With the sun rising earlier at this time of year, and walking straight into clear, bright hours, it feels as though the day is born earlier. It's alive by 6.30am. Everything is beautiful, everything is energized. There's no slog; even if there is a slog within myself from those dusky hours the night before, the sun will grab me by my bedclothes and hurl me up towards it. Less sleep is fine because there are less hours of darkness. The world and I are being birthed into activity and we are thriving. 

stile

Unexpectedly, you walked into my ungodly nightmare. You lurched me from the haunted table at which I was sitting - an abrupt upheaval back into 4am Earth. You gripped me at the shoulders and said, urgently, "Get out now."

I woke with true anxiety. Cast in the moon's sheets, I tried to stay conscious. I kept slipping back to that dangerous place, numerous times, each time being startled alive again by your warning. I felt straddled between two worlds.

I gripped rocks into my body. I shone some artificial light into my cornea because I've heard that tells your brain to stay awake. It was 4am and it was dark. I thought, 'The sun will rise in two hours. That's a long time to stay awake.' No-one was home. I remembered when I was young and some unknown sight was shaking my bed from its end. I spoke into the darkness: "You're not welcome here. You do not have permission to be here. Please leave, now."

I think it left. Not for good. But away.

You also left.

When I woke with the sun, all the details had dripped out of me. Or maybe, the moon had siphoned them out as it lowered itself past the horizon. I had a shell of where I'd been sitting at the base of my skull but not much more. Though I could see your face, gripping mine with its sight and feeding its words into my ears.

juni

I really do hope we
fallintoeachother,
somehow,
kind of settle into the edges of each other
and float about the earth's surface,

that would be
nice

take our tickets and
run
not to be away
but
to get to, to find
the world
and be found in it

I'd like to thread myself through you - I already
feel
the spike of your being
in my fingertips, non-urgent
with the patient clarity
of certainty

there's something in the smell of you
that will be found in me
regardless
of whether time follows
us
or not
that even if I were
to enfold myself in another
you'd be within them.

goddess nostalgia

I'm so deaf

from the ringing

and I'm wringing you out

in all of fifteen minutes (you've promised)

and yeah I'll

go 

back in time

for the sake of nostalgia (who

wouldn't do 

that)

and I can't wait to to find my body again

it's been inches away from me

all this time

hiding in the hollows 

of myself

teaching me lessons

knowing me intimately
as I've

known any other

and yes it's a small world

small city

small town

small life, so I need to

know every human - since I know them already
(small world) - 

while I've
youth on my side

she's the most powerful
I know 

and I love her

more than I love them

more than I've loved anyone 

or even

myself

and therefore

can only

love myself

through knowing

goddess nostalgia

future nostalgia

The full moon reminds me of howling through your sheets. It's draped over me like the train of some ornate, luxurious dress - and indeed I did luxuriate in the moonlight of you: Intermittent intensity bearing a metallic cobalt hue. I liked our brevity; the pocketedness of our meetings. Little capsules of time that had space to breathe between them, whilst all-encompassing in and of themselves.

The moon bled a soft burgundy warning over your face. Dampening the blue. A last waning, I somehow knew. You were beautiful enough for me to be content with your brief appearance.

There's a little part of you still residing in me. I'm sure. It smells like summer at the fading end of summer. It looks like persistent winter tan lines ridiculous enough to be churned into "cute". It loiters in the park, marvelling at the chlorella earth and azure sky. It has the face of Anakiwa in a record-cold August. It grabs onto youth with innocuously venomous fingertips and taps itself against the floorboards of basement buildings. It anticipates a future of rushing lungs and twisted heartbeats; that December rain-earth smell and nights with the covers kicked off.

I wish my whole life could be made of these moments. I'd be satisfied without continuity. I'd have the constant of change to hold me down, to ground me into the ground, to anchor the weight of stability into me.

cricket

I drove you home because you disgusted me. I couldn't handle the thought of waking up with your pale, wiry body in my bed. In my bed.

