Morning All 
Okay then... so why the hell did I choose to write a game preview for Bye Week of all things (thereby forever confusing the very simple concepts of "game" and "preview")?
Frankly it was for a lot of reasons:
1: I thought it would be a fun challenge
2: I already had a lot of footy-related stuff rolling around in my head, and writing about the Bye gave me a chance to express them
3: I hadn't written for myself - just for the fun of it - in literally years... and I missed it
4: I'm a sucker for a soapbox, and a double sucker for competitions
5: But basically because a lot Freo people - MY PEOPLE - were really hurting at the time.
Freo's season had taken a massive gut punch with injuries before it even started, early performances weren't up to people's expectations, Cerra's signature speculation was rife, yadda,yadda,yadda...
As a result, this whole bloody Freo board (which is supposed to be something fun and entertaining to do with one's time) had seemingly become a haven for sack-cloth, ashes and preaching the Armageddon.
I get that its been a pretty crap season in a lot of ways... but some of the negativity in here was getting me down so much there that for a while there, I literally had to stop reading the boards entirely.
Of course people have the right to complain, and express themselves. And yes - mistakes have been made this season, and I'm sure the players and coaches themselves would readily admit their best performances are still before them this year. But they are also human beings, with feelings and weaknesses as much as everybody else.
While I'm a dyed in the wool optimist at heart, and while I know the playing group are trained and told to ignore the stuff they see online, I figured the negativity might possibly be getting to them.
The fact Son Son felt compelled to signal to all his doubters to go f*** themselves - immediately after kicking a goal in the middle of a match - ...well it kinda sealed the question for me: Freo's players and coaching staff either read these boards themselves on occasion, or else hear this stuff we say through second-hand hearsay... which frankly is even worse.
I respect people's right to say what they want to here, and will defend that right vigorously myself. But at the same time, I will quote Sir Laurence Olivier here, and remind people that the quality of their life is brought about by the quality of your thinking, and that words carry with them chain reactions like a stone that is thrown into a pond. (Please keep that stuff in mind on occasion when speaking about the team.)
At the same time though, I didn't want to sugar-coat things in my preview. The season definitely went a bit askew, this is a game based on performance and measurement, and whether we all like it or not, at times that performance has been decidedly sub-par according to the very measures decided on by the players and coaches themselves.
I originally wanted this piece to reflect all that, to express the realities of the whole situation and how everybody was thinking, and then try to get everyone's mindsets back on track... but that was too big a task, and frankly I don't have the right to tell people what to think - I can only express myself to the best of my ability, and leave other to draw their own conclusions.
This was the overall mindset I had when I went into drafting and writing the following piece - simply entitled "The Waiting".
Why call it The Waiting? ...because it's bye week (duh!)
...and because to me, bye week always feels hugely frustrating.
Bye Week to me is always like "Footy is here (yay)... but then it's taken away again (Boo!)" and it always leaves me feeling listless, lost, at a bit of a loose end, and very, very frustrated. The end result of bye week on my mindset is very much like going through some horrible combination of both coitius interruptus, and waiting in traffic when you're late for work (...yeah - I have some interesting commutes!)
But I realised the frustration of Bye Week, and of waiting in general, isn't just confined to Freo fans. It's entirely universal... so when writing this thing, I really felt the pull of something deeper once coming up with that title and its subject matter... so I decided to really go digging for it in my writing.
There's a whole bunch of other reasons why I called this thing The Waiting... but now I'm getting ahead of myself. To learn the rest, you'll need to read it sorry.
This piece is longer than I thought it would be, and its late because I'm a pernickety bugger (insert joke about waiting for The Waiting here!)
...plus its only half finished at present, because there was just so much stuff that kept coming to me which I really wanted to say
Sometimes as a writer you spend a lot of time looking for a rich vein of content - but writing this stuff however was more like nicking an artery: inspiration came flooding out under pressure, there was an awful lot of it, the whole writing process was messy and frenzied, and it took a lot of time to turn it into something useful (think of THAT SCENE in "What We Do In The Shadows", when a really prissy vampire is trying to suck someone's blood in a neat and tiny fashion. Well that was me when writing this piece. XD
The piece was also inspired by "Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas too, and makes the occasional reference to its language. It'll therefore help if you image the piece being read aloud by an Aussie version of Richard Burton (you can hear the original here - it's bloody long, bloody magnificent, very well written, and VERY funny on occasion).
