Little Melbourne 2#: Ode to my Home City

I will always be a Melbourne expat
Soaked in wine
Nerves stripped by coffee
Bones like ice and skin warmed
By leaking sunlight
dappled cities, traffic hustle me
for change
They bustle as the leaves rustle, while I meander
Like a ghost
Slipping like smoke
Through cracks in the crowd

Little Melbourne child
I am,
Revelling in cold nights and warm
Alcohol and music, lights
To dance
with strangers, and hold beauty in
their hands and mine
We absorb our surroundings
Like the café paper napkins
And club walls
With a sensory overload, a creative spark
Fired like fireflies behind my eyes
These new feelings grow
They ooze like tubes of bold new paint
On fresh brick walls
On blank canvas hearts

The coffee machine
It plays like drums in my head
I cannot think straight
when my nerves are stripped
Paranoia by substance, released on the public
In the hands of children, even –
enchanted by clouds of milk
When I cannot pay my phone bill
Or my landlord’s wife
Somehow
I can always find a way to fill my cup

You could lock my heart in a glass box
An adornment dressed in silver and gold
For your collection
An amusement, in you museum
But my heart is hostile in a hostel
Not a home
So we skipped to the seaside
And I lost my lover on the shore
Of self obsession, excentricism
And culture
Falling through the looking glass
I let go of his hand
Yet, without the city to sustain us
We had nothing much to talk of
And were lost
I used to languish in getting lost
To see where it might lead me
Now I languish in lost love
Because he left me, all alone,
In Little Melbourne