mortar and cheap bricks

To pack in inches of free air, an allotment

Yielded by the gill for pound by pound of flesh.

The working men of Sydney, depreciating every year,

Kept remnants of life at rest; when cast forth

From factories and driven from the pubs

They came to terms with every antic dream,

Stank, cried, ate sausages and bled

From death till morning on this wobbly bed.

My room is long and narrow, facing west.

Fresh linen with the rent mister,

Ten-fifty every week.

A bed covered in green candlewick, a chair

Slapped over with grey paint.

The wardrobe is propped backwards

On a wad, to keep its door in check.

There is a view for thirty feet

Of rancid, heavy air.

The rest is bricks from sash to sill,

A factory in the rear.

The sun comes in, just briefly

On the final yellow dustbeamed shot of day,

Breaks on each brick and body cooling

And then fades.

The heat goes on though

Dully through the nights,

While a hangover of memories tugs and whines -

They are pencilled on the walls,

"I love you Marg", "The foreman is a mongrel",

"Fuck you Sally", and "tomorrow's piss is mine".

My sustenance of light,

A single frosted bulb, populates the hour,

Thin shadows flit and wane,

For the walls reflect my predecessors

Supping on tinned pudding - join our snack;

It's Christmas, and I'm getting boozed

In a town that's out of whack.

Heart of the Revolution
Central Terrace, Wellington, NZ 1968

This is a winter city of steps and earthquakes;

We perch with gulls against the southerlies,

Claim perilous ledges of habitation

On the surging rim of hills;

Men dwell here in damp timber,

Their houses rock like battered lifeboats

Cresting the unquiet earth.

If you ask where I live, it is somewhere,

Yes certainly behind a door somewhere

Straight onto the stone path;

A facade green with mildew

And the rain like rivets without and within;

Weak daylight, worn carpets, dishes to wash,

Pungent fumes from a kerosene heater, someone

Trying to stay awake at a writing desk.

The year is 1968 and we are the brave,

Contemptuous of closet sexuality and immoral wars;

Knowing our fathers to be flawed men,

Our mothers servants to their whim,

Honour is on our banner :

We will march under the tank tracks;

While they carpet-bomb Vietnam to save democracy

We will put their lies on public display

And sing the Internationale with luscious irony,

For the Russians are liars too.

They, those Others, don't like our haircuts,

Find blue jeans subversive,

But we are about to inherit the earth.

Actually, making the rent is tougher

Than aping the proletariate;

For seventy-five cents an hour

I pick the chewing gum off fetid pub floors

And polish dirty windows : waiting for the Revolution

Has its drawbacks in godzone .

We are already outlanders, remote from favour;

Servants of the Evil Empire are harrying our flanks

While in the tasteful suites of downtown business houses

Callow youths with blameless eyes

Are respectfully at ease

On the ornate stairways of ambition.

Dave Crumm, my flatmate, is at home with rats;

Cementing wires into their brains

He tortures half of them for the Psychology Department

And waits to see if the unwarped survivors

Are grateful for their peace of mind.

Odd how victims always shape God

In the image of self; Dave has this droopy way

Of waving his forepaws, and squeaking

As he extolls the duplicities of experimental science..

Mice, forgive us our after-dinner mammal jokes.

But there is no drowning

The memory of Chau Ngan, who came amongst us

Then went to hell in 1968.

A gaze too droll for stepping across,

Wrists unusually flexible in worn white cuffs,

He played a wan tune on a bamboo flute

While the sun went down like thunder.

In a front room Chau Ngan learned English

And wept for his wife in Takeoville,

Learned the tongues of death, learned to float

For a moment above a gorging dark tide

As Lyndon Johnson swore an oath in a rose garden

That his Valkeries rode to no murder

Through the Khmer heartlands,

And hidden from the ancient eye of Tonl Sap

Pol Pot's crazed vengeance gathered shape.

Beneath the pain of Chau Ngan's flute

Our banners held no karma. Lost,

Unrecovered, my heart is like a butterfly

Amid the ashes of a forest fire.

It has no trust,

And decides to be born out of love,

Skeptical of Time herself.

So my purpose scents loss at charm's edge

When Margaret Svenson comes close by

In this year of passionate contradictions,

Arrives to make history, armed with Rem's Zen poems

Which persuade us of cleverness and eternal truth

According to our mind's ambition :

Square moon, square sun, blue eyes waiting.

And the bloom passes; remembrance has left

Faintly, two distant figures,

Rain streaming down our cheeks

As we perch with gulls, cresting the unquiet earth.

Wide Worlds
East Putney, England 1971

Their ad' was on a board in another part of town :

Flat to share, own room, cheap -

We settled it over a pint of bitter.

One rucksack and a radio

To hump up the mean and perilous stairs.

When you're broke and traveling light

The eye doesn't dwell first on the colour scheme -

"Polka dots wif' everythin' guv',

Count em' off like sheep.. ".

It was true. A pink polka dot bathroom,

Washable yellow polka dot with breakfast,

Lurid violet polka dot to dream with.

A bolt hole to heaven ? Have you ever wondered

At those doorways abruptly on the footpath,

Caught in delictio

Between the plump vulgarity of opulent shop fronts ?

