A social site for poets in Sydney.
These heights held fast by the heathen and church folk, all stitched into it
Like askew white fenceposts laced with strings of weed and flower
These heights held also by their fused children:
Dissenters and Freak Cultists, hairy and clear-eyed, with the rain
Dripping like glass sap from ochre jumpers and red beards
Fog keeping them all up here, floating in their beanies
In a mist that wraps fat tomes with a hundred words to describe it
The wet atom shades of a Confucian Limbo Land
Cold as brass and drunk on condensation
They hold the heights, or the heights hold them
And fried chicken shop steam against the glass is a slide of water
In a colony of chimneys built into the living vapour
Punched against the earth like rigs, venting earth smoke in slow escape …
Beef and black bean sauce for tang and then it’s
Back out into the dragon’s heaped breath
Turning streetlights into drowned brave submarines
That sink away with Morse code epilogues
We move like fog fishermen along these heights
As gargantuan dreamtime serpents glide in the shoals around us
Through prehistory that sends some tilting into white loud madness
As from the rooming house, the Slavic former prisoner of war
In all her insane license comes calling onto the main street
Like a dire bird housed in body fat and half-dead dialects
Up here, smashed bottles seem to dissolve
In wet crumbs along brick corners and silty trails
The marauders lost to drown in the depths of fog
And the green-black gradients that fall through the town
As spirits with faces of husks and wooden horns
Rattle their knuckles in worlds of wet gumleaf, in this petrified sea
Where clouds pass through fossils coiled like bone fuses
The orange jellied heater of the station waiting room draws us -
A bright hot collection plate in a vagabonds’ church
In this rookery where each glass of hot chocolate is
A tall and heavy
Shining signal bell
Will Swan
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