Shoveling Cultural Snow (Pt 2, The Japan Suite)

Hikari 425, 18.40 (Shinagawa to Kyoto)

20.01.2009.

To tie down these kite-flown thoughts
Into well-formed expression.
A single string, buffeted by wind -

Rushing from here - to there
With an essential Japanese efficiency
Slipping by the sleeping towns and warehouses
Bullet-speed - so swift it's as if
We are still.

Walking the streets feels like this.
Noise - hopeful bargains, sex hecklers, vending conveniences
Reach for your brief attention
Late stage capitalism -
Shoveling cultural snow.
'Nani?!'
Really. (Really really.)

Sex as a business expense.
Lovers in Japan
Are full volume or mute.

Pain in Japan
Must be screamed aloud
ah - hysteria. Or
Left to simmer
A low pilot light burn
Awaiting the trigger
Innocuous - as gas filling your Ikea apartment
Of all those things you kept buying to persuade yourself
To keep living.

Flick. Boom.
Nani?
Really.

...

Hikari 366 Kyoto to Tokyo (In Praise of Shadows.)

24.01.2009

Clear blue cold day.
Fuji-san to the left; low stormy seas on the right
Sleep like a soothing balm
By the growl and hum
Imitation of...

Tao - the many named, and nameless
We doze our last before Shinagawa
The train shoots through - Tokyo Station
Where the municipal salarymen go
Flow to the East
We, of the West
Come for nothing.
To laze under a sky of nothing
Deep sunk well where only an oval
Blue snow cloud shows

"We will soon be arriving at Shin-Yokohama
In 4 minutes."
In minutes leaping distances
By foot - days

Roll on. Doze.
Dream of shadows.

...

Paper Chaser (Fukuoka - Beppu, Arr. 23.39)

Looking to live in my own skin
Pen spinning Paper Chaser
Left to the devices
Of the world's whims

14.05. INT. CANAL CITY.
I'm watching from 1F
A handsome juggler
Yoyo thrower, men's joker
Rhythm flow to the to/fro
Gypsy accordian song
Chords plyed
By a classic kawaii girl
Love, is who they are
And radiate.

They play anarchy - with ease
Their practised chaos
Is really a departo store joke
to delight the Japanese children (Fukuoka size!)
We're laughing along, us camera-hanging gaijin

Together, they love as love is and should be
Mr Juggler & Ms Accordion.

Mia, from the Shire ('but don't hold it against me')
Turns between photographic capture
And grins:
"Everyone in Japan is dating!"

Nani?
So des ne!

I found it.
What I longed for -
Paper chaser's dreams
(It was on the Sonic 57 to Beppu
All along.)

I'm ready. Alive and entirely
Here and now.
Singing
(I dig it.)

----

Before/After

----

White Lillies (Hotel Costes)

4.2.2009

White lillies
Views of the city
Summer in Sydney: $200
Breakfast (American) for two

Wine, well aged, cooling by the mini-bar

Skyscraper lights leading the way
To the Bridge, to the glimmer Pacific
Wilkommen.
Konbanwa.
This is our city in Summer
Say the street banners on George

Most definitely.

Home is this hotel room.
Home is the space left quiet
Between 2am conversation
Between your hunger and my
Back pressed against these anonymous white walls

Say nothing.
We are East. The sun peaks to glitter the CBD glass
Law firms, banks, Ernst and Young auditors
Aflame by the dawn.

Shimmer on the ranging glass
City, and Hyde Park, the Domain
Sunday morning.

...

Shinagawa 304

9.2.2009

Let it come as it goes
Fall in with the flow
Be, wherever you are
'Now, life is living you.'

... (That line was on a poster outside Higa...something temple on Karusuma-dori, Kyoto's main street.)

...

Isn't it good.

You.
Always trying to undress me.
My beautiful clothes

'Leave them on, then.'
Sure.
And as I do, I sing
'Isn't it good
Norwegian wood.'

And you say - again.
Again.

...

Neo-Tokyo: Year 21. (The Japan Suite.)

So I'm fresh off a flight from Narita Airport, where the ground staff wave you goodbye with glowing airport signal sticks and the temperature flatlined at five degrees for a week or so. It was a culture rush. Where to start? Well, me and my boyfriend and a friend I met in the first week of high school, now over ten years ago, headed north for to flee the bushfire/flood of another Aussie summer and celebrate the end of undergraduate uni forever.