In East Putney the embrace is leaner and dirtier.

Clients come and go at hours unfashionable

For the rich and languorous.

Voyeurs about our street door

May once have claimed to visit

A shoe shop and a florist;

But humanity had been rolled under. Traffic surged,

A low roar filled the nights and days,

The land was wrought with smoking dragon trails

As narrow footworn havens crumbled and broke :

We were aliens cast up in the wash,

Debri on the city rim.

Rodney and Michael survive as a mystery;

Their tracks faded each morning with the frost

From the ken and to the fury,

I would guess, of more anxious enquiry than my own;

Rodney had push in the style of the street,

Quick movements,

A check shirt and moccasin man

With a lock of hair painted above his rogue eye -

The knack for selling you flim-flam,

A wind-up yellow plastic butterfly

On a tube-station escalator.

Michael wore steel-rimmed eyes,

The only sharp line on his body,

Blinking kindly, surprised at daylight,

A disheveled version of the young Trotsky

With wry humour and a hint of fatal knowledge

About the kinds of good causes

For white hot ideals

That make dead bodies on the unwashed pavements.

Funny, isn't it, how even dangerous men

Clean their teeth after dinner

And sleep under pale green candlewick bedspreads.

It was time to get established.

I bought an ancient bicycle

For five pounds from an Irishman at midnight,

Lashed a rack from our fridge on the foc'sle

And went to joust with the dragons

In their courting rush to the fabled houses of gold.

This wiry mobility left the rubber-footed reptiles

Honking with despair..

But then one day a black carnivore

Of the genus London cab, opened its door

With a sudden shrug of impatience.

Which brought the bike to an awful collision

With a ton of cold steel.

The fridge rack crumpled scientifically,

And saluting Newton's first law of motion

I swam through a window of Armorguard glass,

Won a trip all expenses paid, no tips required,

To Saint Bartholomew's Hospital on The Strand.

How did this racket start anyway ?

This quaint reversion of Australian poverty

Delivered to the scrawny lap of old England ?

.. Here was the end of an overworld trail,

Anchorage for a traveling man, adrift through time

In a style that claimed to despise

The package tour;

Which flaunted exotic encounters

With the daily boredom of ordinary people

Who had funny names and addresses.

Hungry though, now in a hustler's town

Where money was real and the rent voracious,

I schemed to buy off the moment of penury

By flogging an old Leica camera

To some ideologue of the glorious past,

A native bunny.

The only taker caught a train up from Oxford,

An earnest and delicate fellow whose vowels

Would have curdled the spit

On my father's colonial tongue.

I cornered him in a pub saloon

Reeking of leather and varnish

To utter reverent phrases -

The mystique of German engineering,

Feel that precision ..

(the damn thing had wrecked rolls of film),

Chance of a lifetime for twenty-nine pounds.

And those notes from a hand-sewn wallet

Were good for fish 'n chips too.

The next week a plaintive phone call,

He'd really changed his mind, old chap ..

Kept check-shirt Rodney and young Trotsky

In respectful giggles for days.

The Aussie T had arrived

In the city of London.

But bolt holes are a pilgrim's last retreat :

What was this country made of anyhow ? Let's see

I said, if they've sealed it as a parking lot,

Nemesis to larks and daffodils.

The faint-hearted pay good money to tour,

Though a frozen thumb

Can win a ride with every thousandth car.

Have you ever swayed like a shattered signpost

Pointing north, frostbound on the M1 at Christmas ?

There was another kamikaze that festive day:

Taro San, diminutive, wrapped blue

Like an omiyage to Santa Clause.

We joined forces

Which was a tactical mistake :

His finger jabs at the parting ungenerous

Were starkly scrutable

To approaching drivers.

We prayed

Oh Father

Who art basking on Cloud Nine,

Toyota-Nissan-Silver-Ghost, Minimashi Hoichi,

Deliver us from ice and snow.

And some miracle in passing

Dumped us by dark

At Tyneside habitation; we propped limp as rag dolls

Against a nameless corner bar

While the strange pitch of Geordie dialect died.

Then a clutch of crones saw profit in pity

And led us to the widow Ballantyne's dank spare room

For "two pounds apiece, sorry boys, no breakfast".

Taro San and I had journeyed from the rising sun,

Reached the heart of darkness : the Old World

Was a mildewed kapok mattress.

The Boarding House
Reading Street, Wellington NZ 1973

There are corners in that dark hallway

Vaguely enticing. The old photographs,

Plastic flowers, the barquentine

In a glass case; women past their prime

Who giggle and vanish

Behind black, numbered doors.

I ignore the telephone, it summons them.

Jeanne's high squeaky voice answers, bleats.

Mary comes, decrepit,

Her dull foxy eyes swearing to heaven,

And with a cigarette trailing dangerously

On her lower lip, growls

Jim you old bastard !

Where the hell have you been ?

So Jimmy stumps in, wounded he says,

Fifty-five and five foot nothing in his only suit

That's as black as his boots

And Irish as the cut of his best mannered brogue.

