I was at Central Station in Sydney the other day. All bright and shiny and new in the sunny winter weather. Despite the gleam I could still feel the old ghosts and many moments I had spent there in the last decade, all my departures and arrivals in more turbulent times… places I lived and things I went through as I moved around, somehow hanging on to love and coming out on top again along the way, before the wheels went round and round again. Life gets so big in its experiences and feelings you can just about burst. Not sure this poem is coherent; maybe it’s more like a bunch of points glanced from a train window: memory stations and emotional stops racing past. Anyway, it’s a journey in back-and-forth form…
Where did I live?
Beautiful things, I lived with you
by the sea, a tin drum
cut in half to hold fire,
the white steel of the bunk beds
in a one-room shack
where we slept together
inside the arts of breathing
and dreaming.
Later, when I searched,
I found myself in the city
writing poems and lyrics
in lead pencil on the stone
of my cracking kitchen wall,
wise words about death and red clay,
a season of illness and leaves,
Japanese haikus, Neil Young songs.
It was here in a downstairs flat,
all packed in, falling over shoes,
that I cooked you pasta when you came,
four days of fatherhood,
then ten days of goodbye,
crying and getting drunk
on red wine and my eternal pain
every time you went away;
here that we lived and lived
in days broken and perfect.
My children, we survived
the split truth of all of our hearts,
the wild sheets of winter rain
bouncing off the silvered, saturated streets,
the full moons by the Tasman Sea,
the heatwaves in Summer Hill,
the southern glow of the railway lines,
the heavy sand we trod barefoot,
the changing traffic lights of my return
waiting for each of you on Parramatta Road
to come and watch TV
or do your homework at the kitchen table
by that wall where I scrawled Basho notes
and the language of rock n roll foxes crossed with poets and singers,
men whose work I tried push into my chest, men who wore their damage
in strange colours and animal-spirit skin and star-bleed,
men as ordinary as me.
Where did I live?
Between poverty
and the unemployment lines
at Corimmal Centrelink,
in the language of the terrorised
and a box that needed to be ticked,
between a thousand poems I wrote
and threw out into the air for nothing,
my flares of success so bright
I got to travel with rock n roll gods
who treated me as their equal
and their travelling confidante
an unexpected friend.
I seen, too, on my lower rails
those youthful broken souls
in their lost forever and smoky hair :
11pm at Central Station in the cold,
looking for warm places at the hamburger joint
or on the Quiet Carriages
wearing hoodies like gargoyles
webbed in their Target shrouds.
I listened, too, to your hearts in your sleep
felt them like those magic stones we found
with milky lines in their black grain
on the shoreline at McCauleys
collecting their mystic residues
studying the pictures in their grains
telling us things about the old people
who’d lived long ago in the long grass
who’d hunted and hunted
till they entered our world again
through the pathways we had opened
as they changed form inside our dreams.
Yeah, those were the days:
every time I get to Central now
all modern and clean
I think of the late and raw departures
my lover joining me for coffee
by a Russian stall, our bones
meeting the takeaway midnight call
our eyes on a digital clock
heads dedicated to the fluorescent thrill.
Half my week in this new freedom,
half my week chained in the loss of you.
Indivisible, all of that stuff,
ghost moves on numbered platforms
that I still count myself upon…
maybe one day I will give it up again,
write a book about it,
open a diary of torment and beauty
handwritten, printed, the letters curling
like it’s me there rising in the ink
decorating all the directions
that I took with messages,
making sense of it with just one beautiful word,
nothing more than a heart beat
waiting for me to speak
a sound in my mouth like a kiss
that I leant towards and sent
through time to be close
with each of you.
Central Station late at night is its own world, other worldly.
It could be anywhere on the planet too.
Have the renovations been finished?
Beautifully expressed longing Mark Mordue.
Walking down Foveaux from the Trade
shining with sweat and smoke
Jim Beam and Julie Mostyn
to an empty Central and a journey
back to church on Sunday.