the years of collection, walls
nacreous from hoardings, a paper
codex, squirrelings, till each room,
a labyrinth of the past, teeters
ceiling to floor with extracted
life, objectified, amassed, meant,
grows out to clog the doors
packs down the hallway,
exudes into the garage, engulfs
a car, morphs towards the street
this refuge for roadside discards knows
all the damp sufferings of domestic
disintegration, the decay
of possibilities for:
baskets, doll houses, tins, cupboards,
chairs, lowboys, blinds, plastic toy
lawnmowers, upholstered blanket
boxes, ornaments, a model elephant, wicker
side tables, pots, decades of newspaper
when the grey wisps pump out
from the side of the house, grey blood
rising furious at past containment
everything there comes into itself
the house, the stacks, the compacts
with rancid fat and frayed electrics
all the puttings-up with of the floor
the doors, frame work, roof and
tiles, all conspire, cease to be
shelter and go with the loading
to make
too much fuel for any fire to continue
to resist
heat, fervent heat and plenty of it,
billows of pumping smoke,
carbon unbounded
glass exploding, a fire music,
as windows hammer
out a percussive map
bits of ash, cinders, specks
newspaper coins
floating off
a fire engine pissing itself
like a red cow on bitumen
dozens of red blue lights rotate
in scenic hypnosis, everything
a filtre of smoke, strobes,
sirens, engine burble
takes over as sound
Is your mike switched on -
he shouts - I've got no fucking
audio - young men in suits
ask the voyeurs
do you live here?
I half expect that newspaper,
1986 front page coverage of the Space
Shuttle disaster, betrayed to the
footpath in the year 2000
to come back burning, those
fragments floating down
might be the Space Shuttle
falling, burning twice
instead a grey, yellow, fluxing
mauve and green plume
of particulates, fume, ash, monoxides
cyanides and stinging aromatics
lifts, snakes over the Harbour Bridge,
the firies, muddy with ash
sag in the gutter, companionable
with their green air tanks
the smoke kinks south, sifts
falls and blows, undoing, like flames
in all foolish directions
