Augustus Street vale Dave McEvoy I do the work of remembering now I wish I had done more before I see you there on the worn terrace stairs doing the daily junkie impression or the fingerprick test to see where youre at its all new to me but its your life its not obvious where the sunlight is from but something is cooking, the rocket ship fridge accompanies all lean to the radio - early days of the Hawke and Keating show and Enmore is our territory - leaf against concrete like a war starting then we were on a kind of frontier there was an anarchist bookshop you were upstairs, I was down - a kind of doorkeeper - foam bed on milkcrates Italian parsley wild in the garden and always tabouleh time the garage was full of communist stuff and motoguzzi - which seemed to me - as an unbeliever - something like a victory of the parts over the whole - a kind of Zenos paradox - the more work you and Gina did the less distance the machines would go I was in the party and you were a fellow travelling it was a haze of smoke we stood in I remember you fighting fit, off cycling in forgotten corners places I might have hitchhiked once but now I was employed I remember the night the dope cookies vanished and Mr Many-Hours-Sleep whod needed the sugar stumbling down the bleary stairs next day with the accusation cum revelation - it was the cookies - the cookies! we were going to free Nelson Mandela - and I think we did I was always grand in narrative you taught that life was tinkering that soup could be made out of a pumpkin without recourse to a blender or bamix even then you were the bloke with the short straw fate fixed you more tangibly but we sought contradictions together made ironies for art under the pain and the bleary ending Loftus Davros Elucidator, mastermind of an Underground Smackaboy of Murchie girl childhoods wry smile and wise counsel, friend things fall apart - you did a kind of showing the way no one would have chosen if theres a heaven ... if theres an after... in that case ... if is the best we can honestly say (blessed those for whom belief is culture) odds infinitesimal, still thats the virtue of a universe as good as infinite then why should not the soul be possible? weighing it of course was silly but the breath of a dream must rest somewhere how can anything be lost? so I have a place in mind where you are able-bodied, alert, astute where rapturous Christians linger in hells theyve cooked up but you have Billy Bragg and bicycles, Paul Kelly youre taking it all one act at a time looking down from the top of the stairs steady into steps of a parodic dance Elvis Costello croons to yours is a sure footed cynicism for arsehole authority you bear witness, you bear with us the world thats passing your life is solidarity with the dispossessed and the struggle came to you till you lived with the everyday struggle to be and so I say these last words left however little they may mean - go well, Dave, go well -
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 11:32:33 +0000
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