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.