Notes from the diary that survived 2004

I woke early in the morning light offering up my face to the mosquitoes, slept and woke again with my nightie twisted around me, sweating. Blue paint and olive oil in that dream, three bodies, then just me and him. For a while I was in my old house, then a bedsit flat in town where I could be alone with him. His hair was spirally and fell like a horse's tail. Then we were in an open sided shed. He was soft and real and he liked me.

When I pulled into the dentist's car park to pay the bill
I nearly cleaned up the opened door of a Commodore sedan.
An old Aboriginal man sat in the passenger seat,
nodding away to Bruce Springsteen's
The Promised Land on the radio.

She goes to pre primary and comes home with a picture titled "My Family".
It's a collage of different fabrics glued onto a template.
Me.
Mum.
The third figure had been carefully erased.
When I quiz her teacher, she said, "She told me she didn't have a Dad."
"I thought every kid has a Dad?"
"It's a bit sensitive sometimes. She just wanted you and her in the picture."

The fat state prosecutor sits astride a confiscated Harley Davidson on the front page of West Australia's only daily. Today I drove the south coast highway with a Spaniard hitch hiker who wanted to get dropped off on the corner. Drove down to the East end at Cosy. A man stepped out on to the road.  There were police lights flashing and cars all over the place. Five squad cars spread over the corner. An ambo too. It looked like a bus crash.
A cop stepped up to my van.
"Hello! What's happened?"
"Not too much, M'am. Just some bikies running amok up the other end."
When I got up the hill to my friend's house, he said Baz had been down to the camp a few times, blind, in his unregistered bomb with an old pistol that had the bolt taken out. Legless Bazza, teeth missing, handlebar moustache, waving his dodgey pistol. He's not afraid of dying, is Bazza.
Bazza came up to the house later all hyped and said one of the cops had been talking to him at the corner; blonde, swept back hair, ice blue eyes, Nazi Youf if ever he'd seen one, he said. The cop was really checking him out. Bazza was sweating out mull and wine and illegal firearms until he realised the cop was just smoothing out his hair in Bazza's aviator sunnies.
"Three days without a bathroom mirror ... those poor bastards don't know how to live rough," Bazza said.

I've murdered two mice. I hit one with a hammer and he still wouldn't die, pinned under the trap's wire with bulging eyes. The final splash of red blood surprised and shocked me.

Dark side
I covet the tanned hide of a Thylacene.
I have a favourite child.
My body is drawn to those I don't like very much
and I can walk away with only a tiny,
jingly part of their soul attached to me.
In need of drama, I spray Aeroguard on a single platoon of marching ants
to see what they will do.

Dog catcher came today.
I count up the months like a miser over butter portions.