(r)Adelaide
Prose poem prompt: through the city
Only grains of sand would rap upon my door, tak tak tak – carried on winds from the north, which wilts drought-stricken flowers and drags the sailor out of Spencer gulf. Wide raging rivers bitumen grey weave through built-up forests of suburbia teeming with spiteful steel.
‘What is the city but the people’ wrote William so and so, city-planners aha-ing, drew a square in the ground, said “let’s put it there” and the people followed suit. No need for a map, perfect grid plotted for your neat little life. Fake mountains to the east, empty skyline to the west, endless sunburnt country north and south – let’s call that outback.
The rush of a country town, population one point five million and counting - down main boulevard, every person you’ve ever known, strangers all the same, so it goes. The pub does smashed avocado now and supermarkets sell craft beer – it’s all fizz and no fun. Over the road on high street, kindergarten kingpins mixing powder and paracetamol in middle-class family homes – cashing in on a population’s boredom, look at all these customers go, go, go!
So I lit a flame and let it burn, burn, burn to escape. Skittering king brown snake over white-hot sand, its belly aflame, finding comfort in shaded brush, cool familiarity, driven out again and again by fierce hunger pangs. So here it is, a hole, I could never fit, which carved a similar shape in me, as I left it all behind.
Vic Spandrio 2021
Good on ya J.D. Harms