Enough said... let's get on with it - the rest should hopefully be self explanatory... (because otherwise I can't write for crap and need to take up knitting.)
Part one is attached in image format below, and I've pasted the raw text below it (minus the standard disclaimer). The rest of it will follow very shortly, once I finish the graphic design.
Click on the thumbnails to view each full page, or scroll down to view the full text (apologies if I stuff this up, I've never uploaded pages like this before)
This one's for the lovers of language! Good people of BigFooty, for your reading and footy-related entertainment, I proudly present: "The Waiting - Part One"
Page one
Pages 2-3
Pages 4-5
Pages 6-7
Pages 8-9
Pages 10-11
________________________________________
The Waiting (Part 1) - Text Version:
To begin at the beginning:
It is chill windless, full-mooned midnight,
in my lulled and dumbfound port-side town
at the very edge of the world.
on the icy and unloved Saturday eve
of our annual mid-winter bye.
Tonight is solstice to my townspeople’s passion,
winter to all our discontents,
and the much-hated mid-point
of an annual pregnant pause in the middle of football season
so most my sports-mad town is sleeping now.
Life’s rhythms for the next seven days
Will be subsumed into hours of footy-less, meaningless musing
deadening our senses and permeating our happiness with impatience.
Only you and I are out tonight
Hoodie-huddled in the shoulder-shrugged streets
Our coat-pocketed hands buried lock-elbow deep,
Steaming and striding our sleepless sport-less frustration
through frigid, starless, cheek-slapping cold,
on a night where nothing is moving,
A night with nothing to move us.
Robbed of its regular winter love,
the entire town is trapped
in perfect silence and eerie expectation...
the icy stillness so unbroken,
we can actually hear the townsfolk’s breathing,
and rustling in their beds..
But be still now. Hold your breath and listen closer.
Because on this night… of all nights –
if you let the silence hold sway...
and still the thoughts within you enough
to match the stillness without,
Bye night is the night
you can hear the people’s dreams.
Listen... the supporters are dreaming
The players are dreaming
The umpires and runners are dreaming
Commentator, coach, captain, consultant
Volunteer, administrator, physios and medicos,
The fans, the fanatics, legends and losers,
The has-beens, could-have-beens,
and those that never were...
all of them have their own particular football dream.
And tonight - in the stillness and sullen silence of bye week
Be they waking or sleeping,
this is the night when these dreams are overheard.
Because even in their deepest sleep,
the townsfolk’s tossed-and-turned,
bedclothes-rustled body language of somnolent frustration
rings out like a unbidden whisper.
Muttering their innermost secrets
out into the moonlit midwinter stillness of their bedrooms
So be silent now,
Look around you and listen as we walk.
And bear witness to the dream-whispered stories
from both some of our fellow, footy-manic brethren,
and their town that’s lamenting a momentary pause
of the sport which has come to define it.
If you do so, you will see,
that all of them (and all of us),
each in our own listless ways
are just trying to deal with the Waiting.
_____________
It is bye night in our fields and ovals.
In cosseted change rooms, black as boot and scattered sock
discarded strapping lies fallow over benchtop bed and concrete seat.
Shower spigots splash their intermittent tears
onto shower-misty windows studded with scale,
Empty hangers hang in empty lockers,
And in every room, at every field,
it is still as contemplation, as silent as failure.
Only the Humming-bird whine of exit signs
ring softly down concrete passages of our catacombic halls,
past meeting rooms, where minds only meet in opposition..
and change rooms where nothing ever changes save for the names,
to the heart of our cooch-clad temples.
Where weeks before,
colour-coded messiahs of our warring houses
strove with sherrins against external foes and inner demons
possessed by a lust for possession.
