making electronic music, in public, at night

what you ought to do is not go home tonight –

                   “psychedelic trance is like starport indra’s engine”

and you’re thrill-riding you’re chroming on its fumes,

sucked along in a slipstream of eau de parfum

with ‘ocean’ and ‘sport’ and ‘romance’ and ‘euphoria’

in their names – using a worn-out broom to disinter

the pine needles from those graves in the pavement

that shouldn’t be there – the render on your sober face

crumbling like the handiwork of a third millennium husband –

you watch a man with one leg try to jump a fence –

he succeeds and it’s the holiest the world’s been

since that solar eclipse in Cape Town you were too high for

and too low to be lifted beyond sea level by anyway –

emotionally low that is – so, what is on the other side of the fence?

Fennel weeds pointing like arrowheads toward the city

and then an embankment and then a highway and then

an embankment and then fennel weeds and then a fence –

no-one’s saying light out for the territory –  only

to not go home quite yet – the night smells too much like rain

for the preclusive dryness of an apartment roof

for the twenty-six plastered ceilings atop your own –

you sit on a bench and unravel your polka dot bindle

gnaw on the bamboo shaft and open a laptop

that wasn’t there before, turn the wet on the Ableton arpeggiator

to a million percent, imagine the redlining CPU as a hypertensive heart –

notice that the moon is almost red now,  and that the pulsing sweep

on every seventeenth beat, if it is any thing, is that thing meltingly –

Melbourne is like a wasp nest lopped and broken,

much of the colony saddled and ridden by smaller insects,

most of its poets saddled by the skittled cricket wicket

motif and other tongue-twisting Australiana, and train stations –

well there’s a Russian doll containment to the notes in your lead

synthesiser line too, a Pandora’s Box that’s got you pretty ensnared,

a melody so beautiful it must have been a saintly fluke

because you can’t even see that the keyboard is capitalised

or that there are some men with designs on robbing you.