Curtains
enough to last a while
video-on-repeat memory loops slither by
first scents of grainy sugar spills
spell ego-in-absentia
idle, praising the chekist with forlorn shoulders
and a slippery ice back of head
you repose
forget multi-blended romance blurred in empty jazz teacups
with broken saucers on the marijuana seabed
drenched by starry crumples
a bird in pause
wherefore the blur
wherefore the blur?
standing alone in a field of curtains
you know not where to find the window
whose opening you so desire.
Crossing
The decrossed first draft immediate impulse of my stir
Is you taken as text
And wrapped in twine
But the words never end, penetrating all twine
An amorphous mass of experience
Causing a grand unraveling and a frayed end of journey beginnings
Reciting verse like smoking pot
On the shoreline, gazing down at the opposite pair of feet
As backwash mingles with foreflow and sand dips and
reclines for immutable beauty
sunsink reflected on the crest of shimmering blue in turn in the seashell mirrors embedded in chiseled face of chalk in contrast to the white of empty walls that hide all communication in vapoured silence
hail the ancient bracken
warming us now in consumption by primal golden shards
shimmering continuing unabated, all is ashimmer with flames and the crescent in the sky and the breathing in of sunset and another's scent
what is your hair but freshly fired straw sparkle-crackling with the broken bonds of childhood
you are a piggy bank of moments, smashed on a suicide bed and left lying
glimpse of an eternal truth behind the mosquito nets of subjectivity
caught in flux between desire and destiny and not understanding from whence came the contradiction that lodges between bones
I have no experience to write of but this one instance
I grew my hair long, for you I lost my inheritance.
Would you drop out of school for me? Even though you're 25? I know you still fear.
If a shooting star catches our vision, can we not question its sincerity in so gracing us?
Were you perplexed by purple lines in my flesh of did you see back to the womb.
Lesson in Detournement 1 - Rebel
I don't know how to write but I would like to say
beautiful things and I don't know how.
I don't know how to write. So I scribble.
My backyarded trees form steps to the sky - superimposed railway to the stars - dew drop throughfall mist the cloud cover broken
Shattered by goosesteps of wind and wolf-cry tendrils of noxious fume smoke belched from the chimney - a paradigm away
Across the rusted fence
Home to a stunted pigeon I have christened my saviour
Let no ship, no train leave for white guard Poland.
The world never stops
Daisies form chains, spontaneous self activity, industrial unions against potted tyranny marching for an 8 hour, 7 hour, 6 hour day, placing their own limit on the freedom to grow
Focus on the dizzying speed sucking you along to worm eaten corpsedom
Supernova splinters your atoms spiral into darkness
Void. Until then - contribute.
Boredom is counter-revolutionary.
This cosmic epiphany you cannot step in the same soil twice It has left you behind to ponder its shadow
By this gate art thou measured.
Lesson in Detournement 2 - Communism
Welcome to the dreamtime of the mud, deathmask of childhood
Please leave your magic behind.
No toy train whistles around idle corners in this land of plenty.
You, who shall emerge from the flood; straining against the bars of the cage
Sing with my spectre, dance my neurosis
Dangling on a string of limes.
A refracted lightwave; the people of the future materialise
In the merry-go-rounds of the present
And the dusk of a city's raw flesh.
Emblazoned on consciousness a banner proclaims:
The sun has gone out.
Already ten days of happiness.
And a chime blows, drifts its weight
Down to the aural garden, harping the arrival of the crystalline
Eternity.
Howl, my brothers. The new day is marked
by the scar of the moon.
We are subject, object both.
A liberated daydream of the corporeal mist.
And as a Little girl Caught in a bellows of sparkles
You mirror utopia.
Lesson in Detournement 3 - Nomadology
Business thrives in the ruins.
There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere.
Our delegation supports the theses that the Executive Committee has put before the Congress:
Theses 1: the apple tree is a very good comrade
She does not complain when I drink of her dew
and bathe in her unsullied silence
reeking of a noble, self-absorbing moss
for this I thank her with an occasional kiss
or a pat on the trunk
when nobody is around
(At this point a toast is proposed)
to disturb our solitude, we contemplate dancing
sometimes hurling each-other into the wind
to break a fall
on empty nights
moths embrace our ballet
and swarm till dawn
(To our fallen brothers and sisters. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.)
as sunlight on a fix
enchanted by a hole in a curtain
in a worn out villa called home
thresholds shiver and snap
breakers break. completing a shore far away.
and the hawk cries forgiveness
as the field-mouse melts to dust.
(A bag of grain is stolen from an overflowing silo. A river slides. A child wakes.)
You.
You have passed, as they say, into worlds elsewhere.
Emptiness...
I am a coyote roaming
in an hourglass called world.
you are the sand. I desire dust.
Let my transience not disturb you-
for we all are nomads, seducing horizon.