Oiv bin t'hospital, says he,

Flapping the plaster cast of a wrist,

And his bulbous nose like a beacon; where else

Would a working man be ?

Here is Mrs Miller shaking frailly in the draught,

(How did you glow on this evening sixty years ago ...?)

Come in come in.

I wonder, she says, I was wondering,

You see I've been reading ...my minister says...

But perhaps you know ...that every religion,

Well there's truth in ...

I don't know,

I say,

Sit down.

Silver Screen
Epson, Auckland NZ 1975

Well, surprise.

Another child with black and white vision..

You're a hasty man. Grey vision for a grey day.

Doesn't Rudolph Valentino give you goose bumps ?

Under my toenails. Where are you sitting ?

A Thursday afternoon, rain, a cinema,

An accidental meeting, Julie.

Something special.

His mind was shaped in a different place,

The architect's and mine,

Gables with pirouettes of ice from an English winter

Had steeped his memory.

Mine, the sparse shade of Australian summers,

Burnt grass, verandahs.

But she was here in her bones, Julie,

Known to the soft rain and wisteria.

I had followed the architect of Epson Hall

To the genteel bucaneering town of Auckland

For a spell in teacher's college.

From a circular drive

I eyed the Hall's white clinker lines,

Like a cruise liner moored in the greenery,

Then tossed my kit aboard for a year.

After the film we walk in a circle of rain,

Shoulder to shoulder, in our hands a tent

For two; the black umbrella drums softly.

Who are you lady, who is this man

In my shoes ? This softness and lightness,

This hair tingling laughter

Is not in the script. I know your irony

Julie, I've watched your eyes dissect poor Wilson

And all the court's pretenders,

Play catch-me-if-you-can,

But who put us together on the silver screen,

Who whispered love ?

The Hall sheltered babes and grandmothers,

A sanctuary for making schoolteachers, they said,

A half-way house for growing through life's stages

Where daddy thought you safe in the hands

Of mister Wilson, who could also play jazz

And was felt to vibrate with proper empathy.

Perhaps it was for worldless pilgrims too

Since I've never been sure of my planet of origin ..

We ride home in plodding J2, my old grey van;

Her home with mum and dad and all the relatives,

Stuffed in that special Eastern European way

With bric-a-brac, velvet cushions, silver spoons,

Glass cabinets, souvenir plaques from seaside spas.

Here I am (weedy little colonial) being bone-crushed

By the great square fist of father.

Do you play chess? he growls;

What, dragons to slay already ?

Only on a full moon old man,

With favour from the goddess.

My Maori grandmothers at Epson Hall (they claimed me)

Reveled in body-warmth at the whare kai :

They had fled the blank walls of pakeha houses ..

E tamaiti ! You're not eating,

You'll get skinny and die !

Marama you old witch ! Fatten us like pigs eh,

Then stuff us with hot stones for your hangi ?

Kati ! Listen to this matchstick !

All bones, no flesh,

Cold bones. Aue !

Here is elder sister, a weightier edition,

Sister-in-law, mother, grandma on the antimacassar

Shaking with gargantuan laughter,

Expanding down the line,

Sight them off in the shooting gallery :

What's your prize sir ?

So this is what tomorrow looks like,

And how many kilos ago did that one simper

As a swain hoisted her with reckless strength

Over the glowing threshold ?

Aue ! The future is too heavy to hold.

They transmogrified on long weekends,

Changed plumage and body odour, grew rings

On their fingers, these final-year college girls.

Like locusts who'd munched their way

Through rich pastures of indulgence,

The horde sighed,

A mighty rustling it was; cast around for a male

To feed and breed with.

My glamourless shade

Drew some stragglers in desperate moments,

Comic sad little locusts waving their feelers

For the wish of a nascent Frog Prince.

I remember, she runs out to say goodbye,

Dark hair falling about her bright eyes,

Waiting for a kiss,

And the first pain of doubt in her glance,

That last instant by the roadside

As I leave limply, flattered, astounded,

Hating myself.

Barbecue Blues
Waterloo Street, Howick, New Zealand 1976

You've seen them populating the landscape

Like embarrassed teenage girls not built

For fashion and the flirting style :

Cheap investments by the newly rich,

Economical apartments trimmed and tarted up

With mini balconies and aluminium eyebrows,

Their flushed face-brick neatness scarcely concealing

Identical interiors of pre-assembled pastel boredom.

But then you're quick to judge and slow

To find our hidden passions. Upstairs downstairs

High class or low - Shall we be labelled

By a speculator's whim ?

No! they said; come to Gino's shop

And have an equalizing mozzarella pizza,

So I did and we weren't.

I moved in. Downstairs

To a studio-bedroom (as the agent said)

Half carpeted, a sinful double bed thrown in.

For the memory of grass and halcyon skies

I painted the concrete floor green

And planted hints of summer :

Languorous chairs , a garden table

Brilliant white, shaded from fluorescent suntan

By a giant striped beach umbrella.

The menagerie above caged nature's pride,

An amiable chaos of randy fellows.

Terry shuffled a shifting pack,

Women won on patter, sympathy and brawn

While hollow-chested Evan with his music scored

Harmony, a girl like Spring; and Michael was condemned

By black fingernails and halting speech to making love

With hard sleek engines on the garage floor.

