Just pretend that I’m singing the titles to these blog posts, as tuneless as it might sound. It helps with the festive mood.
Up next on our reflections, David Goodwin on his poem ‘Cerulean Fire’.
Beau Hillier | Editor, pageseventeen
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I wrote this piece after an unnumbered collection of nights made up from moments just like ‘Cerulean Fire’, often as a passenger in a car sluicing through the glittering circuit board of Melbourne post 2am. I’ve written many more since.
Depending on how you approach it – not to mention how you choose to fuel it – a night out in most cities usually presents its own witching hour for all choose to partake. While such a thing is often a chemical romance, I’ve found that it doesn’t subtract from its almost whispering splendour, nor its power to hang silken, but still warm, billowing occasionally in my folds of memory.
I still have many snapshots from nights where the city pulsed like a living thing, its dark arms pushing us through its circus of searing green, molten reds and that omniscient liquid blue that poured over the glass in an alien sheen as you sailed by entranced, staring from within the eye of a gathering storm.
With psy-trance leaking out the windows the world was a videogame of holographic ghosts; it was slower and softer but with a holy urgency thrumming from both inside and out.
And often, just as in voodoo where the half hour before midnight is for things of light, the following time attracted different energies. It’s hard to forget the club’s neon roar, its crunch a foundry of the gods as Medusan arms slithered between duelling swords of purple; rapturous funnel eyes machine-gunned by searing strobe light as they rose like an army, yanking unknowingly on the threads of the night.
On nights like this the city and its secrets were a racecourse for colour and dark, twisting like strands of DNA through an Oz that glittered, pernicious, like a promise that couldn’t be kept.
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David Goodwin is a young Melbourne writer who is starting to enjoy poetry. This is his first published poem. He is currently seeking publication for his memoir detailing six chaotic years working nights in petrol stations. He enjoys psychedelic trance, semicolons, and attempting to train his French bulldog, Madeleine.