Baby Powder

BABY POWDER


Like a bottled sifter
this desert earth is full
of white talc gone to powder
or bleed-powdered talcs of some off-red hue or cry
that desert-road users otherwise call bull
dust, the unpolished pits will explode on being hit in soft white dry-mist
as if powder monkeyed with small restraint
that's used in a talcing bottle-end's fist,
like earth-set random explosive devices whose clouds
fly out so far from being blessed rain;
those pan-plain towelling spreads on change tables with unlidded
sprinkles that sift out to the perfumeried appearance of most fine
matters, so subtle and so soft that every modern post modern kid
is tioleted in products of this outback of desert mines
and sold into the same coughing plastic-bottled whiteness
that would bog down and undo travellors in the powdered dry-ice
of its talc-ground bulldust ambience covering ruts and wallows
for the supermarket-shelved bottles of a commonly bought nicety
of deserts that no consumer would admit to want to swallow.


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- Dingo Hills, Simpson Desert, Towards Old Andado, Northern Territory