There’s a dragon flying on your arm

And a friendly reminder, as of April 2017, my first collection – BONE INK – is available for order from Guillotine Press. This is one of the poems that didn’t make it into the collection.

There’s a dragon flying on your arm

 

The second summer of love was in a ten year tailspin,

we’d wasted years backmasking the Bad Seeds in search of a

decent Springsteen song, the end was nigh,

all we found was Shoegaze and the clicks of Drum

and Bass. There was nothing left to shake from the decade.

 

We tossed darts through the death throes; endless games

with a dealer, tucked in the pocket of a battle axe

off Jasper Rd. Months spent honing our class A manners,

preparing our banter, lippy precision darts –

501, 501, 501 – while he bagged tabs and doves.

 

The guy looked like Jeff Duff, shirt open, twitchy

as a whippet. Blabbed lore as he rolled

the barrel of his favourite dart between

rubber-gloved fingers; a squint, feather-spin and

triple twenty. He had a Staffy that could open the fridge

 

and fetch beers, it’d nuzzle up and you’d have no choice

but to take the spitty tin. Three games or a beer before

we were allowed to escape. Amphetamines and tins of beer

never end well in the suburbs. We pulled up on night to see

cops dragging him through gravel, wrists cuffed,

 

hands still gloved in latex, dog chewing a silver bullet.

 

Another oddity from 2015. Still clearing out the strange, old stuff. For all you people not familiar with Sydney slang, silver bullet = a can of Resches.