Sit in a backyard cement sea and drink a beer

think about how bad it is to drink beer

and all the other people I’ve seen drunk

the same thing and how bad it looked.

Why name a beer after a suburb?

 Maybe it’s the toast of the town

though I’ve been to Carlton

and nobody drinks it there.

The cement sea can move without warning.

Possibly my surface is

              cracked like the jagged tongues snaking

              under my seat though.

Sea sits outside my window,

                     grinds with my teeth.

Land laid in the forty’s,

             colonized shitty grass

 mosaic concrete at the feet of the valley.

Valleys don’t stay still    they turn

they mush rock and mud within

a water table I think.

So the sea turns too.

It rises and bubbles beneath

     the concrete, punctuating each bubble

  with a beat or crack in the surface

                a fractured crescendo that

       punctures

and though I feel it turn and see the cracks

maybe it all comes up from the bubbles in my

beer.