Such an emptiness in me, and I don't know what it is.
Such an emptiness in me.
Is it like sitting on a bus waiting for your stop?
someone asks.
Is it like sitting on the train, waiting for your station?

No, I say. Not this emptiness.
This emptiness is like sitting on the train,
and everyone has hunched off at the station before
in their drab overcoats,
and the platforms you clatter through are empty,
and the bleached paddocks are empty,
the white utes abandoned, the gumtrees dying
from something under the ground, and
gangs of beetroot-dyed cockatoos have fallen dead
out of the sky and litter the road like fencing-gloves
stuffed with gravel
and you can almost hear the saddest leaving song
you ever heard
in the clacketty-clack of the wheels on the rails,
and a mangy old dog with a tongue made of tinned ham
and black rubber gums beside a forgotten letterbox
looks up with marbled eyes as you pass through
the urine-stained town and then turns to chew
at something burrowing into its hairless flank,
and the sad, sad people have left their dull, dull houses
with the taps running, leaving rust in the stone sinks,
and the stove-plates still warm from the last grey can of soup
and the perished curtains hanging limp out of windows
like champagne-spewing bridesmaids,
and the unwashed milk bottles standing, fermenting,
on front steps
and a humming child, pasty-faced,
with flies in its blank eyes
playing in a sour scratching of dirt
with a flattened bottle-top,
squashed miraculously by the back wheel
of a dripping slaughterhouse truck.