Along the way, we found a Netherlands trust fund traveller/philosophy student/writer who doesn't write/player of the Neil Strauss Game and self-proclaimed Napoleon reincarnate. We missed the last bullet train home to Kyoto after a tipsy karaoke session with my boyfriend's unbelievably hip Jap cousins in Shibuya (yes, Lauren, I did the Bill Murray cover of 'More than this' in honour of Lost in Translation), and accidentally stayed in Hotel Zero, in Shibuya's infamous Dogenzaka, or Love Hotel Hill. The windowless room with plastic wrapped mattresses came with free condoms, NHK news and both european and japanese porn. Plus a seductive box of Japanese chocolate wafers and every kind of luxury skin cream imaginable.

While bathing naked as fashion and Japanese tradition dictates, in Japan's most locally famous onsen (hot springs warmed by the lava of volcanoes) in Beppu, my boyfriend was awoken from his blissful onsen sleep by the splashing of a very fat man. After which I ordered 5 for 300 yen somethings from a vending machine...somethings turned out to be eggs hard boiled in said lava heated onsen water. Haha!

We hung out at Harajuku's Takeshita St and Ura-Hara every weekend and every spare day, and are now far too cool to function. Seriously. Haha. A black guy heckling for an out-of-the-way Harajuku back alley fashion store tried to persuade me from my beeline path to pasta lunch, and I nearly punched him. Don't get between me and a meal.

We watched Nagano snow monkeys bathe in onsen north of Tokyo, and a little baby one, tapped on the shoulder by me, turned and shook my finger out of a very Japanese politeness. Although another one attacked my friend. You know how it is.

I bought a second hand bicycle in Kyoto and cycled around like a local for three weeks. You know, that local you see everywhere, with panda ears who keeps falling off her bike? Yep, that's me.

I watched the sun rise through the concrete alleys and valleys, artificial mountains and skyscrapers of Tokyo on the Yamanote Line. My boyfriend was told he was a Japanese Olympic Swimmer lookalike who, during the month we were there, kept advertising Quarter Pounders (tagline: Big Mouth! No Limit! Quarter Pounder!) We flew by Fuji-san on the Shinkansen at 259km/h (and that was the SLOW train...the other Nozomi bullet trains zoom through the country at 500km/h)

My friend did a 12 hour marathon date with her kinda boyfriend. We met another Aussie soul struck with wanderlust, with absolutely no homesickness for her home country (she's from the Shire, so really, it's quite understandable), with whom I wandered Fukuoka for four hours, blissfully lost, eating Ramen at Ramen Stadium in Canal City, watching a Jap Amelie-lookalike play the accordion as her boyfriend juggled for unbearably cute kids. We talked about love and life and other things. Ceiling Wax. Cabbages and Kings!

It was that kind of trip. Life is beautiful, as it always was, as you always knew. But it helps when you find an MIT student hired to design a world-leading eco-green city in the suburbs of Tokyo filled with the same awe, to share the culture rush over an egg and coffee breakfast on a quiet Kyoto street. Cheers Chris! Hope you read In Praise of Shadows. Here's to the nothing-like-Shibuya-green-city that only a generation raised in the smoke of overcrowding, Blade Runner dystopias and SUV supremacy could imagine. And thanks for voting in Obama.

"I think it's great that a country where once the slave class of black men worked under a crippling racial divide now, after the Civil Rights Movement, can elect a leader from that class to change the nation. This is what I think people mean when they speak of the dream that is America. We are an idea. An idea that opportunity is for anyone - hispanic, black, asian, white." Well, Chris from MIT, I agree. Who could deny it?

Of course, I have a few poems to light the way of tall tales so good, they could only be true. Here's Number 1. I wrote it on the second or third night after landing in Tokyo. The title is from a billboard we kept seeing everywhere (we got very lost, as we thought it was feasible to walk three suburbs to Shinkjuku from Ikebukuro, the sex/dinner/shopping district where we stayed) - a handsome Japanese soccer star's face underlined by the words: Human x Beauty (Take Action!). No other explanation. It's a call to action, honey!

Human x Beauty (Take Action!)

Ricochet pachinko
Let it go, glow
Living in the Seibu side of Ikebukuro
Where Tobu pleasures sell their wares to the Seibu West
Let it flow and fall into an
Unquestionable logic.