I felt annoyed that you didn't want the lamp light on. Your kissing me on the balcony was horrifically cliche, boring, impatient. Your hand on my knee within five minutes of meeting me was infuriatingly boring and impatient, and your impatience to get home at an ungodly hour made me feel cheated of my desire to revel in my intoxication. You stole everything I love about fleeting trysts: the conversation, the departure from sanity, the meeting of bodies. I resented you for it, so I insisted on driving you home. You insisted on feeble excuses.

Your maleness seemed pathetic to me. I flinched not with vulnerability but with voracious anger when you reached between my legs as we walked home, because you were uninvited. How dare you. And still, I let you loom over me. I sincerely believed that once we undressed, it would be fine. That like others, our bodies would match even if our heads didn't. I was unable to fathom that anyone - anything - could be as grotesque and dissatisfying as you were. As always, I overestimate people. I couldn't help but laugh feeling your wrist's poorly-suffocated retraction, as your hand crept under my long, lissom hair and stumbled over the shaved undercut. I imagine you are the sort of person who would have resented the hairs over my pubic bone but imagined some fantasy to combat them in your mind.

"God, how long has it been since you had sex?" I asked, as you breathed your disgusting air all over the space in front of me.

"Two weeks," he said.

"Shit, and I thought I was bad at three..."

He raised his voice. "TWO, I said!"

"Yeah, exactly.. and I thought I was behaving desperately," said I.

Eight always defaults to humiliating people when she finds herself in a situation she doesn't want to take responsibility for. I had a choice. I made the wrong one. Then I rectified it best I could.

I drove you home because you disgusted me. I'd rather sleep alone than alongside self-involved, invasive hunger.

The world's been robbing me of both sex and money, yet I'm the happiest I've been in a while. 

get bigger

oh, there's a poem 

in this irony

that I'm dressing up in silver 

and gold glints 

each night

and feeling like 

the biggest fraud

feeling weak

feeling dull in my eyes 

soft of voice

barely able to cope with the day itself

shedding tears before breakfast

like I'm a child back at Uni

crying my way

through my un-favorite thing 

failing only because

I think that I'm failing

my body always betrays me

it won't let me lie

I can put on a face

but my body will yell the truth

until everyone is listening

and me -

reveling in my humiliation. 

In the end, everything is beautiful.

life.model

It would seem
they're all
watching me but
actually, I'm watching them
whilst they're all distracted
with thinking they're
watching me.

post-meditated

When I open my eyes afterwards, the world is washed in a metallic cyan. I'm that sleepy kind of alert which you feel after sharing skin with another person. I can hear the world with immense clarity: the silence of empty space amongst the gentle wave-like crash of cars, the creaking of swings holding small bodies in the playground next door. The surface of me is breath-held still against the bright white air. Blood and atoms are rushing through my insides. I am an Arctic stillness with a powerful undercurrent. I am potential and possibility. I am with only myself, and myself is embedded in the world. 

unseen

Sometimes, because of other peoples' behaviors around me, I sincerely believe that I must be invisible. Not as in, literally invisible, but as in unseen. 

Surely this is a choice - so what am doing to hide myself? And why am I hiding myself? These questions bother me. 

assembly of Japanese bicycle

"Peace of mind isn't at all superficial ... It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good maintenance; that which disturbs it is poor maintenance. What we call workability of the machine is just an objectification of this peace of mind. The ultimate test's always on your own serenity. If you don't have this when you start and maintain it while you're working, you're likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself." 

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

an observation

Men hovering around the age of thirty seem to make the best lovers. Guys in their early twenties only want to fuck you. Or only want to fuck. Yet they've no idea how to speak with their skin; they don't take the flesh's cues. Men heading towards their forties are bored of it, or else lonely - which is a similar thing, really - and only want to feel your companionship, to talk and share blankets with you. They see the boundaries and they don't reach beyond them. You can deny them and writhe - ambivalently, in both pleasure and guilt - in the accepted sadness that lingers afterwards. 

Men in their late twenties or early thirties will fuck you and talk with you. They know how to equal the intimacy of the mind with the intimacy of the flesh. They know that words speak to skin speaks to spirit. They understand the importance of talking and seeing during sex. They understand the importance of listening and touching during conversation. They emit the energy of both wisdom and youth; anticipating the possibility of the present, and bearing the sophistication of experience - they've known people, places. The music of their lives is undulating in their veins. It's melody has not dated but they know the rhythm well enough to dance. 