Where blind ball-toss bustled the rucks to reaching high as Cazaley
wrestling elbows, their fears and fortunes on tap
as mids dashed fervent out of the muddled middle,
Running their fifteen along a forty-five,
hurtling square-wards, eyes beyond the oval arc –
Looking only where others were going
And the forwards loped sly down invisible paths
wheedling forwards, coaxing back, gesturing sideways
drawn to the places others have fled,
All fluid as water – holding its shape.
While the poncho-clad masses of frozen faithful
Shivered and shouted tiers of rage, pleading for pea-whistle protests,
Awaiting the trump and the shout -- the claxton-herald end to all labours,
the exultation and lamentation of champions,
and the shuffle-standing exit of the half-happy throng,
funnelled car-bound through congested doors and hallways,
As crowded as matchsticks at match end.
But tonight it is bye-week..
So all our sacred temples are silent now.
But look harder tonight -- past the fields,
and up in our stands. Do you see it?
The sighs, cries and long-held breaths of the faithful
are still in the stands where we left them...
All the dreams, prayers, chants and curses
we bellowed into dragon’s breath together
Are all condensed to condensation.
They have formed into wisps of mid-winter fog
White as a chevron - silent as a snowdrift
Blending now with the glistening mists
that bead softly over our tiers and turnstiles,
on cooch leaf and beer cup,
folded seat and pie-crust,
fence post and goalpost,
the sauce stains splattered like blood stains,
and the wounded grass.
By morning, our cheers will become the dew
Feeding the grass, and help it heal.
And our chosen few - the noble twenty two
will run out again on grass made green
by our passions and sorrows made solid.
Tonight however, our fogs of war are still silent sentinels.
standing by the seats where we birthed them.
and looking East for the the sunlight,
Which will allow them to commence their noblest work.
It is cold misty midnight on our mid-winter bye,
and even the very air itself is waiting.
________
It is ten minutes past midnight
on our annual mid-winter bye,
And George and Joyce --
The husband-and-wife owners of Blarney's sports bar
and resident lifelong, geographically-displaced Cats fans --
are manning their Karaoke console.
They are happy, contented,
and pissed as a urinal - with not a stable leg between them...
And who for reasons incomprehensible to everyone but them,
are bellowing out (sans accompaniment)
a ball-strangling rendition of the Geelong Cats club song,
like a 1970's Tom Jones chart-topper,
at the very highest heights of their tone deaf,
Blue-and-white forever striped, Ablett-loving lungs.
They are selfishly hogging a long suffering mike
which even God himself would have
ages ago begged them to drop.
Amusing the ears of their cat-loving family,
And abusing the ears of the bar staff,
As they warble and croon their
heartfelt-yet-horrible caterwauled cacophony
out of their intimate little sports-bar home,
and into the spotlighted, patchwork-painted walls
and shadow-clad corners of inner city evening.
In the process, they are chasing
all their more Geelong-intolerant patrons
And we - the passers by -
ear-clapped screaming away from their rowdy row,
And back out into the evening’s chill.
With all of us glad to be passing by earshot,
of that drunken duet’s impersonation
of a clowder of alley cats brandishing chainsaws
in fever-pitch battle against a voice-broken choir
of Tom Jones impersonators,
and their kazoo-wielding, jug-banded orchestra.
George and Joyce boost their warble’s volume,
in the distance behind us as we flee.
Sending their sub-woofers off to meet their maker,
and bringing their verbal barrage back within earshot.
We can now distinctly hear their friends and family
laughing, cheering and clapping them on.
Somebody calls for an encore —
People start fleeing a little faster.
They are singing, laughing and are hugely happy tonight,
potentially simply because we have left,
and we are now happy and laughing too,
frankly for much the same reason.
Because during bye week...
bouts of tympanic membrane piercing,
Avoiding all people who are drunken Cats fans,
(or chasing away all those who aren’t)
are both understandable, acceptable ways
for some folks to deal with the Waiting.
____
Listen harder now,
For the next set of dreams
are softer, smaller, and therefore easier to miss.
It is bye-night in our coastal town,
And Auskick’s teeming hoard of future champions
are cosy in the snuggery of their beds,
And are also dreaming...
