Giving Directions to McDonalds

when I’m braced for a mugging is stranger than the Eritrean boy asking the question outside Clifton Hill station. The skinnier for baggies he’s hop & a skip across three lanes following my hand. No way to countermand him. No way he’d stay for the whole story. The ghosts of spray-can gangs who tagged the length & breadth of the subway are benign I’d tell him. There’ll be the odd gutter-crawler in front of the House of Love. Keep walking. The garage’ll be closed but in summertime a gaggle of mechanics will punt a football in the road there. One missing his mark is bound to call an Eritrean to kick it back. Ignore them. Continue to a far flung franchise of the American dream. Once it was the dull red brick of the United Kingdom pub where the last of the blessed aged quicker than most on Victoria Bitter. Now it’s the McDonalds of this convergence of worlds in whose vicinity I’m more or less lost.