Rehab for Everyone

hands so cold 
             fingers cold 
tucked under legs
   sitting in insect hiss 
           low white noise
   gas heater undertone 
        no other sound 
                              nothing 

almost asleep, 
       a car pulling up the hill

        a currawong 
  does that shrill thing 
                    into pink air

a huge open yawn 
           almost breaks my jaw

  the pen that makes the marks 
            alters the angles of the letters

a patch 
       of  yesterday’s chocolate 
              stuck to my corduroy sleeve -
a signal 
         imagined and interpreted

we look back 
            at the years in the tops
     waiting to be taken out of time

red brick 
       wall map of Australia 
      grass green carpet
mustard coloured plastic chairs 
          clumpy piling on the mittens

mitts on the keyboard 
         pushing thoughts and jingles
                                                out 
   to Dublin to Seattle, 
            Adelaide, Kane`ohe, 
                       Faversham, Glebe

sadly notating dim trivia 
        me-minus-you 
                    outside community

literary festivals 
           can’t help anyone 
       like a rehab book sale

making mistakes, 
             so different 
      from being morally wrong

in an unsettling world 
              it‘s a rabbit life,
built the walls from Castrol cases 

black tyre ribbons
                  strewn 
       like a giant’s licorice 
under the striated cutting
             siding on the highway, 
say goodbye 
           to the Woodford bends

sometimes the clunky 
             can incandesce 
      but I want to know
how to vitalize gawkiness, 

      sometimes 
I’m in my no-mind     sometimes 
          in a technological mindlessness 
  sometimes nowhere near limber, 
                          although that’s unusual

some people 
          just float along all the time 
     accumulating the placid

       sometimes 
 when you think you’re going down 
                   you’re not,
you’re going straight ahead 
                         to a utopia of modernity.