There’s nothing much more crazy
than this fever in the air
radiation like commas around every day.
Hot hot heat. You lean against a building.
You burn. We walk home. We burn.
The alarm sings unremitting song.
Electricity goes crazy grid by grid.
Who’s fooling who when fools arrive
with gauges already set in ice?
Dazzled stuff, planned arrivals
big angry animals and trees
advancing. I sing idiotically
along with lorikeets and honeyeaters.
They know their songs like I don’t
know my own thinking.
I remember land with its water.
Quays and bays, ferries into harbours
archipelagoes, tiny islands containing life
being life, being just as important.
I want to charge myself up
with that thinking
so I can see better, enough.
It’s all there. Too much sun
hot plaster, streets sighing
too readily, branches expiring
into roads, a brilliance you’d applaud
if it wasn’t killing you. Feverish, late
we can’t let this go.
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