tarawera (after taupo)

both feet (blue)

of both feet:
knee soaked,
with hand-hold and
hand-picked,
being cared for, for caring's sake
and still having some
slight shake from the morning

being convinced and confident
of times since and
thereafter
and before --
"years and years" say I, in the
aftermath he holds his hand over love
... and drives us.

the contract

You know it is going to be

         Forever.

You know.

   You decide, you

go.   When you come back, 

  everything is the same. 

  Having felt through the anxiety of

changed rhythms and 

plain speeches and 

    hurtling. Into the morning 

         with phantoms and fantasies

up around your head

(though coming thick and ordinary from mine)

-- a sign of the times, he, thirty-one, says

though she says, 

"Welcome to the '70s." 

test

We're on the longest, straightest stretch of road between Te Awamutu and Cambridge when he turns in the passenger seat and puts one hand over my left eye. He keeps his fingers splayed at first. Then, holding his gaze pointedly at my temple, he begins to shut out the gaps in his hand. The horizon disappears out of my left peripheral vision.

I keep very still at the wheel.

"You're testing me," I say plainly.

No reply.

"Why?"

Now he holds still for a moment. He shuffles closer towards me in the passenger seat. He wraps his right arm behind me -- just below my headrest -- the front of his shoulder stacked into the shoulder of my seat. His fingers inch in towards my head.

I take my right hand quietly off the steering wheel and place it along the upper outside of my thigh.

His fingertips keep creeping around the headrest. The middle fingertip touches the corner of my right eye, pricking an eyelash into my cornea. It waters a little.

A van bobs up over the hill at the end of the road.

The car keeps moving forward in its designated lane. I imagine, as I often do when driving, us both hovering just above the road -- sans car -- our legs at right angles in non-existent seats. His hands remain very, very still. I can hear him breathing close to my face. He is breathing calmly.

The car keeps moving forward in its designated lane.

Then: Lurch, scuffle.

My hand resting on my thigh shoots up to grab his prone wrist; at the same time, he drags his right hand over my right eye. My hand, on his wrist, over my eye.

"The other car is near us," he tells me.

"I know," I reply. My left hand is still on the steering wheel.

"Your hands are over my eyes," I tell him.

"I know," he says.

"Yes."

The left front tyre grates against the perforated shoulder of the road markings. I listen to the sound and keep exactly on top of it. It deviates occasionally and when it does, I find it again. The vibrating it causes seeps into the whole car.

We both say nothing and listen to the rumble of the tyre. We feel the car shuddering disjointedly underneath us. He is barely in his seat. My back is very close into mine.

After some moments more he takes both hands off my eyes but his body remains hovering in the space between the driver's seat and passenger. His gaze is still at my head. Mine, straight ahead.

"The van has passed us," I say.

"Yes," he replies.

He settles back into his seat and stares forward at where we are going.

Falling asleep to the sounds of trains in Arthur's Pass. 

abundance

It's not that I want everything. I want all kinds of things. Things that don't match or fit or go together. They're not found in the same place or moment or person. 

So, meandering ... 

watercolours

Eighteen heads shifting:
up, down
(I'll make choreography 
of this, I tell them).

An embrace with the eldest
before eyes
shut,
and they all
and they all
caress me with their pencils.

There are fragments of words clutching at pieces of my brain, but nothing that actually builds meaning. 

south and north

We're back to breakfast
(today's colour being purple),
unable to stomach the best:
full circle, full circle.

aside from death and dying

In flight:

stage one tonight

to avoid fight.

Karangahape

I love that K' Road is a place where you always see people you know, and where people you don't know will quickly become people you do know. 

take five

You say there's ghosts hovering at my doorway,
your mind mirrored out across the floorboards.
You're imagining them, I say; you
insist.

So I confess
I've heard the ghosts before, and
not just in this house ...
You confess the apparition came from
elsewhere
-- around three hours ago,
to be precise,
in the shape of flattened lego --
and, without me,
for which I'm a little resentful.

Like the ghosts, you seem to
have been
pulled through the walls, defying what's
perceived as possible, suddenly
porch to
Parnell to
Parkfield
the ultimate nomadic
pirate without penance,
the living ghost of amphibia

... after a brief lucid hiatus, tradition follows:
barefoot adventure for hash browns and juice,
talking shit about
getting shit and
doing shit but not actually
really
getting or doing
anything

the ghosts are us.
We are hollow with reckless safety,
invisible to next door's gentrified suburbs,
in semi-perpetual existence
transparent,
indifferent.

old maids

Saturday apocalypse
muddles down Grafton Road, hanging
off each other, hanging
two minutes too late
outside the only
liquor store

stumbling,
confused,
past a lone girl human
who -- distorted, disregarded -- becomes a
missed meal...

but is hollow, anyway,
from all the ghostly motes
rising up from the earth below her
rising up through the arched cement
riddled with probing tree roots
infiltrating bodies
skeletons
pathways
rising up and up and up, and
levitating through
flesh, and
clinging to flesh's back.

"But one day the 'why' arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement." 

- Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

stop

All contentment wants 
is to wander 

home in the rain, some 

strange/familiar haunting 
in my ears, keeping feet pulse,

however, 
but -

My subconscious 

forgot 

to pick up my umbrella

thinking I could manage 
a quick slip

out, 
the rain -

Your crutches are lonely

Pick up your crutches

they're hiding under the bed

afraid of the world

afraid of me
afraid of my width ...

The end.

The end.

The end.

My body believes it can run;

the head thinks it might never walk.

My words 
quietly 
disjointed as my gait.

Apt Y Idos

New choreographic baby in the making:

Composer: Lucy Beeler
Dancers: Sarah Elsworth, Mattie Hamuera, Matthew Moore, Rosa Provost, Gaby Thomas & Lydia Zanetti.

of leaving

Hourly, I still taste
myself in my own mouth:
occasional influxes, Ninety Miles of salt and sweat
and I've an invisible bruise on my forehead
from the thinking,
and on my neck...

breakfast cider culls the drinking
caffeinated asphyxiation
blinking through Monday morning
It's all through the throat,
that old communicative fault --
though still leaving the best for last
or next time
or never

and that lovely old ache
of class, of past and morning --
or mourning, as he put it -- that reproductive ache
of habit, haves and have nots
the giving of give and take

but when I wake, nothing's un-same
the day before rebirths itself
making a child of two humans
from parents of eight
(and old eight creeps back in, oh
she's my only friend, really)
and the sun is still here
and we're swimming
we're the sand
we're hands with hands in hands
we're sinking into the ancient
what-were
rocks

and even with sudden instigation, being
caught with deliberation
by the hand of the Shaman
caught me by surprise
for lessons in nines
never come easily, well

just this once.

But then home's habits call
huger than even these
and so I find myself

driving. I recall an old friend,
or, rather, his arrangements
to edge against shoulder lines, to defy the road's form
I furied at his schemes, yet:

hurtling down
the Mangamuku gorge
and then again, howling through Brynderwyn
I consider my own choices
of swerving, despite --

and almost because of
 feeling, finally, happy.

blood on our hands

There is blood on the kitchen bench. It is not mine, and it is not human. It's just there. Ignored like any other stain. I'm almost sitting in it. I'm sitting in it. And next to it. There is blood on a plate. Sunk in the shallow swimming pool of a dinner dish, the fluids of some creature's veins the afterthought of a meal. Now it's in the dishwater. Some creature's blood is in the dishwater, and all the dishes are being washed in a slightly yellow liquid. Now left to drain in the dish rack. Now drying - an invisible caking/clotting. Slight remnants of an orthodox homicide on our dishes. And still on the bench. Now on our tea towel. Now going onto the cupboard handle. Now we have blood on our hands.