The slash and burn barbecue à la wheelbarrow

(Bush waggon for the coke)

Was a man-made catastrophe,

Planned (so we said) to stake out a holding-paddock

For skittering women and other dumb pets.

We had to let it happen, had to strike for fame

In the wastelands of hey-wacha-doin-tonight.

Nouvelle cuisine is a curly ask in a bachelor's dive;

Cabbage is cabbage, so when I was asked

To cut the coleslaw for our great shebang

It seemed a natural to serve it neat

With a dose of vinegar shot in - well

How's a guy to know the genteel tastes

Of maids and carpet salesmen :

Whose idea was this commando mission

Into the mysteries of social style ?

Pink luminescent strobes painted the ether

And assaulted our domestic souls;

Snatches of uncomprehended niceties clung

Between the hammer-beat of heavy rock,

While a thin harvest of restless sweet things

Dropped NOT VACANT signs over their gilded eyeballs.

Catching a general view of life, the barbecue objected,

Sank into deep gloom and sent its acrid smoke bombs

Spiralling up the staircase.

We quit, and settled for a burial :

Requiem to burnt sausages without honour.

So much for mating customs, we thought,

Get on with life, don't judge us by our coleslaw.

So we did, and would you believe it,

They did.

Terry went funny, fell in love,

Wooed a blind pianist and got a job

Selling corks to rumbustious vintners;

Evan floated off in a bubble of semi-quavers

While Michael sought solace, sprawled luxuriously

Amongst cartons of beer, fiddled and tuned

The temperamental carburetors of rich men's Jaguars.

My concrete Riviera with its neon sun

Remained uncluttered by languorous bodies

For in truth

I like the psychic space of silence.

Dementia
William Street, Armadale, Victoria 1977

You notice the cracks first, the grey streaks

Like grime between the fingernails,

A working history of the inner city

Coded in tired brick walls,

Split and peeling window sashes,

The charm of Victorian ironwork

Despised by rust and neglect.

Next you are surprised

By the first poses of ownership, the new car

On hire purchase at the door,

The mortgages that cling

Like reproving relatives, confining

The feckless generosity of young ideals

To a slight delay : tomorrow, they murmur

Is postponed until the bills are paid.

Eventually you understand :

Their designer renovations will remain enshrined

In airbrushed pictures

From coffee-table-conversation magazines.

One day the aspiring possibilities of youth

Are panicked by the mirror-eye of middle-age.

The house is three-quarters "owned"

And lives three-quarters lost, blurred

With the dull palette of paradise omitted,

When a smooth-talking agent persuades

Old hope to find a haven up the coast,

And "prime real estate" is on the move,

A "sure investment" for the young executive

With vision and a working wife.

Marigold's addition to these yuppie postcodes

Was one of nature's accidents;

No hovering menace of a mortgage here.

And if she slipped a little at the edge of gaiety,

The fault was from an inner, subtler pain.

Her house in Armadale, so like its kin,

Had been a final afterthought,

Detritus of a declining inheritance

Assembled by a dignified and grasping ancestor

From backroom political payoffs

In the ruthless years of the Great Depression.

Now it stood, modest and stolid

With three dead pot plants on the porch,

Its extra bedrooms rented out

To a cavalcade of men, forlornly classified

By Marigold ( they quickly came to see)

As maybe Right for a longer stay

In the street of rising names.

Born to an age when women no longer waited

Like hat racks in the vestibule

Of a man's career, Marigold did duty

Collecting the views of expectant mothers

On throwaway nappies and tabulating

The mercenary needs of corporate accountants;

Market research, they called it.

Her two-piece jacket and skirt,

The white ruffle blouse and glued coiffure

Wrapped and concealed a muffled chaos :

Marigold was decaying along the fault line

Between known terror of her daily work

And statistical projections of a lonely decline;

Freeze-dried in a tableau of tomorrow's dread,

Pasted with two cats and a television

In the tar sealed frame of an urban snapshot.

Roger the Dodger was my intro' to the joint.

I chanced upon him flogging the life

Out of an exhausted yellow-cab

To make an extra buck; an old pal,

My gnomish friend had never lost his sense

Of the absurd, and in a knockabout way

Mostly honed his sense of turning a quid

In the computer consultancy racket.

Nothing to it mate, yeah, you wanna' bed?

There's this broad with a plaster-cast hairdo..

The house, come over, check it out.

Money, sheilas, whaddya want,

A ticket to heaven ?

With modesty he told us then

The highlights of a Dodger's way

- we sank another beer -

On a raucous, drizzling afternoon

At the mid-week races this tipsy tart

On a streak of luck, took the battered cab

To a lonely spot and paid him by the hour

To lick and tickle in the pink of pleasure -

Said the Dodger, what the hell..

Half a gnome's luck, but soft breaks

Are not in my contract

With the great puppeteer in the sky;

Downtown from the loveless pavements

A room is a room, and a bed without bugs

Is a bed, so who's to complain?

Until trapped with your money

In a bond and a lease, you look again.

Time came, we did.

