Tack

In the sky

Powder blue gelato air

The kindest cut

In the street 

Outside the window

People  with little money

clothes washed to a shapeless comfort

In the shop windows 

disposable garments

heels  so high they appear correctional, quasi limbs missing from birth  or accident.

Outside the window

The birds on the large green field, evenly spaced, a mix of marine and terrestrial, sizes and colours

As they lift and resettle their collective movement reprints a complete pattern 

again and again.

Inside the window 

The young man  stretches

pushes his chair back off its front legs

raises his arms above his head, revealing  a bare midriff  

a kitten's lets play

but as they all do 

he catches himself 

shuts up shop

bumps suddenly forward.

He has the ice blue eyes of a young narcissus  gazing intrigued and aroused

sickened by all that is not him

7.30am Xpress

closest shave
sharpest haircut
crispest shirt
the most savvy  phone
softest skin
clearest eyes
heavenliest scent
the girl cradles the iphone between two sets of slender fingers, cupping it in a way that suggest a flower held by a debutante.

Transport

The beautiful  visually impaired girl reads the questions blown up to A3, centimetres from her eyes   and identifies the bits of Australia which are of  interest to tourists on an A2 black and white map. Iluru is really somewhere dead centre of that great hulking island.

Then the short answers. "In 1967 the referendum was signed which recognised the Aborigines as citizens of Australia". The national preoccupation with  a signature putting her wrong. Half a mark off.

The weather outside at midday was compressed grey and stagnant with brevity.  Nothing much could move the spirit on such a day.

On the 002 a pregnant woman and her two toddlers sit on the alcove seats at the front.
A man  sits up the back talking at her down the bus.  He says that the guy is a stupid cunt and he will tell him so. The woman attractive and proud grins at a small serious boy sitting opposite. A grin which is culturally  borrowed, pasted on and makes the eyes fill with pain.

Up the front a middle aged man debates something in fruity tones with the bus driver.
His girlfriend leaves him there and sits down in the middle of the bus.
One of the children starts to grizzles. It is at an almost subliminal level and could be just part of the day.
Shut your mouth. You want me to smack you across the face Crunchy, a man calls down the bus.
The silence is sudden and a shock. The child is quiet.
The man relaxes now he has attention.

The middle aged man  with a white goatee ends his conversation with the bus driver
He joins his girlfriend and says that he tried to get on with a pensioner's pass but the driver wasn't buying it. He is wearing a distinctive  black jacket with some  complex embroidered Asian motif on the back and the front, his hands are covered in heavy gold rings.
He talks with the projection of a radio DJ and tells his girlfriend that he has always called the guy a little gollywog. Always. He has always given him a hard time. He worked at the mission with him. Knows him well. That was when he himself had owned an upmarket property in Mountain Road, the
one with the swimming pool, yes that one and it was very nice, very nice indeed, insinkerator, washer dryer all included. The guy he sold it to made a loss on it when he sold it but he didn't.
The pool was out the back wasn't it? The girlfriend is younger by half a decade,  and has a whine which is set in relief against his mellow elocution.
No no it was around the side, the grounds were nice. Swimming pool.
You needed a key  to get in though? No no not if you knew the key pad code. It suited him and his Chinese girlfriend of the time.

In the Asian food market  entrance through the food hall  and the strong smell of medicinal herbs, there is a recent colour addition to the rogue's gallery of shoplifters _ a photo of the middle aged man with the white goatee wearing his embroidered black jacket. His eye brows are raised over glasses which he must have put on after being apprehended  and before having his photo taken. He seems to
say, oh so you have caught me you little wogs but I am impervious.

girls

she  said she wanted like her own identity
she said stuff like that to me but i think she is bullshitting
she is always saying stuff like that but i don't think she means it.
in our group we battle things out but she was fully like wanting her things her way
i know, if she thought stuff was wrong she would nut out and become more stubborn
she was so quiet and gentle, i am so cute and small rah rah rah
and the way she dresses i would not see her that way
she is so funny but
i mean i wanted to say that is the dumbest thing ever but  she didn't need to hear it from me
how can we encourage her
she is so lost
she covers it up by saying things like
i find it funny
i wish she would be more open about it.
i hate kay he has never been nice to me
he is so cold
it is so funny she said none of the boys like you guys
thanks genelle.
She is telling everyone different things
i always hide myself around myself
they are geeky
they look at us like us
I don't know what they expect from us.