To stand on top of the city for a while, where the horizon looks like water and the clouds look like mountains. 

Emily

Emily,
our walled meetings are frequent, but distant.
I, at my computer, open curtains, wondering -
how many cigarettes can a person possibly
have in twenty-five minutes, you:
wondering why I exhibit myself,
lights on
("lights off")

I remember the time you came over
Drunk
very Drunk
very together
very drunk-together
You sat on my cold wooden bedroom floor and gave me a demonstration of some badly dancing children (teenagers)
I loved it.
I was perplexed. I was shocked.
I found the shock perplexing and hilarious --
I laughed, frowned, listened, mostly...
I thought, "this is a repeat of the day I moved in,"
when you were a nuisance distraction from Mr. Horsfall across the hallway; my (many, as noted) things piled up around you (us) as if we were two strangers squashed unfortunately into a medium-sized storage unit, forced to make polite and obligatory conversation meantime, until rescued...

...exchanged only by a chance
reading of your thesis
bound in red
and woman
leaving spilt wine
on the carpet ...

Emily, Emily,

The light shining through the panes above your doorstep is
beautiful. Do I look as nice? In my lamp-lit bedroom,
changing into my sleepwear (or what
passes for it, as it blurs with the day),
imagining some company
taking notes
pouring thoughts,
ingesting the same
passing through savasanas (voluntary, induced and involuntary)
all to the soundtrack of your coughing, your poor throat's complaining.

Did you envision me the night I curled myself
foetal on the mezzanine, having eaten my stomach to
sweet dreams
convinced that this would now be my bed; my bedroom a dance floor...?

Did you envision the ropes slithering in from across the hallway, my imagining a summer in the middle of winter...? (The only one invited in, because he was here first. All others shut out, kept categorically separate. But those you can't see, Emily. I keep them from my bed. For it's mine and not theirs.)

What stories of mine do you have
that even I can't tell?
that I've lost to somatics
but you have recorded in sight?

Plenty, I'm sure.
And with this, I'm alright.

floodblood

Vertical, again
blood floods down into my shins
inside: the cleaned cells circulate down and
back up to my heart
mimicking the outside, yesterday
after razor nicked mosquito bite --
a red fault line drawn down my leg, appropriately
culminating at the
foot.

It wouldn't stop bleeding, it wouldn't stop.

My legs feel washed with the weight of a body laid on me.

but I am alone in the bathroom.

but I am fine.

There are no leisured words coming out of me, because they are all being expended on a million bloody funding applications. 

unfolding

It looks as though the sheets in the next room's reflection are unfolding. Though it's an illusion (the tarpaulin on the garage opposite flaps cautiously in the wind), they will be unfolding in two days' time. One of the bed's inhabitants will send herself 180 around the world and the sheets will be unfolding with restless single-handed searching -- for something that was never honestly there in the first place, but stayed for a little while and played pretend. 

footnotes

You have to take off your shoes after something like that. To feel your own feet sitting on top of the ground -- even if one is broken -- just stand. Stand and listen for a little while.

There's no music. The music is in your silent feet. A possibility. Something waiting.

There, too, is the dance. The dance is not order. Or steps. The dance is chaos. Flight. The dance is masked, a gesture, a gaze. The dance is. The dance is in us. The dance is when I look at you and you look at me and we both know something. And everyone looking at us, everyone knows everything. We are. We are. We are the dance. The dance. WE ARE. We are the dance. The dance is in us.

However we may find ourselves. We are about to enter something holy.

"I've abandoned my crutches," I say, with a slight cringe of coy guilt.

"It's ok," she says earnestly. "Dancers are not like normal people."

Saturday night's stain sits on the inside of my left wrist. Two days later. It refuses to wash off, mimicking the colour of my unoxygenated veins running underneath the blurred stain and up to the base of my hand. The mark that should have married old nights and new feet. 

Instead, I declined a durry for conscience, left a full drink at the bar for urgency, paid for two kebabs I could barely afford. Sat. Waited. Listened. There I was, playing Mother again. Suiting it so well, they say. Like a condescending complement from your know-it-all teenager. It's not malice, I know. Just quietly confident naivety. 

Yes. When it's someone else sinking into the river, it suits me. When I'm counting above my eight. 

the aftermath of hair dye /
the most brutal shower massacre

The God Half

That crippling poison game of second year

relocates, from Point Chevalier hallways to

the unmapped streets of Hamilton

Down by the river, at Devil's hour

- opposite that clock which hung Christ -

the demi-Humans create a raucous, 

fishbowled from the earthly chaos above.

Noah's apocalypse streams from his face, the flood gates

wall up in hers,

mighty Cyrus' throne fuses to the base of her spines,

demanding seats

She turns her knees away,

her back

wrenches tighter the shutters

Then the pelting hail.

Sent by some other being refused fire -

graciously, though enough to promote

fury in God's

The carriage never comes

We wander forty through the swallows, holding

tongues and speaking them, too

We head north, such as all souls do at Death

for we have died tonight

and will be rebirthed in 

tomorrow's dying sunlight

glimpsing a few silenced hours before the

Dark again.

This is why I cannot be a mother

This is why I cannot be a mother: I have been a mother my whole life. I am a mother to my work, I am a mother to my dancers regardless of their capability; I am a mother to my flatmates and friends. I am a mother tonight, knowing my children will pay gratitude for the complements of friends who did not have to nag, give notes, sort finances, make decisions that would sometimes be wrong. I spent most of my adolescence - and my old life - playing mother to my own mother. So while everyone is birthing children into a world that is turning itself into a furnace, I will be on vacation with myself. 

This house is barely holding itself up

cracked through from floor to ceiling

beam to beam

wracked by three years' violent jolting

but held up by the two bodies transferring

around it; underneath it, in it

blessing their meals

tincturing their daughter's heartaches

inviting strangers in for one week stays.

Undo it, and also know how to reconstruct it.

undo it and find knowledge

leave it ornament and remain ignorant

or undo it and also know how to reconstruct it

If I put music to it, would you allow me my esotericism? 

in-orchid

having lain back on the bed:

feet up the wall

music beckoning a shout in my ear,

the possibility of that drawer...

I wasn't reimbursed for it, so

hell, I might as well spend it

we're all sanity to lose

if not yet lost, coming -

"all's not lost," said they -

well who is 'they'? And who's

authority have I?

to lend my own ear to 

something conjured up on a Sunday night, Sunday

morning, mourning the loss of

hungover jogs through the city

(some of the times in which I feel most alive)

morning drags me towards itself, 

through sleep

I come out the other side

dishevelled, more lethargic than

when I entered my non-existent dreams

in unspoken hours,

having imagined how I was sleeping

in other beds, in other seasons, in other countries

with other conditions

Parkfield, Central Park

it's just a dodgy anagram, really

poor thing's lost a few letters

gained some it never meant to

found itself backwards

man, I understand that,

understand being

flat-backed on the bed

book in hand

totally immersed, but

not getting out.

as how, when tramping
you go the
speed of the slowest
walker, now, the
left foot
must
slow down
for the right

fire

There's a
fright-lurch
panic-sink
shock-cold
fear-shake

latched on me,
that usually temporary grip -- usually
usurped by logic-survival -- is
sleeping with me tonight.

