The walk along Brunswick Street to my office
up two hills and down two dales – why every town in Australia
has to have a street named for Hessian mercenaries
I don’t know – past the absurdly good coffee shops
and the absurdly good icecream parlours
and the absurdly good banks, the backpacker hostels,
the ethnic restaurants, the skin clinics
and fitness studios and chiropractors and nail bars.

A touch about it of D.H.S.S. and Camden Town,
a touch of Prenzlauer Berg, and then always a touch
of paddle-steamer, the tropical levity conferred
by the tracery balconies and louvres and pillarets
the rusting roofs and riotous growth;
taking in the trees as they went red and blue
and the stumps of the succulents spurted buttercream,
and the whiff of mock-orange and jasmine and chips.

The bookshop no longer, and the cinema no longer
and the theatre a fishbar theatrically named The Codpiece
but still the surprisingly earnest and massive hotels,
intemperance hotels, and one music venue after another,
and all of them Spelunken and grotto-dark,
and the endearing bars with their windows wound down,
and the customers staring out at the continuous paseo
of the young, the buxom, the drapey, the stringy:

the pre-owned and the pre-loved, the much-travelled
and the want-away, the ripped and the buff
and the sweatered and coated, the baby-dolled and the muscle-shirted
and the skirts pulled over trousers and leggings,
and the flipflops and biker boots, and tote bags and shoulder bags
strapped across the bosom. (And it was all one style,
and that style was called Alternative, or maybe,
Consensual Alternative at the World’s End.) The Judy.

The little nest – suite – of three or four subdivided rooms
– that plasterboard and aluminium arrangement
so relatively permanent in its provisionality –
the red daubed walls and purple foam sitcom furniture.
My office – hardly ever used in anger – though I did stuff
a thousand pages of Alone in Berlin into a cake box for collection once,
and then surfed home down ten blocks of Brunswick Street,
out of the green sky of the short northern dusk.