Under the Flinders Street Clocks

I am waiting

We were seventeen when you said
we’d meet under the clocks
at Flinders Street Station, each decade
for twenty years I waited for you.
Photographed by students, longingly harassed
by alms gatherers, still there the third time
that other guy, seen by everyone
in the woollen monk’s habit morphed out of uni
hair unfledged as usual, held there by an umbrella

I am waiting

At the forty year plimsoll line
new trains bringing new suburbs
of ancient peoples having traversed
the earth, I am waiting for Esperanto
to ask them all where you are.
I will be under the hands of half a century
as the new ticketing system fails again,
in the chimes of reasons the next time
to make sense of this liturgy of travail

I am waiting I am waiting still

First published in Bukowski On Wry,  I am Waiting Lawrence Ferlinghetti Series, Silver Birch Press.
Australian Poetry Journal Members Anthology
‘Unstill Mosaics’ The Book of Love, Loss, and Longing, Busybird Publishing 2019.
‘Abandoned Soliloquies’ UnCollected Press 2019.
Photo: Heather Provan ‘Flinders Street Station Melbourne.’