I watched the girl from down the road
throw up on a tree, her
little sister's bedroom
crumpled into their
lounge

the oranges and yellows making
silhouettes of the palm trees
better than any sunset could

Friday 13th, you've out-
done yourself.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/national/news/video.cfm?c_id=1503075&gal_objectid=11124493&gallery_id=137825

from May

It's as if each time we return here, we are faced with incremental amounts of oddities to navigate. The challenge becomes greater each lifetime. More and more is required of us at each soulful advancement. It parallels our growth on each individual life: that the more we learn, the more that is required of us to be learned. Life, the exponential evolution of technology; yet our biological revolution remains steady, anchored in time. What are we to do?

I fear that eventually I will return and my bones will not know at all how to fold against the edges of computers. I will be sent with near-impossible tasks, the world driven irreparably forward by expansion, my settled self wishing only to walk, read and eat. 

michael (again)

Look who's back on the doorstep:

that old enigma
that familiar slouch
in scapula, in cardigan,
in burned-out eye-grin
sheepish -- yet
un-apologetic

neck on neck a brief moment
shoulder under clavicle in greeting

through the door, into present
conversation ...
back to table, past ...

I slip elegantly back, the
habits of
those ideas,
compelling as they are
as you are, in first moments
... as anything is, in time; until time.

and sure, the first: "You on painkillers?"
in foot's direction, a small nod

and I explain, "it's
  too much effort
either for you, or for your liver
I don't have time" (or patience, and
I'd have even less time if I did --
him being the catalyst many
wasted evenings, afternoons, days)

"I've spelt my encoding
it lacked warmth
I slept
that was it

but if you want them, they're
yours." Which is
more or less
what I said
in the kitchen
last October
without words

Then it stunk for ages.

my pragmatism suggests
opening drawer, follow through
but I just
close the door, and
go to bed
without goodnight.

to bed

my eyelashes have clamped themselves to the

tops of my cheekbones, but my

thoughts, like restless children rampant on a kindergarten mat

refuse to sit still

dear

in the overgrown
back yard, on the
second day of spring

I slip the corners of my
garments off my
newly freckled
shoulders

I am
home alone; sunshine

conspicuous

can't do the usual 

exit trick

on crutches 

even in Pirongia

The whole world is 

holding on -

not to ideas

  or each other

 or hope

    or knowledge

   or life, but to

Smart Phones. 

Wednesday evening

my sister says

the rain unfolding like

comet showers over her windscreen 

is wasted beauty 

I said,
"I'm going to clamber over you now."
and you, in your practicality:
sat up
leaned forward, and
made a small gap through which I could pass.

encoding

I promise, that little bottle 

was unlocked 

by the pharmacist

I didn't do it

The warning laid fixed to my mouth 

tasting that parasite

becoming my tongue...

At best, I am not very social --

least without legs

But I am no introvert, either

I am quite simply,

"solitary-chaotic."

(In the background: The rain 

and associated sounds.)

I'm jumbling and don't care

words, head, cells; no

Order/sense, nonsensical

I think I feel some 

mellow high, as prescribed, but

I could just be doing the same as

paranormal movies

It's amazing what 30mg 

can do to 63kg 

how? Because: 

comparisons 

are incomparable. 

scaling

There is a man on the roof of the house across the road. He is allowed to be up there on the roof because he is a Tradie.

I am not allowed to climb around the parts of buildings that are not intended for holding humans (rooftops, balcony rails, kitchen benches, etcetera) because I am an Ordinary Person. Especially if I am drunk, because that is considered Dangerous and I might do something Unexpected and Irrational, like Plummeting to my Death. 

I met someone on Monday who did that -- without the death part, though. But he was drunk and Dangerously fell off a balcony, and now he has metal bits inside him which are not his and weren't there before. He told me he fell fourteen storeys, but I think that was a lie. Because he was alive and in front of me, and surely if you fell fourteen storeys -- even if you were a cat -- you'd be dead. Maybe I should Google-check that fact.

waking to words

in that instant of conscious shift

   your

dialogue is already 

circular 

through me

at the end, this holds me up

early, it holds me in

at earliest, it holds here

sometimes it holds me out

regardless,

I love it. 

but --

    Sometimes with anxiety 

order

open notebook

sit, think

sip tea quietly, several times, quickly

one-two-three-four...

sit

think

sip tea

think.

Place fingertips lightly across jawline and 

stare

out into the street 

stare, sit, think

Shut notebook.

pick up novel

Open.

stare at novel.

Put down novel

pick up notebook

Open

write.

God, or "God"

I think God is in us. The thing which we refer to as "God", I mean. God is people. God is in people. "God" is connection with yourself, connection with other people. God is connection with this world and a sense of something beyond this world.

majesty

looking at you

thinking: 

you know things.

there is no capacity in me for multi-tasking

diversion / distraction

when your words are hovering out across the floorboards 

bus stop

A stranger planted a kiss on my cheek today. The kiss's roots bore down into my face, through the flesh of my cheeks. Inflamed my pores. The roots wrapped themselves across my gums and between my teeth. My tongue sat calmly in the centre of my mouth, careful not to touch the root-tentacles. My whole body felt still and quiet: in control of the situation despite the situation being strange and unexpected. Maybe it was shock, too. I felt safe in a pitying kind of way. I remembered that I am a girl. I did not resent it, but I knew it. Knowing I was a girl made me feel despondent, and empowered; and I felt both of these things in a passive way.

"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen." 

-Women, Bukowski.

I can't tell the difference between discipline and fear.

I'm not present anywhere

and especially not in the present

I have been before

I'm in the after

I'm in the other

I'm not anywhere

I'm in perpetual isolation

by choice or by circumstance

by choosing circumstance 

I'm not present 

anywhere

By choice

I'm not anywhere 

I'm in the other 

I'm in the after

I'm not present anywhere

and especially not here.

the last half

All significantly mundane occurrences begin or end on the porch. Like sex that doesn't end up anywhere; that traverses dates only to rewind. Books which are read whilst waiting diligently for the second education. Two-legged, three-eyed fancies over a cup of diuretic tea, jogged around the catwalk of Grafton bridge. Plans for travel, art and fame -- the most mundane fancy of them all.

Suddenly, the illustrated inside space -- meant for insignificantly mundane tasks such as sleeping, hair-brushing and thinking -- becomes the ultimate anti-asylum. Insomnia rears its best when there is less capacity for its consequent occupational output. The cosy walls are insulated with grief and the porch steps represent the unattainable starting line. Start before the starting line. End at the beginning.

Is it bad luck to leave a knife out on the front porch? Maybe there'll be red marks through the letterbox slot in the morning, where the neighbour diced her tobacco (carelessly, or deliberately). Maybe the red car parked outside will be painted a shade darker in a passive-public protest. Over what, who knows -- but certainly not smoking. Perhaps I'd find myself lock-picked and sigh, with the knowledge of dreams ... I'd say quietly to my visitor, "thanks for coming." Followed by another sigh. And then nothing.

I'd start hallucinating that the lamp posts outside were the moon, all of them, all-full twenty-four moons lined up at very exactly regular intervals. Parallel to each other on either side of the street. Not earth, obviously. But something like it.

Just as I receive my welcome visitor, the tobacco-wielding neighbour collects one too. He (the visitor) crosses past my porch, head inclined away from the gracious homicide adjacent: towards the moons. He slips in through Miss Cigarette's window. Elegantly. Practised. He slips into her bed with the porch's wisdom tied at his ankles.

meta

I said, my 

feet are the 

only part of my body I 

don't like

and then my foot broke.

Poor foot.

I'm sorry.

you don't need to 

dislike yourself

just because I do.

Sophie

Sophie says,

"You drank too much coffee today."

"You've painted your head Krimson."

"You should've gone for a walk," Sophie says.

Sophie says,

"Remember Wednesday nights?"