Of their tiny epic prize-fights on AFL weekends
before the distracted horde.
Of ball-chasing boundary games on the side-lines
of battles royale between sharks and bulldogs
with Mum and Dad watching in the shade of ancient fig trees.
They are dreaming of game-day weekends
of train tickets and duffle-bags,
Or their feared opponents in the bright Blue Tigers of Carine
and the Winnacotted Cats.
Of grazed-knee greens and ill-fitting gurnseys
Of splayed fingered hands shooting blindly skywards towards the blue
hoping to harvest the sky Sherrins that hide in dazzling sunlight
Of imaginary ice-creams being smashed into left-hand leather
Of kicks, and falcons, and tears in that order,
And the trench-coated semaphore flags
Of the compassion of umpires with intermittent blindness
Of the encouragement of supporting strangers
and the bitterness of opposing parents,
Of shoulder-patted niceties from school-mates and teachers
And shiny dusty ribbons hanging in the loungeroom.
Of turn-taking possessions with mixed gendered teammates
Of hair-ties and shin guards,
and what’s-that-girl’s-name?
And wishing that she were on their side.
Of vinegar chippy sandpaper-salt that cuts at their gums
Of hotdogs and mars bars,
soft-drink and sandwiches and orange peel grins,
bible-black onions and carbon-dated sausage,
Of smoke from the BBQ that wants to hug their eyes
Of volunteer labour packing lolly bags and fairy bread
And of guernseys that hide the spilled mustard
Of ebullient mothers, straightening sock and sipping lattes
of dad-guarded urinals the size of skyscrapers,
With yellow-wet concrete and swearing in the stalls
and studded boots skidding on the wet tiles
Of back-seated Taragos making multiple stops,
Or fish and chip congratulations after the game,
Of being with family, hair ruffle and loving hug,
Of two pointing fingers after the siren
And being called by their heroes on Draft Night
Tonight it is bye-week for our children too
And all of those innocents
with their wonderful dreams,
…they too are patiently Waiting.
___________________________________________
To be continued...
Okay then... so why the hell did I choose to write a game preview for Bye Week of all things (thereby forever confusing the very simple concepts of "game" and "preview")?
Frankly it was for a lot of reasons:
1: I thought it would be a fun challenge
2: I already had a lot of footy-related stuff rolling around in my head, and writing about the Bye gave me a chance to express them
3: I hadn't written for myself - just for the fun of it - in literally years... and I missed it
4: I'm a sucker for a soapbox, and a double sucker for competitions
5: But basically because a lot Freo people - MY PEOPLE - were really hurting at the time.
Freo's season had taken a massive gut punch with injuries before it even started, early performances weren't up to people's expectations, Cerra's signature speculation was rife, yadda,yadda,yadda...
As a result, this whole bloody Freo board (which is supposed to be something fun and entertaining to do with one's time) had seemingly become a haven for sack-cloth, ashes and preaching the Armageddon.
I get that its been a pretty crap season in a lot of ways... but some of the negativity in here was getting me down so much there that for a while there, I literally had to stop reading the boards entirely.
Of course people have the right to complain, and express themselves. And yes - mistakes have been made this season, and I'm sure the players and coaches themselves would readily admit their best performances are still before them this year. But they are also human beings, with feelings and weaknesses as much as everybody else.
While I'm a dyed in the wool optimist at heart, and while I know the playing group are trained and told to ignore the stuff they see online, I figured the negativity might possibly be getting to them.
The fact Son Son felt compelled to signal to all his doubters to go f*** themselves - immediately after kicking a goal in the middle of a match - ...well it kinda sealed the question for me: Freo's players and coaching staff either read these boards themselves on occasion, or else hear this stuff we say through second-hand hearsay... which frankly is even worse.
I respect people's right to say what they want to here, and will defend that right vigorously myself. But at the same time, I will quote Sir Laurence Olivier here, and remind people that the quality of their life is brought about by the quality of your thinking, and that words carry with them chain reactions like a stone that is thrown into a pond. (Please keep that stuff in mind on occasion when speaking about the team.)
