The Fog of Freedom

(Incident in an Outer Suburban Park at Night Time)


A low fog of distorted sky
in the bush park after 3 AM
Fudges a streetlight shine
among re-growth gumtrees.

And the halo of the highway halogen
blurs its eyeless-coward-yellow
into the shadowed creek recesses
of remant bush-wetland rises,
where an unminded flotsam
of loose teenagers ramble
to the smoking of fat grass
about thin sixteens of years.

In a freedom of nights being
now taken out of bed,
Out of the fenced and gated
detachment of their lives,
As if no parent back in
the shrouded night’s shutness
In the damp-dreamed houses
of streets near or far, bothers
About them enough to
be getting up to asking after
Where they are or waiting up
to find how they are.

Huddled in the fog
along tarred bikepaths, like a shadow
Heidleberg school of scenes in these
after midnight landscapes.

With no camp, no clandestine fire
to circle as a centre,
no satisfactory or temporary hearth
to gather round.

Just a wandering darkness
picked out in red joint ends
As they knock marijuana shoulders
and elbows each.

Then a female, stranger -
an older teen or 21stC adult? -
Screams from the scrub, comes
falling to broken wings of knees,
a waif curling into a foetal ball
before them, frenzied, not breathing,
choking up in fog, coughing liberty
as if wanting some other, frothing
grief, wailing hoarse abuse, incapable
of focus on a conversation.

Her distress sows discord
like the inarticulance of a kicked fungus,
let loose in the night,
poisonous in its stray uprootedness.

With a gaggle of teenager help
she recoils into higher vegetation
And only with the arrival of
a quartet of police does her
banshee wail settle to curdle
in a sentence that they can hear
and understand:
‘My ex-boyfriend took my mobile phone!’
Said as if she’d found, and lost,
a key to one of those houses.

The female, quieted, eschews
the arrived medical ambulance,
Wanting only to go to a free friend,
begging someone's mobile to call for a lift,
but failing, she accepts a prisoner-like lift
up-back with the police.

The other squad faces the teens,
now perched suckpipe-free
and smokeless on the edge of a BBQ,
like daybirds liberated from night trees,
like daybeings freed of a darkness.

And freely commands them,
binding them like public parents:
‘Now Go Home! Go Home.’

Said with more passion and bother
than the ones at home.


26 August 2006 © Wayne David Knoll
Bayswater, Victoria