Mex and I, we meet often
to do a circumlocution
of the periphery
after coffee at Redfern Park Café.
Mex usually has a ham, tomato and
cheese toastie and I have white tea
in a takeaway cup because it stays hotter
while we ‘strategise’.
We come prepared, Mex with silver glitter,
maybe, a gauze bow, a sprinkle of sequins
in her bag, me with stickers that
don’t really stick, and say things like
‘Save Waterloo Green’.
Mex gathers her bags and
I scoop up my arm-dog, and
we march off past Woolworthless,
and the Sally’s headquarters
for the Corporate Christ.
Our destination, corner of Pitt
and Albert Streets, we flaneur along
saluting the ibisery, loving Lucy,
trawling the path, her furry hindquarters
neatly nappied, evading Tommy’s
sermons on Satan’s eyebrows,
and reaching it, we reconnoiter.
Familiar things, the pretending-to-be-dead
frangipani, with cache of birds, the ivy
waiting to be artistic.
We like the new: today the black
hoarding has become a chalkboard
overnight advertising the inhabitants
of earth to aliens, should they be looking back
from the future. ‘We are friendly’
(mostly, the cat is a bit suspect though)
is the message, ‘but random and
meaningless’. Once the hoarding
used to be white, and before that just
ply-board colour.
There used to be a fence there once
and inside it, the Rachel Forster Hospital
for Women.