I often consider how I will be when I am this age. It feels simultaneously distant and as if I am hurtling towards it. I'm not in a hurry to get there - I appreciate that many good things will happen between now and then - but I am curious to know it. To feel that certainty in me with room to grow. I'm cautious sometimes that I'm being too idealistic, but - if it creates hope for the future, then I will allow myself to fantasise. And in the meantime, I'll enjoy my vicarious encounters. 

return to paradise

It's 5.45am on a Saturday and someone's trying to jump off Bond St. Bridge. It's for real this time, not because we wrote it into the script. He's not even drunk. He's almost smiling. Welcome home to Auckland.

The airport shuttle drives past and I think, surely the iron-blue uniforms inching towards him are only encouraging his defiant, almost laughing fingers to gently lift themselves from the condensation-soaked handrail. Reaching towards the transient car bonnets conveyor-belting along the dewy tar seal lanes below.

There is no depression in New Zealand, ladies and gentlemen.

A tourist sitting in front of me marks the sign of the cross over their own body, as though they themselves are the one destined for great things. Their partner points out any slightly interesting sight  - houses, parks (there's no Skytower here) - to distract them both from a weighted first impression of Aotearoa's grey slump of dawn sunshine.

The sunshine is enough to make me feel hopeful; to know everything is beautiful; to know great things are coming. 

repeat

Sometimes I tell stories that aren't even my stories. I mean, I'm not lying - they used to be my stories, but they aren't anymore. Yet I'm still telling them. I keep writing and telling the same stories over and over again despite not knowing them anymore. 

I need to expand my vocabulary. 

oder

I'm not sure if I've

never been in love,

or loved 

everyone

who had a smile and 

a secret. 

a little

simultaneously 

touched and infuriated 

that you kissed my cheek

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our all exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." 

- T. S. Elliot

we are all hopeless
romantics, and all the more
hopeful for it

from the horizon

there's a small piece of my aliveness
floating in the waters of Anakiwa

it's swimming around
looking for itself

it doesn't know where its whole is, but
it knows
that it is
Home.

it is torn between
all the things it loves, of which
there are
many -
too many, perhaps -
and found in various places,
moments, people:

nestled in the embrace of many beautiful arms,
sitting in the corners of many beautiful smiles

- and especially, in this moment, in the
slightly ochre cheekbones
of some ridiculous but successful
luring tactics
who I'd have happily stayed put for,
who neglected to remove the glitter from my eye

who was part of this week's opening,
heart-pouring
beside the ocean

How bizarre to wake up in my own bed this morning. 

I feel most at home when I wake up in the world. 

1 -

how typical of me
to bury
so far into ecstasy
that I emerge empty,
unable to feel it's current
but for small, sharp, static bursts
incensing my calves, heart, feet

and having needed so badly
all week long
some body pressing into me
(so much so my dreams were riddled
with unwanted past lovers
and future mistakes,
I was melting with disgust
whilst awake)

how typical -
how unbearable -
that I should falter in my own concoction:

of barely cinnamon pseudo-Red
(how fortunate that science
approves my nocturnal pursuits -
as willed by my insides
beyond my brain's haunts)
and glistening with white,
one palette above my teeth
a dustier kind
than my solid-ground molars

finding at dark intervals, lucid, us
glistening in our toxicity,
odd and beautiful entanglements...
a delightful shock
to execute morning pages here

and I am grateful for these departures
however the repercussions fall
because I'm built of all I've known
and I've a glutton for humanity,
more alive for sleeping less
for passing Saturday's rhythms through me
- Sunday's head could almost convince me
I dreamed it, but,
Sunday's life knows
night's morning secrets -

and despite drowning in my pulsing self,
despite omitting the key arrival, I'm
more alive like this - subsisting
on skin
and conversation's complicity
revelling in the blurred moments
between self, ish and less

containe(d)

burying myself
in the sound of you, despite
having matched my shy eyes
with yours infrequently

