Unmanned Part 4

You recalled the hot seaport, your departure planned on the Ruiz Cano that dangerous barge which took you out over the Gulf of Mexico

away from the anger hidden in laughter, from the pistilleros lounging by the Presidencia.

You the too curious gringo left behind you the coasting steamers & pink squared plazas to forget the taste of warm beer in dreary cantinas.

You headed for the high ground of Tabasco & the country of ruined churches.

Back at the beginning

of those lawless roads lie the dingy houses smearing out onto silver sandhills.

Wardrobe Drinkers

is what they are in Austinmer.

Yuppies from the North Sh.o.r.e, $300,000 homes on the beach front, sending the RSL broke & the greenies blocking development for a few birds up an estuary. Could be worse, given the j.a.ps on the Gold Coast going off like mobile phones.

The miners & cottages are long gone & so is full employment. In 1941 as a telegraph delivery boy I made 13 s.h.i.+llings 10 a week. Across the Harbour Bridge to the North Sh.o.r.e on a regulation red bike. Sunday was the day for casualty messages, the dead & wounded delivered all over Sydney except Vine street, Darlington, where Darcy the Crim lived & the most dangerous place in town.

I came to Austinmer 30 years ago before the Wardrobe Drinkers in the days of the miners & cottages.

Take those grain & coal carriers upwards of 250,000 tonnes with a 12 man crew, anch.o.r.ed stern to wind, off Hill 60 out of Port Kembla navigated by satellite direct to j.a.pan.

You want the best view? Sublime Pt.

Lookout, right down the coast, the Pacific ironed flat far as the eye can see, a sky expanded metal-red nightly.

Girl. Gold. Boat

out of Port Moresby. The obese Oxford villain tumbles overboard speared by the fuzzy-wuzzies. Our hero, Captain Singleton, finally

puts his s.h.i.+rt back on and tilts his cap to the sunset. He places one arm around his sweetheart and the other at the helm. The sea falls into

suburbs of light, a topiary of Islands could be mist. He is American and at home in the world as he moves forward on the celluloid tides.

He came out of sickness country (sic) he came out of the Holy Land.

Domestic Pack Shots

1. The Gays Next Door

shrieking like hyenas in their s.e.xual mirth to the dis...o...b..ng of Madonna making her mint in the sacrilegious from the sacred. For some, perhaps, a continuous custom to hang together whatever sense of family may be had once the wild oats have pa.s.sed into the photograph alb.u.m: circa: June, in some tumbled month, the garden hose spurting champagne and the neighbour, suspect as an affair, out of shot.

2. Working Hot

Joe Hammer makes his move on screen and the girl cries out for Mamma.

A family of sperm packs up and moves house. The removal of limbs.

The images dim to an impotent mauve and the stage act begins. Shes only working warm, consistent as a vibrator. She hopes one day to make big bucks; the conference room, that is, before she hits twenty.

The one spotlight fixes on the portico between her thighs.

The audience soughs in the dark. Strippers dont have no union, strippers dont.

O Karen, your smile, cool as a cuc.u.mber.

3. Hooking For Jesus

Let us sing the rosellas who buckle under branches for the paper-bark blossom, and the far distant shadows on slate-roofs. Let us herald the Children of G.o.d, the Family of Love, progeny of the Jesus Freaks founded in Oakland, California back in the 70s.

And this child, who believes Bethlehem resides in her fourteen year old womb. Hers is the pioneering spirit caught in a spectral watercolour.

There she leans, under the guiding star of a single streetlight, while bluestone clouds move away over St Kilda into yellow, polite paddocks.

4. The Priest Across The Lane

in the presbytery is maxed out from the exo-bike, beads of sweat drip off his fingertips. He is purged of the last house-boy from the jungle parish in Papua New Guinea, ten years previous. He pounds at the peck-deck in his lounge room wis.h.i.+ng the garden hand were an opera singer. Several repeats of the pole-twists and his bowels grunt like a sermon. A final gla.s.s of claret drops him to his knees ashen faced. His big bath steams plump now, full as the Jordan river. The one bedroom light burns on the lemon bush which holds its globes of fruit like a juggler stopped mid-trick.

Chelmsford Street, Newtown, Sydney

5. Corruption Is Glorified Mates.h.i.+p

Its Bastille Day in Sydney.

The weird man in the moon falls to the night basket. Stars roll out another lottery and unemployment raises dust over the land. Tout est perdu fors lhonneur. Among thieves.

Running with images I whirl out the rainbow. Spring flutters as the National flag to salute the pilot whales herding one more disastrous landing.

Waves roll head-to-head round the plate of The Great South Land.

Which way to Wynyard, calls the currawong. Helicopters line up like magi over Bankstown. When you look up, that old full moon makes you feel like a cowpoke, dont it?

6. Inner City Camping Blues

under a dusty-hulled moon out of an empty Hollywood lot placed there in the out-take of twilight. The bus families have arrived in convoy.

Stolidly parked nearby in protest at two suburban parks up for auction in a depressed market. A couple of pitched tents and an Information Stand of press clippings. Kids play in a refuse pit between tossed aside railway sleepers. Slung about the Council Chambers fairy lights all a twinkle since the last bi-election a year back; not much in this, not even a picnic.

Tarts & Takeaways

is what hes into, he said & thats fine by me (William street in winter and p.i.s.sing down is the pits) standing around in doorways waiting for some totally wasted guy excuse me!

its a trick is what it is to slap his dumb meat between my thighs.

Hey, Im Jasmine though I dont feel like one. Mostly bored.

On each hip Ive got this tattoo, says Allan kind of smudgy & out of focus because its real old. The main man. A jerk off really in someone elses life. A lifer. Summers s.h.i.+t, more noise and especially groups.

For hours or however long it takes & I do Spanish & French, but Im better at French. Sometimes not much happens. Idle as a lizard pointing brickwork on hot buildings, someone said.

I read in this magazine once, (I meet all sorts) and this guy says, nor can I say I love you but a gentle calligraphy informs your brow. What a whacker! I know s.h.i.+t from clay, he just reckoned he could get away with saying nothing. d.i.c.khead!

Guys are like that with money like its some f.u.c.king secret.