Tim Heffernan lives between the escarpment and the sea at Wollongong, NSW – a refugee from various towns on the Murrumbidgee River. Having Bipolar 1 for thirty years he enjoys living on both sides of the margin. His poetry has benefited too?
Breakdown
This morning – the coldest
November’s morning for a century
I look out the kitchen window
at the fluorescent jacketed man
chaining the neighbour’s ute
to a tow truck that I can’t see
because my garden has grown
and screens this suburban view.
Soon there is nothing but the street
and I think back a year and a bit
more and the times before
when my motor broke
and the ambulance came
and towed me back to the workshop.
Flat noises
Pipes hammer warnings
of the impending gloom.
Doors slammed
too loudly
in anger
shake the transient rooms
that are not home
but another place to live.
Furtive,
muffled voices
drift
then intrude
through the first floor window.
Darkened
he remembers the ward.
The fiend has returned.
