for Kate and Nicola and Wayne and Paul and Cameron and Skye and Kylie and Nathan and Cameron and the weird guy next door.  


Here’s to you, my crazy friends
You ******-up misfits too cool for my school
But you liked me anyway, you let me
read you my book of poems
You played Bone Machine while I was tripping
We walked through the suburbs looking for fairies,
We slept with each other despite my huge crush on you
You liked me anyway.

You taught me to smoke ****
To stop hating on op shop clothes while
I wore Country Road and cashmere vests.
We watched the sun come up, smelling of sweat
and drugs and DJs’ last hurrahs and dark old
warehouses, kerosene fire batons and your menthol
cigarettes.

I gave you Siddhartha and Guildenstern and Rosencrantz,
though it wasn’t the first time.
I loved it all: the guitars, the punk chords, the dodgy old houses
in run down parts of West End,
the random houses, the secret nights smoking your
Champion Ruby in my old *** pipe because we’d
run out of **** and Henry Miller wouldn’t settle for just plain *****.

Bohemian Cafés and curries,
girlfriends turned turncoat then lesbians,
your secret *** parties that I never found out about ‘till years later
your Mezz Mezzrow typewriter and bright candles of novel beginnings
that never saw the light of day.  Her sweet little hips showing a little too
clearly with the the shining light from inside as it lit her silhouette on
your balcony. I miss you guys, with your madness your friendships and
deep inner hipness that wasn’t in me.

So it’s years later now, we’re old and I ain’t seen you in years.
Wayne showed up in a café one day with CDs of his latest, still cool
I was studying Mandarin, and I wanted to reconnect
He gave me his number but I didn’t call him, I can’t explain why.
You showed up one day, “weren’t you going to come and say hello?”
I was but I still don’t know how.