In the street

of my childhood

nothing is reliable.

My parents’ friends are dead.

Their children gone.

Familiar houses

are dissolving.

I’d welcome the macabre

solid comfort

of cemeteries and weeds

but instead

there is a tropical

rotting splendour

that disturbs and distracts

like an invisible cockatoo

shrieking from a tree.

Time is melting

everything I remember

into a soft silt

shifting under the mud-mangrove

smell of the bay.

While I wait

for the eternally salty water

to unanchor all my memories

and sweep my old self away.