... delivered by love and rain
to five years earlier
(I've already moved with you
in yellow) - I'd like to be longer, now,
stretching languidly across time-
and maybe that's why

my shoulder blades featured
in tonight's videoic brainstorm
(I like to notice coincidences
like that, and
make mountains of them)

and the bending of my neck also:
(I suggested imaging my skin;
he suggested tying a skeleton around it)
not just in art, but in totality of ecstasy

heading into water
with someone I barely know -
as I did at the moment
last year became
this one:

wading through that tiny river
until we arrived in the sea
(though this time, by myself,
'til I master sending stones)

and don't worry,
I know he knows - I know
how transparent I am:
I'm in my own head
wearing my own skin
hearing my own mumbles
I feel my own gauche halo circling every inch of me

what is it with me

that I can never rebirth my courage
in the moments that matter to me?
I'm only brave
when I've nothing
to gain

"You believed you could transcend the body ... You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, non-physical realm. But it's only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy, you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery."

- Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood

how's this for irony

I asked a question
hoping to avoid the situation
that came as a result
of asking the question.

window

face says I

swallowed

too much 

whiskey
Saturday

(I did).

the irony being that

the grey pillows on which my eyes sit

hold less regret than 

milder strippings - 

acting on impulse

instead of just

acting. 

ravenous

for words, and skin

(my own, and theirs)

re-viling

lumpy throat

because this song is reminding me

that I have to go and

own something

half finished

and tell them 

how well they've done

and I know their bodies are crowded

but I'm still disappointed

I wanted to cradle my baby

'til she ventured into places

but I couldn't; so it was

I know all this, yet

I'm still disappointed 

(in myself? or in circumstance?)

my ego knows better than that, but

it's fluffy around the edges

and success was in its clarity

now the angst feels unwarranted

and least we sound good

even if quietly

so we go back to red

and hold off the smudgy black

forward back

hints of summer
on Sunday:

I found myself
(again) heading west
remembering various de ja vu with
lovers and would-be lovers
and unloveds, precarious night-drives
and sunshine also,
more than one of them
tinted with smokey hues
anticipating earth-staining my pristine white singlet,
not so chaste
in my haste to get under your skin

I'm glad you pulled me backwards into you

remembering summer and
it's beautiful spontaneity
driving one hour for a stranger
and seeing into the future
with the hard-edged certainty that frequently carries me
into choices that surprise
even my self

(who needs to travel
when you've a backyard-full of tourists)

remembering summer and
that hammocks are not only
for sleepy outdoor New Years' nostalgia
but also belonging
to wide-eyed mid-years in your room
high from not enough eating and too much sex,
the beer grating against my empty, happy stomach
as if Saturday night had simply rolled into Sunday morning
without hiatus

(I could've had
three in as many
but I preferred to spend my energy
on two legs alive
instead of my back)

these weekends there's poems
riddling through me again,
but they rarely get written
because I'm too busy enacting them.

finally, this morning

my eyes feel open

because last night

they barely shut 

revi'ered

She's right, I suppose 
about the five week famine - 
I admit I've found liberties
having my skin all to myself
satiated by possibility
instead of craving what's before me 

so I've three more weeks'
untouching, lest I turn inside out 
from needing
to be turned
outside in 

three more weeks swallowing my own mouthfuls
inhaling my own air
pawing at my own pillows, instead of
devouring some other
I'll feast on carefully arranged bodies
who are writhing with another ecstasy 
and looking ferocious for it 

my only children are my unspoken words
and my favourite lover
the note that they were born from  

Another useless habit:

Thinking I am bad at things I'm actually fine at

and then getting such a shock

when I'm complimented on them. 

I wonder where that appears in all the revelry. 

circular II

They all seem 

to begin and end with drugs, so that some of the most 

beautiful moments

are the most nostalgic - seeing things 

only half there, and 

wondering whether the space 

my eyes inhabit

is a different color 

to theirs. 

like me, please

"Of course you're beautiful," I tell him. "You're sixteen and you're drunk."

He shifts his chin higher, hearing sarcasm despite my subordinate sincerity.

