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.