You are ready for the end of this world because
you are paid, and the apartment is good.
If the earthquake separates the head from
the plexus, finish your lamb casserole,
you are meat and you are juice,
my yoghurt tarantellas
in an array of elaborate maquettes
of the city and its outer suburbs,
all the way to the hills.
Not fiercely but informatively
disembodied in capacity to
see the end miniature.
It is hotter than it was,
why clairvoyance
buoys in my efforts to get to you,
buoys in its treachery of you, because all
places not there are awful. That is what I
have learnt in this life, not the others,
that when you are not there
it is awful, and when you are there
it is good. How is the family money,
can you buy a new nominal pedestal
by which to be seen again by the people
surrounding? No, I don’t know the names
of the local prelates who confirm
the honorary chair for the rocket ship
out, just the drug dealers for a delicious peace
time which will brace the horde.
It’s only your stupid fantasy that the dunes
are sex, that the sand trap is Psyche.
No, the trap is the thugs hired
to break up the local groundswell union,
its cities and cooperative housing,
marinated in shadow odours of Dad.
____________________
Corey Wakeling lives in Melbourne. He is the author of chapbook Gargantuan Terrier, Buggy or Dinghy (Vagabond Press, 2012) and Goad Omen(Giramondo, 2013). With Jeremy Balius, Corey co-edited Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land (Black Rider Press, 2013). He is reviews editor of poetry journal Rabbit, and interviews editor of Cordite.