I smile at his inebriated grab towards indignation. I  remember being beautiful too, though the peak of mine came around the better parts of 19 and the more jarred parts of 22 - the former when this wrongly-accused pseudo-lover inhabited the room next door, and the latter when the night skies were dancing in spite of my paralysis.

Sixteen's proud of pushing double digits. He thinks he's beyond us. And sure, I was before the starting line at his age. Not that I cared. I was in love with other things: the idea of dancing, paper-thin hymns and words. Though now - contrary to his suggestion - I'm his equal, at least. Knowing is my dancing. Exhaling is about as holy as I get. My poems are spoken in contorted flesh. I don't schedule my trysts as he has to, and I don't need to steal phones for an excuse to run into the darker corners of Aotea Square.

He's got it all back to front. Including my intentions. I don't fuck everyone I share ice cream with. The pseudo-lover shifts along the seat and is accused of doing what we've denied. Sixteen laughs when I suggest it's him who's being looked at. Wrong, of course, but closer to the truth than my own skin.

"Is it because I'm beautiful?" he says smugly.

'Yes,' I say. I'm not taking the piss. "You're sixteen and you're drunk. Of course you're beautiful."

I envy him his tangled little head. I've a vicious wave of nostalgia. And yet I know there are reasons I have chosen to ground my own atoms. Perhaps I have grounded them too much.

So, on Saturday night, I go back. Not very successfully, but I'm there. I encourage others to do the same. Forcefully. I miss the first hour of sleep waiting for the future to repeat itself. Then I miss the first hour of the day recovering from the wine I didn't drink. I manage to steep myself in some short history in the afternoon. I visit the supermarket as per tradition, former lover in hand but not held.

Then I write about it.

golden

Something in my body
badly needs to press itself
into another skin

and it's not even
a lust thing - no, it's like
I need some other pores to breathe with
some other veins to push my blood through
just to be sure
that I'm feeling
live

really, here and me
is fine - in fact,
when I have that, mostly,
I feel how I imagine I should -

but when I'm energised so,
I become a greedy glutton
for repulsive atoms:
I need them all 
pressed against me, into me, through me
I'm shelling onto the rocks
or else,
melting beneath the floor

oh yes, I know alone's better
but skin-tight feels so nice
and the idea feels
even nicer
and even nicer on a whim
held in a fleeting moment
those atoms sieving through my lazy hands.

revilery II

There have been few words
these seventeen days -
my words instead
riddling in their bodies,
writhing around their arms,
fluttering in their oesophaguses

my words have been spinning
in their pretty little heads, their wrists weighed
with the binds
of my gravity,
done up by the ribbons
of my mind

out from their arms fold my thoughts
I have unwittingly asked them
to hold a mirror up to me

and so
instead of talking
to the page, I have been
talked to
by my other

- that angry
dark-haired faerie
has let loose, in the dripping walls of
this third floor on Cuba,
rattled by tens of tiny ballet shoes
and buskers' strings. I have
held white up to my eye
and though those whites weigh heavy

I am all the better
for not having slept. 

back in forward

I stopped
on the stairs above the hostel

because I heard your voice -

not yours, of course, but

so much like it

and my ears, having been lacking

but for drones of engine buses

and crackings of skulls,
a phone call, and so on

drank (you) in

I stopped for longer than necessary

to stand on the stairs 

to absorb that pseudo-voice
and eavesdrop on imagining,
to make the strange familiar. 

revilery

There’s a particular pleasure - a certain sensuality - in our self-inflicted suffering. In our madness, we find ecstasy. In the familiarity of self-abuse, we are home. Our fragility makes us resilient. Like undercover masochists, we revel in holding on to the habits that hurt us.

icicle

Oh, I melt so easily into
    things

    this little iceberg
so submerged, just
 skimming the surface with my
    brain-bits. I'm
there and I
don't want to
  rise out

           I melt into songs, people,
                             substances, moments

and once I'm on the floor 

   I'll never stand back upright
if someone doesn't 

      freeze me fast

though I'd rather be liquid
   and slither around
- you just can't allow it
      because I'll forget what I am.

everything

Kind of lovely to be creating melancholy inside the rain.

and again, sunday

I knew I
was going to
see you
before I actually
saw you

I don't know how I knew,
I just -
did.

