He washes up upon the shore,

that blue man, waxen in the printer’s trowel

of harbour light. A wedding pumps

on the waterfront, a limo driver smokes

and blows his rings at bats, and he

who looks so often to his watch sees

the washed up golem beyond the rail

and parking bay and barrier and

does and says nothing.
So the sixth bell peels at two AM,

when poems fall away and the tired quay

sighs; the circle train death-rattles

from cut to cut, slipping into Hades’

graffiti bunkers, satanic murals,

black water, black rubble, Tank Stream.
The dead man brushes himself off,

scrapes his way up sandstone walls

and shuffles toward The Lord Nelson.

The bell sounds again, and something

vibrates in wet jeans – the cross is right

way up on an eastern hill. Time falls

back into the space between steps;

the echo of the bell is set to ring.
Stormwater gushes from a cut below

the city’s ribs, as if the CBD sucked

vinegar from a sponge. Metals settle

like a drowned man’s hand across the silt

and scalps of rusted weed roll, quaffing

through a tide of endless wash.
The moon lights Lavender Bay, a light

moons coal-lap bars as coloured rays

dance from off the decks of charters,

or leap from North Sydney towers, taking

brands from neon scaffolds, drowning them

along with lost dogs and the drunks of Darlo.
The dead man touches all the figs from

shadow-bridge to Barangaroo and steps

toward the bar to find the happy-hour spent,

and TVs mounted on each wall ticker-taping

news events to a room of people blue as he.

‘What will it be?’ the barman asks, as once

again his wet pants buzz. 
                                             Barangaroo

was the woman who presumably tamed

Bennelong, or was it the other way? Or

was it neither way? All the blue man knows

is in the heated room, is in the amber diamonds

flitting from his glass onto the beams of ships

planed and bolted down to stay the swaying.
Stormwater pours out a clean deluge

which hides in crystal flux the heavy metals

of give-and-take and rips like razor light

into the shoals. A sixth bell tolls.