"You're going to leave her. You know it. You're selfish."

"Sophie says," Sophie says.

"Time isn't a thing."

"You drank too much today."

"You're painted."

"You're young."

"Sophie says," Sophie says.

"Remember Sunday nights and have breakfast before bed,

throw away your days," Sophie says.

I lie around aging while 

young Sophie says, "Sophie says, Sophie says."

terrace

I came home and there was a
half-smoked cigarette on the kitchen floor
still very orange at the end
still very new-looking
except
not in its entirety.

I came home in my clothes
from the night before
twice:
slightly before midday the first time
and slightly after, the second.

I came home to half a bottle of sparkling Lindauer
sitting, uncorked
on the passage-way table
I don't think it belongs to anyone who lives here.

I came home and went straight back out again
coffee curdled in my stomach as I navigated the Aucklanders
out for their standard Sunday stroll

the sun was shining.

I came home and was alone
because
everyone else was
out

I don't see them much or for long, the other
bodies who live here
but I investigate
the things they leave behind.

chevelure

There's this dead thing growing on my head
It is large
I keep growing it just to show how dead it is
growing the dead thing
lots and lots of it
deader at the end than
at the top
decomposing down its length

I change its colour to make it feel
living
I arrange its dead limbs as I please
sometimes
on special occasions --
but mostly, on a
day to day
basis,
I let them flop everywhere
all dead-like.

When I dance
I thrash it around so it looks like it's moving
but it's not really moving
because it's dead
I'm just trying to shake some life into it.

12th

Day off from routine vice

makes way for second outing

out of home and head

but hosted with home-spelt hospitality

Home is the power-cable cluttered attic of
some haunted old theatre

Home is a smile across the fourth wall

Home is where sticky studios become
cauldrons of genius, where I
have a loyalty coffee card 

despite living
distantly

Home is:
a Road that collects

a ziplock-bagged gesture

Home is new friends from old lives.

Home is on stage, Downstage.

Home is the perpetual Elsewhere
Home is nomadic.
Home is present.

Home is now. 

centennial

the rarity of the floor orders her drinks minus cream, but
exchanges that discipline for kind nicotine
(when offered by green eyes you
forget your tongue
and then remember it)

hand held, saltine mouth streaked
speaks: Why'd you take off your pink lashes?
"Because I wasn't wearing them anymore."

I have flashes of distortia
a personal address flecked with hollow threats flies through the window
stands she and leaves the mid-life fight, left light
I won't carry your fuck-ups, mothers
there's some gorgeousness in my youth and I feel it

Ladies Rest

I need to sit amongst the trash

If I am to feel normal 

PN

Under gargantuan pink lashes

No-one sees the salt

but he sticks his brain in my face

and asks, "what's the name of our motel?"

plane

I.

I'm sure some
people
read
just to be
seen
reading

but
don't we all
do things
just to be seen
doing them?


II.

I had a half-finished poem
nestled in my glitter-pummeled bag
between the fake eyelashes and reluctant leather
scrawled over some
post-party
serviette
illegible, inebriated ramblings
I pulled it out to announce
that
"I
 am a
Poet..."

No, I pulled it out accidentally
whilst
rummaging...
declared myself
A Poet.

"Oh read it! Read it out!"
my adoring fans cried --
All three of them.
But I declined.
Because they never sound the same out loud
as they do when
heard by eyes.


III.

Every time I call someone
"man"
these days
I feel
hyper gender aware
like I just yelled
"CUNT!"
in someone's pretty face

but they all call me --
and each other --
"babes"
so I dunno, I think it's O.K.


IV.

There are no poems coming out of me
for one week, almost
then suddenly
a heavy dog wearing cement shoes
walks by
and I throw up
four.

new favourite where there were no favourites before

"I try to keep people

out of here.

people

never

do any good,

especially their

conversation.

after listening to them

for hours

I realize that their words have

nothing to do with

anything

that they are lonely and

cowardly

and just need to

expel their

spiritual gas

to be

sniffed by me."

-- Charles Bukowski. 

so many words that need to

come out of me

I can't even

don't

can't even 

put them --

on --

page, so many

words

come out of me

requirement

sitting in

hotel rooms at

night ... requires 

Poetry

be written.

flight

with the sun draping itself over my neck

snow spine to be seen right, delicate

but without tendon speech

less speaking

and with time to hear that deepest, driven

electrical hum, which will comfort me now and

in August

I remember my previous fear

and think--

You didn't think.

I know this.

"all the words, you know, it's hard to tell if you're truly in course or 

on some vanity trip: how much can be said, how much has 

already been said, and why? 

other writers' words do me little good, then, why should mine be 

special?"

-- Bukowski 

0000

somewhere in height, full moon
(everyone writes)
but clearer in shorter nights

bath

Having opened my solar centre; all the world's vagrants trudge up to my footsteps. They tell me stories of The Modern Ice Age. A real tragedy, whereby your eyes freeze over from blocked-up roots.

The vagrants come hurtling at me as soon as I am off the carpet. They stubb their toes along the rusty asphalt. This is to make sure they can find their way home. And all the everyones who don't care can CSI the clues. I have howled as loudly as this woman hurricaning along Bath St. -- but never as publicly as her. Her head has been raped by the world's cleanliness. And her father, she claims.

"I'm not sure I understand," I say. "Are you okay?" Though of course I understand when she says to me plainly:

"I just need to walk across town. I'll be ok."

I understand.

"O.K.."

You'll be ok.

So into my car I re-close. My bumper-fucked Volkswagon. Having opened enough for one day (but still, a part unable to shut within the 12-hour)...

So that I am salt-wounded in my car. In the office. On the bus. In the theatre. The flood will not subside until the shit has been rushed aside. Thought tsunami. Intellectual ache and skinferiority. This Pakeha thinking to herself, I would love to be within these arms that whisper Te Reo. I would love to be woken by the world's karanga each morning. 

And when he replies, "Kei te pai," my elsewhere head autos, "Pardon?"

"I'm good, thanks," he says.

I come back to the floor. "You said, 'kei te pai'". A child in realisation.

"Ae," he says. "I did."

We both smile sadly. I think about the woman on Bath St.

I'm directing your youth but you know better than I do

(And this one visits me again

some weeks later.

I like him, I do..

Just come back in a year,

and promise to play fair --

Maybe I won't leave you

at the bus stop

at the wheel of your car

Pay your rent, twofold

and I'll pay time

to your bed.)

"Reading is pivotal. Another human being's syntax is the soul's water. While walking a mile in another's shoes is impossible, caressing a stranger's paperback spine is the closest you will ever get to fully understanding another human. So sink into a chair every once in a while. Sit outside in the sun. Cuddle up next to a lover. A window. A fireplace. Just read. Don't you dare read on a damn Kindle. Your fingertips need to feel the pages. Your nose needs to smell the pine sacrificed in the name of literature." 

From http://bit.ly/163xySG

red

I am stood in a shallow wash of sick, sugary, semi-translucent red; the world's smallest man-made lake: plastic/glass-encased. Running red over my callused toes and hive-enraged ankles.

There are parts of me plastered all around the soap scum stained walls (plastic): Melting onto Courtney's all-natural facewash (bought on my advice), creeping over Paula's razor, my razor, my soap (the soap-scum culprit). Red ripping down my back, having birthed at my forehead and nape. Someone added food colouring to the cocktail; it's a little to thin to be real. Traffic-light mocktail. Has the red settled or sunk?

Pulled from between me, still more red. Pooled from me, out of me and in me. Real red now, the kind that took so long to be trained into tame, to regular -- and today, at once, that regularity culled. There's no use for it sitting in my body.

