Carpark (May)

Down here at eye level twentieth century’s Braque hatchings end. Sunrise enlightens grease slicks and loiterers’ solo slop Klee lettering. Sketch plans incorporate carparks between parks and Mondrian polychrome buildings. Hard squares, bold crosses, long lines for miles mock Malevich. Guston guzzlers maraud the territory anxious intent for vacant spaces. Midday is stop and start May Sales golden as Gascoigne. Vehicles’ drifts and detours delineate Steinberg permanent parallel swerves, forever. Layers of blinkers and door-mirrors queue towards Rauschenberg exit ramps. Nightfall clouds the lines between Pollock frenzy and Rothko melancholy. Midnight carparks borrow moonlight edgings, metallic scratches in Tàpies etchings.

Skatepark (May)

Another Saturday, the usual objective. Ankle-bend the recreational curves. Eye the distance. Lift off the purpose-built earthbound pit 360-degrees. Break the bank. Test the ramps. Skim the smoothed concrete click-click runways. Moonwalk the BMX base bash. Escape home streets onto inlining freeform contours. Pilot the vert scooped half-pipes. Fix the cap. Air the shirt. Aim at steep deep quarter pipes for stalls and flips and breezes. Balance perfectly spine transfers. Pitch into pyramids, spiral in the bowl. Board-step the side stairs, snake-run the volcano edges all the way around. Tap the wheels. Another May morning, another leafy spin over funboxes.

Billboard (May)

Facebook is my friend’s personal billboard. Television is a motion picture billboard and motion pictures a nation’s notions of itself in subtle word-for-word scene-by-scene billboards. They go on for hours, but billboards in landscapes were made for seconds’ sight. Freeways set up the dogma of capitalism, like skyhigh Mao icons. Buildings with big words state expectations. Billboards on trailers arouse desire. Yet around the edges poetry intervenes. Paper peels, rust lines borders, spotlights go on the blink. Graffiti changes brute meanings. Weeds scramble the hard words, like May icons. Rooms become soft and airy once we turn the switch ‘Off’.

Foyer (May)

Lobby has the allure of big city America. Cinemas are crowded with elaborate men and lippy women. Politicians fight in corners like it’s their hobby. The tremendous sounds are all human. Lobby and foyer are synonyms, but are they the same? Foyer is more European. We may linger there, waiting for a friend. Foyer waves like quiet fire. We find ourselves there sometime in May, say a Wednesday or Thursday, hearing whispers, needing to be somewhere else, publicly reading our private text messages, out of the weather. Vestibule never caught on. It’s a bit like anteroom, somewhere for inappropriate furniture.

Manhole (May)

Kick the plate out of place and the earth opens up. Gaze into darkness with concern not to fall. Slip down into that darkness with one eye on the sky. Notice a few May leaves blow over the oculus, a glint a plane in sunlight. Follow wires along passages rife with modern feelings, life sentences. Descend via tunnels where pipes pour into underground rivers. Start remembering childhood ins-and-outs, home a given. Come to vault doors leading to other doors, like scenes in a film. Detect cold dripping walls of ancient rainfalls. Wonder how far down it goes before the fires.

Site (May)

Site under deconstruction. Brickwork unpieced, foundations smashed down. Patterns of fashion reduced, a consumer ruin, to earthen squares crossed with bulldozer tracks, rubble mere blips on the surface. Leave the tabula rasa to archaeologists, bomb disposal units. These full-stops find definition in the rain. Site under construction. Defenceless land is fenced off, in weeks will be hives of brickmen, or a skyscraper hole. Open space goes to rio, a horizontal-vertical omniverse of grid. Completion date: next May. Only there’s roll-out, overheads, downloads, weather. Fashion requires imported patterns. Hardhats show every day but deadline races against skyline, the next big thing.

Barrier (May)

May as well be Felix the Cat veering at 100 between two walls steering past peripheral vision on constant curves of Babylonian cliff hangings and Oldenburg potato chips and cockleshell plasticated murals all in a row and berms that alter for the driver’s attention span, and all in cabin silence. Noise reduction for Steinberg freeway neighbours is less apparent, though they sleep deeper than otherwise and speak without a Spector wall-of-sound behind every word and enjoy less fear of heart strikes than if noise barriers were absent, as only Fred Flintstone would expect, frequenter of every bowling alley in town.

Signals (May)

Now they remove level crossings in the name of Speed. Clogged arteries, traffic ‘chaos’ sorted. Across the network knotty joins are freed for increased combustion. Meanwhile sentinels remain, slow weeds surround their foundations. Indifferent graffitists badge their weatherboards. Stacks of old sleepers guard their fastness. Windows are closed eyes on signal boxes. And inside? Great wheels that turned gates stand unoiled. “Left behind,” think speedsters idling at crossings remains. But they are spider queendoms, ivy pavilions, May weekend castles for boys who find a crack in the floorboards. They play superhero knights and monks inside as freeways proliferate, never stopping.

Landfill (May)

 All those plastic bags of house waste will come back and mount up at paradise door. Open the door and they will pour through the house. All our luxurious waste will, not may, come back to judge us. It’s a warning, met with laughter. Out of sight is out of mind. Garbage was collected by garbos at purgatorial early hours, once. Now it’s fully mechanised, robots in dawn streets lift bins high, emptied into sightless depths. Tips were the destination, dumps, buried by the word ‘landfill’, as though land were there just to be filled. Best not to ask questions?

 

Verge (May)

London villagers heard that Nature spread abundantly beyond the Strait. They came, saw, conquered the river they called Yarra, they were not disappointed. Their descendants divided Nature into strips. Nature Strips draw territorial lines between house and road, soft but firm. They’re herbaceous borders with their own customs, a race memory of manor lawns, fractals of a green and pleasant land. They’re less liminal than little luxuries, scenic extras where bush was stripped away. Lately Verge has emerged. From whence, California, WA? This import may upset equilibrium. Are Verges Converges? Diverges? A menace to public order? They resist high density.

Storey (May)

Said the St. Kilda champion in town for the day: I worked on the ICI Building. 1956. The men would go up on the girders midair. Once a fellow went with his mates for lunch, his birthday. Too much drink. That afternoon he stepped out on a girder – fell straight to Albert Street. Missed his footing. Said the old chap on the 96 tram, one May morning, off for a reunion with Neil Roberts & Co.: Tallest building in Melbourne, twenty floors. Heritage now. But y’know, when it was finished the windows’d fall out. Too loose. Fell from their fittings.