Even the Dodger and I stepped back

At the artifacts of Marigold's creeping derangement.

In the flaming orange-bright kitchen,

Cupboards fumed with collapsing putrid grocery bags

Bought and forgotten; black slime in the bath,

Cat piss on the carpets;

Accidental unspeakable glimpses

Past bedlam's door to the boudoir of Shelob.

Faced with the stuff of Picasso's dreams

We retreated at last

To the imitation Spanish decor of a corner pub

To settle our sensibilities,

And plot hasty exits

To a poem less surreal around the edges.

A mortgage for the Dodger,

His house of tired bricks in a quiet suburb

A sure investment; for me, Dag's Progress

To another city up the coast,

Pilgrim in search of a cause

With all the world's wisdom

Packed on the roof-rack of an ancient Kombi van.

The Last Cockatoo
Illawarra Avenue, Cardiff NSW 1979

Now how about a cup of tea eh,

Sit down sit down, yes tea

Just a minute, nice bit of toast

There I'll make some toast. What do you think?

Hands transparent with age, that try to grip,

Their shaping almost over.

..You need a place ? Merv has a place

Joyce had chuckled like a mischievous cherub,

Old bugger he is, gotta watch Merv.

So here we were.

That crew from the Last Supper clung to a bedroom wall,

Condemned to inspect our squalid condition;

From yellow space helmets their mournful Italian eyes

Tried to make sense of a dozen half-read books,

Unironed shirts, and some alien god's constituent

Obtuse and unrepentant,

Dismantling a carburetor with infinite care

On the Lord's day of rest. We coexisted,

Our syncretic miracle, to find a thread of humour

Over crumpets and honey.

There is a sacrament wherever wry men meet.

They visit me you know; these photos, look,

This is Edwina, a tigress she is,

Never cross that one mate, and here mm

Bessie, the first you see,

We had some times her and me ...

I'll never forget them days by the lake,

And on the other end there is Mavis;

She used to stand right where you are now,

And polish silver,

Always polishing spoons, Mavis.

You'll hear them

Banging when they call at nights.

I never did

But the spirit of another age was near enough,

And the little red-brick church

Where Joyce and Merv met mediums of the dead

Seemed a haven for old chivalries;

They spoke the clear hard tongue of mining folk

And each paused to lend a hand, or smile

While them Ladies on The Hill sniggered mortally,

Passing by to their beauticians and morticians.

The bundy clock and furnace, pitiless work

Had consumed his peers,

Yet Merv found life and frugal nourishment

Like some ancient exotic plant

On the unweeded slag heap of souls.

He didn't wait for friendship;

Frail and stooped in his eighty-third year,

This timeless leprechaun

Embalmed in a grey silk waistcoat

Was already walking around death's door ..

And back again, just to be sure

The kettle didn't boil over.

A kind of miracle.

At his core the man remained untouched

By a lifetime of the singing clash

Of boilermaker's hammers : Merv was almost deaf.

Violence which once wrenched and crippled

His gateway to the music of the spheres

Now left a querulous inner peace.

"Aark ! Shutup shutup !" squawked his white cockatoo

Unheard, hanging upside down from its perch.

Sometimes the cockatoo was right :

The old bugger was a broken record

Jumping the tracks of a music-hall tune;

But how could you get mad

With the merry eye of an historic monument ?

Why, I asked, all innocence one day

Would a tottering fellow in a trilby hat

Go south each month, a hundred miles

To flouncing Sydney town ..?

What's that to a kid like you ? he winked.

Great striptease in Oxford Street.

Wanna' come ?

We are the people

Stored in toytown boxes,

Permitted trim green beards of lawn

All wrapped by grids of bitumen;

From far judgment, in the high cold clouds above,

How might an angel's gaze find joy

And damnation amongst the little folk

Way below all glory, putting out the rubbish ?

Saluting Edwina, Bessie, Mavis on the sideboard

We sip our tea and guess :

She'd swoop with a rush of certain knowledge

To carry off the crotchety soul of a cockatoo

Hanging upside down, noisily scolding the world,

"Aark ! Watchout watchout !";

But Merv would never know,

Making me crumpets and honey.

Halls of Academia
Newcastle NSW, 1980

One day they forgot the muzak

And we lost our disguise; suddenly

Bladed carnivores were heard in a rising crescendo

As cold steel mandibles crushed and tore

At the rendered carcasses of broiler chickens.

This was the Hall of Residence

Of a not yet great university,

Where the hopeful splendiferous were listed

Like war dead, on wooden plaques

When they passed with certified mentalities

Into the employment offices on Main Street.

I lie : some would move

Serenely into daddy's business,

While others hoped to catch the habits

Of a boutique and brandy lifestyle;

The cloying odour of callow landed privilege

Hung about their bunkhouse jokes,

The sports cars resting sleekly outside,

The weekend woolshed dances at `okay' spots.

It was not their fault, not yet, not quite.

Somewhere on my bookshelves there's a picture,

Chilly science fiction, a space-port

Inherited from cavernous futures

Where warps of time and place intersect;

Travellers from oblivious worlds

Pass as shadows on the mirrored floor;

And summoned by wandering memory

I see amid those elusive faces

Our overseas students from "The Hall".

