for Lachlan Berry and Emily Crocker

Somewhere in the suburbs a tongue shapes caper-tasting words. Somewhere in the suburbs a tongue kicks consonants like a soccer ball. Somewhere in the suburbs a tongue lifts a sentence like a barbell: a test of lexical strength. Somewhere in the suburbs a tongue tastes syllables like a patisserie chef. Somewhere in the suburbs a tongue launches a poem of sparkling wine, contained in a glass backlit by the glow of a Liquorland sign, and the poem arcs up and hurtles towards the head of a woman emerging from glass auto-doors, who is so startled by the terrible beauty of words caught in glass caught in neon light that she lets her bag slip from manicured fingers and the poem caught in glass smashes into the doors made of glass and glass shatters and prawns fly out of the bag because the poem has ripped ten thousand shreds in the plastic. The poem hasn’t saved the prawns, but all those shards of syllables and broken words shine bright as the sun on the bitumen, eclipsing the Liquorland glow.