bedlam
louise carter
Glebe. Night. Beer. Bedlam.
The bar that sells records is open and lively.
Lust for garlic slaked, we enter,
exchange banter with a sex-wounded waitress
and get incorrect change from a fifty for a couple
of bourbons on ice. Up steep wooden stairs
into a small room bleeding music. A waistcoated
guitarist with long silver hair plays Hendrix
B-sides. It works, it hurts, it dumps us
on a rock face; a fire hose, a geyser. Emerald
profusions of light, an upsurge of infatuated
violence. Cyclonic, we slide like stormwater
back to the street which takes us by way of
another pub to his squalid bedsit:
a shrine to the decomposition of hope.
Clothes strewn; a grenade in a charity bin.
Dark leaves frame a balcony where I puke
through the bars in a moment like beauty as he watches,
sips his drink. We sleep on a bed
of loose change, chinking as we undulate.
A rain-swell moistens the dawn. Consciousness
paused. Of all the world’s places, I am here.
Dirty. Baffled. Quixotic. At sea.
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