There are no seasons within me, so why should I fall to the acronym which takes it's onomatopoeic name almost maliciously? What right have they? Those spiteful three letters "S.A.D." naming me seasoned. I am seasoned.

The parts of me ran out of me and off me are lapping out the rubber seals. A bold and natural quest for venture out the shower door. But no walking for the legless. Chemical within chemical-induced discard. I can "rinse til clear" but my insides will keep overturning that sugar-spelt velvet floss. The maternal roots of me gripping, never trusting since birth. The faults of me insipidly inherent -- determined before womanhood though only apparent at.

The wigs of my youth have called for other disguise. I put on and shed; manufacture and shed; wear, cry, loathe, love my favourite colour.

I am red. She is read. Wear'd to red; From Red to Led. Led by unleading, unwilling organs. Those twins who refuse to produce twins. I am red. She is red.

All these truths we have been fed not by others but by the knowledge of unfortunate, unavoidable, unignorable self-navigation that 12 year olds all over the globe know. That waking to find one's hair colour does not fit, so it has crawled into the sheets.

I am full of dreams.

Dream the dreams outwards, into the

real world.

Sappy floor-soaking dreams

Spelt, at least

In beautiful letters.

"Mamma, the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much! He must..."

          -- Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen. 

("Remember, my love, that you are not seventeen," replies her mother.) 

I always imagine that someone would come and sit at the table with me, but, this is rarely the case. The cowardice of humans appalls me -- and worst, my own. Somehow solitary is always the state. I don't even know how it happens, yet quicky I find myself here in most occasions. In leadership, wonderful. In socialization - the nost mundane melancholy.

"Men will only do their utmost when they feel certain that the future will discover itself against them if their utmost has not been done."

            -- Samuel Butler, Erewhon.

My past came tipping back at me

Threefold in a single day

One inviting; one writing; a sighting

Resented

Hoped for

Pleasantly indifferent 

And then the fourth:

Unattached nostalgia.

I thought things you are not allowed to think about children --

But I suppose you're not a child anymore, are you?

And I'm certainly not, wonderful stranger

I, hawk-postured and eighth;

I, lamping your face

with torch and eyes

I would that I were at the coffee table

Just to talk--

and twice, really...

But instead I stood in black

Sat in black, secret scowl

I smiled only with my eyes in that mourning glare 

So you better have been watching closely

(and not just at the lower changes)

Yet, I'd rather my day this order

Than the reverse

For forward to end

Than beginning in order towards harsher words.

"Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machines than in tending men? ... Are we not ourselves creating our successors on the supremacy of the earth? Daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organization, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be better than any intellect?

...

It must always be remembered that man's body is what it is through having been moulded into its present shape by the chances and changes of many millions of years, but that his organization never advanced with anything like the rapidity with which that of the machines is advancing. This is the most alarming feature in the case..."

                      -- Samuel Butler, Erewhon.

demi-god / half human

Yet, for all our thrones --

we can't but love it all

You stand cackling on my back while I watch her spine cry

we're dressed in bottomless nauticals

my head's an owl

I haven't space to see

you're the wrong way round

and the blackest of boxes can't make

up for her skin

we've been lost a long while: all of

ten minutes, and undisqualified

so qualified

but disqualified 

for our ivory

for our rounds, which we grope

grope for the public

(that is their perception of our title, anyway...)

and we hold this small stage

in incongruous

harmonic chaos; 

"alien meets exorcist,"

watering Bosch's garden.

Photography: Blair McTaggart. 

NB

and had you opened?
Then what.

Like the time I said
(almost) --
you are testing me
and what had I?
What had I? then, he
would have likely withdrawn sooner.

No excerpt for patience
No finale for grandest performance
audience eyes always penetrate the unconvinced
and all the acts a de ja vu

because
all the world's a stage.

highness

Biting down on my bravado 

with red wine lips; 

staggering against the palimpsest cess pit:

(We've been here before) 

and

we've been here before.

She says, afraid of old

I tell her: it's fine out here.

She wants the tick, the trick--

and has it; both.

I, unheard... 

As with the four point triangle: I am still.

Quiet. 

There's no right to motion when she sings you of alone.

I understand nobility, Ella

and it's a furious dilemma:

gloriously outward and overdrawn,

eight dollars declined and inclined for something more

than pills back-lipped and waiting games.

The collision of souls reincarnate to time itself

for we are not living, but we have lived -- thanks to approval 

and soft, dull patting of all ten digits

whack, whack into each other

like some multi-impaired sea creature.

But you're right about the rough:

for when we are good, we have good.

No home like performing. 

"Not only did the grown-ups get mean, the kids got mean, and even the animals got mean. It was like they took their cue from the people." 

- Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye.

"When he had left the room, I mused over the conversation which had just taken place between us, but I could make nothing out of it, except that it argued an even greater perversity of mental vision than I had been yet prepared for. And this made me wretched; for I cannot bear having much to do with people who think differently from myself." 

-- Samuel Butler, Erewhon. 

mother

Having waded herself through the rivers of time, casting out her second self to faith and remembering the un-lived sights of primordial Aotearoa, she -- sat previously only in bath waters and storm clouds -- finds herself beloved again to the ocean. Swimming with her past strung around her neck, but afloat... Here she carries from her legs back four from two, and takes a stranger's most sincere blessings toward the Pacific. Back to a birth that precedes this current one, gifted from eldest birthing and on towards some newer place: though lower lying than this land, a mountain still. And climbs she with strength -- those two sturdy legs -- to the top.

compulsory viewing

All of the ideas have settled here, but here they shall not stay. For they are not exclusively belonging to you. They are gifts from the mind of the world, which will reside in your mind for a short time. And they must be actioned -- else they will be gifted to another. So: rather than think, do. 

"...the ridiculous and the sublime are near..."

- Erewhon, Samuel Butler.

happy sunday everyone

I will sleep briefly, and then I will wake, and then I will dance; and then I will sleep briefly, and then I will wake, and then I will dance.

I have lived in this room since the 28th of June last year. That is eight months. Tonight, for the first time, I saw the lock on my door: A little latch. I can pull the latch across and hook it into the door, so that no-one can get in from the other side.

I locked the door. Because I don't trust the artifice of flamboyance. But what made me feel more afraid than whatever might be outside the door was the fact that I have never seen this lock in eight months. Yesterday morning I walked along a street I walk almost every day. And noticed for the first time the rooftops cascading on a slant. For the first time in four-and-one-third years.

There I was, standing in front of my newly locked door, nauseous at the confrontation of my own detachment.

Suddenly the floorboards felt like a giant moat of history between myself and the door. I had the sensation that when I could finally upheave the courage to unlock and open the door again, I would step out -- not into a hallway -- but into a grey void of nothingness. A vacuum of perpetuity that would leave me completely isolated in my bedroom. As the only person and only thing in the world. My bedroom: the world. I would be unable to step outside because there would be nothing to step into. I could only put my feet behind me and re-close the door.

Quietly.

Four-and-one-third years in this city. I used to look for noise everywhere; now I look for quiet.

It's in my nature to climb the walls of night time. But instead I have been putting myself to sleep. I have force-fed myself until I can only manage horizontal, stripping my organs to get a better night's rest. In various corners of this country I have pressed my wit into strangers. Stolen their volume to make the world calmer. Given my speech into their ears so that they might be asked to think instead of ...

Sometimes I have talked to other women, too. I hate this. It's too familiar and it makes me resent myself. For these women, whispering is not enough. They need to be drowned in words. They take my eights, and put me on the spot. I feel betrayed by my own sex.

