IX
Sun shines metallic off Footscray and out across Westgate bridge. Silver & green office blocks rise from a dun plain. Superman, bearing a stash of old money darts over the dockside and the hidden sea home to Melbourne. The thought of you adds weight to new memory sad as lamplight on rain sodden guttering. Sadder still is the Romantic lapsed to obscenity, the swine tides that clog the spirit. Again, I drive my centre to the eye of your hurricane. Remember how the senses wrangled, anger like a vicious exorcism of betrayals not worded? To run is to hide is to freely admit the hidden hurt. Volscian woman, we flung our fire at each other heavy as fists. The old man sits in the park feeding pigeons; like his memories, they are grey-blue and flutter about him. My memory of you from any perspective falls along the flat face of this earth. No lamp lit up our consciousness, only the blade figured the light, Psyche.
The funeral of the sea sings the Italian documentary. The worlds rotting oil-fleet blanks out the Mediterranean from the French coast to the Bay of Naples. Six hundred burning black candles turn crude the Arab night and Red Adair pots another well. Oil Magnates! Corporate Cowboys! Have you built your little ship of death, O have you? And there in the deep the Great Underwater Colonialist, Jacques Cousteau, laments the dark night of the sea, his eyes are the colour of basalt. Today we have part-time cloud & the hours work at it cruel as barbed wire drawn across the face of the moon. What then is this other? It is the shadow personality, evil comes from the power of evil. It is the third presence. O Romance of the World.