Discretion, shortlisted for the NT Literary Awards 2021.
Discretion
My lime green lanyard parts
doors onto the purring hunger
of the library where I thought
discretion might be an act of love.
While policy mandates
otherwise, I hand out
free prints by the public
photocopier, grant access to
the private phone, spend forty
minutes instead of ten
transferring gospel music to
mobiles from at-capacity
USBs, recovering passwords
to download income
statements. Then I thought
discretion might be a device
of power, necessarily the prize
of pageants adjudicated
by eye-sight or vibe. Afraid
of paternalism, I adopted
a maxim if one warrants
discretion, all do and everyone
was cleaved from circumstance.
With no reason
to know anyone anymore,
I thought discretion might be
the carceral state. Discretion
is not kicking minors into forty
one degree days, its not
withholding fruit when you have
excess, it’s also mayors
securing tenders for pals, cops
letting fast white drivers
off. So I thought discretion
might be an ultra-sonic
device, echolocating infrastructure
briefly in hologram blue, like
the colours bullied into your
eyelid after bright light—a
capilaric rendering of form
and what exceeds it, hard
to study long enough before
it loses definition, or gains it,
as if apprehending negative
space letters leave without
detecting what the inverse says,
which is slightly possible by
zooming way in.
By its own light discretion only
exists if policy exists, so I thought
discretion might be policy, desperate
to relegate need to the call centre,
imagining infinite transfers
that move want like wealth. We want
to do away with policy altogether
which is slightly possible by
zooming way in. By the entrance,
under translucent yellow
windows striped with see-through
words— minerals, adventure,
learning —we’re photocopying
passports, we’re signing stat
decs, we’re filing for divorce.
Up close, we combine tones
exchanging papers, language
each other, inflect with each
alternation like geologists
skateboarding the survey
vessel’s helipad arching over
rough swell, in short, we jam
in range of asking for everything.
Twice a day the sun casts
the outline of a word across bodies
by the photocopiers, the letters
illegible; trembling cuts
in garbled yellow.