Blue-tongues are rampant in the heat today.
They have walled off their citadel of iron sheets,
granite, and cut grass. Their armoured bodies
appear and retreat. They blink and extrude
their tongues as warning, drinking eviscerated
air. I am at home in the heat, the dryness
stinging, scuttling mucous membranes.
I drown in the extraction of moisture. I walk
down to the barrier between here and there:
the grazing space that links the granite citadel
to here: to rise up to outcrops, white-gum towers,
marri with singed crowns, intense frequencies
shaking the flesh out, disrupting thought.
The blue-tongues, fallen angels, interrupt
my way. They hold little fear for me
but I respect them: who they are,
what they’ve been, who they’ll become.
Surrounded by good economics, the leisured,
even the ‘keep-to-themselves’, they retreat:
under siege. They are still glorious, stoical.
Everything we impose on them. To break
rank and spread out: struck by cars,
torn open by dogs, murdered by the fearful,
the vengeful, the habitual: those of broad
churches. When the message comes
they will swing side to side at slow but steady
pace: making use of the terrain,
knowing city walls better than those
who have built on the fallen, swept the bones
away so souls will have nothing left
to latch onto.