Some Night Thoughts from the Rooftops of Contemporary Fried Food Eateries.

Here accumulate the drifts of seeds and dust carried by the desiccating wind. The gutters are heavy with felty weeds and plants as sharp as shattered glass. This week I read that in Shegeg Karo, Darfur, they are eating the burrs. Subsisting for weeks by consuming a sparse barbed-wire salad that they scrape up from the ground there. The children suck on prickles for hours; mock-lollies that crosshatch their tongues with lacerations. How plush then, this accidental hanging garden on the concrete rooftop in Perth. What opulent nature - almost obscene, the turfless grasp of plants. Wild peas seem to be growing in the window seals, everlastings clinging to the brickwork. There is grass, plush around the chimneys and spreading out a green, fraying rug. A lawn grown deep on airborne chicken fats in the effluvium. Commercially sized tins, Long-Life Deep Frying Oil, are stored in stacks. I consider for a moment whether that means the oil is long-life or if, once battered and fried, the label applies to the underlying product. A crispy giblet in the shape of John Lennon’s head under a bell-jar on the mantelpiece. Bullet-proof for years. Batter artefact. Crackling token. Shall I kick these tins to see if they are full?

There is a dry electrical storm gathering the skeins of cloud. The sky is bronze foam. My fillings buzz inside my mouth. Tapping my teeth together causes car alarms to go off. At home my bedroom has only a skylight and no windows so when the first vein of lightning quivered through the sky, the transparent part of my ceiling flashed white and turned everything into a photographic negative. For a moment I thought there was a hole in the roof. Or a huge aluminium bird flapping about up there. The second time I could see through my hands and the walls. 2 am, after a night spent getting narrower and narrower in thoughts, sleepless under the wash of the pedestal fan. So with the weather performing a nice act of anthropomorphic fallacy, it seemed only right to go out walking in the tiniest hours of the morning. OH PATHOS! howled the sky. A Shakespearian night, “blow you cataracts and hurricanoes!. THIS WAY IS UP! Screamed the clouds. SINGE YOUR HEADS! Was I actually still asleep? What dramaturgy is this?