At the same time though, I didn't want to sugar-coat things in my preview. The season definitely went a bit askew, this is a game based on performance and measurement, and whether we all like it or not, at times that performance has been decidedly sub-par according to the very measures decided on by the players and coaches themselves.
I originally wanted this piece to reflect all that, to express the realities of the whole situation and how everybody was thinking, and then try to get everyone's mindsets back on track... but that was too big a task, and frankly I don't have the right to tell people what to think - I can only express myself to the best of my ability, and leave other to draw their own conclusions.
This was the overall mindset I had when I went into drafting and writing the following piece - simply entitled "The Waiting".
Why call it The Waiting? ...because it's bye week (duh!)
...and because to me, bye week always feels hugely frustrating.Bye Week to me is always like "Footy is here (yay)... but then it's taken away again (Boo!)" and it always leaves me feeling listless, lost, at a bit of a loose end, and very, very frustrated. The end result of bye week on my mindset is very much like going through some horrible combination of both coitius interruptus, and waiting in traffic when you're late for work (...yeah - I have some interesting commutes!)
But I realised the frustration of Bye Week, and of waiting in general, isn't just confined to Freo fans. It's entirely universal... so when writing this thing, I really felt the pull of something deeper once coming up with that title and its subject matter... so I decided to really go digging for it in my writing.
There's a whole bunch of other reasons why I called this thing The Waiting... but now I'm getting ahead of myself. To learn the rest, you'll need to read it sorry.
This piece is longer than I thought it would be, and its late because I'm a pernickety bugger (insert joke about waiting for The Waiting here!)
...plus its only half finished at present, because there was just so much stuff that kept coming to me which I really wanted to say
Sometimes as a writer you spend a lot of time looking for a rich vein of content - but writing this stuff however was more like nicking an artery: inspiration came flooding out under pressure, there was an awful lot of it, the whole writing process was messy and frenzied, and it took a lot of time to turn it into something useful (think of THAT SCENE in "What We Do In The Shadows", when a really prissy vampire is trying to suck someone's blood in a neat and tiny fashion. Well that was me when writing this piece. XD
The piece was also inspired by "Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas too, and makes the occasional reference to its language. It'll therefore help if you image the piece being read aloud by an Aussie version of Richard Burton (you can hear the original here - it's bloody long, bloody magnificent, very well written, and VERY funny on occasion).
Enough said... let's get on with it - the rest should hopefully be self explanatory... (because otherwise I can't write for crap and need to take up knitting.)
Part one is attached in image format below, and I've pasted the raw text below it (minus the standard disclaimer). The rest of it will follow very shortly, once I finish the graphic design.
Click on the thumbnails to view each full page, or scroll down to view the full text (apologies if I stuff this up, I've never uploaded pages like this before)
This one's for the lovers of language! Good people of BigFooty, for your reading and footy-related entertainment, I proudly present: "The Waiting - Part One"
Page one
Pages 2-3
Pages 4-5
Pages 6-7
Pages 8-9
Pages 10-11________________________________________
The Waiting (Part 1) - Text Version:
To begin at the beginning:
It is chill windless, full-mooned midnight,
in my lulled and dumbfound port-side town
at the very edge of the world.
on the icy and unloved Saturday eve
of our annual mid-winter bye.
Tonight is solstice to my townspeople’s passion,
winter to all our discontents,
and the much-hated mid-point
of an annual pregnant pause in the middle of football season
so most my sports-mad town is sleeping now.
Life’s rhythms for the next seven days
Will be subsumed into hours of footy-less, meaningless musing
deadening our senses and permeating our happiness with impatience.
Only you and I are out tonight
Hoodie-huddled in the shoulder-shrugged streets
Our coat-pocketed hands buried lock-elbow deep,
Steaming and striding our sleepless sport-less frustration
through frigid, starless, cheek-slapping cold,
on a night where nothing is moving,
A night with nothing to move us.
Robbed of its regular winter love,
the entire town is trapped
in perfect silence and eerie expectation...
the icy stillness so unbroken,
we can actually hear the townsfolk’s breathing,
and rustling in their beds..
