View from the Great Victorian Spa Bath - Corey Wakeling

Corey is 24 years old and a writer living in Melbourne. His work has appeared in major newspapers, literary journals, forthcoming in anthologies Nth Degree: Australasian university writers, and EWF's The Reader.

View from the Great Victorian Spa Bath

It is waking up in

twenty-second intervals,

this outburst at 2.30AM.

Explosions have begun indoors.

You could take a child up

by the feet and shake them,

this relieves them of their

pilfer toys, found change. A

Melburnian child wearing a

blank scarf and black shoes

must look at the museum

aspect of Swanston Street

between intervals. Thudding

black laptop. Secrets of beeches

imported from the Peak District.

Secret architectural arrangements.

Local councillors pondering poetry,

for them the bobbing of a child upside

down. Melburnian children want

Snowy Mountains. Newman College

wants soft Snowy Mountains and

skis of Styrofoam. Whitley College

wants the marriage of Snowy Mountains.

Museum journalist Eyjafjallajökull wants

a broadsheet feature, a lost city, its wise

tenderness studied.

We had better

learn from Tasmania and invite the

beech tree incumbency, its ever shifting

nocturnal opinions. Peak District trees slide

into position like chess pieces. Eyjafjallajökull

is matriarchal from afar. Queen with Rook. The indefensible

offensive. Peak district locals close in their fireplaces

with found ash, betray their villages to Nottingham,

Birmingham, Manchester, and Stoke. There is

an abominable silence on the road to Winking Rock.

Village Victorians light their houses on fire as the

floods and locusts beat through the little pastures,

they take on Melbourne mostly, but some Ballarat,

a few beach combers Geelong. Imagine Eyjafjallajökull’s

joy at all of us boiling in a hot spring spa bath.

Counting the great discount, soothing the great eczema,

winking the great wink with a reddening, gaping blue eye.