Elsewhere people.

People ? Split by a gulf

Of polyester shirts and stacatto intonation

Exiles in thong country,

Shunning the zinc cream and T-shirt drawl,

They agglutinated at feeding time

To trade news on charter flights

And regret their splendid isolation

From the hustle of Asian cities.

So I rolled like a lemon

Between beer nuts and gado gado

To settle at last for adorning the Asian salad

As a kind of crinkled aperitif,

Tolerated, a token concession to local cuisine.

They pacified me

With tidbits of careful English

And wondered with sidelong glances

About ASIO and the KGB,

Whether skullbones of the whispering night

Hovered to claim reports at my hand

On their brand of brilliantine.

Other outland palefaces lingered,

Decorations in the Asian Quarter,

Merely quixotic in courteous quarantine,

Fishing for some common equation

Some cryptic sign of minds working.

They mostly found it, found the banality

Or surprise; small favours, a message passed,

Sen's lucky day, Fong dropping things as usual.

Here and there, rare, eccentrically curious imports,

My doubles in adventure,

Migrated across the no-go zone,

Said gidday mate; tried to admire sagas

Of the legendary Great Pissup, left saddened

By gaping indifference

To their traveller's gift of second knowing.

One man built his bridge and walked it;

Glen arrived for a term, escapee from mother

Making up his bed and wrapping lunch,

Laughed in his creaky way

Some bacon & egg breakfast time,

And was wed to a Japanese girl in bobby-sox.

Gleeful beer and kisses were passed out

Under a backyard tarpaulin in a miner's house,

While the perplexed politician,

Her father, rushed from Sapporo,

Grasped strangers and bowed

With horror in his eyes.

Later, together hand in hand

They came down a foot track towards me

Stepping over tufts of grass, and my heart sang for them

In the timeless bright morning,

For this was a thing destined, as it was meant to be

Though I didn't understand its making

Or my own crooked, wishful smile as they passed.

Infidelity
Pitt Street, Newcastle NSW 1981

Old privet makes a wedding arch of dark lace

And sprinkles morning sunshine on the path.

This place is touched and greeted

By the murmur of wind chimes.

All who pass are marked and known;

Our echo is stolen and kept among the leaves

For the reckoning that comes before we part.

The coal pits were not a daily deadly chore

Haunting the first masters here.

Their sons and daughters came home twice a year,

In spats or tresses,

To play languid badminton on lawns

Only faintly dusted by passing winds with grime.

Our new aristocracy dissects the scented air

With stranger energies; tai-chi arms

Drift in slow motion, catching `tiger's paw',

And bodies bend to `lotus leaf unfolding'.

Roaring steel mills under the valley ridge

Still smudge their signature on a low, pale sky.

'House' is a humble word,

Kept for places in the suburbs,

Narrow of eaves and mean,

Boxy rooms painted in cautious pastel shades.

But number two Pitt Street shrugs that epithet

And spreads her verandahs,

Encrusted flourishes of Victorian ironwork,

Arched windows

Tinged with an exuberant solemnity of leadlight.

She defies the workaday shame of neighbours -

Jostling heaps of houses stickytaped with tarseal,

A choking necklace of humanity beyond the hedge.

I am admitted to vague company, bare forked limbs

Without a stitch of repartee,

Owners absent without leave

In the quest of holy grails, prime numbers,

Alchemy for rings of power.

The vaulted rooms are barely disarrayed

As we pass each other in elliptical orbits;

Our masses align briefly while muesli is digested

According to the laws of planetary motion,

And words fall among the utensils,

Bereft of interpretation

In the unfocused gaze of my new acquaintances.

They have their passions though, these wraiths.

MacPine, weary of the electron microscope,

May bend his will upon a startled piano

And let his fingers loose to titillate the aspidistras

With plangent waves of a Faure impromptu.

Unshakably attached to the mystic self,

Oblivious of music, Hossbone snaps and winds

Through the stretched angles of endless katas,

Seeking Zen ( or is it reassurance ?)

In a new twist of each pliant muscle.

We are drawn to imitate,

Inveigled to acknowledge a master by playing noviates

To the mortal risk of Hwa Rang Taikwon Do.

Square-bodied Sunshine lends her passion

To freewheeling lean bicycles,

And packing her lunch in a plastic bag one day,

Like Oates of the Antarctic, steps outside

Into the blizzard of free air;

A carefree adventure for seven hundred miles,

Joyful pedal-power to Melbourne she says,

But we know her step too well...

A journey out of one man's life,

Right off the edge of the planet.

More calculating women call at night, a subtle exchange

Whose terms have layers of sweat and promise.

In the dim stale-smelling jumble of his lair

Hossbone clambers spiderlike

Over dour Kylene's heavy-duty frame

Looking for pressure points on her pale hard flesh,

The mirror of a hard pale mind.

There are no surprises

Until the lady, scoring a black-belt

Through a lucky break in Hossbone's vain defence

Changes her appointment calendar

To take in an investment class instead.

