Everything that has leached from you

I realised today that what always makes me surprised to see cockatoos flying towards the radiata pines in the neighbouring land is that, once they get there, it will have seemed as if white short-limbed monkeys had been sailing the backyard air; a red wattlebird, though, will stare at you, dinosaur-like, from any branch that scratches the house, and when it dives at you to snap near your ear, it won't have been you that it wants but one of the myriad insects that, drawn to the colour yellow, hover near your lobe, or one of the flies that, having pulled the sounds of bleached paddocks with them over the sandstone cliffs, have grown so tired that they will drown in your tea but, first, need to crawl all over your face to taste everything that has leached from you and that you have leached from everything else.

Kurtz's mouldy house

I've been noticing everywhere in the city, but mainly in the strangest, hottest places -- where the footpath takes you, for example, across the out-breathing mouths of underground parking stations, opposite fenced, greyish tropical gardens (Kurtz's mouldy house that the city has grown around) -- young adult Europeans with their middle-aged parents in shorts and thongs who seem to be listening, keenly, to their offsprings' account of the way a humid Christmas in Sydney needs artificial snow and plastic holly, and how coffee must be taken seriously, and how they have learned hundreds of lazy practices in their year of being crowded in share rooms and picking deformed fruit in dust-rimmed towns.