JEFF GUESS

Abandoned Car

This is its last garage
an old FB Holden
painted in the latest
colours of earth and stone

to which
on the downward track
of mallee scrub
it is slipping

into an atrophy
of orange scabs
and carious
lesions

wheel-less in a wilderness
of bridled inertia
the road that flies past
mocks its protracted idle

past modification
its only movement now
the slow alchemy of years
to this

old scabbed skull
eyeless in a gold afternoon
sunk in yellow grass
and stopped on empty.