Zeta plays girlish for MacPine

Who believes in fairies

And love at the bottom of the garden -

Squished figs on the clover

And giggles in the metaphors.

Bred on more barren ground, spoiled for free dinners,

The tilt of her nose infects me

With an allergy of acute distrust;

But my nettle is no match for MacPine's hallucination,

Until the planets realign over the muesli,

Where wide-eyed Zeta finds Hossbone bereft

And tries for infinite flexibility.

In the skirts of the old lady herself,

Perched on the front steps

Between the plaster lions, I like to pause

On long, warm evenings, and listen

For the rustle of wind in the leaves.

Our cloistered infidelities

Are faintly dusted here with honest grime,

While the roaring steel mill under the valley ridge

Smudges its reckoning on a low pale sky.

Firepower
Tarania Street, Lismore NSW 1983

Little fibro shack on stilts

Clinging by the dusty rail bridge

At the fringes of a country town;

Strangest of all homes for insurrection.

A sub-machine gun, ribbed

Like Death's skeleton himself,

Draped in a grubby dressing gown,

Lurches in the corner of a wardrobe.

D of the expansive moustache stirs spaghetti, bellows

Food's on, speciale Italiano

Wog tucker for you mob,

Stuff it down yer and yer gunna' like it

Un'nerstand ?

X, the lady who loves animals

And wants to free-fall two thousand metres,

Butter soft, steel heart, yin of a man's yang,

Sniffs the steaming sauce, cogitates,

Grinds her cigarette to extinction

In the cap of a jam jar.

Like an imposter on the deck of flame,

Browbeaten into rimless spectacles

I lack the élan of a spaghetti grenadier

And tend to fancy free-falling into bed.

The family has a lowlife hanger-on

Safely patronised as man to dog:

Kaffir ! Yer black bugger, git outa' here !

Run dog, but knowing safety, you nuzzle in

Tail down, between the woman's tender knees.

Our house is pitted with the seeds of terror

In faint guises; pass the salt

And praise the ammunition : nice day;

How goes the airbrushing of Stalingrad ?

Tin-soldier talk, or do we settle for a TV dinner ?

In a front room, his and hers,

D's miniature battalions pause forever

On neat boxes of brass shells

Waiting to be packed with violence;

A place for games to be played

With press and powder funnel, chests of cordite,

Bullets for making real corpses in an idle moment.

D fears the insurrection of my eyebrows;

Blow us away, my storm trooper of the army of dreams,

Lay us out in rows to moulder.

Who will be left in this Valhalla of brave poses

To wash the dishes, comrade,

When the moon sets over the crimson grass ?

But irony is too tart a taste

For the hot flush of glory.

You got a cigarette X ? Na ?

No bloody cigarettes. Gotta have a fag with dinner.

C'mon girl, we're goin' for a trip

While his nibs here licks the plates.

The expeditionary force rocks off into the night,

A full panalopy of jungle greens and jackboots

To thrash the Landrover over a ditch

And three hundred meters to a corner store.

Kaffir and I can listen to our home at last;

Little fibro shack on stilts, moving gently,

Old wooden bones which remember

The first coming of strangers with guns.

Respectability
Tyrell Street, Newcastle 1984

Signed in peeling paint

The Resident's Committee forbids

Children to play in this courtyard

For the hopelessly hopefully upwardly mobile.

Through the brick backsides of respectable apartments

Burghers burble and fart discretely

While cockroaches make off

With vestiges from better days;

Seventy-five a week said the lease,

Balcony, w dash w carpets, parking underneath.

Extra. A kind of toy(-)room,

Always handy sir,

Frosted window to the courtyard without games

Looked my only source of handy cash.

Strapped for respectability

I cunningly inserted a three-foot bed

And slipped an ad' in the local rag.

The prospectives came, sniffed my ambience

Sipped coffee with furtive tongues, fled

Refusing to be miniaturized,

Until a bargain basement lady

Acquiver with chiffon and anxious chins,

Expired with the certainty of ownership

Into a charity shop's chair-bargain-of-the-week,

And cut a deal for twenty-five.

From the beach-head of toyland the lady laid siege;

Two pairs of panties, pale green and generous pink, flew

In daily rotation from the shower rose.

I put a telescope to the blind eye of intuition

And settled for a strategic retreat

Behind the literal bones of our contract.

Fair's fair in black and white

But every lady has a heart for someone

Out there in the blue, with a shoeshine and a smile.

She ran an ad' (Monday bargain rates)

Ring Patty, friend wanted for good times -

And the Johnnies came rollin' in.

Tough choices for a quiet life;

Electric pulses of heavy breathing, the sudden click,

My male voice zapping their erotic dreams.

So at last, catching capacious Patty

Between playland and the kitchen,

I tried to cut second deal :

We march to different drums dear lady,

Find another house, flat, street corner,

Railway waiting room,

And I'll deliver you free of charge -

Bags, shoes, body and pink panties all complete.

Done, she said, for two day's refund on the rent.

These days I'm respectable, and short of cash.

There is a room to let;

The ad' runs every week, like an echo

From hopelessly hopefully better days to come :

Quiet guy for flat; stylish, carpets,

Parking underneath.

