Cacophony on Blue

Hundreds of white wings and open beaks, a sky of shrieks, like a gaggle of middle-age women spilling out of a restaurant with a bottle of wine in their bellies: a cockatoo panorama - a sky of glittering white, circling, and all landing on one small apartment building - concrete turned white-washed, not just by feathers, but no doubt, a flock of birdshit like pale, festive baubles hanging off a grey, bald Christmas pine.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Larceny

Burned rubber fills my nostrils, and the dark night fills my eyes.
Stars. There are stars up there.
Same as in Melbourne, but crisper, more dominant in the night sky.
I'm walking, and I don't know if it's safe, even though it's not that late.
I like being out of the streetlights on a rare evening stroll - away from eyes and intentions.
Just the sound of crickets rubbing their crickety legs together in their eternal plea for sex.
They're brown and small, and at first I thought they were cockroaches.
Recognising their legs and heads, I relaxed, and even felt affection for the blighters scuttling about the lit verandah.
They were pillaging the Salvos donations.
Scumbags.
I spotted two black PVC boots - my size.
Hrmm.
"I'm glad you aren't grabbing the whipper-snipper, Miss."
It was the guy in the white cap with the backpack.
I had sensed he was dodgy when he'd walked past before, but he'd disappeared and I thought my radar was off.
But I lived in Wodonga a long time.
And here he was again, scraping the edge of some pre-smoked cigarette on a bin lip.
"You're 'right," he said, seeing he'd startled me.
"Was just looking at the whipper-snipper."
Short of his words, he reminded me of an old Yorkship pauper, meaning yeh no harrm, Miss, just eyein' my ol' eye on that whipper-snipper there...
I hadn't even spotted the garden implement - just lots of drool-encrusted kids stuff and 1990s CD racks. A selection too sad to keep, and too sad to steal.
I bid him a good evening, because we were, after all, both thieves in the night.

Have You Seen My Sausage?

I was unsuccessful in my search for my son.
I typed in "sausage dog". I typed in "mini sausage dog". I typed in "miniature dachshund". And still none of the pictures sprayed before me portrayed my son - my dream doggy.
I miss him - my four-legged little frankfurter. My cuddly, cute, borderline-stolen dog.
Where are you? I need a picture to put as the wallpaper on my phone.
The best moments of my life were holding you... the worst was waking to see you were a pillow.
I know you're somewhere out there in Google image search... my son... my furry little sausage son.

If you see the dog from my dream, please call this number:

Christmas Cont'd

The miniature plastic Christmas tree droops in the hall. 

Tinsel and baubles glint distant daylight. Dust dims its foliage.
A 40-year-old Santa clings for his life to the very peak, as if a lumberjack has just called TIMBERRRR!

If I leave it there long enough, maybe it'll merge into the tub it sits on, the boots around it - the pile of miscellaneous CBF. 

Only one person can make me put it back in its drycleaning bag, back in its box, and try to make space in the spaceless closet for it again. 
A hero. A superhuman demi-god.

Marie Kondo.

 

Opium Papa

In the chair next to me with a vitamin C drip in his arm sat John from Macedonia. 78, looking good for his age, but worn out by cancer and surgeries.

He was telling me about growing up in a small town in the mountains, about life after the war, about moving to Australia.
He said they grew a lot of cannabis in Macedonia, and used the female plants for medicine, ropes, more.
There were also opium poppies everywhere, and he told me how to tap them. He said they used them for medicine.
When he was a little kid he'd play with a big bud of opium, throwing it against walls, and his grandfather would wallop him.

His wife died of cancer a few years ago and it wrecked him. She was only 68. He really loved her. Still holding hands in public kinda love. He'd internalised all the pain, keeping it from family, not wanting them to see him weak, sad or sick - and I chastised him for that. Told him I talk to so many men in their 30s and up who are ruined by stuffing all their feelings inside in a toxic little ball.

And all that internalising equalled belatedly finding out his immune system was collapsing, liver failing, and pancreatic cancer blooming.
He doesn't want chemo. He watched it eat away the last of his love's life. Hence vitamin C infusions. Rebuilding the immune system. Getting quality of life back - much more important to him now than quantity.

He said when he moved to Australia in 1954, he had heard that black people eat white people's babies.
He's a smart guy, so he didn't take it at face value, but was still wary.
His first occasion of seeing an Aborigine was one being thrown out of a pub by 4 white men.
"I thought - oh, the black people attack the whites - and here I see, it's the other way around!"

50% Off Christmas Cheer

Landfill county - and if you collect enough bags, you become queen.

Melbourne Central Boxing Day sale - 30th December.

Racks clustered with treacle clothes to be retired to forever bins or op-shops by next Christmas.

Idle minds in slow-moving bodies.

That looks nice.

That doesn't look nice but I'll buy it anyway - it is half-off, after all.

What is a 50% discount on something vastly overpriced?

Just... overpriced?

"Excuse me, miss, do you think I could have some change?" a native face drawls.

"Sorry man, I don't have money."

He slurs his pupils towards the two plump grocery bags beside me.

"Well, do you think I can borrow a lighter?"

I'm jotting in a notebook while waiting for a tram - a smoker would be getting in final puffs.

"Don't smoke."

He drifts on, ghost eyes already elsewhere.

Nowhere.

Across the road a man sleeps in diagonal - blue and grey sleeping bag cocoon with no beautiful butterfly coming.

Other men wear grizzled grins on their muzzles as they hold their dogs - 80c of coins starving the inside of a stained hat. One with a starry-inked face ponders his next marketing attempt - permanent marker poised over cardboard in his lap.

Still, the shoppers and tourists and well-to-do students, walk slow, clotting every street - often displeased that one person would need to slip by their 5-berth meander. How very dare I?

I walk fast. No patience for noise, litter, begging and lacklustre hedonism. But I stop to watch the dancing, the shouting, the cry for help from the dark bodies in bright clothes on the State Library's steps. Chants echo the sound-off on a megaphone. Banners scream their plea: No more rape as a weapon of war. No more. No more. Freedom now. Freedom now.

I want to sob. Instead I smile. People should know about this stuff. I know so little, but enough to be hurt by it. And I'm happy to see as many tall, determined men as round women in headscarves. They've fled dictatorships. Unspeakable horrors. And now someone in tepid Gucci accoutrement pauses to video the scene. How quaint!

I'm glad my tram comes, or I may go up and ask one of the protestors about their fight.

And if I do, I'll cry. My safe street filters will come off and empathy will render me socially unacceptable.

Much more de jour to pop your boutique bags down and record without expression.

And still, it's just another day in a city.

No-one's getting saved - they're getting spending.

Little Friends

The puppy toddled on the strip of grass - body light and feet small. A piece of KFC with shiny dark eyes - it ran at me, on its fabric leash.
It sniffed and licked my hand gently but with enthusiasm, and I greeted it before acknowledging its human.

And for 30 seconds, I felt all the cracks in my soul fill, and I was whole - vetted by a cavadoodle fried chicken angel.