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Kinives, & Newtown - an unpunctured-prosepoem...

I awoke at 8 and was edgy, but then she seduced me (not that I put up a fight) and I fell back to sleep like the cliché I am, then it was 11am, I’d been snoring apparently, so I jumped out of  bed, put on my clothes from the night before, cut a slice of hard cheese on the counter, then put a pear in my pocket, and bid farewell, and I was off, into a storm-cloudy King St on a Saturday, where the streets were full of suburbanites on holiday, mixing with inner western freaks, and yuppie bankers who had bought in, and a women said she didn’t know the way, but if they were in Paddington she would (though I don’t know where they were going) and then I caught the bus outside the gay chemist by the Martin Luther King mural and at the next stop, bus packed for a Saturday, a local bag lady got on, and I was glad, because it felt like old Newtown, she had a dirty ocelot-print blanket around her and hair like a share house bathmat and she smelt like a week on the street and it was a gorgeous aroma within it’s context and she asked the driver pleasantly for a ticket to Broadway, and handed over $10 and because it was the weekend he didn’t tell her she needed a prepaid Oyster or Metro-Ten or some other inconvenient crap designed to make public transport less attractive and out of the reach of the poor, but I’ll get off my soapbox, because behind her, in delicate juxtaposition, was a family of three, and the father asked awkwardly if the bus went into the city, and he said, Yes, and they were a little freaked-out having stood behind ocelot print lady, but they got on, again with cash, and danced past her, she was sitting behind me, I could tell, and then I got off at the pool and did a quick 25 min swim, to sweat out the vino and relax the muscles for drum practice at home that arvo, and cool the nerves so as to freak-out just ever-so-slightly less about ‘that’ play, and about the conditions of my casual day gigs (one of whichs [is that a word?] conditions had candidly soured that week, boohoo, yeah) and it was the worst time to be at the pool because one side was taken up by seniors aquaerobics, and another by kiddie swim lessons, and ran into a friend, Glen, and other breeders whose morning (well, it was midday now) was ruined by sitting next to a pool watching their sprogs paddle, but there were three lanes in the middle, and I got in one, and as I swam I thought about how juicy that pear was that I had eaten from my pocket on the way, and would it be late enough to jump straight to lunch, bypassing breakfast - a nice, hot curry perhaps - and I was halfway through my 25 min swim and then before I knew I was under the shower and then the change rooms where nobody looks at one another, awkwardly (this seems an awkward planet for many people) and back out under the darkening sky on the bridge towards Abercrombie Street it was starting to rain, and I ran into old compoetriate, Tug, and my godson, Rock, and they were retreating from tennis against a wall, what I would have called two-touch as a kid, but done with a soccer ball, and they seemed not to know what I was talking about, but they offered a cup of tea as they climbed towards their garage door but I was in a rush to get home, for lunch/breakfast, and coffee/tea (as I’d not had that yet either/either) so I strolled through Redfern, which was looking more and more like Newtown every day, but that’s OK (as long as my rent stays stable) and noticed that the Newtown Vodafone shop had moved there, and seeing as my phone had been playing up and I was out of contract, I dropped in, but there was no shop assistant, and I waited another five minutes, spending the time trying to tell the difference between the seemingly identical phones (in fact they all looked the same as mine, which was shit, so why would these be any different?) and after briefly considering ripping off all the display phones (although they were probably just shells, and empty) I left, and things where uneventful (even more so) until I was walking through Australian Technology Park (what a ridiculous name for an old train works) and there was an enormously portly (OK, fat) man waddling towards me and I said, Hello, as we passed (rather uncharacteristically, perhaps I was still drunk? unlikely considering the swim, but I digress...)  and the portly man nodded and said, much to my surprise, Are you going to look at knives? And I stopped, and said, Excuse me? He said, Are you going to look at knives? I said, No I live around here, I’m going home, Oh, he said, OK, because if you were I was going to offer you my ticket, and I realised there must be a knife show in the old carriage sheds, a trade show sort of thing, but for knife makers (knifesmiths?) so I smiled and said, That sounds kind of odd out of context, and he just looked at me awry (though not awkwardly) and turned and waddled off towards Redfern Station, and that’s when I saw the sign alerting me that that there was indeed a knife show and I thought, why not, so I went into the old metal-works bit at the beginning of the Eveleigh-side of the old train carriage works (where my grandfather on the Irish side had once worked, and which I live next to) and I watched a blue-overalled blacksmith (knifesmith?) lady stick a metal pole into a gas-fired furnace and then pull it out and bang it down with some kind of foot pedalled industrial hammer straight out of a 1950s Warner Bros cartoon where the anthropomorphised hero or heroine would be getting crushed, and then another dude, older, perhaps her dad (because we like to think of quaint trades-people as family, and ignore the horrible TAFE course they probably met at) and he was banging some metal bit into a fire-place poker type thing and I thought, Oh, that’s how they make knives and shit. Makes sense. 

 

PS: it appears I left my swimmers at the pool...

PPS: next day, picked up swimmers from Sydney Uni pool where they'd been put in a box in the basement with a tag that said, "Vinito - will pick up Sunday"

Molly #35: unpunctured prosepoem about a shit park in St Peters...

I woke her at one in the afternoon, and she still couldn’t talk, but I’d brought her lemonade and soup, and then we finished her articles and while the sun was still up I dragged her into the light (what there was of it) and we examined the Indian and Fijian markets of the Paris end of King St, (true), then we wandered through St. Peters where we found a secret café and yoga and salsa studios before settling in an ugly suburban park, where the oval was closed and flooded and a father and daughter played basketball on the saddest court you’ve ever seen and dusk came on and people walked home from shit jobs and I climbed over a dumped TV and sat on a filthy water tank with a rainbow behind me and recited a poem about how shit this park was (accompanied on a Hohner harmonica) as the trains rolled by and the planes flew over and the dogs shat steamy on the field and she laughed a sexy pneumonic laughter, and then it started to rain so we hid in the greasy 80s canteen and then we strolled up the back streets and looked at houses we wished we could afford to rent and bought some Fijian accoutrements and then we got home and did more work on the articles and opened the wine from the night before and everything was perfect. She took her antibiotics and we watched a documentary about dwarves. Then I walked home. Who needs a vacation?