Pam Brown

Side by side

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.