The Ox
By Corey Wakeling
Published 1 January 2021
So free and easy on the draw capital gain
during the years of the ox, when the five-year-old
painted the domestic and spilled your whiskey,
Kazan scapegoat,
you scholar of all three versions of progress.
That pillow book is your surgeon’s,
by it family history stretches, like gum,
for some boy-child precocity to pop, no doubt.
At Batman Park, a dance of surfactants about
the tobacco smoke and a small bonfire with molten lead,
like old folks at home in Grafton,
a lung test if you’ve tried anything like Yeats’ symbology
and turned out an architect. Nothing doing, no.
The best known name in Newark versus
unbeaten fuselage-like Hoddle Bridge, strangers
we hallucinate a hanging from the Victorian pommel
lanterns that colour syrup on our return
back, the Yarra near black.
Still, whose municipality for which poverty is numbed
by surgeon’s proletarian sacrifice, Batman Park
the gallows a burst in anyone’s careerism, old folk pending.
So sways the ox family.