(The peasants smile. Galileo's pupils are still there.
The Congress dissolves.
Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.)
Grasp my hand, nomad. Freedom beckons.
Jester
i sing of a foolish jester:
harping round a campfire
garlands of snow hair, a lyre in his heart
with a dream of a shadow known only as wolf
sunshine struggles with the moon in a teardrop of perception
glinting in his blindness he rolls a kerouacian sonnet
and smokes it for tea
with me
and a dream
aside the donkey spraypainted
urban primitive style all aboriginal chalk on grey
chalk on grey
my skin is chalk and grey tussling with the shadow
of a madcap jester
still in this citys morning light.
Alice
if i were to bleed
your image would be wrought crimson as my life flowed to dirt, returning to the ancestral earth whose image you represent in my subconscious daydream
you, mountain spring oasis penetrate my senses with delight
sunset walk to the cliff and the mysteries then unfolded diving naked into the seaspray of summer aside the rocky crag symbol awaking sensual a hand on your wet breast
you are the deep-eyed owl that rests on my bedside palm and speaks to me in gaelic of mountains and valleys and wooded copses and i understand, i understand with a deep yearning for the past and today and the future my 18th-century-abandoned starlet regretting being born into an age of mass produced beauty that fails at the vital test, the kiss and the shape of the hair as it drapes the neck
our dreams are idealisations this is realised but it doesnt prevent us from making them reality
your naked body beside mine
a hand in your hair
kisses on the shoulder, neck, spine, lips, lips again forehead eyelids eyelids gateway to alice's mind so beautiful and fragile the first summer bedsheets of ice across the lonely lake called existence fundamentally alone but why do i feel so together when i am near your heartbeat?
a loft apartment drizzle outside inside warmth security but not too much for the wildness inside burns like sex and of sex and candles and roadtripping and plunging headfirst into the unknown but not caring for the only thing that matters is the burning pain inside that crystallises in the form of love, love, love when im inside you and i see you smile with tears of joy on the inside, outside, everywhere water dancing in the tears of a sadness swept away by the ocean of our being together, us.
Suicide
tiny pebble flakes of dew surround the barn
a crystallised rural heartbreak. crowcall shatters
cobwebs surround suicide
suicide
come
driving with
me
away
from here
to the mountains, mountains of glory agonising on the plate of a heaven
existing only in books of false memory- does it matter
if
we
can play pretend, we've found it in the snow!
ice
myriad precipitations of tears shed for sheer joy,
kid ourselves with guitar and broken drum kit poetry? -
kisses - sharing affinities, sunsets on the highway
the rope, death itself such a waste of time,
when its much more fun
to mock responsibility with a game (or two, three, forever)
of make believe.
bla de bla. i could ask why. but a shattered pebble pile reveals your intentions to the loving stranger clad within the grey coat of eternity. he dances mockingly on your retina before fading an eclipse. no jesus greets your passing. harbinger of nothing.
you never realise your error i carry it in my heart as a key to memory.
Red Wedge
you saw right through me 26/01/2004 18:52:49
i thought i hid the fact that i liked you a bit quite well almost ethereal
dont you just love how i play hard to get
beneath this cold hard exterior, im in love with you.
Tomorrow burns the ape heavens black
So say, so saw, so hope.
The number 1 rule is etched along the walls
Cellmates! It is not too late to seek a new world. Bring along the Scotsboro boys, Tom Moody and all. Bring along Woody Guthrie and we shall set sail! Onwards onwards Comrades! We can build Utopia on a single island!
Freedom - a scratch from a nail that snapped and hit the floor to crunch under a jackboot
Born in Cyprus. Founder of the Stoic School. Few of his writings survive.
Zeno Citium
Post-Fordist model of accumulation, I am commodity. Grieve the passing of the village idyll! Long ago, long ago they sang to me that song. On a rocky outpost in the nuclear wastelands of South Asia I contemplated the mountains and the prophet.
make it the pure way
they say, all say in disagreement, thinking opposition.
it doesn't relax you or anything. Heroin needles neither. Read Junky twice. Got friends hooked. On Burroughs. Beatniks. But one.
I know you're shining path in disguise. Gonzalo is a minger. I = But it ain't gonna happen.
Where is the soul sister? Shaking in the field, clad in blue. Sway
I was startled by the news. In a cold sweat I lay. Dead? Dead. All childhood dead at 7. Please, no flowers. Hug, kiss, try and find me a tree that breathes. Choke. If you can breathe you can choke.
Moses came down with a blank tablet, filling in the gaps. So on, so on. He sits in the white house. He spills his coffee. So did Clinton. And Reagan. And Washington. Which terrorism to side with? I'm not a hippy. I was born in 1986. I don't regret that. There was no golden age. Not even silver. There was an iron and a bronze age.
