more rain

Theres a storm coming in. The stables are ringed with layers of grey clouds and I'm sitting under the awning, smoking the last of the dry tobacco I've scrouged from the sand. This cough is receding and I'm back smoking ciggerettes but still can't bring myself to buy them. I keep telling myself I'm going to quit. That I'm going to get out by thirty five and cheat emphysema and cancer cells. The half breed dingo is prancing around me, searching the ground for scraps of salami. I do a mad dash across the paddocks, avoiding clusters of buffle grass to retrieve my clothes from the line before the deluge sets in.

I'm willing the rain to come down, the past few days have been so sweltering I've retreated to eastside and the comfort of friends with houses and airconditioning and blow up pools. But today I'm back out here on basso island, listening to the low growl of the sky blend with the country rock blaring from the portable jukeboxes of the mob in the creek.

pinks and greys

Drunk on skylines, thristy for country. Windows down, hair blowing along the highway, my fingers surf the horizon. Crusing across rippled red and green. Nails painted pastel pinks and greens. Brushing against the swollen ranges, plunging through the depth of field.

Today we bacame surface tension, strectched delicatley, baiting ripples. Reaching from rock face to rock face and calling the rain. In this time we are still.

I am4wd dreaming. I am river crossing delirium. I am soft hues and arid wetlands. I am back where I began.

grog frenzy

The door to the bottle shop was crowded by 1:30pm. You could feel the tension in the plaza; people sitting at tables, sipping on coke, rocking overloaded trolleys, fidgeting.

I'm one of the door way skulkers. I've got a whole fish in my bag. Two young bogans come to join their mother whose perched near the doorways. 'first time I've seen whitefellas lining up 'ere' she'd remarked as she pulled up. I've seen her round town before-last time she had laryngitis, her voice shrill and rasping about 'that cunt who makes her sick'. I wonder if that cunt is the man who stands in the doorway with her now. He looks like the father of her children, they share the same stumpy neck.

Theres a young couple standing next to her. He looks like a bogan as well, poking her in the belly, asking if she got the pumpkin and the sweet potaoe and peas. She's tierd, eyes rolling as he instructs her to get two bottles of red and a white and a champas will he gets a slab from the back.

It's 2:01. The staff are still methodically unstacking boxes and counting out the till. The young bogan kicks the roller door, eyes flashing as he turns round to smile at the family. His father nods in approval. He kicks it again. The crowd begin to get agitated. The manger opens the roller door. We stream in all grog frenzied. End up bottle necked at the register. I slink away quickely before the riots begin.

exodus

Today we are basting with rasping throats, the landscape is speckeled with heat waves and phlegm. My throat has become an antique landcruiser rattling it's way along dirt roads.
The heat always makes me so damn carniverous. I am camel sausages and slabs of beer. I am practicing reconcilliation on long distance phone calls, reciting landmarks in my career.

Everyone is packing up and driving east, somewhere away from the heat and the flies and the moths and the stones that trap sunshine to emit onto houses at night. Four wheel drives seek out highways to places, mouths frothing like cuppacinnos, chasing those city lights reflected in broken white lines.

And me? For now I am left on the island with my alcoholism and bleeding throat. Talking to the half breed dingo about heat waves and swapping hustling techniques. I am left to negotiate nocturnal bike rides past camp dogs, left to pace the sand and climb the hills. To wait on the outcomes of credit card applications and plan my next move.

grave

Killing myself amidst corpses of cicadas, chainsmoking ciggerettes. Tying up loose ends, splaying the bows across reporting templates, bullseye targets.

The freshness of neon and airconditioner hum, the phlegm in my throat and the rotations of days. The endless challenge to be honest amidst cross eyeds and rising river beds and bitumen oasises.

The stampede of christmas, the hum of the season stretched out across keyboards and grass plains. The illusion of speed, of growth and adulthood. The secrets I choose not to keep.

or something else entirely

the only thing I'm scared of more than thinking too little is feeling too much. all my genuflections are in front of the mirror when I'm drunk. I've abandoned god but I still pray when I'm scared. i eat salami and drink beer and call myself wholesome. I spend late nights tapping on artificial keys and kid myself that I'm connected to the earth because I live in the desert. That I'm here now despite my dreams of chasin the big city on roller skates.

I spend my days climbing hills and my nights locked in moth proof rooms, but fuck it. I wouldn't swap this madenss for any other....

below the clouds, above the dust

Dropping below the clouds we flew parallel to the rain, lowly and slowly like plane was seeking carrion amidst the red and green undulations. Country is swelling to meet us, and I am too, reaching through the windows, below the wings, gliding across the sand and spinifex, cliched.

I am every pop song about love and loss in this country. It fills my chest until I can't speak. Stripped back like ancient sea beds, rising to meet the incoming storm front.

escaping the rooftops and the endless bitumen parades of manscapes finding myself back in this place. drinking cider and dancing in the dirt, dodging the centipedes, weaving through blades of grass.

I'm home, thank fuck, I'm home.