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.