Two Poems About Canberra

Telstra Tower

I thought of you in Kyoto

Phone dead

Map unread

I followed your Perfect Form

(more brightly-lit, more

Economically efficient)

All the way K's-House-Home.

Now in the warm-dark instead

Of the cold-dark as I

Spin home,

I do the same -

Your shape a little weirder, a

Little more hollow

Under rose-gold lamp-light

I plan to stray

But not beyond the scope of your

Gravitational pull

Berra

(first published in Yolk: http://www.yolkmagazine.net/poems--stories/berra)

this city swings
about a dead needletower
beneath it: a mirrormaze:
of students just like me but not quite;
slot-machine double degrees
and bared knees in winter.

i’ve lived with sociopaths and naturopaths
worked at maybe-mafia restaurants
and taken schrodinger’s film-photos
of willingunwilling friends.

on our off days we drift about the city
amidst megafauna goon sacks
in and out of nightclubs with floors as stick
y as inertia
(outside is cold winter past-midnights)

amidst the air-ice, like  
kangaroos on the powerlined othermountain
hovering over
rose-gold clap-powered lamplight;

there’s a liminal lake named george
and another called burley griffin 
that sprays its toxic water at highway cars.

bush capital
heroin capital
porn capital
cultural capital
capital capital - 

this gap of a city
has been left to run amok.
this gap of a city
is where i’ll learn to grow up