Chaos underscores Order, and order - chaos
It is a happy marriage. Mutually beneficial, contractually binding
Quid pro quo.
Flip it over and re-use
Break it at the bend, renew
"Happiness" (you see)
"Spurs the world's turning"
On an ever replenished wheel
Oscillating wildly
Beyond evil/good. Useful/used.
It all is as it is. And ever was.
And will be.

This is the philosophy of
"Kinda Buddhism", practised by Yu-kun
Tokyoite to a tee, who studied at university
Because of Bruce Willis in a blockbuster Hollywood
Armaggedon, the movie
Astrophysics, the Masters Degree.
Citibank graduate by March

He loves this city. I love it too.
This world, its whacky cool
Accustomed to its contradictions
Fashions and ideas flow with the seasons
Rather than reason.

In the air, an ineffable urge
A spark, a dark well un-filled
To go - anywhere
'Takodanobaba, Gotanda, Shibuya, Ginza
Haha, Hakata'

We're half-cracked blooms
Cherry blooms - sakura
Dying at their height of life and drifting
Boom. Eh? Kapow!
'I need something to do now.'

We'll head to be Beppu, in a week or two
"Nani? Bepp-oooo? You know?"
Yu-kun knows, impressed.
"You are very energetic, you know.
Good for a writer."

Domo arigato.
Curious too. Another essential.
I want - the beginning, the end, the middle
In that order. I can wait.
Take a day, take a lifetime.

Time ticks down its hours
The world turns
Salarymen file home on the 6am commuter
Necking a callgirl on the stairs to the street
Dawn is grey, daybreak calls
Other night-watchers
Gaijin honing in on the Pig and Whistle
Lovers 'nesting' (vigorously) and by the hour
Pachinko slot addicts blinking in the first sun rays
Sex show hecklers in full body black coats
"Are they Yakuza?" asks my friend.
"Will they steal us into sexual servitude?"
"Do they live in rich Shibuya?"
Hai, hai. (Yes, yes, sure.)

4.01AM.
I have a point to prove.
Though words, as always, will not do.
Do not do.
By the shadows as they slip between the cracks
Of the steel frame wire-net window
Frosted by midwinter snow
I can feel its pulse. The grappling logic.

Of whacky-mad order.
Turning over worlds
Re-use, renew.

Goodnight, and thank you.

(c) Wenee Yap, 14/01/2009.

The Next Crazy Venture...

Writing is best done when you're supposed to be doing other things. (Haha, in this case, writing, of the paid kind.)

Happy 2009, everyone!

The Next Crazy Venture

I craved an uncomplicated life.

Problem-free

Though, of course, the problems wound their way back to me

As I suppose

There’s no show without

A conflict

To be expected – silly, really

Resolution is for the rested dead.

So we deal, we play

We place our wagers

Here a five, and there, our life

Clenched by a tight wire thread

Strung between the Twin Towers – NYC, 1974

Walking as the wind

Dances, and we dance, we do

We lie suspended in the sky

We laugh at the ease of it

We sing; we wait to deliver

The wisdom of an age.

The punchline finale:

‘All the world’s a stage’

‘Reach, though your reach may yet exceed

Your grasp. Or else what’s Heaven for?’

Know this. Life is one, and life

Is not meant to be survived.

Announced to wild applause

Real and recorded.

Your quality – one to be remembered

Then forgotten.

Peace. Cease to seek it.

Be.

Whatever. Hand me the deck.

Deal over.

© Wenee Yap.

wine on the high wire.

Blog update. Work rushed headlong into Xmas break, my book/website project has been tentatively approved for sponsorship by the faculty, I scored First Class Honours in Law as quietly confirmed (in manner that is not open to most students - so hurrah for working in the faculty), my little bro looks on his way to cruising quite well into a selective school with all his friends (which is all he wants right now, other than more lego and to go to the Powerhouse Star Wars exhibition and play Wii + PS3 and sing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the Bono cover), I fell privy to personal scandal to rival de Sade's finest works (Philosophy in the Bedroom, of course - thank you Iris for that continually amusing book), I am now fully employed and then some, pulled into several projects (Catfox, 85Boroads, the new Communications Law Centre), I caught up with old friends and found new ones, tidied up a little more Japan organising...

...and Julian came back from Vancouver, alive with the wild bug of traveling in a way he's never known before.

This, like so much, is for you.

To the world out there: I expect your intelligence and worldly experience, whether gained from a book or first person, will leave you to infer the finer omitted details.

"Travel & Leisure." (or "Here, the strange familiar.")