(this has happened to me
before
but the subject
didn't believe me

"you're just drunk," he said
but I knew
that I knew
that I was going to meet him that night
and then:
I did
(and then, after a five-year hiatus
he turned up on a KFC commercial))

and then
I had the same
surge I had the night I didn't see you
and cut my hand bone-deep
on all of our
empty
wine glasses -

but it was probably also
two years'
first coffee coursing through me
and it being the week for yellow pills
and the fact that I was
rushing around
on only a croissant and a banana
gathering terrariums and
friends and
airports,
etcetera

and then suddenly
really happy
in the queue for 'Twelve Items or Fewer'
like, glad that I've arrived now
and thanks for helping me
get here
and thanks for
departing 

or something along those lines
except
much less
final

perhaps, more like:
revelling in my own stories
because they are mine
like little secrets pinned up
in the crevasses of my own self

and for all who've been written into them:
thanks for making an appearance.

from your bed, past mine and to work

There's a poem in this bleary-eyed

early morning walk 

through the city and its 

(my) satiated fatigue -

but I'm too busy listening

to Christina Aguilera to write it.

and you forced me to sit still and look you square in the eye

I want to write things 

(archive, rember)

but I don't know what the things are

the things in my head need decoding

just like I do

just like I want to 

but don't need to

with you. 

beginnings

I don't feel like I know a person until I feel like I have permission to touch them.

My school reports always said "diligent" and "conscientious".

I am repeatedly described by other people as "hard-working." When this happens, a fear creeps in where I wonder if perhaps I am not really actually good at anything, but just hardworking and persistent enough to pull things off ok.

Sometimes persistence is stupid, depleting, relentless; scant in its return and embarrassing in its refusal to compromise. Sometimes tenacity doesn't get you very far. 

What will happen when I'm just too tired to be persistent anymore? Too exhausted by myself and my life to keep being "hard-working"? Maybe I will cease to achieve anything, and instead, just be. I think that will actually be kind of nice. 

Karangahape

just so many 

beautiful

people in the world, I can't even 

cope - this Libran unravelling 

every time her magpie eye 

catches something glinting, and so many

different

kinds of beautiful, too

each needing to be known

needing to know how they all feel

when I press my fingertips into them

and query their pretty little

heads - 

what stories do they have to 

unfold to me? 

what new colours can my skin 

morph itself into, having

known them ? 

So much beauty in the world -

in us - it

overwhelms me. 

I used to have a really good memory for the details of past events in my life. 

Now, I find it quite difficult to recall specific memories - but what sticks vividly is how moments or experiences made me feel. 

Even though I am bored with Auckland now, having morphed a whole chakra here, I know I will still fall in love with it again when I return after having been away. It will always be home: not the place I grew up, but the place where I became the young adult I am and carved the foundations of my life as I wanted it to be.

Grey Lynn epiphanies

Almost everything I own was once owned by someone else.
I know 60 - 70% of the previous owners.

I love walking through the streets leading up to Ponsonby on Saturday and Sunday, and seeing all the discarded half-finished beer bottles left behind by weekend town go-ers.
This is completely contradictory to my attitude on littering.

All the streets I walk through remind me of past lovers.
The clubs and bars remind me of past friendships, or my own younger self.

I like the view of Pt. Chev - the city sprawl, or at night, the lights, and then the water - from the top of Cockburn road. I didn't notice this until I'd lived here several months, because I was always looking down at the footpath or noticing the trees that smell like weed and trying to figure out if it actually was pot or the trees (still not sure).

Locals will get angry if you pronounce it "Cock-burn".

My house is probably worth over a million dollars, despite the floor sinking and it being frikken cold and the fence falling over onto the neighbour's property.