But be still now. Hold your breath and listen closer.
Because on this night… of all nights –
if you let the silence hold sway...
and still the thoughts within you enough
to match the stillness without,
Bye night is the night
you can hear the people’s dreams.
Listen... the supporters are dreaming
The players are dreaming
The umpires and runners are dreaming
Commentator, coach, captain, consultant
Volunteer, administrator, physios and medicos,
The fans, the fanatics, legends and losers,
The has-beens, could-have-beens,
and those that never were...
all of them have their own particular football dream.
And tonight - in the stillness and sullen silence of bye week
Be they waking or sleeping,
this is the night when these dreams are overheard.
Because even in their deepest sleep,
the townsfolk’s tossed-and-turned,
bedclothes-rustled body language of somnolent frustration
rings out like a unbidden whisper.
Muttering their innermost secrets
out into the moonlit midwinter stillness of their bedrooms
So be silent now,
Look around you and listen as we walk.
And bear witness to the dream-whispered stories
from both some of our fellow, footy-manic brethren,
and their town that’s lamenting a momentary pause
of the sport which has come to define it.
If you do so, you will see,
that all of them (and all of us),
each in our own listless ways
are just trying to deal with the Waiting.
_____________
It is bye night in our fields and ovals.
In cosseted change rooms, black as boot and scattered sock
discarded strapping lies fallow over benchtop bed and concrete seat.
Shower spigots splash their intermittent tears
onto shower-misty windows studded with scale,
Empty hangers hang in empty lockers,
And in every room, at every field,
it is still as contemplation, as silent as failure.
Only the Humming-bird whine of exit signs
ring softly down concrete passages of our catacombic halls,
past meeting rooms, where minds only meet in opposition..
and change rooms where nothing ever changes save for the names,
to the heart of our cooch-clad temples.
Where weeks before,
colour-coded messiahs of our warring houses
strove with sherrins against external foes and inner demons
possessed by a lust for possession.
Where blind ball-toss bustled the rucks to reaching high as Cazaley
wrestling elbows, their fears and fortunes on tap
as mids dashed fervent out of the muddled middle,
Running their fifteen along a forty-five,
hurtling square-wards, eyes beyond the oval arc –
Looking only where others were going
And the forwards loped sly down invisible paths
wheedling forwards, coaxing back, gesturing sideways
drawn to the places others have fled,
All fluid as water – holding its shape.
While the poncho-clad masses of frozen faithful
Shivered and shouted tiers of rage, pleading for pea-whistle protests,
Awaiting the trump and the shout -- the claxton-herald end to all labours,
the exultation and lamentation of champions,
and the shuffle-standing exit of the half-happy throng,
funnelled car-bound through congested doors and hallways,
As crowded as matchsticks at match end.
But tonight it is bye-week..
So all our sacred temples are silent now.
But look harder tonight -- past the fields,
and up in our stands. Do you see it?
The sighs, cries and long-held breaths of the faithful
are still in the stands where we left them...
All the dreams, prayers, chants and curses
we bellowed into dragon’s breath together
Are all condensed to condensation.
They have formed into wisps of mid-winter fog
White as a chevron - silent as a snowdrift
Blending now with the glistening mists
that bead softly over our tiers and turnstiles,
on cooch leaf and beer cup,
folded seat and pie-crust,
fence post and goalpost,
the sauce stains splattered like blood stains,
and the wounded grass.
By morning, our cheers will become the dew
Feeding the grass, and help it heal.
And our chosen few - the noble twenty two
will run out again on grass made green
by our passions and sorrows made solid.
Tonight however, our fogs of war are still silent sentinels.
standing by the seats where we birthed them.
and looking East for the the sunlight,
Which will allow them to commence their noblest work.
It is cold misty midnight on our mid-winter bye,
and even the very air itself is waiting.
________
It is ten minutes past midnight
on our annual mid-winter bye,
And George and Joyce --
The husband-and-wife owners of Blarney's sports bar
and resident lifelong, geographically-displaced Cats fans --
are manning their Karaoke console.
