Day flicks its cards, laconic.
Even in April, a flamboyance of colour:
stray perfume for the pent. Burnt leaves
drift away one by one, like concert-goers
after interval. High and handsome
loom the houses, forlorn, dogless even.
No one frolics on a lawn.
Merriment is shadowplay, happenstance.
Yet we build new ones, colonies of selves.
Czars of concrete lay their riddling floors
listening to songs of the eighties.
Loud they ring through the torpid suburb.
A flag is draped over a balcony –
rebuke, provocation, an airing?
Even the kookaburras exhort us now.
Two doors down, in a bedroom window
(boy or girl we wonder as we go),
Dennis Hopper broods for us, ageless cowboy.
Plague in a park vivifies the dogs.
They snap at each other, foreigners.
Pigeons peck among the futile seed.
Though no storm comes, a great bough
topples from the golden gum.
It lies there cordoned and criminal.
Triathletes excel at their several sports,
haughty in their charismatic tans.
Undeceived and wan, we trudge and trudge:
the circuiteers of inconsequence.