Backtown Boys High School
Feel old, it’s been 50 years
since the screaming sure
I now have a river that is sleek/lazy
her lap takes me like a newborn
& sings the songs of drowners.
Enviro reports reckon dirty, but the government
says there’s jobs to be had upstream
so that has to be good?
When I was 15 I screamed
with a cracked stupid voice
that thought it knew about pain.
There was a boy involved
then a girl.
I was drinking at the pub
where Thommo once served a kid
who had to stand on his globite schoolcase
to see over the counter.
School half-heartedly pretended knowledge
but I was taught elsewhere.
Jerry’s mum gassed herself.
The woman next door to Derek
had been fucking him since he was 11.
They shut down the place.
I stood there last year,
with all its windows broken & few arson scars it
still forced me to be furtive.
Hans became the local mayor
Derek’s tradie shorts are a size bigger each year
& he’s fucking the apprentice.
Jimmy Jones was the apex predator,
word is he couldn’t kick a habit.
There’s been some death
my worn-out arms couldn’t carry Tim’s coffin.
We’d both talk about the school days
in cardigans of forgiveness.
I’d take it in then dump the lot.
We’d laugh.
I look others up,
there is no surprise that
some worked out wiser than me.
Most are divorced.
So much to lose… your mind, your family.
At the local Men’s Shed
we make more than cages & coffins.
The privilege of men
is sometimes set off against
the heap of garbage that we hod.
It doesn’t seem quite real, back of the cupboard stuff
with the tie-dyes & sarongs.
It’s a suit that really needs to see a tailor.
I occasionally come to visit
the forest down my working-class road.
They say you can stand in it & scream.
Cockatoos labour at their nesting hollows
make homes of a world’s rot.
Wallabies peer from the shade —
spectators at a schoolyard brawl.
It hasn’t rained in months
that river down the valley
has asthma.
The peace here folds like paper
could have had solace
perhaps hope
but I scream.
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