Friends
Irimo Street, Lae, Papua New Guinea 1985

Mi helpim yu.

The large soft fingers fold gently around my keys -

Strange greeting from strange hands, so dark

Against my pale, the quality of new sensation;

Unbalanced I admit the uninvited

And watch technology defeat all good intentions,

For the lock will not acknowledge

Its new master.

Nem bilong mi Pita.

Apinun, nem bilong mi Thor.

Sadly I take back the keys.

A legion of green ants claims right of way

On the choko vine entangled with the gate.

It's a condominium, as they say

In the cities of the West; in equatorial Lae

It's a high covenant fortress, decayed

Up from its damp green bottom

To the corroded window bars. A sleepy scene

Of silent raging warfare between gekos

And an ark of insects. It's paradise

To the voices in the foliage, over the barbed wire,

Across the chasm of colliding worlds.

The privileged dwell in this block

Of four retreats, defended from poverty's claw

By three metre cyclone fences; imprisoned,

Tethered by the culture of their bellies

To the ethereal domain of supermarket shelves;

The expatriates trade their guilt psychoses

For the shifting masks of "expert",

The fool a thousand miles from home;

Caricature of fey qualities,

Wishfully misfit, missionary, mercenary.

As my feet quietly slap about parquetry floors

Prizing the solitude of their echoes,

Eight beings sweat and sing hymns

And sometimes fight

In a box of a one-room shack,

Not twenty metres over the wire.

On early mornings

Smoke wisps hover from their fires

And the shouts of the children

Are full of hope.

Hope wanes for the warriors bereft

With each day as the sun goes down

Over the squatter camp,

Where chance is taken from God

And luck is rarely given

To these lost proud men from the mountains,

With funny languages

And no weapons

To seize the dazzling prizes of new knowledge.

Only the women find something to sell.

They forgive my prodigal isolation;

They admire my freezer's capacity for making cash :

Crimson ice-blocks are the currency of civilization,

Sold by heavy, patient Jane

Of the spiky hair and missionary smock,

To 'munkis', all elbows and dusty kneecaps,

Who miraculously in the depths of a ragged pocket

Find twenty-five toea

To dye their tongues sticky-cold-red.

James knocks every night, after dinner -

Slight, polite, insistent, searching for a key

To the realm of parquetry floors;

He comes with a single torn exercise book

At first to study (he says), to learn

From the silence of empty rooms;

But away from the rich aroma of kin

He is spooked by a stranger within.

They hold him in awe, pool ice-block money

To succour their hope for the clan.

With his book James carries new magic;

But out of their sight

He bares his shame and terror :

The image of a boy in an unironed shirt.

James brings the garment regularly

Like a vestment to the temple of light.

For forty minutes each the torpid evening,

He irons with infinite ritual

And respectful conversation

At the creases in his mastery

Of a foreigner's domain.

Behind my dancing mask,

Trickster, expert, self-deceived,

Finally I know the limits of permission;

Of all the treasures,

What minute gifts are taken from my hands.

The Wrong Address

Fragments from an Australasian Life

AFTERWORD

OK, here’s the latest offer. For $999 we can remake you on a 3D printer. Money back guarantee. Are there any details you’d like to change? A nose, a knee, or perhaps some detail of fate? Well, not yet available by Internet order, but surely it will come (just have faith in the Russian programmer who made possible, and the Nigerian gentleman with the marketing rights). So how will you choose?

If you had asked me at most times in the last fifty years, offered to let me push the big red re-set button on living life over again, I would have hesitated in confusion. Perhaps that’s why I am still a poor man. But born in a lucky country at a time of peace (more or less), ugly but healthy, aware of the desperate lives in less fortunate places, only a fool would not want to count his lucky stars and pause before gambling on another throw of the cosmic dice.

Sometime in the last few years I passed a red traffic light that suddenly loomed out of the mist without warning. The sign underneath it said “Welcome to Retirement Land. Game Over. No Exit From This Territory. You Are Now Harmless and Useless. Have A Nice Sunset”. It was true. The mist cleared, the warm sun came out, they gave me a pittance to live on and gently suggested that it was silly to work now. I looked around, then looked back at the race I hadn’t known I’d been running. Now it was clear. Life was supposed to be over by regulation. Wasn’t I decently happy? Well, not altogether. Where was that big red re-set button? Just having one shot at a very short race whose shortness you don’t know about at the time seemed kind of unfair. Dammit, I’d just learned a few useful things and it was game over, the official story said. Come to think of it, there were a dozen lives in parallel universes which I’d like to have a shot at before picking a final one for posterity. To hell with the official story!

So now it is over to you. Maybe we’ve been born an aeon too early (before the necessary 3D printers). Or maybe an asteroid impact tomorrow will blow this human game to smithereens anyway. Personally, I’ll never know about it. The tale on offer in “The Wrong Address” is a fragment of a fragment, written in bad verse about a character who means nothing to you anyway. It was fun to write the bad verse, and fun to wonder whether such an ordinary life could hold any kind of mirror up to all those other folk crawling between heaven and earth in this corner of the Milky Way. What do you think?

Thorold May
thormay@yahoo.com

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