Domestic Pack Shots
1. The Gays Next Door
shrieking like hyenas in their sexual mirth to the disco bang of Madonna making her mint in the sacrilegious from the sacred. For some, perhaps, a continuous custom to hang together whatever sense of family may be had once the wild oats have passed into the photograph album: circa: June, in some tumbled month, the garden hose spurting champagne and the neighbour, suspect as an affair, out of shot.
2. Working Hot
Joe Hammer makes his move on screen and the girl cries out for Mamma. A family of sperm packs up and moves house. The removal of limbs. The images dim to an impotent mauve and the stage act begins. Shes only working warm, consistent as a vibrator. She hopes one day to make big bucks; the conference room, that is, before she hits twenty. The one spotlight fixes on the portico between her thighs. The audience soughs in the dark. Strippers dont have no union, strippers dont. O Karen, your smile, cool as a cucumber.
3. Hooking For Jesus
Let us sing the rosellas who buckle under branches for the paper-bark blossom, and the far distant shadows on slate-roofs. Let us herald the Children of God, the Family of Love, progeny of the Jesus Freaks founded in Oakland, California back in the 70s. And this child, who believes Bethlehem resides in her fourteen year old womb. Hers is the pioneering spirit caught in a spectral watercolour. There she leans, under the guiding star of a single streetlight, while bluestone clouds move away over St Kilda into yellow, polite paddocks.
4. The Priest Across The Lane
in the presbytery is maxed out from the exo-bike, beads of sweat drip off his fingertips. He is purged of the last house-boy from the jungle parish in Papua New Guinea, ten years previous. He pounds at the peck-deck in his lounge room wishing the garden hand were an opera singer. Several repeats of the pole-twists and his bowels grunt like a sermon. A final glass of claret drops him to his knees ashen faced. His big bath steams plump now, full as the Jordan river. The one bedroom light burns on the lemon bush which holds its globes of fruit like a juggler stopped mid-trick.
Chelmsford Street, Newtown, Sydney