Randwick Bridge
The women call me Genghis Khan
For my chains and endless beard
Holding children to their chest
Dirtied little faces beaming
From their sodden naval sheets
-
The children stare with mouths agape
And giggle through their fluffy cloaks
At strange gruntings and moanings at night
Yet there isn’t much to see
With the wool pulled over their eyes
-
The men call me a hero tramp
For my brave, endless beggary
They count their shillings from their day
From their labour deftly spread about
The infinity of a day
-
Randwick Bridge sings to me;
A tarmac above my watery grave,
Whilst I dream of making passage there,
The filtered light speaks miracles
To my yellow, calloused skin.
-
Each day I stare with a fish-eye
Poised steady upon my view,
Upon our quarters beneath the world
The edges turn all fuzzy and blue,
For all visions come through dreaming
-
Footbridge to my sleeping quarters
Promenade to my begging spot.
Pier for my idle mind
And my teacher most kind indeed;
I march as a dead man in ether.
-
For one fateful day I lost my way
And fell into the water
Beneath the surface I saw so clearly
The strong foundations of the Bridge
And fell to sleep by the calm undulating vision
-
Before my fatal step
I etched my story into woodwork
My few lines of poetry to say:
-
“This wooden beam hath been my totem,
My ascension and my fall,
Look all ye upon its form
Like a cruel splinter in the sea.
-
I climbed the broken ladder rungs
A passage into death
And through my misery I hope
You learn from my mistake.
-
I took the fatal passageway
To dote upon the Bridge,
Sweet in all her promises
But cruel in passing her gifts.”
Filed under 
Come As You Are
In our century, convenience comes with the push of a button, the addition of water, the automation of a robotic call centre. While clearing the clutter and cobwebs from the crevices and corners from your place, you might be stuck wondering where you fit into all of it.
DSM-IV Categorisation for Facebook Social Anxiety Syndrome (pretend, of course.)
Status changes at least five times a day. Games and applications to the excess that the PHP script is broken. Copious wall postings, usually of inane conversation. Affiliation with numerous groups, syndicates and fan pages. Trolling, flaming and blasting are your favourite hobbies. Your photo gallery is immensely populated, to the extent that you have been asked politely to reduce its content. Disastrous sense of social isolation, segregation and/or perpetual self-comparison against invisible metric of what your friends are doing, who they are purporting to be and what you’re missing out on.
6,834,052,227 billion people are now present in our world. 4,057,913+ hectares of forest is felled every year. 16,228,904 tonnes of CO2 have already been released into the atmosphere. 9,716,799,700 kWh of electricity used this year so far.
With numbers this large, you can’t help but feel a little insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As a subordinate at your job, a number in a sprawling society and a struggling soldier of your own ambitions, it’s hard not to feel a bit squashed. But isolated from the whole? That’s where we’re wrong. We are global citizens, and through globalisation, we’ve achieved the means to branch out and embrace a kind of human reconiliation that we’ve never known before.
An academic member of the University who has presided for some 20 years, returned from overseas recently with the widest and cheekiest grin I’ve seen on anybody for a long time. She looked around and laughed and said to me, “You’ve got to see the bigger picture. Here, you’ll only see things through the tiniest lens.” I didn’t know whether I should feel offended or overjoyed at her sentiment.
Then I thought about how nice it would be to travel and be immersed in an experience outside of the comfort zone. That is, until I found myself helping some backpackers, some tourists and interstate travellers find their way around the Sydney metropolis. You come to realise that where you are can be perceived as just as exotic as where they hail from.
Edmond Dantès’s Inferno: The Makings of A Millionaire
There, on a table, surrounded at some distance by a large and luxurious divan, every species of tobacco known,—from the yellow tobacco of Petersburg to the black of Sinai, and so on along the scale from Maryland and Porto-Rico, to Latakia,—was exposed in pots of crackled earthenware of which the Dutch are so fond; beside them, in boxes of fragrant wood, were ranged, according to their size and quality, pueros, regalias, havanas, and manillas; and, in an open cabinet, a collection of German pipes, of chibouques, with their amber mouth-pieces ornamented with coral, and of narghiles, with their long tubes of morocco, awaiting the caprice or the sympathy of the smokers. Albert had himself presided at the arrangement, or, rather, the symmetrical derangement, which, after coffee, the guests at a breakfast of modern days love to contemplate through the vapor that escapes from their mouths, and ascends in long and fanciful wreaths to the ceiling. -The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas – 1844.
Imprisoned in the Chateau d’If – one of France’s most gruelling prisons of the time – on account of false treason, Edmond re-invents himself in a catharsis of faith, sacrifice and recklessness. He initially makes some foolish and amusing attempts at starvation and self-sacrifice, self-harm and solitude, only to be met with further contempt by the prison guards and the stoic walls themselves. Though he is imprsioned in body, there is no containing his active mind, bent on revenge and liberation. The real liberation, he learns after some great amount of time in captivity, is found by the metric of his own design.
This was something very interesting to read about and reflect upon: how often and how easily we fall into the trap of mass-comparison and the “grass is greener” ideology. While competition had brought him to detest those who sought his lover, and pride obscured the vision of a necessary path to re-invention, Edmond learns patience and stillness are his true allies, and that his supposed loneliness was really the void necessary to be filled by the self-respect that was missing
At first impressions a man of grievous misfortune and the product of a major stroke of bad timing, events take the turn of good favour through a thorough reinvention of paradigms; from the guiding philosophies of a wanderlust seafarer to the refined sensibilities of an aristocrat. And yet this fundamental procurement of “easy cash” bears repercussions and a myriad of moral messages – some more clearly allusive and some more profoundly realised than others. Edmond oscillates between degrees of altruism and shifts constantly through class sympathy that puts him in the favour of almost everybody he meets: this pattern of ‘happy-go-lucky’ and see-no-evil sounds ridiculously familiar for the unscrupulous businessman.
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