What time is it?
8:40am.
My feet hurt.
I don’t have a typewriter.
I’ve been reading Beat poetry again, getting lost in it.
I have to make scones for Poetry Kitchen.
Power tools howl on both sides of the apartment.
Cars stumble down the street.
I am thinking this in the I am voice of Allen Ginsberg or Jack Micheline.
All those men.
Outside Simon works with the leafblower clearing up the leaves.
He makes a terrible noise at least once a week.
I wish I were him. His life looks simple. He does the grounds and the building.
I have to bake scones for Poetry Kitchen.
I have to do this. I have to do that.
I want to sit here writing poetry letting my mind think things as my pen records them.
I want to sit with the writing of Jack Micheline enjoying the rhythm of it.
I want to live on the streets like he did begging from village to village with my poems.
A man could do that and retain his dignity.
A man could do that.
A woman has more sense than to do that.
A woman makes a nest to come home to. Somewhere to keep her books.
Micheline can’t have had many books living like that.
I suppose he died happy or perhaps unhappy but we shall never know.
It was the 1960s. The 1950s.
In San Francisco. In New York.
It was a whole different time.
It was McCarthyism and now we have Tony Abbott.
He makes a terrible noise at least once a week.
To maintain my sanity do I have to maintain my apartness?
I don’t have a typewriter.
My feet rest on a synthetic persian carpet.
I bought it in Lifestyle Furniture for two hundred dollars.
From The emptied bridge
This poem was written in late 2013, not long after Abbott became the prime minister of Australia.