The only time he let them down was the time they let him go.

It was nice to belong there, with the gang, with the crew, with the homies – ok they never called themselves homies, they weren’t of colour or cred – but it was nice to belong with them nonetheless. There was something about togetherness, something that roused a surge of vague emotions inside, something that was printed in thick black comic sans on stickers in tourist shops and the dusty two-dollar racks in the corner of greeting card stores. It was a kind of strength, or a joy, or a pride or something similar that crept down from oiled hairs to tightly laced shoes. He was one of them; they had a purpose. He could saunter into their afternoon gathering and give someone a high five and another someone a friendly nod. They were a gang of familiarity, names were known and stories told. Like what he’d had for breakfast (eggs) and why everyone’s mother was a Class A NAG. He said things like ‘fucking A!’ and no one thought he was joking, or had made a mistake; he rolled previously forbidden words around with his tongue, considered them as they bounced between cheeks, and gently flicked them out. And it was ok.

And people laughed. They laughed at his jokes, this gang. They lifted their heads from the photocopy jobs, from the cartoon images of Engels winking cheekily at Marx, and they smiled, one by one, a flood of watery association.

It was in university he had come upon them, a chance flyer sitting on his tutorial table, and he had nothing better to do, no one to see, so he went to them. They were all long-hair, all dank cheeks, all swing low boys and girls, with their feet up up up on the table and big thoughts on their shoulders. They understood things that he didn’t know this kind of people understood, they networked with the small town campus politicians and sometimes they spat about them later. They read old paperbacks and hated coca cola, but they had liked him, had shook his hand like a businessman and not an undergraduate, lent him flannelette shirts and reworked soviet dreams.

He felt uneasy from the moment that he brought it up. He pushed it outward with a tentative tip, tapped it just beyond his bottom teeth, until it flowed out quickly and naturally, like the contents of a jerry can, setting all the catechisms alight. It was something to do with economic management, something he had heard his father say, something other men said over the newspaper, with a coffee in hand and a deep authority; something he had wondered but never understood. It came out in questions, angrily, in warped confusions of text and integrity, in a quick and awkward flurry. And suddenly the doors were shut, if not proverbially, then quite literally and he wondered, his organs curdled, why he had ever even spoken at all.

Pomona, California

Rosie was all lady, she was. She was all thick silver zips and untreated leather, tiny freckled nose. She was small hips Ro. She tied her shoelaces tight and wore lumpy black cardigans, heard the husk of Tom Waits’ rise slowly out of old speakers in her one-bedroom apartment, telling her about the apricot tips she set alight in indigo skies.

I asked Rosie if she loved me and she told me that she did.

“Do you love me Ro?” I asked. “Do you?”

She was stripes down to her little toe, she was tight jeans and slick, slick, slick.

A brief description of an ambiguously aged woman who liked to stand in the sun

She stood surveying summer with one hand on her hip and some shadows in her sockets; a full, semi-exposed bust seeping out of a plain black bikini. The fag drooped out of a downward mouth corner (left and down, down low and left) like a strip of plastic cheese. It melted onto her face. She had a leathery stomach; darkened flaps hung over broken down muscle, a wrinkled cocoon for the organ of her post-mastication.

She was the kind of woman who filed skin cancers like toenails. She went to the tired local beautician each week with the newest incarnation of a sticky magazine subscription. And she lay there, thick and naked, whilst some pale thing rubbed oils heavily over her skin, she lay and willed cheap, violent pulsations into the rhythms of their oddly agamous neutrality. She had seen ten thousand furnaces of sun (bright sun, always bright); felt it heavily encase her, the porcelain layers of youth stripped off.

It was nice today, in her kaftan with a moistened fag. It was nice in the sun.

This little mumma appears in the current issue of conconversation, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music publication.

Skinhead

His flesh was so thin it was almost non-flesh. It hung, or rather, was suspended, loosely from his skull like a deflated balloon taped to a mail box, rendered virulent in the sorry wake of someone or others festivities.

The City Circle

They were busy in the mornings, those armies of gray.

They departed concrete houses. They nodded at their neighbours. They got into automobiles. They drove places. They got out of automobiles. They went to train stations and bus stops (various). They bought tickets. They listened to sensible songs on their ipods. They were important people, people in grey. Sometimes they wore a tie with a pattern. That was usually a joke. They were jokesters. They were pranksters. They sometimes sent a humorous email. They had a special email folder titled 'humorous', for those. They arrived at offices and had desks with little plastic containers in the top right hand corners. They called out to their secretaries and asked for the business cards to be reordered. They put the cards in the containers. They held their pens importantly at big desks with leather chairs. They nodded sincerely. Sometimes they nodded insincerely.

Then, in the latest afternoons, their brains fell apart, like bits of cake left out in the rain. They went to the train station, or bus stop, and sat next to someone with a crayola face and a bag of tricks. They thought about this person. This person probably rides a scooter on weekends and designs web pages, they thought. This person probably wears green hi-top converse shoes on Casual Fridays. This person probably is very lazy every morning.

If I was there, I would have felt the burning sensation on my shoulders.

Periodically, I search for short clips of gasoline explosions. I like to watch (with volume muted) the results of the leak; the thick red smoke as it propels forcefully upward and outward, and the flames which lay beneath the surface, waiting to puncture it and seep quickly out. The sky is slowly eaten up.

I don't think that this habit stems from some sort of carnal lust for destruction. I think it's more about the finality of things.