Why is my page swaying?
I read the news everyday, more often at night. Al Jazeera. New York Times. Granma International. Only syntax differs, not language.
Debs appeared to me in my bedroom last night, asking me who Gramsci was.
I told him we now lived in a perfect world. Global unemployment at record high!
As long as there is a lower class of people, I am in it.
But dear God look at the movies we make!
As long as there is a criminal class, I am of it.
Iranian Council vetoes reform bill.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
Iraqi citizen cries.
Cage .We pace
With banners the broken pieces of white chalk on Remuera Road. The savage assault wakes night fear bleeds. I am the red wedge.
History mole, sing a song in an abandoned tongue. English mayhaps. Where did we go. What did we see. To scar our eyes so. Scar our arms. The mark of the knife, the blade, the times, the news. The candycane we share.
Pink on white, but I am the red wedge.
Hello? I'm finished. I want you. You are not here. Ache.
let your body resonate with mine
and fill the receptacles of numbness
with the ache of motion
make love to me
I am the red wedge.
I saw Guernica in his eyes, his mad mop of hair. I saw 200 million dead.
I saw Ulysses in my backpack. Heavy. The weight of the world is love.
Solitude recurs. But I have many friends.
I see the past in their eyes, refracting the present a line ending in the future. Graphs obsolete. Where are the quarks? I tried to see them. What is that blurry stuff in my eyes? Why cant I see your insides. I'm sure they are beautiful. Please understand. I don't want to manage factories or finance. I still have a New Zealand accent. Wild beach at Piha.
My parents' friends' amateur philosophy. Dinner table. Roast lamb with sauces I can not name. Vegan.
Lavender! The scent the fragrance I place it in my mouse cage. We shall own a farm. Mum says it is not farming its horticulture. Semantics schematics!
Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.
I saw an angel in the toilet at the age of I can't remember. Quite young, vulnerable. The jungle wallpaper. The shining. Too scared to sleep in my room. Slept on the floor of my parents' bed. Too big to fit inside. Awkward. Spareribbed youth. Can't say three.
Slice away, by Jove! No.
Read me some more ezra pound as I curl at your saintly feet. So pale. So transparent.
Ascend ascend, become a god. Ra Ra Ra. Osiris.
I like her.don't tell anyone. I like secret.
I like cardigans. Should offend my pro-feminism. But honest. I like the delicate wisp of woman. So faint beneath my fingertips.
The surf rages as we bond our youth together. We discuss our hatred for Shakespeare movies.
A dissected rat in the classroom.
Learnt timestables at 7. Rote. Preferred the special class where we studied insects and stuff. Felt so elite. Do we all long?
I am long. When I was born I was fat. You think ugly. I think still. You say beautiful. But that's you darling!
Neil Young on broken stereo, peace-signed guitar. See the lonely boy.
Hello. I love you.
Doors. A bad name for a band.
Want to stay up all night with you. May have to take up coffee. Fearful of hot drinks. Fearful of insects, so hard and scratchy, so alien. Fearful of failure and rejection. Teenagedom. Fearful of responsibility. Fearful of living life in books. Fearful of ties. So tight. Suffocating.
Freedom trees like apple trees.
Cross-pollination. Teachers can inspire. Dropped maths due to bad teacher. Could be mad genius. Now just mad. Resentment.
Religious imagery. Crescent, cross, star. Southern Cross. New Zealand. Homeland. Nation. Secular. Multicultural. Rotting. Always rotting. Never whole. Must leave. Can't leave. Confused leave. You have made up your mind, you will leave. You will fight. Don't know if I can. So unsure of so much. And so the journal closed. Bile at the sight of blood.
But you. You no uncertainty. You magic. Dreams of fly fly away.
you never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn you are a dharma bum. You may hide it. I shall free it. We shall free it.
We Shall free it all. Henry Ford rots. But the rot was born of the bronze age. You are the key. Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
I am the writer taking off my white gloves.
After the Arts
this is not disjointed.
there are threads - fibres of twine, and a subject preparing to leap from behind the canvas and grab you from behind in an androgynous bear hug. so clever in the juxtaposition of the hermaphroditic and the animalistic wouldn't you say? Well say something. Anything dammit.
