#781 - two for dream catalogue

 

23.ii.22

781

3.54

two for dream catalogue

 

places that still are, places gone, places we don’t know

 

Lam Woo, Mrs Kwong

I sit at a desk

was it mine once?

I know they are talking about me

let them say what they will

 

refuse timetable, clock

staffroom, chat

could not be bothered to comply

 

I leave

I unstraighten my tie

masked

tell the office

must be COVID

a quarter of a century early

but there’s no amount of money

 

skip down those white timber railed stairs

it’s Avenue Road in the sixties

you have to imagine the tram

the green grass bamboo

 

way home through

a kind of a carpeted yumcha

 

then it’s the table tennis centre at Summer Hill

you see it never went

bit of Adelaide thrown in

a little rickety staircase

as if a theatre once

 

a ball bounces out onto the road

early seventies traffic

mostly ignore

 

it’s raining

there’s mist

the wallaby grazing at the transpiration

all eyes and ears for me

 

it was ten cents a dream in those days

 

 

long way

 

to-do sunk  

 

after the whole night out dreaming

early hours then

decided a taxi for safety

 

crossed the bridge to the old neighbourhood centre

 

turned out to be a bus

and this was the long way

round the world

 

a hunch and not quite knowing

 

slept past the post

and the bus went on shamelessly

suburbs nameless

 

too late to get off

too late

 

last, slipped down an alley of trust

into dawn

no bra

but those roused swellings

brought me

 

it was a new day we’d make

 

think I was working through some phase

I can grow out

 

all this to light

 

who can ever own a childhood?

and whose?

 

this is the world of forever

where we all live now