A blue flame burns low on the horizon,

Whittles the wick of a July day

And kids scuttle like cockroaches

To moth-wing mirages called home

As mothers pull scorched chooks

And themselves out of ovens

And fathers waste in armchairs,

Statues in the shadows,

Dead still, or still dead, besides wrists

Twisting flask lids like clock hands.
After dinner red living rooms

Snap to black down the street

And wives huddle on mattress edges,

Crossing themselves with calloused fingers,

Listening to footsteps play

The nightly requiem on the staircase,

The crescendo a swinging door—

A backhand to the room’s dark cheek—

Before husbands bow,

Comatose them with a kiss

As the curtain falls, bedsheets

Embalming their bodies.
Behind duvet forts

Children stare at the world

Through cracked windows,

Piecing the jigsaw in their minds,

And conjure dreams with torchlight,

Holding empty corn cans to their ears,

Heads tilting to green plastic stars

Glued to the ceiling, whispering prayers

To a deaf god in the asbestos cosmos.
Streetlights bleed out on bitumen,

Skeletal oaks shiver with dawn,

Swinging mossed tyres noosed

From their silver boughs like clappers,

The morning bell rousing hounds

Asleep on frontyard thrones

Of broken glass and milk thistle

Who croon to marrowless moon,

Waking the neighbourhood—

All those lovers and loners:

A letter apart, a sentence together.