happenings

your fingers open like petals, or a single petal flayed

it’s a mass transit greenhouse

it’s the hottest summer on record

you’re the most foreign flower native to Australia – 

milkshake seat patterns – topographic

fishtails of desert tracts

of slate escarpments

thumbnails of pudgy mountain range

you puff up the dust to pitch into, you fart soundlessly into

playing eyes

playing with the eyes

of some ravishing tourists who speak gruff Quebec French

and unfold and unfold a map, hand of a different girl

at every dog-eared corner

ease their cotton shoulders

from the straps on their bulging Quechua backpacks –

read the map and the Reflections of Herman Hesse

and L'Avalée des avalés

do you think they think conterminously

of swallowing you? fucking you? watering/their waters breaking with you?

toes squinted closed like eagle beaks, mongoose claws

you note that of all passengers

you are both the calmest

and the most unhinged – it gnaws at you, that weird dialectic

all you get is calmer – South Melbourne corrugated iron

ribbed like the roof of a mouth

so far from the Fitzroy seabeds

so far from all that warms you, so far from warming notions

you’re cold you can’t feel yourself – think of the bay winds

baying and be present

think of sand in groinal clefts

think of sand grabbed in slants to punish, of sea spray sandy

like half mixed dough – think of green water, vast bays of ill faces – 

all the rockslides happening

all the Kevlar braiding happening

all the kitten drowning happening

all the gold mining happening

all the doilies being ripped

from ‘Awesome Orange’ jam –

all the movies being ripped from DVD

all the absenteeism at Movieland

all the intellect conventions

matinees in far-off time zones

all the chicken salt eaux de parfum

wafting through KFC air vents

and in variety buckets through homes –

all the master signifiers, nervous tics round nervous animal eyes

happening.

·       

six stops until the end of the line – you’ve only just passed Langridge

and yet you feel the line has ended, that it ended while you looked

at other things – and this motion, an ersatz motion, only you

being passed on all sides

above and below

at breakneck speed, only you catching whiplash in weed-like growth –

the woman wiggling her nose like Sabrina the teenage witch

dislodges a booger and eats it

your jealousy almost euphoric

next to her an old man with a rice paddy hat, next to both of them

the ceiling and then cabling and then ceiling and then power lines

and then pollution and then sky – limpid as a creature of the abyss.