thornbury hardware shop

'I need castors for my bed.'

'How many?'

'I dunno.'

'Well, a bed you buy in the shop'd have four castors. How much weight you putting on it?'

'Not much, but I feel like it needs more than four.'

'Well, four should hold a couple of people at a hundred or so kilos, give or take. If you're gonna have more than two people in your bed who weigh more than that, I'd say you'd be in trouble.'

'Reckon you'd have more to worry about than the castors ... I'll take nine.'

alphabet

'Your alphabet was wrong, Roy. Wrong. You have a good memory. Don't waste it.'

Closing time at the Gem

'So i wake up naked, in bed, with my fists clenched like this, right ... thinking, "ok, i'm still alive, ok good." So i get up, and step in a puddle of water.''

'Wee?'

'Nah, a puddle of water, and I keep going out through the house to the car. the door is open and on the driver's seat there's a ten dollar note and my phone. Ok? Weird.'

'Yeah, like when you wake up and you can taste McDonalds, but you got no memory of eating it.'

'Yeah, kind of.

little skull caps

i saw a man in a tshirt with lungs on it today, like it reminded him how to breathe.

the other day, a young kid, kind of dumpy, in a skeleton hoodie.

little skull caps for my bike tubes and a skull-shaped rear light; manni gave them to me when we were breaking up and i lost my shit on smith street when they went missing or got nicked, whichever.

it's the neo-renaissance.

instead of staring at the skull by candlelight in an old painting and wondering who we are, we are wearing our skeletons on the outside.

breaking ourselves down, like that will make sense of this life. and if that doesn't work, then at least we're making our own mortality public.

like it helps to share it.

convection currents

the last time it was hot, we were falling in love and hating it. the streets were irritable, trees and worm farms baking behind fences. a man with no top, all angles and muscle, cycled into the heat of smith street outside the needle exchange, the hard brown skin of his calves cut off by white ankle socks. as i passed him going up the hill i saw that an old sanitary pad was stuck to the sole of his runners, hanging off by the wing as he fought the weight of the weather, jaw clenched.

on snails

'I'm cool to put in effort. Then if they're still fucking me over, the little cunts need to be caught.'

corner russell and bourke

'I got a large so you could have some but I ate them all,' she said, putting brown paper bag in the bin and hugging her friend.

Several

'My god! It's the most beautiful woman in the world,' he said, walking toward me arms outstretched, with stains down the front of his green/blue shirt and a cigarette between two fingers.

'Maybe you haven't met very many women?' I put my helmet on.

'I have, I've met several,' he replied, and disappeared into the Clifton Hill pub.

Scout Scout at the Empress

I saw him reach for his bag, then hesitate when she spilled her white wine on the pool-table cover. She'd borrowed someone else's wallet to buy the drink just three minutes earlier and the look in her eye said, damn it, that's just typical. now i'll be sober all evening.

she huffed off to the kitchen window - standing on tippytoes like that would make the waitress notice her sooner - and while everyone else was lost in airy harp folk the cellist from Scout Scout drew a clean pink Chux from his bag and mopped up the puddle.

'Is that pink one someone else's?' asked the waitress later, rubbing a blue rag over the spot, her leopard-print t-shirt slipping down over her shoulder. he nodded, sheepish. 'I'll rinse it out and give it back to you.'

Pollen with eyehooks

Blue sky as kettle boils.

Housemate in silk PJs

'Ah, you can smell the blossoms!'

i am out of hayfever pellets

(this is how i eat them,

by the handful),

eyes watering, preparing to

ride through clouds of

pollen with eyehooks.

itchy, patchy, red and white

squinting, while the rest of Melbourne

roll its limbs on lawns

in short shorts at lunch time.

Lollypop on Gold

'Do you live around here?' he asks, at the pedestrian crossing on Alexandra Pde.

'Yeah, just down there.' The lights take ages at Gold St. I'm taking my time getting to work. Usually there's a cute girl ahead of me laughing with the lollypop man - the elastic cutting into her flesh a little at the hip. Today we're alone together in peak hour traffic.

'I hear Glen at the pub got stabbed last night,' he says.

'At the Leinster?'

'And his missus. He was closing up,' he says.

'Are they ok?'

'He's pretty bad. They caught two young blokes, one was 23, the other 17.'

'Any motive?'

'Robbery, I suppose ... hang on ... okay you're good to go,' he says, walking into the stalled traffic to bawl out the driver of a white four-door who had crossed the line.

Five minutes later I'm waiting for my tea to steep in the sun outside at Mixed Business. Geo beat me there - damned long cycle pedestrian crossing. She'd driven past the cordon around the Leinster ...

'Junkies. Probably junkies,' she said, sizing up her coffee.

'There's some left in Collingwood?'

hungry on the train

A litre of raspberry soft drink

chicken burger demolished before Parliament

small box chips on middle seat.

Short curls pasted to sloping forehead.

Ears pinned back to head

a fine pixie boy in man drag

with a plasticine-thick brow bone

and mono-brow regrowth.

eyes hotwired by cayenne grill.

slightly pink shirt, collar open

over three-button suit jacket.

Dad's shoes, black wool socks,

quiksilver backpack.

Must be halfway through an IT internship,

those long fingers like tentacles across the keyboard by day

pressing chips to teen-thick lips

on the way home to second dinner

somewhere before Epping.