Perhaps a corroboree? Crime scene? Or cloudy sky with stars at night? I see faces, figures and footprints dancing — raging flames and fireworks, or flocks of birds in flight. When autumn leaves are falling, a breeze through plane trees paints the path with stencil-stains from leaves alight. Sleeves of gold, vermilion, crimson, brown — until life fades in winter's blight.
So far — and yet, like moth to flame: that alien world of drought and indifference; where days are so bleached with light, they're burnt in closed eyes by night.
An abrasive scrubland of parching wind and ultraviolet radiation; A tinderbox of accelerant and scent of phantom smoke. Where fire sired eucalypt wilt in thermal haze; and browning leaves keep falling like some foreign Autumn calling.
Out there red-stripe snake and spider eat each other, while ten-foot flying shadows prey on six-foot rat. Out there meat ants strip bodies to bone, while blowflies plague the shade and cicadas sound their siren.
But out there is peace, for people are nowhere. And so like vampire I hide in lair, until the ghost of day I stare. They say Hell is a place on Earth and in that summer for sin beware... the Devil down there.