A zindan’s a hole with a grate,
Where the Russians keep soldiers of late,
Their genius and flair
Changing fear and despair
To morale, but it doesn’t translate.

🇺🇦

Another young woman is dead.
Her three-year old daughter is dead.
They’re dead to delight
All the hatred and spite
In a sad little narcissist’s head.

🇺🇦

Another Day at the Office

When there aren’t any cars on Pittwater Road, the silence is like the end of the world.

A single hiking boot lies abandoned on a bus stop roof.

Top deck of a B1. It’s a whole new world.

“I want to sit on mummy’s la-ap,” moans a boy to his mother on the B1 bus. He climbs on top of her and glances around. “I want to sit next to a window!”

“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” says the mother.

An old woman sits in the aisle seat of the bus. The window seat beside her is empty. She’s a big woman in blue jeans, a big black pullover and sunglasses. Her hair is dark brown, in a short bob, with a thin red head band.

Reaching suddenly across the empty seat beside her, she stabs a long finger at the window and speaks.

An old man on the seat in front of her, by the window, turns his head as far as it will go and looks at her in peripheral vision. He has a black cap, a grey cardigan and a messy shirt collar. His face is very red and his mouth is moving.

The woman flicks her hand at him in dismissal, but he’s already turned away.

At Dee Why the woman stands and the man follows her to the front of the bus. She sits in the window seat so there’s room for him beside her. He sits across the aisle.

Looking towards the IMAX Theatre and Anzac Bridge

From Druitt Street, Sydney

In Russia, a telephoned moan
To a friend is okay, when alone …
‘Got you! Caught in the act!
It’s a broadcast, in fact,
Cause the State listens in on your phone.’

🇺🇦

In the gulag he’s ruled by oppression,
Putin sinks into fear and depression,
Isolated, alone,
On his paranoid throne,
For his rivals are always in session.

🇺🇦

A correction, updating the score:
Six children were murdered, not four,
In Uman, as they slept;
Now the coward has crept
To his bed in the Kremlin once more.

🇺🇦

The Visitor

A Goanna in Crookwell

A block of flats looks down on Sydney Harbour from an otherwise green promontory, and on its roof a radar wing spins round.

The 504 to the city packs in the day’s worn out and weary, their faces angled to avoid each other. The video screen has also had enough. ‘No Signal’, it says.

A little house peeps over a fence, with exactly half a gutter full of brown leaves.

A woman stands on the bus with hectares of hair unleashed in long, dark ringlets, and a Plan B scrunchy on her wrist.

At a building site in Manly Vale, where there used to be a billiard table factory and then a furniture warehouse, the scaffolding gains two levels, and each level has its workers evenly spaced. It’s like the backdrop to an 80s music clip.

It Almost Makes Me Want to Learn to Knit

A needlecraft shop in York Street, Sydney

Someone take it away by the scruff,
Cause it thinks killing children is tough;
Oh, how many of those,
Until everyone knows
That enough is enough is enough?

🇺🇦

Putin’s prison, in spite of his orders,
Still struggles to widen its borders;
Since arming the gaoled
Appears to have failed,
Perhaps he’ll try drafting the warders.

🇺🇦

How bravely they froth and they foam,
The Russian elite, when they roam;
See news from the desk of
Young Nikolai Peskov,
Who served while he partied at home.

🇺🇦

King Street Facade of the Forbes Hotel, Sydney

The world is suddenly full of triple decker baby movers.

A man in his 60s, neatly turned out, walks briskly past in Aldi. There’s no one with him but he says “Oh!” in loud surprise, and follows up with two more of the same.

A young man’s lumbering run, shoulders dropping one way and rolling back the other, like a jerky metronome.