When she walked into my bedroom tonight I felt like saying to her: I truly don't mind who you are. But don't you dare pretend around me. I was fuming with politeness.

Everyone is transparent because they think they are opaque. But I have fives and threes inside me, too. So I know how to deal with them. You think you are opaque; you all think you are as opaque as your own eyelids.

And I step out into the Quiet.

this & this

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

- Nietzsche

set

The night seems more sacred to me, somehow, than the day. The day is empty with calendar; anxious. The night stretches into the forever-future. It is a place for living and holds no finishing line.

In all this convict, still, I need the sun.

So: I have been shocked by my own eyes. Mirror showing them carved in frozen Arabics from my insistently wandered carpet-fueled dreams. These hieroglyphics seem no worthy trade-off for productivity (or at least, for restless peace).

I have seen my skin, in passive outcry, imitate sun-ripped fly-shit speckled ceilings. The carriers of my second selves have gripped tight in defiance, wrenching me into irregularity or nil. My arms and stomach have mimicked face with small heated secrets. My lowest sense has cried out at me too; cried, What are you doing? and wept at my stubborn decisions. Not that I have cared. I have not listened to any of these bodily protests.

So: I have been shocked by my own eyes. All the tea bags in the world cannot save them. The newest paper sends them red; the clattering baking trays send me wandering into the night. Having adopted medicine, my insides full of malice practice reverse psychology and wash rivers out of me; though giving me my own face back I am still sent into cathartic doubling at the ribs as soon as I am bleeding. No compensation at all. It seems the more I do well for myself, the more I am reprimanded when I deviate. All the daily poisons become more poisonous the longer I abstain.

Like the guilty conscience that has haunted me since childhood, the fourth and the ninth commandments ally. Leaving me wondering, Where do nocturnal animals get their vitamin D? 

from this morning

I woke this morning and knew that I had dreamed:
    Of some foreign forearm grazing my side; phantom lips not quite kissing but sort-of gently rested next to mine; my face huddled somewhere near a strangely angled neck; and the body of the world all around us.

coffee
tea
sugar
movie
music
words
adrenaline
awake

common

after Leon, Joe,
I swear I saw the salt creep into your live eyes
the same: the day I split myself from spitting Matilda's lover
having, until then, split for

(though, forgiven -- easy to mishear
as Gus and Gwil hold your voice in their throats, too)

Ms, too
whispered to me like a gun in my mouth
being dragged willfully around this lemon-condensed apartment
I would
and her prickled pre-pubescent legs dangled into my taut throat

who did she give herself too, in that pink dress?

boy barely mutters the word 'snatch'
-- so,
how did you snatch yourself from...
I suppose, he the old man
but then goes from ember to soot-stained pillows

but how did she exit those eight quiet gestures?
(under her concrete-sodden pillow, of course)
shit them all, beautiful

beauty left no good
stripped in waves,
or something.

Comes the new man.

...but surely, subtle hands need leed, too 
even new

thus man (boy)
snatches snatch's vowels in grenade-pinned honour
knighted common
'til the bloodflow leaks of all the buildings we've traversed
marking all those who are and refuse to be 

(come on)
still in hand, and head
there's silence without applause
slighted wrongly, adverse 
and then hearts (subtle lead)

man wails -- 
with no good to remain
but stripped in waves:
something

banter / ted-y bear

"...and then I started watching TED talks instead of having sex," she explains to me. "So in the end, it was fine. I became educated." The corners of her mouth stretch horizontal. She picks up her coffee cup. "And really, that's what men prefer anyway. Someone who knows things about the world, you know?"

Jesus, I think.

"Yeah probably," I say.

She places the coffee cup back into its saucer and sneaks one - nope, two - sugar packets out of the glass in the centre of the table.

"You know, I've been reading a lot about all those artificial sweeteners," she carries on, "and I think-- they're actually much worse for you than just real sugar. I mean, sugar is a plant -- right? It's a plant. Why on earth would you choose a chemical over a plant? That's just--"

"Well, I suppose--"

"Ridiculous."

"Well... Well I don't know, really."

"Neither did I until a few weeks ago. Seriously, I thought that I was being really healthy. You know, cutting out all my sugar. But it turns out -- I read this online, on this nutrition blog that I follow -- it turns out that actually sugar isn't as bad for you as aspartame--"

"As what?"

"Aspartame -- and yet, most of those diet soft drinks are chocka full of the stuff. It's really, really bad for you. Really bad. Like, it could kill a cat. A small kitten. You know?"

"Chihuahua cat."

"Exactly! So there's all these women -- well, men too, I suppose -- men and women... Sorry, women and men." She pauses. "People. There's all these people wandering around-- well, they're-- anyway they're going through their lives, truly believing that they're doing a good thing. But actually, they're more or less putting poison into their bodies."

"Do you miss the sex, though?" I ask her.

She places her spoon down parallel to the table edge.

"What?"

"Pardon," I correct her. "Do you miss the sex?" My spine moves back into the chair slightly.

"I... Well yeah, of course." She looks down at her coffee. "But good things have come out of it, you know? I mean, a year is a long time doing the same thing. The same person. Sorry that came out wrong. You know what I mean. Anyway. It's a long time. Well, not at our age, I know. Well I suppose not in general, really -- but it's still a long time. In terms of doing something you're not fully into."

Her eyes follow a guy to the till. He looks a mature twenty.

"The thing is, Natalie." Her eyes return back to me and she looks me very squarely in the eyes. She puts her elbows and palms down flat so that her forearms are running in my direction across the table. "I am a better person now. I am my own person. Now, I am ready for a proper relationship. I wasn't before. That is why it didn't work out."

She reclines back into her chair, point made.

"Well it worked for a year..." I offer.

"It worked for a year. But I want more than 'worked'. I want-- I want..." Her eyes search the ceiling: "--all kinds of things. Maybe some of them are a little unrealistic. But I have high ideals now. Ideals that could only have come from this break up." Hands groping the coffee cup again. Groping. Groping.

I tell her, "You're groping your cup."

"What?"

"Pardon."

"What am I doing?"

"Pardon you. You're groping the coffee cup," I say.

"What do you mean, groping?"

"I mean you're groping the mug. Like, the way you're holding it. That's not normal. Most people don't hold their cups like that; that's why it's got a handle."

She looks down at her grip. Back at me. Tips her head down slightly.

"I think you're over-analysing this."

"I'm not, I promise."

"You are definitely over-analysing this."

"I really don't think I am," I assert. "I'm not. I don't over-analyse!"

This is probably not true. I feel a little bit bad.

"Hey, sorry. I didn't even say anything. Like, I'm not telling you that you groping your coffee cup means something particular or anything like that. I'm just saying: you're groping your coffee cup and most people don't do that."

She squints her eyes, shakes her slowly head side to side and squeezes the words out of her mouth. "You -- are -- such -- a -- shit," she says.

I shift in my chair. "Oh honestly, Cassie, don't talk to me like that."

"Like what?!"

I look at her, straight on. "Don't call me a shit."

"Well you are." She shuffles in her chair now, lengthens her back. "You're being a shit."

I tip my head sideways. "Well thanks."

Then there's temporary silence. I turn my eyes to follow the direction of my head, profile to her; I see out of my peripheral Cassie turns her gaze the opposite way.

After a moment I ask her, "Who are you looking at?"

"I'm not looking at anyone."

"You are. I can tell."

"I'm not."

"Is it a guy? Who are you looking at?"

"Look, Natalie--"

"No, who are you looking at..."

"I don't have to be looking at someone, okay? Maybe I'm just... thinking."

"Oh yeah? About what?"

