you did the right thing davey boyo when you left
your job as a milk boy at the end of that (summer
seventeen years old smart but overshadowing you
was the consciousness of not yet being a man not
yet standing taller than your sister boyo (milk boy
three dollars an hour running up & down middle
class streets hauling crates of slippery clear glass
in the rain your feet sinking into the grass it was
always a haven in the back of the truck (freedom
in the form of sliding stacks of crates & bottles of
milk sculled at each rest stop memorising every
dim housewife’s cryptic messages here an empty
bottle meant two a stack of two cent coins meant
payday wasn’t till tomorrow or hubby was away
this one might be on a diet (she’s switching from
pasteurised to lite we could reel off every combo
counting change in the dark yelling out homo for
homogenized (plain for the silver top laced with
extra cream at the end of the night i’d choose two
yoghurts one custard & then hit the shower get
that sticky milk off my legs when i started i was
nothing to the other boys (sons of working class
men whose jobs at the steelworks had morphed
into admin & power boats holden sedans (their
wives in their dressing gowns & slippers bustled
out to the front porch when our boss blew that
horn a kind of cross between a cow & a strangled
sheep up & down the jacaranda-lined streets in
the dark sitting in gutters waiting for the truck
talking shit about australian crawl girls & what
they smelt like i never did see a girl through a
window or a couple making love only tv sets &
automatic porch lights savage dogs & stunted
christmas decorations & i told my family about
that dog but they just laughed how could they
have known what it felt like running down the
street alone in the dark with a crate full of glass
& half the sky stained by arc lights & steelworks’
flames (feeling the muscles in my arms begin to
knot & bunch i felt the strange senses of a man
begin to seep into my miniature boyhood brain