Churchill said Laugh! when London got bombed
and Bush said Buy! when the Twin Towers fell
And while the rest of Europe wept
Londoners hardened themselves
in the same way a schoolkid laughs
at a three-legged dog
And as white ash rained over New York
the city was so quiet
it could hear
the sound of cash registers
all the way from the West.
I am in love with an architect
who told me that skyscrapers
are held together by double-sided sticky-tape.
There is not a single bolt, he said,
between the glass and the frame.
Just the strongest sticky-tape in the world.
And up a scaffolding made out of bones we climb,
through a latticework of knuckles and kneecaps and
the sigh of the wind as we get higher and
higher until we sit perched
with a crow’s nest and a satellite dish and
a little red light for aeroplanes
And as we look out over the fold of our knees
amid the slight sway of tall buildings
my favourite architect whispers
look, its just sticky-tape and glue.
I bury my face in my feathers
and wonder
what happens when it all comes unstuck?
Under a bridge in Spain
I have a cousin who weeps
faraway from her mother’s ranch in Nevada
where the desert looks like a silver sea
and kids drive big cars into the dunes at night
to make out under the neon glow of Las Vegas.
But all my cousin had, she wrote me in a letter,
was casinos and cacti.
And when she cried,
her tears were parched
before they even hit the ground.
When her third step-mum turned fifty years old
she stabbed her birthday cake,
lit candles and all,
in front of forty-odd guests.
It was a chocolate mud cake
with a thick spread of real strawberry jam through the middle.
Then she went to kiss the closest male,
her husband and my cousin’s father,
and held the knife to his throat
for three minutes
until someone coaxed the knife from her.
Now my cousin weeps in Spain
mixing her tears with oil-based paints
She called her last painting
I Couldn’t Stop Crying So I Left.
There was once a pub called
The Angel’s Pavement
down by the mall on Bourke Street.
My grandmother hovers outside
where it used to be.
It was sold from our family
many years ago
but she keeps going back
and tries to pry open the cracks
in the pavement with her fingers.
She says she is looking for
something,
a sign,
or a pint glass.
An ashtray will do.
When she does find
something,
cufflinks
or a lapel pin,
she takes it back to her shop in Richmond
where behind the window covered in dust
is a faded picture of budgies
nuzzling each other on a bamboo perch.
The note saying –closed- makes most people walk on by,
but inside she sits on top of an old tea chest
wrapped in shawls and antique jewellery
almost hidden by the junk and a perpetual haze of moths.
I tap on the window
and mouth
that we’re related.
She shuffles over to the door and points
to the sign
-closed -
and walks away.
I have a younger brother
who is being contacted by aliens.
The radio is speaking to him.
And the TV is watching him.
Frank Zappa sends him messages
via his mobile phone.
His black ink drawings
aren’t of waterholes and emus and caves,
but of UFOs and electrical appliances.
He believes he is in hospital
because he cannot weep,
and it is true, he does not cry.
The saltwater ducts in his eyes
have all dried up and
when he blinks
his eyelids scrape like Velcro
across the dusty surface
of his irises.
But he is not in hospital because of this.
He’s suspicious of me and my visit.
And starts to scream when I lean over
to remove a smudge of lunch on his shirt.
Outside in the corridor,
there is a girl levitating
She had no ground under her feet.
No earth
to speak of.
She levitates so high
that doctors walking past can see up her nightgown.
The best search engine,
says my mother,
is Google.
It’s a good way to keep in touch
when you don’t touch.
She tells me that she has typed my name in
every day for the past two years.
I remember she had a jewellery case
made out of Japanese silk
that she kept hidden at the back of her wardrobe.
I used to fish it out when she wasn’t home
and try on all her rings and clip-on earrings.
There was an orange plastic container
Full of moonstones
that looked like a handful of cloudy tears
or the split pulp of a lemon.
I swallowed one,
because I loved the thought
of a moonstone floating around inside me
as I walked around
No one knowing
but me.
We used to watch television on Christmas day,
said a man who lives on the street outside
the Vic market,
Sometimes it was a new DVD,
but mostly it was just whatever was on the box.
Boxing Day is better the men would say
(not me because I am gay)
because the cricket’s on
Boxing Day is better the women say
because the men are happy.
I don’t know what not liking sport
had to do with his being gay,
but I do remember him looking wistfully
at something only he could see
and saying
I wish I were a wog,
Not an Anglo
who watched television on Christmas day.
On the bottom of the bay
where I can’t hear the sound of people cracking,
it is crowded with Chinese starfish
that travelled across the Pacific
hanging on to the bellies of cargo ships.
I stare up at the sky through the water.
and watch the blurry image of a gull fly over.
And remember when my father’s hair
turned white
when they got the call that I had died.
I should have listened to those two minutes after I was dead.
I should have listened to his hair
that had gone white from the roots to the tips,
and went brown again when they brought
me back to life.
I didn’t know hair could go from brown to white to brown again,
but nature is a funny thing.
My housemate told me the other day
that sometimes
when the molecules in mould need to move
to a place with more moisture
they can get together and form a slug.
She studies biology and wanted to know
how each molecule decided to be the head
or the tail
and so on.
Then we wondered if the slugs in our bathroom,
which only come out at around 3am,
were born of the mould that clogged up the drain.
Sometimes when I come home drunk
I have a shower
with the slugs slurping all over the tiles
and baby snails trying out their shells
that are still soft like brand new fingernails.
And I produce a steamy paradise that
makes their feelers wriggle with pleasure.
I wish I could go back
and find that man at the market
and bring him home
We could fry dried chillies and let them spit in the pan
making the whole house sneeze
and we could pretend
a hundred years of stories will flare up in the oil.
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