white stucco dreaming

sprinkled in the happy dark of my mind

is early childhood and black humour

white stucco dreaming

and a black labrador

an orange and black panel-van

called the ‘black banana’

with twenty blackfellas hanging out the back

blasting through the white stucco umbilical

of a working class tribe

front yards studded with old black tyres

that became mutant swans overnight

attacked with a cane knife and a bad white paint job

white stucco dreaming

and snakes that morphed into nylon hoses at the terror

of Mum’s scorn

snakes whose cool venom we sprayed onto the white stucco,

temporarily blushing it pink

amid an atmosphere of Saturday morning grass cuttings

and flirtatious melodies of ice-cream trucks

that echoed through little black minds

and sent the labrador insane

chocolate hand prints like dreamtime fraud

laid across white stucco

and mud cakes on the camp stove

that just made Dad see black

no tree safe from treehouse sprawl

and the police cars that crawled up and down the back streets,

peering into our white stucco cocoon

wishing they were with us