Weekend

It was a warm night. It could have been early spring which it was not.
The late night air of the inner city park was filled with the fugitive   scent of high quality hydroponics. The park was in an ancient gully that had been grassed over,  its steep boundaries held in place by huge trees which floated out  canopies of branches. From where she was waiting   in the car  looking down, she could imagine as it had been when it was a sewer and midden, the old time citizens flinging shit out, getting rid of stuff they didn't want, squatting in rough shacks on the ridge above  until querulous letters to the editor drove the city fathers to do something. Once something was done they had named it in their own honour. It was their town after all.


Quartets and trios of people in light clothing stood under the sodium lights talking quietly to one another.  Down at the bottom of the gully at the feet of giant marble replica of a ever brooding Moses,  three drunken boys  shouted, threw themselves down and  picked themselves up again increasing in volume as they did so. She then remembered the old double story boardinghouse villas which had sat  on the cliff up above them. To visualise them was to bring to mind a chunk of time that had its own specific sadness. The sadnesses were bottled each in their own vintage. This one contained these houses which she realised  were like dead friends whom she now realised she had never really known or appreciated. In the heat of her first summer here they had been part of the city's  underlying tropical aspect. People had sat on the verandas looking and calling down to the park, their possessions, washing and lives on show. Now the white  facade of an office block formed a rampart of small square windows.

Toby slept only a few hours and was gone  before she woke and would not be home for hours. She
would be alone all day.  In the dairy/convenience snacks  section of the supermarket, a tall transvestite on high platform espadrilles and skinny jeans was stuffing items into a large paper sac labelled "PROPERTY OF PATIENT' in blue lettering. She was slender with a bruise on a lightly beaten face and was still wearing a hospital id around her wrist. She moved speedily down the aisle  and up again rapidly selecting items as if shopping urgently for a impromptu dinner party. The sac
was filled to bursting and she had to throttle it to get a proper grip. She marched quickly  to the self check out aisle, passing  right through to the exit  doors. As she arrived  on the curb a white taxi drove up the hill to the corner,  a companion  leaned across the back seat to open the door and they drove through the intersection and out west.

On the way home, a song bird in the pensioners' housing garden was singing to itself quickly and delightedly, an old school  typewriter turning out a real page turner.

Pigeon pie

It was this time of the year, when everything was stripped down and reduced to its essence, that human beings appeared to become more  hostile. Perhaps we were in the grip of one of those very unfashionable innate drives, with its source in ancient winters of such great scarcity that each mouthful of food was to be wrested from the hand of another who would then perish. It could all be seen most clearly in the behaviour of receptionists.

Receptionists appeared to take a bleak view in all weathers. It seemed a cruel fate  that those who disliked others so much should have to come into contact with them so often. The woman in the Hospitality office, in a warmer season, usually masked her dislike behind a sliding smile that made it part way up her face. But now; did she snarl? It was as if behind the barrier of the front counter and from her lair in the corner, she snarled, lowering her grey shaggy curls, the whites of her eyes momentarily visible. Maybe not. She was a drinker with a grey lined pouchy face. She was also a smoker. Possibly the night before had been filled with gaiety and talk and now she had no use of either. During the day she often stood on the side walk where the smokers had been relegated by sweeping smoke free policies to puff her cigarette thoughtfully among the fumes of passing traffic, her shoulders hunched and brooding.

She did emit a little friendly spirit from her closely husbanded reserve for those in her world who were able to cross over behind the counter and breeze by her with organisational updates or complaints. She then laughed a short harsh smoker's laugh. There was no form of human behaviour that she had not witnessed and found predictably ridiculous. But now she sidled over and snatched the paper Lotte wordlessly held out without meeting her eye.

 Lotte thought of her again at bus stop while she sat in one of the two black enamelled shelters bequeathed by a benevolent couple who had had an evident desire to seat six people from among the crowd of pale commuters. A pigeon was walking about in hope of crumbs. Its plump body was bound at the base of its tail by dark grey markings crisscrossed over like a thong _  bound and caught by
nature for some unfortunate purpose.

Winter solstice 21.6.13

Snow on tv and the photo ops that brings
Thunder and lightning converge over the  hall skylight at bedtime
A woman is reported suffering of a heart attack when a sonic boom
activated by a bolt of lightning blasts the windows from her home.
In the heavy grey air the city is black tinged beige, the same colour as her rejuvenated leather boots
Across the harbour the sugar factory's pink  rambling structure, a modernist painting of a sugar factory with deftly painted planes over a sure perspective, fades in and out of the sea mists like a the slowest of heartbeats