Oh it's time, it's time, time for decisions and indecisions and a little bit of poetry. I had promised to send this to a li'l lit'ry magazine, but they seem to have vanished off the face of the Earth, and that's sad, because they published a couple of my short stories. Such is fame. (Hah! Fame is being published in a magazine with a circulation of less than a hundred. But at least it was LIT'RY.)

Okay, a poem:

THE ASBESTOS HOUSE AT BROOKVALE.

A tree was an adventure,

Full of mulberries and sticky sap and birds,

Gnarled and twisted like a troll’s arms,

Or it was a jacaranda that could musk you away on a purple cloud

To whatever page turned in your memory that day.

 Dark, disinfectant, pines, bleeding amber,

And eucalypts that smelled of throat lollies,

With leaves to blow music out of,

Or pull gently apart, just to see the gum stretch.

Trees to tie swings to,

That dropped you down on your arse

When two of you tried to swing at once.

Backyard? No; it was the Sahara, or the Congo, or Atlantis,

With monsters and magicians in the scrubby potato patch,

Climbing the wall of the dunny, with the pea vines,

And a black dog under the Hills Hoist

Lying in the sun, chasing rabbits as big as elephants.

The rusty Austin

That sighed on its tattered tyres by the fence,

Would fill with machine guns and gangsters and detectives,

Until it was time for the Mickey Mouse Club.

The rail fence was a tightrope,

To be paraded with an old clothes-line pole,

To be leapt in the Olympics,

To defend against the hordes.

It was the Great Wall of China,

And the last frontier,

Where I found the two stuck dogs

That mum threw water on,

Before she told me to go inside.

Beyond that was the pushcart hill,

Where odd-wheeled boxes rattled

As they raced to the chequered flag,

By the ribbon factory

Where a million bright rags

Confettied the floor,

And mum cleaned them up every night.

Farther on, up the hill and away,

Was the stream where yabbies bit on old stockings

With last night’s chicken leg in them,

Instead of your sister’s.

Tadpoles worked their mystery and turned to frogs,

As, in time, did we.

In that patch of bush,

Bordered by the bitumen school

We kept the games of children,

Carving them into trees like our initials,

Like a valediction for something

Of which we were unaware.

We knew that the road at the end of our street

Led to other places

As real as the ribbon factory,

Led to a future as dark as the pines,

As tall and mysterious as the grown-ups

Who stumbled home from the pub at six  o’clock,

As bustling as the traffic that passed us by,

On the big road that went to Africa and China and Huy Brazil,

But we were young.

Nothing passes by forever,

Not cars nor time,

But the pink asbestos house still stands,

As stubborn as the hill it stands on,

As fragile as the blossom on the jacaranda,

As fixed in memory as breath.

(And the whisky is good old Johnny Red.)