I like it here.

dolls house

I was a little
drunk tonight, at work
and it was both
stupid and great

- like that time
Mike convinced me
to smoke a joint with him and his girlfriend
when I lived in
Grafton's shittest flat
(I only agreed
because he'd fucked me
four nights earlier

and I could still feel
his tall torso looming over me
and over
the blood-stained sheets -

and even as I write this poem
I see the habits
unravelling

my life's not really as badass
as it sometimes
sounds
on here

it's just that the badass bits
are sometimes the only bits
worth mentioning
sometimes they're the bits
that feel most alive
most raw and therefore
most honest

most like me.

reveling

beautiful things you said to me

that still reverberate in my head:

that I had a cute coming face

that I have nice areola

that I had cute tan lines

(still nice, despite "cute"

being

vaguely condescending)

and that time you said my name

which was strange, because

I'd forgotten we had 

names, we seemed too 

temporary for those

but still, nice

and no I won't 

apologize (to myself, mostly)

for writing about you, because -

as David and Lena have assured me -

that's just what happens 

when you fuck a writer. 

ganglion

There's a cyst in my wrist
that likes to balloon up every now
and then, it makes my
wrist look larger than
normal, in flexion

it feels likes it's shuffling
my little wrist bones
around
making space for itself
making itself comfortable
in me

it wakes up and sleeps
and sleep and sleeps, and then
wakes up to let me
know it's still here -
just when I thought it departed
on some permanent vacation

it wiggles up my forearm, my
shoulder, my neck
it sits behind my skull
then wanders down my left sacrum

it goes on adventures but leaves its
footprints everywhere
leaves a trail of knots and agitation and fury

someone once said, "your left side
is your feminine side."
when I remember this, I think of
the cysts also in my ovaries
that cause me significantly
less pain.
they are quiet
they are hidden
even I didn't know about them for ages

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."

- Lewis Carroll

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

- seen on the way home.

to home

being drunk by 1pm feels
much like sober at the clock's opposite -
both some schizoid kind of absentness
both equally displaced
(from whatever, and who...)
both reminiscent of summer's length
and best accompanied
by walking,
abrasive music
or, preferably, both.

Sunday, again

Sometimes

I feel

so electrified by possibility

that I become restless enough to

render myself useless,

unable to take 

even 

the first step 

towards great things. 

departure

I have to confess,
I love this hypodermic walk home
with the moon spilling larger light than usual
- though a large chunk of it
has already been eaten

I miss being out of my mind
in that totally controlled way

I miss wasting whole days
in the
only town I ever allowed myself

I miss living
on three hours' sleep, some
self-destructive ritual

I don't miss the rain

but I miss the feeling it gives me
when it floods out at this midnight hour
(and so lucky I just missed it..)
though - there's something sensual
in arriving
home, dripping

St. Vincent, she put it neatly
when she said bring me
your loves - I wanna love them too

I want to know everyone
and I want to have felt everything
before I depart this earth
for the place that leaks into it
when I'm most me
when I'm treading my mid-brain

swim

Home Bay is no
Lake Taupo, but I still felt the
orange coursing through me
this time lashed with salt
and flanked by
three on-lookers

this time I was prepared, bikini bottoms on
(which was just as well, due to the un-company)
and black attire, so as to avoid the water
seeping through (or at least, the appearance of...)

the cars climbing up the bridge's slope
whispering to me still here, just changing
and I knew in this moment
there are things coming in the future
and they will be
great

I just knew.
(there is power in my adult-ish youth, I can
feel it)

and
this time, I ran:
all the way
home.

ritual/s

Tonight I washed
four days of stories from my hair:

Wednesday night's hurtling through One Tree Hill,
demanding some over-carbonated inebriation
from the hand of my instigating passenger
(afterwards I said, "that was naughty, I know, but...")
and lying under the pseudo-stars,
deciphering some thick German accent that wasn't father's
and then deciphering the ambiguous labels
on the condiments at the dumpling house

Thursday's venture back into the body
with a less than pretty abdomen and the
sweat of some stranger rolling over me, first on the Tarkett
and then in another's bed

Friday's collecting of summer's last salt
which clung to my pores like a child
coaxed from its parent
on it's first day at a strange kindergarten,
and the sand dunes that rolled somewhat like New Year's 2013
and the river-reminiscent towel-bedded grappling
which happened with the same

and finally, Saturday's
habits. Yog-esque sweat
and mud on the edges of me, a large step
above Karangahape's wo-men's ventures
and the gloating run over
Ponsonby's well-endowed diners.

