morning writing exercise: poem about a tourist in a rut

nauseous from those outpourings of joy
and near-carnality
they the living living upon the dead
look elderly atop raking crow's nests
on yachts built at the dawn of Australia
elderly in the ancient sunlight -

*

               at a table - medium density fibreboard -
               you imagine you're an actor thinking of
               the saddest thing in the world so you can cry

               shortlisted:
               an old blind man standing numbly in
               as his guidedog is euthanized -
               his flinching touch as the pelt turns rigid
               operational senses numbed offline -
               problem is, the man is neither blind
               nor old, nor a man, and tears don't fall
               for archetypes stuck between pathos' forceps -

               shortlisted:
               a boy at a throaway table
               sitting on a molded polymer chair
               that'll still be around - but not as a chair -
               when people offer up their supplicant selves
               to insects - a chair made, essentially,
               by insects - forced to act
               like an actor trying to act
               like someone sad -

*

the mynas on the monstrous cooling vents
are graceful, are graceless, and shit and piss
with that unified sense of dialectics
that you get on night five, wasted in a playground -

surface of the slippery-dip too coarse
to move you in your double acid wash
you lie on that diagonal deep-ribbed bed
consider the here-s and there-s of going nowhere -

twizzle your antiperspirant-crusted
finger-length underarm hair -
why tonight are certain stars so there
when others are obscured, not by the clouds
but by what looks like bushfire haze?

*

all of a uniform shape! all of a uniform shape!
the chef is yelling behind mustard-specked French doors -
you weren't meant to hear him, you weren't meant
to know the food except as it's perfectly arrayed
on an oven-warmed bone China
                 made in Vietnam plate

resplendent with the smells of fresh-chopped dill
and the perfume on your ravishing waitress' wrists -
you weren't meant to go behind the curtain -
so unpalatable is it back there
that she takes your marzipan crescents away untouched -

*

someone's drawn a dick on the mensroom man
at a rest stop, where to piss you have to pay
fifty cents to an old bloke by the door
International Roast tin jangling, zip lock
bag full of urinal soap in his seabed hands -
dicks on men: now that's contemptible -

after the line dance class - where you make out
with a skinny girl from France who perspires sex
the bus departs for the final stop -
a Twelve Mile Beach that's only  four miles long
according to the pony-tailed tour guide -

shuttled onto Barton era yachts
you watch as one by one the group is cinched
at their waists to harnesses and J-ropes
climb the crow's nest, tilt their pale heads back
stretch out their arms - think, perhaps, of Kate Winslet

and then abseil clumsily down to the deck -
the whole ordeal upsets your stomach somehow -
when your turn comes, you tell them I'm all right.