1. BIRTHDAY DAY

Pollock lipstick
vagabond slippers, the snug imprisonment of tracksuits
smeared with 11:30 soft-diet lunch.

Begin to hope the progress
behind pharmacological ramparts.
The real medicine is touch
all other expertise unnecessary.

I am now a fixture here
the nurses chat at visits, even read my books
between wiping bums and perennially guiding Tommy back to bed.
Clinical notes recorded on the verge –
chasms of new molecules, pneumonic harmonica and missing teeth.
I sing along at this birthday party
when everybody else thinks it's theirs.
Cordial and cake fly like confetti
slow motion kindergarten.
There's the bazaar worth of plots afoot
scheming over nothing
stolen glasses
or dentures. Pirates are aloft in the rigging of their wheelchairs/
aluminium walking-frames glint dangerously in a
gatecrashed sunlight that cranks gaiety to a cackled fever.
 
 
2. PICK ME UP

Each visitor is like a death, still hanging on
rusted to every mother as she's caught keening into where.

The constant spatter of TVs
worlds coming in to seduce away facts
that have still clung on
(steel hooks in the cerebellum).
Always music somewhere
cassette recordings of pianos built with ceramic tiles instead of strings
Underneath the Arches
We'll Meet Again
(and just once My Generation sent a ripple of fear
through attendant babyboomers).
The heart patch of fort nursed,
mouths open like day
eyes turn tail in prayer
for this week's Dearly Departed.
 
 
3. KIND REGARDS

My mother is “such a lady”
and they love her in the way
of pedestrian driftwood, stars and paper cuts.
The dependable burn of cigarettes,
flags of clarity and abyss, alternate horrors each
in separate ways. Time as soil erosion.
Some kind of word in a sleeping night.
Commonwealth Care Standards
and the guilt of children.

Nothing here is unmanaged
yet there's a kind of anarchy,
painted over every three months and
marked on coloured charts.

Families play a hackneyed role –
their fret, love
and secret wishings.
It washes over staff who've seen it before.
There are always better,
always worse actors for these parts.
It's a morality play
written in DNA
´cause Mum's dementia
will probably be our inheritance.
Partners and doctors monitor afternoon snores,
measure our decay.
 
 
4. LOST POST

This is some kind of harvest
old flesh on brittle bones
and grey wheat above
episodic eyes.
Who says death is better?
Most of us
(today- tinned salmon in a weak tomato sauce).
Usually not the residents
rusted in
sometimes even the mad, tender collegiality
of senescent love affairs –
even though she calls him
by another name and his face
is netted alongside unrelated memories.

In the sound of the sun,
every day is new.
Ambulances arrive
more regularly than friends –
there's the thrill of the ride
beneath panic, balms
and the silent rite of agony.

These veterans wear their ribbons of scars.
Pain management.
Come half past five everyone breathes easier, a sort of tranquillity,
when That Bloody Vera starts nodding off.

An almost accidental smear of yellow
beside the strident gold
of our more important streets, almost
like a break in colour lines, the street directory derailed.

Between Port Botany and the Gateway to Australia
pedestrians are by definition suspicious
no footpaths or signs
beyond contaminated high water,
harder air. Truck Territory
no stopping, metal-mob roar plus the mating preen of jets
above a grey-stained pelican.

I face a dried and battered screen
for both macadam and the open sea. Unsettled land
is where the wars break out. Reaving in cotton blends
people choose the easiest answer –
our stakes too high for ambiguity
or pause.
We never leave the checkout queue, reached
the full-junkie stage of capitalism
more shit, less hit.

Sand is history
but it can only be read in silence.
The old terracotta pipe leads out
then finishes, or dives beyond our ledger.
Eat our lunch joylessly
fretting over dinner.

No one will offer to fix this strip of sand
it even lacks a name,
this one-lane remnant beside the core
of that which makes us modern.
Cormorants camp on broken piers
weeds and cattails form the fence
between peace and atrocity.
Fresh lungs bleed across the suburb of containers,
Happy Meal wrappers are our time capsule.
Beside solvent clear water,
discarded bottles of Deep Spring refuse change.

                              Do not feed the birds
                         they interrupt airport traffic.
Until the Seventies, gangs buried their crimes here.
We modern mass villains are far less clever.
This beach is a border
though so porous you can see
seagulls drinking freely a sullage pond
with gastric striations in a poison grin.
It has no name, in a few more years
simply won't exist. Its driftwood
was once its trees.

We race new tides in eating land.
Here in the downiest part
of the New World Eagle.
Will our leaders be tried for slaughter?
Will we?
The 2.20pm KL and London has left.