waking poetry

morning, and the stepped-on cigarettes

spill open - tobacco hair from ear canals –

the school group crowding round 

smells of lime zest and strawberry bubble tape – the man

whose white beard streams from upright chin to lap

pays me no mind and I can’t understand –

asphalt, scuffed like an ice rink at day’s end

is hailed with small rocks loosed by the Eltham train –

flung up higher than I thought they would be

making indents as they land that I cant see

but which exist as sure as the crags 

in hilly terrain exist, and the concaves at her temples

she rubs as though trying in vain to tell

her own future, that pencil-skirted girl

younger than my little brother, but

weighted already to catch the biggest fish

weightless enough to be easily reeled in –

the old man walks more beautifully than her

but both are scarred beyond all recognition –

then a bell: the boom gates are coming down.