Tug Dumbly - A bum plays Flight of the Bumblebee

A bum plays Flight of the Bumblebee

on a street piano near the station
and Rasta Man, with the amped up didge
and FX rack, joins the jam. They’re hitting 
Rachmanioff, Beethoven, Bach – Fur Elise,
Anna Magdalena, then The Entertainer …
the man’s childhood repertoire on this
out of tune wreck of a piano, outside the
chicken shop, full pedal down sound
rolling over the bipping Friday afternoon
traffic vivisecting Newtown, the sound
reverberating rich, with the didge barping
and honking like a goose on top 
as Rasta Man chucks his dreads and spare arm
about like it’s a baroque rave, and waves
of commuters shoal up from the afternoon trains.
I call the piano player a bum, but that’s
a cheap shot, he’s just a man, one of
the street irregulars who gladhand longnecks
in brown paper bags outside the community
centre in the square, close by the pub, police
station and courthouse, with hospital, rehab
and funeral home within a spit ...
it’s like the set of a toytown village, with life
laid out neat like clothes on a bed, go to woe,
a Truman Show in a Salvos Cheers bar where
the cops all know your name and everyone’s
stamped In Transit, as flocks of released schoolkids
screech past in a Lorikeet identity parade.
I like sitting afternoons on the stoop of the old
Hub porno theatre and seeing it all. It’s like a
duck hide from which to watch humanity pass by,
free street theatre, no two plays the same.
I meet my boy’s bus and we head home,
Beethoven reimagined for didge, incongruous
cuz to a piano that melts into Moonlight Sonata.