darkroom

I had to grow up someday ... so I moved to Boundary Street, West End, in the last residence on the old bitumen line. I’m in a forgotten hotel that’s croaking grey, like a decaying plantation in Indochina. Now I live on the brown river, this is my outpost on the dark snake. And at 31 I may not speak the rhetoric of ghosts, but here, I can understand the tongues of mangroves, or what mangroves there are left ... not enough of them to cleanse the brown waters of the darkroom in my head, developing countless images of everything I see. Rain falls on my first night here, so I have wine and a cigar on the balcony in praise of my dark water muse and toast the matrix of her ephemeral dot paintings.

Small brown whirpools spin,
away from the dock,
reminds me of the Mundagurri
that creature that haunted every waterhole
in our childhood;
when our parents weren’t watching us