Some days the future is like a debt
the millennium racked up yesterday
or a kind of heroic sweat
the work camps built, where
the Bondi view commands a path
from one boom to the next
in the intervening years they
harvest, acute & lonely, & life’s so tough
even a bull shark’s meat is succulent
marinated for a decade
& washed up on a luxury
beach of sprayed on primal art

wildflowers, rock, flint,
history’s salted real-estate
the flaneur poets
clamour for a piece of it
reffo gangs stop to smoke
pick & dig the stony propositions
bouquets of roubles
while the flowers
seep dew on a gravel track
haunted by a dawn of rust

collected and set
on raw pine tables, heritage dried
my cheap flora
persists on a dark lapel
when, growing inward, they
forget about the ‘twenties
& the crowds still come.