The Satisfaction of Speech

Stretched out across the selfish wool table, 

I fix on a mood in the high key of you,

twiddle my hi-viz wedding ring

and laugh at the way rhyme and metre

protect us from happiness. Angels’ tears

fill the rivers of hell in a song I wrote about you

but nobody’s crying in Atlantis now that we’ve

franchised the reckless antinomies of belated

centurian diatribes. Flickering intimate ceremonies

across elmscape cinemas – I wonder how I got so far

away. Landscaped by patent-pending geography,

maxed out in the merchant’s tent of never giving up

on always disappearing. Something in the way you

move, quells the stave that answers to what was barely

required. The concentration of your Northern Rivers

Cattle Rustle Drawl strings silence across the estuary

wide on sonic sighs and moans. Hitching a ride on your

electrical substation, the way you say my father’s name,

a high tension wire whipping through the gizzard

of I feel too much the surfeit. Are you a real shearer

or just pretending? Your Yackandandah stare fleeces me

witless, that wolf you’re wearing goes with everything.