You said: I'm home when I'm with you.
Whispered in my ear as we reached (backseat, where else)
For the elusive
In the midnight crisp
By the black shadowed park tall with trees gnarled
Skin dried thin, cracked and peeling with burn
Trees emaciated after an overindulgence of summer.


You said: I found something
The Siren's song, an Absolute
I've sought so long in the strange familiar
Shapes of clouds.
In dead philosophers and suburban churches
In nights deep with you
I found it
In the north of the border city, walled by wide high snowy peaks
All alone but not lonely
Kerouac's months of mountains.

And you should see it.
I want you, you said, to see it.
I heard you. In my head, your voice -
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

I - in stasis so long
Broke.
Fell below bottom and loved the fall.
I rolled as the wind in the tunneling space of no stars, no milky way
Flew me to a place
Free of -
Words and art and other cages
Naming the nameless.
Grasping the Tao - The Great Beyond.

I dipped my pale face, my slender long nose and its midway crook
Into spring bloom roses.
Low hung magnolia seized my senses
And shattered my sensibility.

Oops.
Beyond rock bottom is not a floor
Solid and infallible.
No, it is an endless fall.

Delicious.

And through, you call -
I want you.
I want to give you everything.
I am ready.

I heard you.
I fell through.
Sweet with dinner dates
Clever young men of many inclinations and tastes
Sharing our elitist histories under the glimmer lights, a carnival
This side of the Harbour.

You know as well as I do -
You can lose yourself, you can betray
In many creative and amusing ways.

Et cetera, et cetera.
Singing in my ear, Thom Yorke is so
Beyond the thrall.

You are here. I am here.
I wonder at the lines that have left your face
The world's weight cast from your
Muscular, winter-tanned, taut shoulders
Your Armani exchange and your red muffed headphones
Your bewildered smile. Your assured, self-possessed air
Your confidence.
You speak - but unlike before
With sureness.
Built upon a deeper knowledge and understanding
As always - you say precisely what you mean
And do exactly as you like.
So right.

Though now, it is 5.05.
None of this has happened yet.
You're walking in the store - looking for
Kino's Travel + Leisure
December's evening pleasures.

You're looking, well, very good.
I'm thumbing through Lonely Planet
Budapest - the Avis-itis city
The 'Second city' of the Hapsbergs

You're here. Like The Who:
You're looking at me and I'm looking at you
We - ah. Don't know what to do.

I look you down and size you up.
Head to toe, to fall for.
Absolutely.

Stranger. Familiar.
Later, you will say: for you, I'm here.
For now, I straight-shoot look at you
And say:

"Hello there."

So let's go crazy.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop."

- Jack Kerouac

It's a seductive, easy declaration. One for poets and professional bums, philosopher artists by reputation, purveyors of heady intoxicants and high as satellites when there's bills due. Attractive sentiments, true. Especially while the rule of cool logic has delivered a natural earth stretched on the rack of human demand, pollution and population growth, brinking on collapse; when distrustful neighbour nations choose useful weapons of annihilation and war rhetoric ("You are either with us, or against us", and you know the rest) over diplomacy; when lego economies crumble under the pressures of near-sighted lending policies, speculative investment and regulatory absence - yes, yes, when everything you know, blows in a deeply unsatisfying way, sexy declarations of ideals suddenly glow.

Don't mistake me for a revolutionary. I've grown up more or less knowing only affluence, even in the early years, when the wealth was reached for through glass display windows and glittering parties at which I did not belong. I've caught a lot of breaks in my short life so far: intelligence and luck, intrinsic talent and the will to risk, conspired for some very good times. In such surrounds - as I watch myself, my family, my closest friends and further friends of extended amusement, emerge, I suppose. Reap, as my friend said (over coffee, in Newtown, could it be any more cafe philosopher apt :p) reap the rewards for our long and lonely uncertain efforts.

And I wonder. Cos that's what you do at 1am when you're definitely supposed to be doing something else - like buying travel insurance, planning itineraries, writing law articles, organising interviews, reading the New York Times, browsing foodie blogs, filing my professional life, brewing a cup of oolong - you wonder about Douglas Adams stuff. 42 and the meaning of everything.

