‘I never much liked the pictures, starlit, gauzy,

a crank hand dealing largesse it didn’t have

scrunched skies and foreground sentimental dogs

like my great-aunt’s china doorstops …’

Disconcerted at exchange, he returns to his vignette,

and last week’s salve backs into its humdrum test-tube

in a safety-catch pouch.

I couldn’t say goodbye to the door,

the facility’s ashed portico and encased plants

under a spool of birds

so print out my friends next to the Colosseum Knitwear,

a doff to its inspector blinds vertical like a corpse.

Sunflowers walk the brûlée gardens to tarp verandah’s ersatz shade.

At the corner they gasp over raw creation, baby on its petal, intoxicated car.

Afraid to own mistakes, fortunes say.

The iron gates’ trade stamp Ballarat 1903, in sun-spined indent.

Aloof birds lantern a tree’s torpor or jubilance

that drain like an extinguished star’s revenant.

A drink of instead of, parasol of intransigence,

that’s longing, then nix.