what you ought to do is not
go home tonight.
how many phonemes elided
when a man tears off your headphones
like a knee-jerk usurpation of a crown
to say psychedelic trance is powering
starport indra? wrest them back
politely. chrome engine fumes –
sucked along the red light
end of Smith Street
in a slipstream of eaux de
parfum named ocean, sport
romance, euphoria.
nature lives nowhere
but cracks in the pavement, the render on
your sober face crumbling
like the handiwork of a third
millennium husband.
to jump a fence. he does
but to what end? all there is
on the other side, fennel weed
arrowheads angling toward Eureka,
an embankment, a highway,
an embankment, fennel weeds, a fence
although, no pulse issues light
out for the territory, only not to pack
it in just yet. the night too sweet a post-
script of spring rain for an apartment
roof, flyscreen, twenty ceilings piled like
earthquake rubble atop you.
sit on a bench and unravel
a designer bindle. drink more. once the laptop boots
you turn the wet
on the arpeggiator to a million percent,
imagine the redlining CPU
as hypertensive heart, notice butterfly
colours in the citied clouds.
Melbourne, a Honeyeater nest
felled by slingshot and housed in
a Lucite cube.
most of its wailing hatchlings can
breathe okay. most of its poets can’t
remember when they wrote
better than on a late arriving train.
now a Russian doll containment
buries the notes
in your lead synthesiser line.
no escape from the beautiful
Melodies you sometimes fluke
so drunk, so tired, you are seeing
the eyes of men as green
as the puddles on the road.