Capital Letters by Omar Musa

I knew none of their government names back then.

Back then, some of the most wondrous people I knew were self-destructive.

Talented vandals who took to relationships with mallet and saw.

But there was beauty in the streets. You could see it everywhere.

In fishtails and donuts. The silver cursive that slanted off tyres.

In spraycan fumes and opals of oil.

In kickflips and crossovers, cuts and kebab shops.

In sneakers that cluster-hung like grapes on powerlines.

This was the Australia I saw.

These were suburbs inscribed on scarified earth.

An alphabet of exiles far from lands of birth.

I’m talking pittance workers and remittance senders.

Traditional custodians and the kids of immigrants.

You know the ones.

The ones heard about, but not from.

The ones talked at, not to.

The ones treated as if very, very small.

In other words... us.

Each day, like smoke, I unwound up the stairs of the flats.

Smelled the oils and spices of many lands.

I heard many tongues.

I learned that in Malay culture, a storyteller is named penglipur lara – ‘a dispeller of worries’, ‘a reliever of sorrows’.

But you and I know there are many types of stories.

I heard carnivorous tales lope down gentrifying streets.

The hiss of talkback serpents.

The whistle of go-back-to-where-you-came-froms.

I lost faith and leapt into the whirlpool.

The scribbled hours, pilled and powered.

Full of sex and camaraderie.

Part of me knew on days like this, the timer ticked, history slipped, we skipped words like stones from our hands.

Words that could never be retrieved like love, like hate, like us, like goodbye.

Yet somehow, somehow I found that something, like a magic key connecting ancient and new, I found it on beats, breaks, tapes and acetate.

Unordained lion hearts on thrones self-made.

Do you hear? Do you hear what I’m talking about?

I’m talking about the numberless underground kings and queens who taught us the power of our voices, of nonconformity.

That each lyric, each windmill, each scarred “45 or fan of paint from a nozzle was a story aching to be told, unfolding before us the fractals of cosmos and starlight.

A world all of a sudden unbearably bright.

So linger now.

Linger with me.

Consider that somehow, we could still own that something.

Be that something.

Something airborne, something gold shot.

Beings arranged in a calligraphy of rhythm and rebellion, people with so much damn resilience, it’s impossible not to smile.

Because you, me, us, we are more than statistics.

We are more than misfits.

We are more than ‘your dreams are unrealistic’.

This is the new scripture of our lives spelled skyscraper high in capital letters... bold.