I.
With the release of his hoof from the pitted step

crushed frangipani petals spring,

wet with perfume, to broken pyramids,

stained-glass rubble.

He gangles his way down the steps,

vast rounded thighs shifting like drunk

whales courting. The fawn blinks in the new century

and he casts his leer out to Middle Harbour

where he heard you were out in the sun,

dear companion,

roaming this joyous city of the dead.
II.
I almost broke my neck

hopping down the steps at Potts Point

because I heard you were floating,

wide-eyed and tendons sliced, past Goat Island and out

to the humpback bridge

to the pearly xenomorph of sharpened curves

past the galleries where every piece of painted plywood

         both adopts and subverts the

         iconography of power

         to interrogate the nexus

         of capital and the state

(if they didn’t, would we survive the shock?)

and poets mutter under their breath

on the light rail:

things looked bland.
III.
Lines rise to the surface like bodies

washing up at the Gap and like bodies

washing up at the Gap most of them aren’t mine:

              RATS IN PARADISE

shriek the gorgeous new apartments shitting

on the earlier bird’s views. There’s a bit of everything

poured into these steel

and watery glitters. Joe Lynch decanted himself in 1927

not – as Brennan lamented – onto a cranium

but into a poem. Shaking his massive legs in the sun

he clops down Writers Walk, too huge,

too wrong, stumbling over

one of AD Hope’s chiselled iambs.

Lunch is drunk in that Sydney way

of investment bankers at the Quay,

sluicing their misgivings out to sea

to boil up as clouds and piss

back down on you and me. 
IV.
Emerging

from the Opera House underpass for a second

everything is just what we were promised:

fistfuls of sudden sunlight knock out

your vision, glory in the skies,

a faint smell of sewerage

and shirts brighter than a song.

For a second it’s goodbye,

as the sun fills your mouth

and you spin out by the crushed light

of the Heads,

singing to the glass sky.