Northern Australia Poem by Niko Tiliopoulos

The other night I found myself drunk
in Gove, in the northern territories
of the southern nowhere,
in the darkness, in my sweat, in my dreams,
looking for her,
my salvation, I guess,
through forbidding signs,
roads spreading like the tentacles of an abysmal beast
and 4-wheel drives splattered with red mud,
as if on purpose.

But instead of finding her I lost her,
in my deafness,
thirty-three thousand feet above life,
above everything.

But she had been with me since the beginning,
my first breath,
the first sound,
the last sunrise,

in a land where the locals are forgotten
and the travellers ignored.