Around this time last year, I kinda broke. Law clerkships, the tugging obligation of a well-paid corporate future to match my impressive grades, sleepless nights and crankiness, were you know, annoying me with taglines. "It's amazing what a doodle can reveal." "We value our people." "No day is the same." "9 to 5 is boring." (This should ring alarm bells for anyone with a shred of value for sustaining human relationships. Not work, not academic - human. The kind of coffees, strawberries, gin martinis, reckless indulgence, midnight wisdom and inappropriate confessions.) It was, in fact, around 1am. Glazed and glaring at the July 2007 edition of Lawyer2B (the magazine to read if you are young and lawyerly), which featured a medical diagram of the human brain, with a young woman ripping through, between the eyes, peeking, apparently, at her future. Headline: Anatomy of the Ideal Grad.

I read it cover to cover. I was pretty sure I was supposed to have applied for every major clerkship in town. Or at least some. As opposed to...none. (I did accidentally win an interview at the Law Careers Fair with Gadens. To their greater wisdom and my lasting joy, I made it to the final round but didn't get hired.) Still, HECS debts were looming. Plus the general feeling that someone in my position should just be amazing already. North Sydney Girls, brilliant marks, a CV that employers swoon for...and here I was sipping black tea and doing things so useless as 'wondering.' Revelation struck. Seized by impulse, I foraged a black DVD marker pen from my little chinese take-out box on my table (from Sugar Fix!) which serves as a pen holder and drew lines through the medical anatomy of a human brain, the front cover of Lawyer2B. Dividing the brain, the face, into partitions of essential graduate attributes of the ideal lawyer to be.

Blind ambition. Flexible ethics. String of failed marriages/relationships. Shameless narcissism. Prozac + cocaine addiction. Cardiac arrest. Nagging sense of disillusion. = Ideal corporate drone. (There's more, definitely more. Haha!)

Tagline: ...It's amazing what a doodle can reveal.

Forgive me - or at least excuse me - I was something like depressed, cynical, and anger was a step up from being in the pits. Let it stand for the record that I don't think this is true any more. That like all that's worth knowing in this world, there's a lot more to lawyers, to corporate culture, to graduate recruitment and professional practice, there's worthy ideals that still hold and guide soulful (currently) corporate lawyers, there's corporations committed, (no, really) to being ethical world citizens (I did my thesis on this, just to prove it) ... there's a lot to like. Fine dining, magnolia in bloom, blue open skies, Border 35% off vouchers, Alicia Keys/Jack White, Obama 2008 ("Penn just went. Bolinger Bolsheviks. This is wild."), oysters and wine, John Mayer and Disney, park rendezvous, John Legend...ok, lots. Trust me. You know too. Really.

I'm coming to a point, I promise. I said at the start of this entry that mad people are the only ones worth knowing, that madness is underrated. No, I'm too bourgeosie to head for the nearest asylum for some friend-making (or to NSW Parliament, Seven News or Macquarie Bank, for that matter). My point is this: given the rather unsuccessful way logic has ruled our world for a few hundred years, in its Darwinian cycle of conquest, domination or to destroy what one cannot have (yes yes, success is relative, etc, but neither being a Jew in the Holocaust nor being a Palestinian in Gaza is a particularly pleasant reflection on the success of society's rules right now).... I seriously doubt whether the prevailing definition of sanity has served us well.

So I say, madness is an evolutionary imperative.

We're a generation raised by Tyler Durden & Dangerous Liaisons/Cruel Intentions. Interesting role models, no?

I say: Let me never be content (with the perfect sofa). Let me never be (made) complete (by buying stuff I don't need, funded by jobs I hate.) Deliver me from clever art. Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from self-destruction. Deliver me from nihilism.

Embrace craziness. Trust me. It's very cool right now. And maybe, with all our supposed excess of IQ points and other incredibly poor measures of intelligence, with all our lucky breaks, dazzling talent, thrilling potential and worlds of oysters and brimful promise, we might do something useful. We might go mad. We might - yes yes, you know you want to hear it - we might forge a better world.

Are you in?

Intermezzo.

For spectacle, and abandon.

Intermezzo.

The fill act
Lodged by rock and mortar
By Act Two and the grand finish
As hushed patrons hustle to
Dial urgent calls to their lives outside
Busy, important, awaiting no plays
Hurry to toilet breaks
Join lines long and slithering round red curtained walls and corners

Intermezzo before the fall.
She is not watched - the dancer
Sleek, lithe, unseen
Her artful leaps and arcs
Bear no practise
Her movements roll with the mood of the breeze
With the popcorn crunching crowd's sighs
Averted eyes, watch-glance impatience
She does as she will
So to please
Herself.

