Poetry: Untitled Poem
On the street where I live
old state houses are falling into disrepair,
under gravity
asbestos removal tents like ghosts
in the mt albert morning fog
haunt the lawns behind construction fences,
mark the space where children played
next to the rose bushes and burning fires of calendula petals
the primordial soup,
the liquid coercion from which
the nuclear family arose.
And only most of these houses are empty
the ones
picked at random
no longer suitable for habitation,
while next door the condensation drowns families of twelve
and shoddy electrical circuits
twinkle like stars in the mt albert night.
It is progress,
this forgetting,
it is
an ushering in of a new age a
curation of the Big State suburbs,
neglected
to become living museums,
exhibiting ‘first world’ poverty,
over-priced student flats
and the matted branches of trees knocked down
by april storms,
and left to stagnate into the new year.
The future is coming to mt albert,
slithering down the cycleway
and creating itself into the sunset layers, all pastel,
in the evening sky, and
as high-rise state house units, compounds, courts,
all sleekly designed,
asbestos free, undangerous,
dry, insulated mediators
of settler-colonial hangovers
and that slowdance murderer
we call capitalism.