Fuck can you not see YOU
YOU waft away when bold stands deteriorate and i know you're afraid
i have always known. it can be smelt in your hair in dead skin and cells. fear is not the creation of the living but the weight of the dead. how the dead cling to us. pawing at our sensibilities they rape us in our nighttime. dead ideas dead fashion dead humans. philosophy today is a putrid graveyard.
go on and admit your weakness
where were you in 36?
on which side of the barricades did you engender your dance?
death to the intellect or quaking rapture of life which roll of the high modernist dice set upon your phantasy?
was it all a dream?
a solar eclipse of the subconscious, obscuration of the internal eye by the satanic eyelid mammon not that i am implying a symbolistic connection between the feminine moon and the creation of veils for reality
on the contrary
the feminine impulse induces a great awakening in me
a dislocation of sand but reject all symbols
including these words on this page for they are barren
reeking of pretension
listen to my confessions.
listen. no reading shall take place. the give way signs rise, rise, rise in bluish vapour to hover, hover, hover above the dazed millions and a snapping occurs as the message is seen for the first time in grand spectacle revelatory manner but not as you imagine. there is no jawdropping. no amazement. for the message was there all along. no-one bothered to look. no-one bothered to listen. but it was there. slumbering. willing itself to break the shackles that glued it to a dollshouse. but we had swallowed the key and were forced to find a hairpin and someone who knew how to pick locks.
hence human history.
listen to my confessions. objective truth hides lingering behind mirrors of interpretation.
do not read. stranger. LISTEN.
i was a 13 year old anarcho-syndicalist
is it so obvious in my eyes told intense but i never tried to conceal,
like the brick veneer so thin and delicate but solid like millenia of rock formation, the granite tors of history. such a great weight crushes and suicide enters the arena to do battle with fate. in the red trunks.
suicide. been done so many times some see it as an art form. life the sordid canvas. hard-pressed to find originality although i did hear of suffocation by pizza. the irony was delicious.
was it all a dream?
but what is dream? such a common question. i first heard such musings from the schoolyard socrates. but he could NOT engage dialogue because NO-ONE could ever oppose themselves to such questions we all feel it. it seems childish to ask but has anyone found an answer? everyone is a child. or should be.
fingerpainting is so much fun.
wouldn't you agree honey hair? we write on walls with our fingers. no middle-man or woman will get in the way of self expression. the medium is the message. and all that bullshit for eternity i think of as bullshit cos its all too obvious. too obvious doesn't it just make you despise us all? and love us. embrace us.
what is us?
stop it child.
no.
no.
no.
a litany i heard once waking from a sickness. the word no. always found residing near stop.
the dawn is always found.
the dawn is always lost.
lost and found the children stand in the fairground. which is the better pathway?
jungle or forest?
left left left so mayakovsy said. i detected a hint of rhyme. self-analysing cliche. welcome to the desert of the real. that phrase doesn't even make sense! but it means something. it must. or it wouldn't be so coooool. how do i express the inflection on the word 'cool' that gives it a half-sarcastic tone? you're beginning to see my frustration! feel it with me. but do not fear it.
NEVER FEAR SUPER KANGAROO IS HERE. dear nothing (God never answered) I miss being 7. bring it back.
roar said the lion. lions do not speak. the lion roared. correct, good boy. now you will never try to hold a conversation with a lion. WHY THE FUCK SHOULDN'T I?
that is, if he has something interesting to say.
what is dusk?
why did i understand it, grasp it in four year old fingers. smell it taste it and not learn the god-granted definition until the age of 12?
such a tender adolescent i was. so very very eager.
like the difference between ephemeral and ethereal? why do i always forget? it really screws up my poetry some times. language is such a crock and i know you've heard it so many times but when, when i ask, demand, plead, seriously on my hands and knees bloody from despair, my tortured face rises in a crescendo of empty longing. when will we get past this?
when will the stars sing to us?
as they sing to everything else we share this planet with? when will we discard this idle crap we have labelled the sum of human progress. not that i am advocating medievalism. or even primitivism. i long not for regression but transcendence. transcendence. the word is ETHEREAL. (HA) it echoes. echoes ethereal.
transcendence.
goes with twilight for an unstated reason. but twilight is the time before dark. perhaps the night is no longer to be feared. the night was never to be feared.
should we travel to hell? heaven was a blind alley. an empty fuck.
no.
too long did we think of only two paths. no wonder we thought the world flat. hello? three dimensions? just maybe. maybe an infinite number of chances. if only we can overcome discomfort at the prospect. if only we can have the courage of Columbus. obviously not the genocidal tendency. that's right i know history. i recognise it. i knew there was someway i could prove myself, prove this isn't a scream of playful postmodernity. ha, foiled again. go fuck yourself with your empty criticism.
black and white?
we see in colour.
Dear Stalin
In 1991 I was asked to pen a few thoughts on the collapse of the Soviet Empire. At 5 years of age my insights were sincere.
Dear Stalin
Couches made of string collapse into
Walled light-slits of bed-time
Soviet memory echoes
Hello you bastard he said entering home
Train-tracks meander the riverside of mottled skin
The train is grit
One pair of broken Shoes dangle-dance nonchalant down oaken stair
To the beat of proletarian jazz
Inside-Heartbeat reflected in the mattress
Silence is not shattered, fragmenting of its own selfish accord
Gentlemen! We have become the sky
And are no longer comrades.
