Published in Overland Issue 207 Winter 2012 · Uncategorized Wireless David Prater The tower was locked (its future being chained to the mast like a breeze crossed with water from the past tense (that immense wall of sound’s collage (its anagram eye, loveless wireless) abstract but intact. Your childhood lies like party lines populated by ghosts (some Fenian, others pulled from the CSIRO telephone directory. The first email (never sent cced Gaia but bounced. So it goes … (that manual exchange inside a powerhouse (a museum exhibit etched in charcoal rides the lightning (killing composers, developing in still-life. Meanwhile, father’s crystal set gathers dust in a council tip. The volume & tuning knobs had fallen off anyway, replaced by one cent coins (also obsolescent. A smell it gave off when ‘live’ could trigger memories you never knew you had back then, in the then when events unfolded in a logical fashion, proceeding to their happy ending, or a lesson (the Masonic Temple’s front yard littered with broken glass, dead weeds (ah that crazy guy who ran screaming down the street (that joke about Oddfellows isn’t so funny now, in his aftermath, the grey dawn of dead things screwed into the sky (that line of furrows from the ground wavered across his forehead, an object of ridicule allowed one last laugh (surprised to end up on someone’s thrown-away camera (your soul locked inside a mangled memory chip (just an SD card away from rapture (or was it repatriation? as shards of laughter escaped from the abandoned sun memorial (a sound came out of the blue sky like, as if from nowhere (a disembodied voice he thought he’d heard on the antique television set describing Vietnam was God (turned out it was the government (calling him up. David Prater David Prater was managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review from 2001 to 2012. His first poetry collection, We Will Disappear, was published by papertiger media in 2007, and Vagabond Press published his chapbook Morgenland in the same year. He lives and works in Stockholm. Visit his website http://daveydreamnation.com More by David Prater › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 1 May 20261 May 2026 · Long read Dungeons & Dragons is a waste of time: an unproductive case for radical action Scott Hudson Another such casualty is the push of AI into the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Used in this way, AI purports to hack your recreational time, allowing you to maximise it by smoothing over the nitty gritty. But the thing is, the joy of D&D is the nitty gritty. AI promises to improve the productivity of work and leisure, but much of D&D thrives on being unproductive. 30 April 2026 · Housing Organised abandonment and Victoria’s Big Housing Build Oli Caruana-Brown and Ella McNicol The crisis is not due to a physical shortage of properties. Rather, it is a series of intentional decisions by Governments to prioritise a system of private property over peoples’ basic human need for shelter, allowing landlords and corporations to continue to hoard housing and extract wealth from tenants via rent.