Finally after four days of collecting
my head is heavy, so I give in.
it all slips down the drain, and for a brief moment
the palimpsest of myself is fainter
- but still, when squinted at 

- visible.

yo-ga

5.45pm Wednesday

smells like weed and looks like wheels 

in Albert Park

with the humans in their larger ears 

shirtless and tattooed

teaching what we pay twenty an hour for in Parnell

to girls they barely know, for free

and looking all the more 

knowledgeable for it

I've done that, on beaches

and archived it on friends' Polaroids

, transferred it to Facebook, set it as my

cover

and now I do it between vacuuming, dusting shelves and arranging props

and I've only had two 

goddamn joints

since December.

"I am not my thoughts and feelings, I am merely the observer of them."

http://1giantmind.org/

September

It's difficult to believe that in the last moments of life before, I arrived home from your bed, shoes in hand, head full of beauty and went for a run. I ran further than I'd ever run (at that time) - right through the Domain, across Grafton Bridge, down K' Road and right back around to my shitty decaying flat that occupied space beneath the Khyber Pass on-ramp. It was as if I was fuelled by charging overnight with you, squeezed into a single bed like my best friend and I used to in high school, when we were smaller and bigger all at once. Comfort in the lack of space.

I really did think that was a beginning - and it was, in some ways. The beginning of the next segment of my highly-categorized life, the one that came limping out of After Graduating and went crawling into "Outward Bound". Feeling hands-first into The Unknown.

Everything anyone ever wanted was felt in that morning. And lost two mornings later. Hopes and dreams. Naivety. Childhood. What do you want to be when you grow up? and Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see, but I disagree with that. I've the best tint in my glasses. They show me the unseen, the unheard and the unfelt.

reversal

I have learned to love myself

and thus I find difficulty in an-other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOlAd5bG_Zk

five in five on Sunday

 It's 5:35am and
  for the fifth time I'm
 falling into you, into
the teacups clattering overhead and
  the hazy glow of a
lost moon surfacing through the clouds

    and in my subconsciousness
it's daylight.
  you're outside in some
 non-existent space
 thats actually like your backyard in real
life. You claim that after this, I
   now "know" you, but still I
  feel indebted to

 the one that says
he loves my laugh
  and insists he can't dance though I've
seen it in my own eyes.

"If you always do

what you've always done

then you'll always get 

what you've always got."

bodytalk

you can come back now, she said

but I didn't open my eyes -

they weren't done

seeing.

revelry

I have to document you.
Because I hope you will be around later.
and when you are,
I want to be
flicking back through my posts
and find that day
(this day) and remember

how you kind of whirled me into a kiss
on the corner of your street and
I fumbled out some words, not really expecting anything
and then,
then I was kissing you back
and wary of future leaving
but actually
would have very happily
just kept kissing you on that corner
for a long time - I feel sad like I forgot to
let my palms drink you up
but I was wary of a car approaching (with its lights)
and also hadn't really expected you to -
but very happily could have just kept
talking to you, and holding
your head in my hands
and your neck, in my hands
all night -

that would be quite nice, yes, but, it is
Tuesday. Tuesdays are not for staying awake all night
with strangers (though mine could be and has been)

Your back was warm and I
like your height, even though it doesn't matter
(but everyone seems to think it does) - but yours just
suits you
and you were the perfect small amount of
shy, so endearing - but
luckily not too shy to
kiss me
goodnight

5:13

I love, actually
that moment when (you) come back to me
and I can taste myself: like
I've gone full circle.

mornebriation

I love stumbling 'round the kitchen 

first thing in the morning, still

drunk with sleep,

atlas lurking in some other world

and even though it's very brief,
it's nice hovering in-between

'til I'm pulled back to earth 

by breakfast and a shower 

pangs

I'm so greedy

I'll have you

even when parts of me 

are still leaving 

myself

some of the time

you've been greedy; not only 

acquiesced but

reveled in it

and pulled my hair

and held me in bind

and threatened me for

taking dessert

sometimes, it has

caused you to fast

and I've regret my own glutton 

for things that are beautiful 

I do eat 

with my eyes, and I 

can taste the good in everything

(though I also, quickly

sniff out an odd aftertaste)