WALKING DOWN ELDER STREET

Dropping down the steps from Heriot Row into Elder Street:
Knox Church and Dunedin North spread out like a tray
of date scones -- to number 10 where I lived and wrote
for five years in the late seventies and early eighties
watched over by Keyhole Stan, the landlord,
who had a penchant for factory girls and mental patients
and knew how to screw the system.
A rooming house supreme.
A kind of sheltered workshop for poets and strays.
A city of psychiatric clinics, pubs and bookstores.

On Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. I'd know exactly
where my parents were.
My mother in her homespun jacket and gloves.
My father in his sky-blue suit and dog-collar
looking up into some dark rafter squeezing out
a Wesleyan hymn somewhere in the Bay of Plenty.
And I, turning over in my sun-knifed room
wrapped in pill bottles and grimy sheets sweat
the shit of the condemned.
Up all night grinding teeth on Doriden, writing laments
to friends who drown in vomit of methadone and beer
at the cross-roads of the Greatest Little Bar in Aotearoa.

I wrote a lot but in the end had little to show for it.
Being a mental patient gave me an excuse to piss around.
I took a cheap room. Got lucky. Had a benefit-grant for as long
as I stuck to the pills and bashed out the odd inoffensive poem.
I scored the Burns Fellowship. After that nothing was the same again.
The best friend I had was when I had nothing.

Who cares if elderberries ever grew here
or where the street's name came from.
Hydrangeas and spiders and wild roses are what I remember.
There was a brewery here once and stables across the road
beyond the chestnuts and white gravel drive.
There was a bashed-up Mark 3 Zephyr leaning
against the concrete curb.
There were memorable parties at the Entwistle's.
From the top of the steps Signal Hill still looks like
a nineteenth century etching.

I inherited a piano from a former tenant --
it made my guitar sound good.
A kitchen table jammed in a corner of the room
served as a writing desk.
Stan fixed me up with a bookcase -­-
let me pin my Renior's and Van Gogh's on the wall.
With the Burns money I bought a desk-lamp and typewriter.
I still have the typewriter.
An ex-jockey, Ned Kelly, I shared the kitchen with
taught me how to ride a legless horse and take a shot to the head.
He wrote the best rugby ballads around
but never published.
Sipped his beer in small glasses.
Smoked only when he drank.
And as for Keyhole Stan, he got by on huge plates
of steamed vegetables, latenight prowling
and violating tenants' washing.
Rode about town in left-hand drive convertibles and dyed
black hair puffing like a Hollywood pimp.
Eventually kicking the bucket at eighty-three
alone on the floor of his wash-house.
Left no children but fondly remembered by
Elvis Crawford
Ding Dong Bell
Pillfreak Olds
Milkbottle O'Kane
Spanish Lucy
In & Out Hone
Burn Kelly.

I shifted North to get off pills and psychiatric.
Caught the last NZR bus out of the city.
I soon missed the view of the peninsula
through the poplars from the french door.
I could stand there for hours in autumn
mesmerized by the fog rolling off the brown hills.
I missed opening the door of my room to the main body
of the house and finding a near-dead drunk on the floor
half in, half out of the bathroom, clutching a set of bloody
false teeth to his chest. Out cold. Beaten up.
A black frost blowing through the wide open back door
and up the filthy passageway inviting anyone to walk in . . .

In the end
students took over.
They're less trouble, the new landlord said.

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