Selected poems
Happy hourAmber brethren unified over glazed tables,cracked leather chairs groaning under the burden of another weary apprentice. Here's to the blackened crust on a Parma specialand to being pricked by an unofficial entry tithe.I lack an opinion on the politics of this golden age that amounts to more than a quotation. Yes, these are free hearts, free minds — at least for the time being. Or at least to the loving regardof a reasonable bystander.Douse me in the balm of mellifluous chatter.Let me move amorously downthrough this molten journeyuntil I am left suckling at the dregs in my comfortably reduced environ,tending towards somethingthat approacheswhat some might callcontentedness.
Chaucer CrescentFrench Provincial style, they call it.I see a concrete bunker.That slight scorn is not a hopeless hankering for the Wattled thirties.I always preferred writing to literature,building to architecture,a house to inhabited sculpture.Did you buy anything at the NGV?I don't want to go backwards.I just want the straight hedgesand the white kitty litter pebbles spread over cookie cutter cubesto be ripped from the ground.Alternatively, I would still be content if revolting weeds slowly choked their borders or if concrete rotcrept insidiously inwards as it did in Brasilia. The worst thing is thatthis village was not built on scrappy highland earth asmisguided metaphor for a reborn utopian polis. They tore down their terrace,ripped out their myrtle, banished their shadereplaced the brick pathto their snail filled letterbox.In their place?Bare temples bloating outwards,silver sleds,grey garages,plunge pools lit by blue bulbs.
Dougal Hurley is a postgraduate law student at Melbourne University..