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