Cutlass

Cutlass

She’s a pirate. A savvy swashbuckler of the seven seas of suburbia. She walks the plank and the pathways of jetties, sneakers splashing in puddles of dry leaves that fall from the masts of scrap metal ships. The swaggering saunter cuts through crowds of the Oceanside taverns, the down and out drinkers that sit with their rum and lament the red dust that runs for miles and drowns the land so far from the coast. She hangs on the prow, proud like the figurehead that slices through the waves of early morning mist and traffic, traffic lights that flash between red and yellow like the sun that sets on a horizon of shimmering stretches of water or heat haze.

Headphones hang in strings of coloured beads and talismans from the travels in her enigmatic one-day-I-will-leave-this-dying-town state of mind, trailing from a black beanie, a buccaneer’s bandana to keep in the riotous thoughts of rebellion. The wind off the sea that she’s only ever dreamt about plucks at the not-quite dreadlocks, knotted through the months of a suburb too drought stricken to waste water on washing hair.

The dust stained skin of sunburnt country says to sunbeams that create stretching mirages on the sea after a storm, the light browns of sands on shores so far away. Her face is weathered from the wind that kicks up waves and washes of faded watercolours, craving a soft touch to caress the hard corners of eye patches and wooden legs and cutlasses.

The sash that slashes her shoulder to hip, ends in the bag that bounces on her waist like the bobbing of the parrot whose plumage parodies the myriads of light thrown from the water. It glints in her eyes, the daggers that aren’t swinging from the belt are sheathed there, waiting to be drawn as soon as the cannons begin blasting holes in the alibi that one day she will by able to heave that anchor to and set sail from this stale port of dry water tanks and the endless attitudes of I’ll-stop-drinking-when-the-rains-come.

While she’s moored in the monotony she skirts her skiff around the houses of the whores and dozing drunkards, and finds her refuge amongst the dark alleyways where no one can afford opium but the dank dampens the gunpowder that she’s got stocked in the hull of her vessel, that builds up and up with every jibe and stab of cold reality that no one ever leaves such a town. Each drip drives home the drudgery and drags home the folly of freedom when the sails of your ship hang in shreds.

But its still inevitable that one day a skirmish will send the sparks too far and those explosives will shatter her savvy into driftwood, and the taverns will murmur and roll over in their sleepy little bed of island in the sea of drought and wonder what ever happened to that bootleg of a girl that always dreamed of getting out but never could.

She hears the seagulls that would never make it so far inland and sees the white sails on the horizon, and dreams that one day her small town suburbia will be bartered for the open sky and success and the swashbucklers of cities and the sighs of anonymity. She’ll find a courageous captain and a crew of unconformity and a cache in which to stow away the centuries of ammunition. She dreams of docking but never dropping anchor, never letting a place grow old like the marooned town in which she is drowning.

She dreams that one day she will sail away, with her black pirate flag in tatters but flying nonetheless.