I rent this body
      a poem is a rent of attention
of course a poet doesn’t own: they rent!
my intention is to live & die 
   not to live forever

        in some perverse never-ending

               renovation montage
   but to love     the pooled water    & resources 
to locate peace – to move with

    the small historical events

which are not classed as urgent repairs
can you even count capital gains with chilblains?

  I’m just grateful to have never known either 
poetry is in the streets

(yes &) the streets are full of poets

I bump into emilie on lygon street

    alex on sydney road

walking between libraries & cafes

where it is always warm 
steph was over & said frustratedly – I wish

there were houses like this one to buy

     but I don’t – I say

ownership isn’t safety in an unstable economic system
no – I say renting is great because I find no joy at bunnings
the week my son was born, I wrote in my journal:
            I promise to make money through non-exploitative means

            to pay for the privilege of sitting beneath someone else’s roof

            in the city I love so that I may write poems as the climate collapses
georgia said on steiner school camp in the grampians

they slept on the dirt under a giant rocky overhang 
& this precarity was instruction    no – it was a lesson

no no – it was private education

   a paid vacation

        an airbnbification?     
sweeter dreams & goldener slumbers & weightier blankets
here we can inherit property & trauma tax free

which sucks – economically & spiritually
no one is thriving if they’re permanently in fight/flight/freeze
even with inflation

   people keep saying ideas are cheap
our bodies decay & that’s ok with me
if you have a garden then perhaps

    you are a poet of the earth

 furnishing the season with colour 
our friends come over at our end of lease

 to help us pull weeds & hold the baby
that week your analyst says you don’t ask a poet

    to do the job of a boyfriend

  or the collective 
in menzies’ dream everyone

has their own little colonialism to tend
o! I can hear the gardens yawning

     in the silent afternoons

  walking our baby back from the shops

past the manicured hedges 
      past houses

  with ‘for sale’ signs

           like price tags

that turn every street into an aisle 
“a buyer’s paradise”
this new suburb

new sticker for my license

(third in three years)
I love getting to live everywhere in naarm
    merri-bek is my new library
how a book lives in a library

         & is alive in many libraries

so it will live as long as we have libraries
you’re allowed to be

in a public library 
where today I am

writing poems

eating microwaved pasta

staying warm

      & agitating
  quietening the disembodied voice that says
RENT MONEY IS DEAD MONEY
            Q: what is a living wage? 
            A: what is rent? 
a hole in the sky or fabric?
     to be torn? 
our baby is now too big

for the chest strap

that I use to carry him everywhere 
is it metaphysics that means

  you can’t return to your childhood home?
like bachelard says: it is physically inscribed
or like the tweet says: the government knows a brunswick

            to fitzroy tram would make the

      queers too powerful
the built environment wasn’t built with us in mind
but also we’re not meant to live forever

the way a great line

 can live forever

      rent-free in in someone else’s head
my uncle text me & said he was concerned

   about his ‘legacy’ – having built his own house

& there being no loved one to pass it on to
anti-pastoral – because there is no time

there is no stemming the flow

there is only the heart of the city

only the guts of the suburb

       only the poets amassing

    on arterial roads

& that is a dangerous thing
lucy said she doesn’t own a house

not because it takes a life to repay

but because its boring

& that’s on purpose 
it took me 5 minutes to join the renter’s union

& cost $11
it’s not ownership for me

but safety for everyone
I think a poem is supposed to be unsettling