There’s a man on Swanston Street
With a typewriter and a folding seat
Keys like rain on a tin-roof beat
On ANZAC Day
He don’t shout and he don’t sell
Just a cardboard sign and a knowing spell
“Tell me nothing, I’ll tell it well”
If you’ve got time to stay

And the trams roll by like a marching band
Steel and sorrow through the city span
While he reads your face like a weathered hand
And begins to say

I can see where your heart’s been broken
I can hear what you never said
There’s a line in you still unspoken
And it’s ringing inside your head
Give me a minute, I’ll make it true
All I need is a look at you
I don’t deal in tricks or tarot
Just the words you already knew

There’s a woman with a poppy pinned
And a name she don’t say again
He types it out like a quiet hymn
Without being told
There’s a boy with a restless stare
Like he’s halfway gone but he’s standing there
And the poet writes like a whispered prayer
About growing old

And the ink runs deep where the silence sits
In the space between all the missing bits
Like the ghosts of lines that the heart omits
But he pulls them through

I can see where your road gets narrow
Where you turned when the light went dim
You’ve been carrying more than you let show
Let me write just a line for him
All your secrets are paper-thin
In the light that you’re standing in
I don’t need you to say a thing
I just listen beneath your skin

And the bugle plays down the other end
And the city stops, and the strangers bend
To a memory they don’t defend
But they understand
And he pauses there with his fingers still
Like he’s caught in time or he’s caught in will
Then he types again with a quiet skill
No one quite has planned

And the pages pass from his hands to yours
Like a letter slipped under hidden doors
Full of all that your heart avoids
But can’t outrun

I can see who you almost married
I can see what you left behind
All the weight that you never carried
Still is pulling you through your mind

Take these words, they were always yours
I just opened a couple doors
I’m no psychic, no mystic man
Just a voice that you can’t ignore

Now the light goes gold on the avenue
And the crowd thins out like they always do
But he’s still there with a page or two
And a story left

And the typewriter hums like a fading train
Full of borrowed lives and a trace of pain
And he packs it up in the dusk again
Like he’s just a guest
But if you read what he wrote that day
You might find what you couldn’t say
In a line that won’t quite fade away
When the night gets long

There’s a poet on Swanston Street
Where the living and memory meet
And he hears what your heart repeats
In a quieter song
No machines and no grand design
Just your story between the lines
And a man with a gift for finding time
In a moment gone