They are happy, contented,
and pissed as a urinal - with not a stable leg between them...
And who for reasons incomprehensible to everyone but them,
are bellowing out (sans accompaniment)
a ball-strangling rendition of the Geelong Cats club song,
like a 1970's Tom Jones chart-topper,
at the very highest heights of their tone deaf,
Blue-and-white forever striped, Ablett-loving lungs.
They are selfishly hogging a long suffering mike
which even God himself would have
ages ago begged them to drop.
Amusing the ears of their cat-loving family,
And abusing the ears of the bar staff,
As they warble and croon their
heartfelt-yet-horrible caterwauled cacophony
out of their intimate little sports-bar home,
and into the spotlighted, patchwork-painted walls
and shadow-clad corners of inner city evening.
In the process, they are chasing
all their more Geelong-intolerant patrons
And we - the passers by -
ear-clapped screaming away from their rowdy row,
And back out into the evening’s chill.
With all of us glad to be passing by earshot,
of that drunken duet’s impersonation
of a clowder of alley cats brandishing chainsaws
in fever-pitch battle against a voice-broken choir
of Tom Jones impersonators,
and their kazoo-wielding, jug-banded orchestra.
George and Joyce boost their warble’s volume,
in the distance behind us as we flee.
Sending their sub-woofers off to meet their maker,
and bringing their verbal barrage back within earshot.
We can now distinctly hear their friends and family
laughing, cheering and clapping them on.
Somebody calls for an encore —
People start fleeing a little faster.
They are singing, laughing and are hugely happy tonight,
potentially simply because we have left,
and we are now happy and laughing too,
frankly for much the same reason.
Because during bye week...
bouts of tympanic membrane piercing,
Avoiding all people who are drunken Cats fans,
(or chasing away all those who aren’t)
are both understandable, acceptable ways
for some folks to deal with the Waiting.
____
Listen harder now,
For the next set of dreams
are softer, smaller, and therefore easier to miss.
It is bye-night in our coastal town,
And Auskick’s teeming hoard of future champions
are cosy in the snuggery of their beds,
And are also dreaming...
Of their tiny epic prize-fights on AFL weekends
before the distracted horde.
Of ball-chasing boundary games on the side-lines
of battles royale between sharks and bulldogs
with Mum and Dad watching in the shade of ancient fig trees.
They are dreaming of game-day weekends
of train tickets and duffle-bags,
Or their feared opponents in the bright Blue Tigers of Carine
and the Winnacotted Cats.
Of grazed-knee greens and ill-fitting gurnseys
Of splayed fingered hands shooting blindly skywards towards the blue
hoping to harvest the sky Sherrins that hide in dazzling sunlight
Of imaginary ice-creams being smashed into left-hand leather
Of kicks, and falcons, and tears in that order,
And the trench-coated semaphore flags
Of the compassion of umpires with intermittent blindness
Of the encouragement of supporting strangers
and the bitterness of opposing parents,
Of shoulder-patted niceties from school-mates and teachers
And shiny dusty ribbons hanging in the loungeroom.
Of turn-taking possessions with mixed gendered teammates
Of hair-ties and shin guards,
and what’s-that-girl’s-name?
And wishing that she were on their side.
Of vinegar chippy sandpaper-salt that cuts at their gums
Of hotdogs and mars bars,
soft-drink and sandwiches and orange peel grins,
bible-black onions and carbon-dated sausage,
Of smoke from the BBQ that wants to hug their eyes
Of volunteer labour packing lolly bags and fairy bread
And of guernseys that hide the spilled mustard
Of ebullient mothers, straightening sock and sipping lattes
of dad-guarded urinals the size of skyscrapers,
With yellow-wet concrete and swearing in the stalls
and studded boots skidding on the wet tiles
Of back-seated Taragos making multiple stops,
Or fish and chip congratulations after the game,
Of being with family, hair ruffle and loving hug,
Of two pointing fingers after the siren
And being called by their heroes on Draft Night
Tonight it is bye-week for our children too
And all of those innocents
with their wonderful dreams,
…they too are patiently Waiting.
___________________________________________
To be continued...
