Time

You asked me what I was doing now
What something I was using to fill the hours
“Still just writing,” I said
You are unsurprised

“The writer on herself”
It’s my latest mot du jour
Of course you’d say that all my writing’s about me, that I’m self-involved
and anyway ethnocentricity is unavoidable

I hate when you use big words that I have to Google.

You ask me don’t I ever get sick of it
The unslept nights, the hungry stomach
The constant sideways battle to edge the word between the lines
or into the small hours

I smile sadly and step back
And you nod and sigh.
And it finished, as it always did
with more words
and stupid questions.

Disguises

We’re getting pretty good at wearing these masks that line our closets
they’ve all got their uses, some of them more than one and the best ones have accessories too;
a red scarf, a hat with a feather in it, an old black velvet shoe

My closet is pretty much overflowing these days, but I keep buying more anyway
I get bored quickly and they only give you a fleeting thrill
and what would I do if one day I couldn’t find one and I had to go out naked?

If you’re lucky the man of many masks will loan you one to keep you safe
but his might not fit quite properly, it’ll sit askew and people will notice that it doesn’t look the same as theirs and they might try to look underneath

My favourite mask sits upon me delicately, so cleverly they don’t detect it,
it’s black, of course, and I wear it out to dinner with the red scarf and the hat with a feather in it
and my old black velvet shoes, and talk quietly while I wait for

the moment when we’ll leave the restaurant and linger on the footpath, watching the stars and our breath hanging in the cold air, waiting to see which direction everyone is going in because maybe we can invent excuses to follow each other so
we won’t be alone for another little while.

The poet’s process

Tea. Pensive window. Looking and looking and looking and Oh! Tuis in a tree. Multiple tuis in a Kowhai tree. Heart swelling with the song and maybe I could find it, that prolonged hesitation between words and meaning, the way to express the sound and the pretty pretty picture, maybe I could –

No, it’s been done, a million times, don’t do it, don’t be that girl, don’t be that writer –
but it’s just that they’re so -
Provincial?
The flora and fauna,
the heritage the history the ancestral inheritance of dirt
(the garden path, my cup of tea)
(Fuck the fucking landscape)

Just look at them, hopping and hanging upside down. They are –
fat? well, yes. drunken? better. Bristling fat gentlemen, their melodic arguments punctuated by drunken choking noises? Well, it’s realistic.

And there! Wood pigeons! (I should call them kereru because of the heritage and the history and the ancestral inheritance of dirt). Are they not just – No, resist. They are also drunken and rolling, their eyes peering wildly from whiplash necks. They do not argue but lurch into uneven flight like a pair of corpulent inebriated squatters.

Resist! Nothing obvious, no clichés. Their white feathers are not handkerchiefs or napkins or gentlemen’s neatly tied cravats. They could be whores’ heaving breasts? They could be the chest of a 17 year old solider before the scarlet bloom of bullets begins. Perhaps I will find the mutilated corpse discarded on the path, that perfect ivory coffer gnawed open and left cavernous by neighbourhood cats, a degustation for ants.

Is that my purpose? To wonder, to see the beauty in the banal and the horrific?

Beyond the rolling hills clothed in creeping Nikau palms the city sleeps in suburban ignorance (oh, god, alliteration? must you? I must). The bush heaves in; the roots push up through the cracks. (What I mean of course is that my roots show through my cracks).

The cup of tea is cold and the dawn parade (I mean chorus. No, I mean parade) is over.

The battle in the garden continues. The roots through the path, the Tuis to continue their drunken clasp to the growing trees, the cat who watches them, the ants’ slow procession of flesh.

My heritage my history my ancestral inheritance of dirt.

Holes

A poem inspired by the Footnote to Howl, Allen Ginsberg.

Holes holes holes holes holes holes!
In my soul a million holes
In my skin a million holes
In my heart a million holes
Every man is filled with holes
Every angel is filled with holes
Every hipster is filled with holes
The empty bar – holes
The empty house – holes
The empty heart – holes

The holes in the whole of eternity
The holes in the simplicity of solitude
The holes in their eyes filled with loneliness
The holes in their howls in the night

Your forgiveness your light your supernatural
sweetness in the dark
The length and breadth of the trees and their leaves
the sun bleeding through their spidery green veins
pooling on the concrete dripping through to the
dirt beneath

Every tree filled with holes, every park every forest
every sun every star every cloudy sky
the holes in the wrap of your fingers their webbing
the things they leave untouched

In my soul a million holes
In my skin a million holes
In my heart a million holes

Sepia snail startled slowly
when I uncover him beneath the council rubbish bag
on the back stoop
Stalked eyes roundning
we are both still
Oh                                           no
I’ve                          been                          discovered
What                                      next?

Death of a philosopher

They counseled on the importance of reason
the need to be aware of the fatal possibilities
particularly pertinent to lives spent inciting dissent

Socrates was inclined to ask questions
men did not want to answer, in his words he was
as a gadfly to the thoroughbred of Athens

and when his followers gave way to grief by
his deathbed with the cup held aloft, he mocked them
‘What a way to behave, my strange friends!’

Three hundred years later Seneca cautioned against hope
the loss thereof being so disturbing to peace of mind
Perhaps it was this that sustained him through three attempts to die

‘What is not trouble when it arrives is an idle worry in anticipation’ said the pleasure God Epicurus
but of all of them, he faced no death sentence
and instead starved on a diet of thought, friends and freedom

The beach house

In the first visit
the moon was waxing
we watched from the dark
water lapping at my knees

In the second visit
the moon was almost full
the last breath, the thin edge
of anticipation

In the third visit
the moon was full
and you stole the words from my mouth
and I embarrassed myself with them

In the fourth visit
the moon was waning
a pale reflection broken by waves

In the fifth visit
the sky was empty
the sea saw only black.

Christchurch

I walked the cordon
stared into the gray
of yawning empty-mouthed houses leaning over the street
spilling broken teeth

The road is bowed and split open like a wound

Someone’s front porch was swallowed, their
washing still pegged on the clothesline and in
the living room the carpet is wet

A church has lost its walls and is standing on corner pillars like an awkward animal
bending its face to the broken path of its own brick facade

A stop sign is buried up to the stop sign
black eyes watch where windows used to be

Beyond the cordon the only movement
is emergency tape swaying
and all is quiet
quiet.

Morning

White coffee sweet hot
the smile that serves it remembers my name
at 7.30 I am vague and unwilling to wake and my conversation is dry
We’re all just addicts lined up for a fix.
Sometimes we joke about the days as they go by and call them their own names
but today is Saturday and is
only synonymous with sleep.

The uncertainty principle

My position is imprecise.
Your greater momentum makes for
an inaccurate measurement.
To the arbitrary observer,
I am obscured,
distorted by
magnetic proximity.
In repeated attempts they try to
establish a simultaneous balance,
but the particular inequality of our pairing
is too peculiar.
When they write you in
I remain the uncertainty
the blank space in the equation.