"I'm just thinking, ok? Not that I can, when you keep friggen scrutinizing how I'm holding my goddamn coffee."

She levels her head back to face me across the table.

"I told you, men like women who think about the world." More of that awful shuffle-shuffle-lengthen-spine. "I'm thinking about the world."

"Oh. Sure."

She just shakes her head at me.

"Such a shit."

"Yup. Got it."

We have a miniature staring competition. Neither of us wins. Or loses.

"So what are you doing with the rest of your day?" she asks my pupils.

"Nothing," they tell her.

"That's pretty fucking boring."

"I'm a pretty boring person."

"Mm, don't know why I bother actually."

"Bother what? Bother informing me about the dangers of sugar?"

"It's--"

"Ranting about your sex life."

"Natalie--"

"I feel a bit voyeuristic with you sitting there groping your cup, actually.."

"Natalie!"

"What?"

"Pardon," she corrects me.

"Touche," I shrug. "What, though?"

She looks down at her gropey fingers.

"Man. We both really need to get laid, huh."

"Yeah." I lower my eyes to bury my secrets into the floor. Cassie thinks.

"But only with the right person though. For me, I mean - you can do what you like. But I'm not settling for anyone who doesn't match at least six of my ten basic relationship sensitivities list--"

"Your what, now...?"

"That's the absolute minimum. Maybe if he was really hot... No. No, six. At least six."

"You are crazy Cassie."

"Hah! At least I'm not a shit."

I shrug again.

"I don't think I'm a shit."

"You are."

"Ok."

"But not in a bad way."

"Sure."

"I still love you."

"Great, thanks for that."

"I do. I really love you, Natalie. Even though you are a shit."

"My god girl, mixed messages--!"

"That's possible! It's possible. I loved Mark, even though he was pretty awful sometimes. Even though he could be a shit, he was worth loving. For the most part."

"If you say so."

"I do say so. For the most part, his good outweighed his bad."

"Ah, but yes, see: There's the catch. For the most part. For the most part is not enough, is it? What did you say before-- '...more than just working...'". 

"Yeah, well that's why we--"

"I know. I know. But how do you know where that point is? The point where you say, 'TED talks are going to be more beneficial to me than you. I would rather watch a funny looking old man on my computer screen tell me things than have a nice looking young man in front of my face.'"

Cassie thinks for a moment.

"It's the point where you look at the person in front of you," she says, "but in you're head you're actually watching the TED talk."

"So instead of wondering about that person, you're wondering about the world."

"I think so," says Cassie. "Something like that."

avalon

Avalon's name is haunting me
the road home
the shitty corner bakery
(named after the road home)

her body...
she's still sleeping on my fold-out couch
tipping ash all over the front porch
dangling her smooth legs over the rotting wooden rails
cleaning up the bathroom vanity to a perfect polished white

I'd have her back, though
if her hands were clasping those small, expensive cylinders

an instance / how I have seen us

This is one instance of how I have seen us:

We could be spines against the wooden floor, quasi-horizontal, comparing daydreams. That would be nice.

I can pull our fortunes out of the garden rocks (they live in parallel universes, across times, like us). I'd hold my blue fingernails around my neck -- around my blue necklace; your fingers might sit somewhere near mine. Or not. Yours might sit closer to you, and this would be good.

Ocre bottles sitting like a seance around us, but not too many. Not all empty. Steady and benevolent. Just there. They're balanced on thick novels and burnt wooden paperweights, all stacked into columns of differing height. Us, too, of differing heights, not only by genetics but the angles at which we lie. A cosy crooked arrangement.

I would find a scrap of torn up newspaper, and a thin-nibbed pen; I would begin writing. It doesn't matter that you are watching. I'm writing about you. It doesn't matter that you are reading. Reading about you. About You. I am writing.

Then I wrap us completely up in newspaper, and all the inky words of the newspaper and my own words (which are words about you) sink into us and singe through our skin... we absorb them all, they all filter into us and burn through our veins into our organs. We know all these words as they enter into us. They are satisfying and legible. So that for a short time, we feel some sense of complete.

thoughts on time travel

Scouring each city, now
's the target
and we win this year-long game
finding him

six months above
(my younger half)
better honest at twenty-and-five, now twenty-one-and...
last I forgot yours
now forgets to ask mine, and so I
decide to forget to tell
more direct questions for me
instead, anyway.

... As when I jumped on Sano's sleep
with my first height,
Saturday's child
in his first height, supposedly
snatches my hand to carry me up Regent
(the very first being Rydges, now I remember)
"I don't believe you," I said
prying his sparkling passive
eyes open

"I am," he said.
"I am I am I am."

I doubted.
Though granted, in the morning:
Something Changed.

eighth/first

It was fine to feel my back scritching against the ground. Clothed. Tolerable ... unlike your poor bare knees. That's the advantage of wearing a dress: you don't have to take it all off.

Your patellae were making little dents in the dirt; the stones and pine needles making small dents in your skin. You pointed them out later as if they weren't worth the trade-off.

No, you didn't mean that. I know. I know.

Let's play a game, as we wandered outside. How much time can we waste? I knew I'd have to instigate. I almost always do. People - New Zealanders, especially - are so bloody polite. It really kills me. Especially when it starts leeching into my own manners like some contagious etiquette-borne dis-ease. I hate that tentative feeling curling around my skeleton.

Pull me down, I urged with my wanted telepathy. Bet you won't. Go on. And then, to myself: That's not fair Natalie, to set someone up for failure. And then; My GOD just DO IT just -- ! Stop sitting with safety!

No, you stop, Natalie. Grow. Up.

I played this solo waiting game for an impatient ten minutes: hand on the tree, diligently observing its knots; How was your week? etcetera. Feigning concern that some drunk had followed us (I couldn't really care if they had; good on them).

And then I did the same thing I always do. I acted on my impatience, discipline-less. I followed through with the course of action I'd already decided. Resenting that I'd decided. Oh, pragmatism.

So much safety in the world.

I could have been fourteen again. Nestled in the edges of Ohope sand dunes, leaving human-sized holes in the beach. My hair in the same bobby-pinned coiffe. The alcoholic scene in the background. The pines looming over us in the dark. Only this time, I find myself thinking, eight others behind me. My hand guiding us forward (or backwards, to the ground).

Afterwards, a quick sweep of hand over back of hair. But, half-heartedly. Everyone knows. People aren't stupid ... when it comes to things like that. Thanks and I'll just go over here (alone) and Oh my, I'm bored as fuck now. Dance dance. "Bored as fuck". That's an unfortunate term, isn't it?

With eight behind me (in life, not just in love), having a small part inevitably then wants for it all. The walls and the tinnitus and the horizontal and the glitter; the burning eyes and nose and throat (from various self-afflictions); the handstands up against cars. Leaping over bonfires. The broken mirrors that bring lucky bleeding nails; the lace blouses... The whole frantic chaos of Chevalier-Parkfield-Cross.

Wanting all of this. I looked around. And the world seemed slow. Neutral -- most on two feet, vertical. Drink in hand, compliantly. The music a background -- non-diegetic -- effect. Costumes now redundant (and ridiculous, hilarious).

There's no point in leaving sober when their 'drunk' is your fallow. I'm a fan of stillness, I am. I am. But not of mundanity.

Let's go back to fourteen, my little head beckons. Let's go back to people. Let's go back to worn-out Wellington.

God

They have told me
I am God.
They have put me on the earth-throne
and commanded,
"Rule".

They have given me a kingdom larger than my eye.

They have convinced themselves
I can do it.
"Homo sapien," they said,
"You are capable
of anything."

