Lost on the North Shore line,

I’m traveling Sydney, station

by station, starting from quiet

tennis suburbs. The sun’s honey

drips down through the foliage.

Back to tie up loose ends

I see this is no longer my city.

A liquidamber outside one station

has been whipped by winter

and wheeling pigeons fade

like ink on the page of clouds.

Let regret and sadness rub

the bung knee of remembrance,

feel scar-lines on the palm: you

had wrong turnings, failures,

fights that fell down spitting blood

on the hard bitumen here. Now,

who are you and where is home?

The carriage view keeps changing

much too fast to construct

a domicile, a memory shed.

The powerline grids are stark

as suburbia turns weatherboard -

poorer, crammed any-old-how

together with bulging families

on working wages. Are they

lost like me, do they question

what factories make of them,

swarming locust-hungry over

the grey lands each job-day?

This rail-loop is a snake eating

its own tail. Who can bear

the sting of knowing they are

caught like stunned mullet

in the want-net, dragged home

each night, suburb after suburb

to the same football replays

on television, the same rough pubs

and fights, or another later

with their missus, each stewing,

seething, waiting up, alone

after the kids are home-worked,

bedded on cue? Soon his drunken

annunciation will stumble into

the snore-pit with an alarm-clock

resurrection just a few hours off.

Then, he will be gone again

on the cattle-packed work-train.

Wheels sing round and round.

This is coming much too late

just days before I fly overseas.

My head bobs with the carriage

like a fishing cork on the waves.

I’m a daytrip drifter, feeling

disorientation like motion sickness

as I climb the skyline, white

as printout. It’s coming up –

the city with a smoker’s cough,

catacombs running underground,

whistling for minutes their black

urban thoughts, before light

at the end and the honey sun

that started this journey is back

with a vengeance, looping me

onto the Bridge, high into grey

which should be clear and blue.

Is this me or the city in a pall

of smog? Is this lostness

something I carry or just picked up,

flashing from station to station?

I ache to arrive at a space

between the earth and the sky.

Reaching there, I might see

a new platform swept clean

without a history. a fresh start –

somewhere else to go.

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