Canberra’s funny flat-black,
mushroom topped
mountain mingled
tree lined streets
coated in thin-black, thin-black tarmac.
See we, canberra community,
smoking in what, I don’t know
ash, fires, fumes and tobacco,
always go back this way
along the cycle path.
Along, Barry drive,
along northbourne avenue,
along the roads curling and alive with
tired tyres
Thin-black thin-black breath in
convincing grin
suck in suck in smoke.
Exhale thinly, breathing easy, wheezy
between Burley Griffin’s water borne disease.
Squatted down between prime minister’s knees
we open the cabinet up to the air
and suck in suck in
wheezy mountain dust carried in breazily.
And it beginnings:
the thin-black thin-black tarmac
begins to crack
it calluses into tiles of crocodile skin
and the walls that keep us in from the
cold mountain air –
fracture as the roads around us rupture -
and the land, the vertebrae of mountain line
velveted in vegetation
starts to sway, swishing and creasing into a spine.
Here comes the ancient alligator rapture.
Morphing into a crocodile, monster with
a snapping smile,
emerging from the mud, coming up.
Has had enough of our
electricity our needles of street lights
digging in every night like
electrofide acupuncture.
The earth erupts
and claws drag themselves, first legs with stumps
then other lumps of a being bigger than us,
out of our surrounds out of the grounds
we’ve shaved into gardens, tamed into
artificial lakes.
with thin-black thin-black eyes
who have had enough.
And the monster begins to shake.