Adelaide Festival
I am in town
staying 10 floors up
with a view of cranes, cars
and the casino
I visit friends with small children
Four heads bob
to Play School songs
faces slack with delight
Their small white limbs
flail and jerk
clap hands
crocodile jaws
stars in the sky
Stomp Stomp!
eyes wide
spittle sprays
dancing is an inalienable right
wading through late afternoon
white wine
we cheer them along
affirm their inelegant joy
Later that night
I dodge drifting posses
girls with owl eyes
and ironed hair
boys rolling on beer
baggy jeans
and spanking new white runners
Across the road
a crowd is frozen
in halted momentum
3 bucks tip forward
chests lean
legs scissor
fists clench
explode across the pavement
shouting revenge
while the girls
and softer boys
hover
suspended in the burst bubble
of hot night inebriation
over the body
red shirt
cream pants
slumped to one side
he does not move
I did not see the punch
but it has split open
the bustling night
of festival city celebration
Everywhere I walk in this town
I am knocking against shoulders
and elbows
no-one watches where they walk
At 11pm a line of bobbing bodies
puckered flesh
and slack alco pop mouths
spills out of Hungry Jacks
the mall is littered with
broken glass and abandoned French fries
Police on every corner
I count ambulance sirens
1-2-3
In the festival club
burlesque acts top off the night
a woman with a black bob
inserts a corkscrew into herself
then stands on her hands
spread her legs
and a red flower pops out the top
of this inverted vase
artists and those who like to be associated with artists
sit under fairy lights
dance on wooden boards
drink beer from plastic cups
swanning in their sense
of in-house belonging
It is a half hour walk
from the apartment
-where the children are now fighting off bedtime
I leave the mothers alone to deal with that one
their anger as uncensored as their dancing joy
to the festival end of town
I walk through the roaming
stumbling groups
who – fifteen, twenty years on from the dancing children
now need to be lubed up to try and find
that uncensored joy
just over the line from
random explosions of anger
The boy in the red shirt
lies still
sensible adults wearing linen stride past
ignoring the trauma
not my business
don’t want to get caught in the splash of
blood or dirt
The police buzz towards the scene
The snapshot starts to dissolve
as I walk past
head down, eyes straight ahead
trying to navigate
a straight line
from the sleeping children
through the unfolding street tragedies
into the place
where a green plastic pass on a lanyard
tells me I belong