PUNK POETRY: The Right Hostel by Amelia Walker

 Written on Wadawurrung land (commonly known as Ballarat, Victoria)

 

SMS from my mother: 

Hope you got yourself a decent hostel this time.  

 

Yes. Everything I wanted             

            – I reply  

 

from my lumpy top bunk, rattling only slightly with the thrum 

of a skinhead band in the bar below, screaming, 

WE WISH AUSTRALIA HAD ITS GUNS BACK.  

 

The yellow pillow smells 

of damp walls that smell 

of smoked cones and spent sweat, 

nightmare lust and midnight yiros. Still

I wrap it tighter round my ears, 

turning sharp knife words blunt.  

 

I do lie – but never to my mother.  

I wanted this, much as I’m hating this.  

I came to find the real Australia, 

to sleep with the real Australia 

and be sleepless with Australia 

– the splitting too-much of it, 

the shadows piled inside 

every politician’s scripted speech 

and unscripted gaffe 

– the Australia that shouted down a carbon-tax 

and yearly lights up fireworks 

to commemorate all it razed 

with those guns it still wishes for – and has.  

 

This real Australia is not the land 

– that still has other names 

and people who still know, still hold them. 

This real Australia was brought here, 

dumped here,  

ran wild here like the foxes. 

This real Australia is fake as fuck.  

 

I want to purge myself of it, 

but first I must know it, 

get skinless up close to it, 

rub against this Australia in ways I couldn’t 

in any serviced apartment or five-star hotel 

– even though it built them 

and seeps all through them 

like it’s through me, 

this rapist Australia I don’t want 

but am. 

 

That’s why I’m lying top bunk, shaking 

with the fever screams of a town built 

from stolen gold sold to erect stone facades 

and pointy church spires. 

I’m impaled on it, this real Australia. 

I’ll wear its razor rash tomorrow 

and all the days after.  

--Amelia Walker