Sunday 2 February 2014

South


The light rail station at South Melbourne Market in early 2014
Images by Bridie Harvey

Town Hall and Bob Pratt mural made very recently
 by Urban Enhancement: http://www.ue.net.au/

Saturday 1 February 2014

Canine


CANINE


Their tooth is an incandescent concentration that
  gorges black gapes in trouser legs and slobbery
  Slazengers; it is cut deep from the memory of
  a fiery palaeolithic stand off.
Their house is first prize in a Dutch auction, a
  satirical miniature, happiness in sunshine turned
  sad by the heart's cruel desire to indulgently
  whimper at sadness and scoff.
Their ear is that point never returned to in the book;
  it listens to every word we hardly notice and
  quickly forget; detects strangers where there’s
  barely a clue.
Their coat is that contagion of colour we admire,
  that cohesion of confusion brushed by the law,
  potentially the cause of bathetic flattery or
  flea rug dropped without ado.
Their toy is the patience of a saint, the rosella
  on the creaking fence, the mustard juiceless
  tintinnabulating shinbone they do not bury
  somewhere conspicuous leaving a tame curve.
Their tail is, like their bark, dependently
  independent, irresponsibly responsive, inexpressibly
  expressive, unconditionally conditioned,
  dogmatically domesticated, and appears to be
  connected to their tongue by the same nerve.
Their breakfast constitutes the ravages already
  left before nightfall, gruel fuel slopped from
  a grand can, uncategorizable lumps and holey dollar
  biscuits that get them to fire on.
Their day is a heinzer of copping the accident waiting
  to happen, guarding the hours while revolutions
  hatch, unreluctantly chasing waves again, and
  grabbing the premiership on the siren.
Their verse attempts wander way off track, go to
  and fro in double Dutch, in unrepentant mongrel
  nashers, ending up beside the doused daisy bush
  of an irretrievable moment.
Their eye is an analogy of type - sleepy as labrador,
  gleamy as chihuahua, clever as kelpie, duplicitous
  as dingo; has the mystique of a snooker champion’s
  in a tournament.
Their master is the anthropomorphic Other whose
  whimmish voice becomes the stop or start of their
  next activity : bounding over the dawning oval,
  sleeping under the afternoon lemon tree.
Their tiredness is that of the conductor on her
  midnight tram, the truckie on Dutch courage for
  his last consignment this week, the scholar
  studying late in the library.
Their drinking water lands crystalline from its
  sky-high leaping cycle, thin into an isoceles
  between the backlane bluestone; cool and good,
  it overflows the ice-cream bucket of their years.
Their star is a Dutch treat, dwells in its own space,
  keeps its own counsel, larger than all others;
  it is easily ignored in a trice, loosens single
  tears.