new ways of doing old things
Bars through frosted glass
Faded orange light filtered
In a little bar somewhere in a back alley
Somewhere in the back of your mind
Like you on your first date
Because you haven’t done it for months
Eating flowers for the first time as a child
Staring at the shadows
Talking with friends
Coffee in the car from a café with a foreign name
Because that’s what you do now
A café of your own
With the windows down
The noise of the street wafting in and out of your conversation
Dulled as the baby sleeps
In a god awful banal place
With too many tables and burly waiters who cant carry the coffee
All they can do is pull the pint and evict some person who loves the bar
Watching the old national game which you love none the less
For its artistic beauty
With a few mates
Because one of them will be leaving
But you talk just the same
You cant bring your self to mention the departure
Designer dress
See over there that light in the window
A naked bulb lightly swinging like a hooker
Flashing by the curtains
Home made green like a designers dress
Inside the mind of the house
A wooden floor
Scratched with shoes
Polished with sheepskin
Straight off the back of some isolated northern farm
Covered with gorse
Two shadows like they might be dancing play games with our eyes
They may only be cooking on the stove
With two broken elements
Or they might be ironing and folding the washing
From yesterday
Dried in the house
Adding moisture to the mould on the inside of the homemade curtains
Slowly turning green like the designer dress
That lies on the wooden floor
perfect commute
The intensity of an urban landscape has invaded my mind
You could call it the perfect commute
A Thursday like no other Thursday
I biked to work in the cold
It was grey and winter
Oh for five minutes of relief from the winter
Five minutes
I immerse myself in the landscape of a city gripped by winter
A cabbage tree at the back of a student flat behind a huge brick wall
An old bus still brilliant orange almost like we were in some state of mid western USA
A cabbage tree standing proud with a background of automotive parts made in another place but masquerading as part of us
A new part of the varsity some flash building fill with flash seats but man you should have seen the reflections of the old city and the subtlety of the frosted glass with a light behind it waiting to get out
Harbour doors grey like the winter but no parking 24/7 – of course
Net curtains hiding behind some hideously painted building but the shadow of the power pole was lost on the other commuters
Mr Shrubs has shifted and he has left a rubbish strewn rock filled deserted landscape behind a barbed fence
Elves are wanted for santa land waiting behind red corrugated iron doors
Work is only a small part of the day
At 7pm its raining
Its been dark for more than two hours
I decide to complete my commute
Im running home
Dunedin apocalyptic church has a large empty cross in the external wall
You can see through to the church with its empty seats devoid of souls
Theres an empty box with pils written on it as if drugs come in boxes now instead of tabs
A magnet on the back of a hooded sweatshirt some guy trying to be different attracting what with his magnet
The orange glow of a street lamp is eating fine droplets of rain on the overbridge side rails
Its far too much
It takes me twenty five minutes to run home and five minutes to walk up the steepest street in the world in the rain but the most incredible sight is the steam I have created adding to the smog of all the crazy commuters trapped in their little worlds missing all the beautiful details that we have created focussed on the dashboard and the mindless ads on the mindless stations playing mindless songs
The urban moments that are never less than my mind