They have convinced themselves I can do it.

But they have forgotten.
It existed before I did.
My rule is not theirs.
In me and
without me,
they have the utmost ...

But they have forgotten.
I am a woman.

They have
forgotten.
To change the terminology;
to amend the paperwork.

They have forgotten.
I am a woman.
They have told me:
I am God.

You all represented the possibility of something. You were each a part of something in the future.

planar

Body in my bed
makes starts.
There's a whole gap free next to him
but it's not mine
That's where I used to sleep
when I wouldn't let in
didn't want life interrupted
by equidistant genders
and their conducive etiquette

So I moved to the wall
and you replaced me on edge.

and death

I feel like all of my lives are filtering through me tonight. Horizontal, I catch heart-sinks of longer skirts and straw brooms as I stare up at where (yesterday) there were cobwebs.

My mother sincerely believe we were in the holocaust together. I think she might be right. I get very anxious about being hungry and eat pragmatically. Constantly, I have a sensation of being shot in the back. But not just these things. Dad, who is German, insists I'm his mother reincarnate, too. And not just that to cement it. Something in me knows. As I said, Berlin calls. Not only because it's the place to create, at the moment. Barely that.

But there's visions here, too. Of a quieter life in earthy olive sunlight. Living with the earth and each other and the sky as God. I heard them all calling me from Lion Rock, tonight.

Then, driving (in this current place). Locking the backs of my knees out against the space between the airbag and the car seat. I imagined us crashing. Well, you crashing, I suppose. As you were driving. Felt the beginnings of my knees dislocating in reverse. Body lurching forward to meet itself and its gauche limbs strung up against the door frame. Enticing this sensation, almost. I wanted my bones to break.

Imagine if I couldn't dance. Next week. Ever. How gloriously hideous.

And more than that. Sitting at our destination, I wanted to be rolling around the avaricious sea floor. I wanted to be lifeless so that I could be totally held. By something other than my own muscle memory and creation collapsing within my head. I'm all yours, nature. That's what I will say to the sea. Smash me around like a masochistic daydream. I want the choice of when to not have to make choices.

If you can see something, do you deserve to have it as yours?

room/tone

Something lovely in 30 seconds of requested silence (though held by cumbersome plasticky equipment).

We are in a cave listening to the sound of air.
We are a group of people.
We are people doing a thing.
We are creating; Creatures.

I want each time I dance to be a remembering of the blood flying through my body.

don't do it

hunting for words to
say something visceral (like
bad choreographies)

in change

Things were beginning in my head, yesterday
and then I flushed them out drunk.
I had lines piecing themselves together
post-death genius forming in me
and then I pissed it all out into a
rusty parking lot.

At some vague post-meridiem
shortly after shortly after
post death-genius
post shock horror
Mab slipped her profanities in me
thought-fucked inside a green plasticky portaloo daydream --
I heimliched her out.
I strung all her ideas down my face;
She sprayed herself through my lashes
infiltrating my bloodstream--

I stood still.

Capa-cha came after me.
Dragging his legs eight inches behind him
screaming my name at my ziplocked eyelids
(He thought I couldn't hear him
but I heard his words with the sides of my feet
which were dissolving through the earth
burning rivers through the concrete).

I looked up from my sinking
and saw
Leon's even eyes
glazed past me, past the city
(he knew better than to ... )
I thought, you are all educated.
And I wondered what in.
I wanted to know everything

Then I remembered.

Tralala's bloody snatch, the same blood
flooding my feet in a wave of Indochina
That picked me up viciously
threw me spine-length onto Auckland's spike

Skewered on this hyperdermic
I saw the world in Interlude
I heard the whole world sounding quiet because
only I was there

and I knew everything.
And I knew everything.

fish

Like a little bit of sandpaper

that flicks 

erratically

all

over

the show

flippity-flip-flip in front of my face

and then

breaks up into several 

little

pieces

and flicker-flick-flicks into my

hair and around my

ears and

past my eyes so that I have to

close them

protectively

and then I have to

close up my whole centre into a ball

and still the paper bits

flick-flutter like the snitch in Harry Potter

over my back and

threaten to cut up my back muscles

and I curl tighter

but still the cutty sandpaper scratches the air around me

"Fuck off," I say over and over

"Fuck off," screams my bolted face

The Skeleton II

The Skeleton asks for a nut.

"Just one," she says.

She leans forward and selects her nut carefully ...
-- A hazelnut that looks a bit sad; brown and wrinkled against the ivory cashews, caramel-skinned almonds and emerald pumpkin seeds.

She shuffles back to her seat and
bites it slowly.

2014

Berlin calls, thanks to father (or mother?!); or Hitler and history; or all these New Zealand dancers flooding the city right now, and ten years ago; or memories; or commodity -- whichever, Berlin calls.

solution

This room is public property
My door frame: the porch

The town's conversations are
leaking into my
bed sheets
I will get into bed tonight and
they will be
damp
with
small talk

I can't even shut my door
because
That requires interaction
Or at the very least,
Eye contact --
Nah uh, no way

I thought...
I assumed, that amongst these people
I'd feel
I'd feel, or
I'd feel
asylum

But as I
keep realizing
All people are the
same.
Always,
All where:
Boring, and boring.
Too interesting to approach
and so unique that it is dull.

They're all different to me
Because I'm as
isolated as them
And therefore boring
And depressing
And stuff

They're all talking about each other
And only listening to themselves
They're all listening to each other talking about each other to themselves

So I pretend that I'm boring
instead of appearing bored
I'm so sad I don't drink
I just think, and then I think--

I just want to cry all over everyone
And kiss up my tears
from their beautiful faces
to dampen my beautiful fears.

I wonder when you will first see me cry, and whether it will be awful or beautiful.

The Skeleton

Skeleton stands in the corner
with abrupt shoulders
pointy pelvis
noseless glare

Her self-possessing thoughts
leak out over the sitting heads
dripping tea-drops squeezed from her thin marrow

When I come out of the bathroom
she is waiting. She says,
"Don't forget about me."

trace

With today's lovely pains, I recall a conversation during my eleventh year of school. Seated backs against a heater in a tamely ocre corridor, struggling to stay warm, Sarah described to me the soft bruises. Underneath her hip bones, on the insides of her small, white thighs. She described the harrowing brown circles she held there surely, subtly; void of the concern with which I met her.

In the following months, I (as we all did in one way or another, at some point or another) became preoccupied with this sensation. It was not voyeurism on my part; not at all. It was a fixation with her. Sarah became a faded enigma. Instead, her physical frame was inhabited by stories set in bare-bar-mattress rooms.

I felt genuinely concerned about this fleshly toll that Sarah's stories imprinted on her. I felt sure that these green marks were signs of her lover's apathy; his self-fulfillment; neglect. Retrospectively, perhaps they were fitting gifts to the girl who marked the other side of her own legs, anyway. I suspect this was the case.

Myself? I've woken to both love and rebuke these aches. They feel like after dancing, when forgotten muscles are resuscitated into beautiful, practical use. While the dancing then (usually) continues for some time, and so dissipates the lactic acid, the settled blood; my year-practiced habit of one-off fuckings has upturned several morning assessments of reminder. Do I want to be reminded? Is this a wanted skin memory, useful to recall isolated moments after the person is gone? Or is it a reminder of the invented eighth game that held no benefit except for lesson?

This one, with freedom -- here comes a constant. More than memory.

Interrupted, perhaps.. Fearfully like the first; but I don't fear it. It is a gift: I get the lovely ache once, twice, perhaps four times. Then I get to feel it subside into familiarity.

It will be so nice when you are familiar. Like dancing.