Smash and bash

There are African women wearing dresses of coloured dots and spots, the kid with a skateboard strapped to his back, another in his hands and he kickflips the third over the kerb, the man with the cowboy hat and belt buckle and turtle head his hands shake with age and illness, fatty smells of the fast food staff sharing a cigarette because Smoke if you got 'em, man, and schoolgirls you can already see which ones will be pretty, scattered reflections of jet plane against the towerbloc which is two sets of people in boxes but these will stay to answer phones and faxes and these will fly on away, away instead to Toronto, Tokyo, Tahiti, London El Salvatore, the back of her head all smiling and shy as she calls her lover, the back of his head as he chews on a sandwich and is desperately in love with the pigeons that squabble at his feet, electric wheelchair whining with high speed and running down the careless, squinting in the morning sun, window cleaner with pasta salad boxes and chamois cloth, All Sports, Bar & Bistro, Australia Australia but you, Scotsman, are proud of being broken. Teenagers mistake confusion for misery and dress in black and pierce lips, noses, necks because their parents never did and their friends always will with laugh aloud humping the lampost, police car, jewellery store, pork pie hats of tweed and black filed beneath with pansexual Japanese; you are fighting a peace for the security of war, war, SHOOTING STARS let's take it literal. War, war, gutshot: when we strike there will be no warning. Her shoes ripple on the flag like stones on ice the song whipping along the railway tracks, the short skirts, the gang of men in suits walk the street in a scene so Resevoir Dogs it must be rehearsed they daydream practice in their cubicles while they manage accounts or sell things, men in suits in company cars with air conditioning and so never feel the wind in their $100 haircuts, the cars stacked along the freeway, relentless broken mirror in the last evening sun still hot so the buildings are on two sides a refuge. Plaster saints, plaster Jesus, Francis, Nicoli, Anthony, standing and standing and sitting and kneeling, evacuation to the desert but when you live in the desert there is nothing to do except walk to the sea. Billy Lee's Cafe at Chinese New Year smash and bash of cymbal and drum, the dragons nod again to lord buddha, the scrapping for cabbage strung to the drainpipe, snapping of eyelids and ear and lip, jump and crouch and shake and can't hear a thing, stretchy bus sings the whale song on the corners, pnuematics, suspension, brakes, mulch bleached white in the sun, the ants a full inch long, the big ones nearer inch and a half and mean to boot, skies blue and black with distant lightning, piano plays soft chords, distant chords... and if all we have is NOW then I'm not sure I can wait.