Only. Absolutely.
Brinking, as the pit violinist strings a high C -
And holds it -
Impossibly -
Still as she -
Levitates
Defying Newton's Laws and multiple city regulations

Intermezzo.
Before the fall.

...

And for the record, Quantum of Solace is every bit as satisfying, burning vengeful, rogue chaotic, bitter wise, as nobody is telling you. You know, don't see it if you're in search of an absolute romance, or any other absolute. For those needs, I recommend Nights in Rodanthe. Or The House Bunny! Australia! There's plenty.

As of today, I am fully employed and brinking on far too employed. Life's good, no?

stomp off, let's go!

Louis Armstrong says it best! So - set this entry to the soundtrack of Louis Armstrong: The Ultimate Collection, Disc 3, Track 13, because that's what's flowin from my cd player right now. Mmm-mm. It's raining, a thunderstorm remnant to douse out the bushfires which burned high near my house yesterday; I assume it was close because we were choking smoke all evening, but I was out all day shopping and caught up in the absolutely awful task of reading Australian Gourmet Traveller & Delicious back issues under the slip light fogged ceiling of the Mitchell wing, State Library, revelling in a room walled with books, smelling library. Yep, it's a fantastic life, and someone's gotta live it! ;)

As I just urged a friend: Listen to the rainfall. Trickle down tango partnered with birdsong. A family of rainbow lorrikeets squeak and squawk from our jacaranda beyond my balcony. On such a morning, like a Louis Armstrong song, I can't help it, I'm on the sunny side of the street, I'm in the mood for love, I'm stomp off, let's go!

So another friend, Alex, texted me yesterday to ask how Day 1: Operation the end of undergrad uni forever (ever ever, ever ever??) went down. And I wouldn't be a wayward procrastinating writer worth my whimsy if I didn't end up answering in a poem. Here it is. Yes it's long, but so was a 5 year degree. Unlike the degree, it goes down easy, like a Tetsuya Ying Sling infused with lychees, definitely a drink to woo women with.

"There must be more than being happy" (Scream love.)

14 Nov.
(1999). A mud hue sedan veered into Pennant Hills Road
The automobile artery of NW Sydney
Male, the driver, late 20s
His mind a kite on a long flying tether
On Caltex, milk and cigarettes
Failed to check right.
His collision theorised by Isaac Newtown four double oo years before
'One object in motion will proceed in due course
Until acted upon by some opposite force.'
Smash!
21.34.
I drank saltwater hospital soup & watched tiny-screen Jerry Maguire
In ER.
The boy across my aisle bore a bloody stump
For a left arm.
So it goes.
(Vonnegut theorised too, fifty years before.)

14 Nov.
(2008.)
I missed my stop.
By plan if not purpose
Thrilling under the passing Bridge beams
Steel pine shadow beams
Harbour glimmer, Quay cruise ships and sunshine
The drop point where a boy
Brilliant, my age, days ago
Dux, final year high
Law Revue loved
Career ready, steady Freehills for life
Forgot the feel of the sun
Heady perfume of magnolia bloom
Of crisp-baked French roll's virgin crackle
Forgot & knew only
Life. Hard life that stretched thin as the skin of a drum, ever ever on.
03.26.
43 mins before the first dawn Cityrail.
By the cold blowing sea gusts, under Bridge beams
He stepped off - saw not
Cruise carnival ships, the harbour as it glimmered
By the city's high lights and brand names neon emblazoned
Felt at last, the thrilling wind as it flew
From the fell drop to the sea.

12.43am.
North Sydney Station.
Unrecognisably changed.
Gone - the smog, 'smoke fog' stairway
Advertising lined, blasted steps
Here, slit aluminium ceilings let in light
By degrees. Dispelled shadows
By design.
I loved to see this. This change. I grew up on this steppes.
Now they're gone.
My battered phone buzzed a message - Alex:

'Spectacular sunny day,
Don't you think?'
I didn't think.
A wild idea for a walking brain.
No-mind. Zen free.
Part of the Plan.

'Exam soon, so relaxed.
Hope you're doing well,
First day of freedom -

Scream love!'

My reply was one line.
The end of the line.
(If I stake my word-bound career by this
I'll be a cardboard box pauper,
Give it days.)
Law - the corporate dream
Hard living
Now a myth.
Dispelled by design.
In one line.

"LOOOOOOVE!!!"