astro lovers

when I lay down to dream,
I invite them all into my bed

I wind my tongue around the mouths of un-strangers,
beckoning them to come and lie with me
(or at least, to omit the truth)

I astro-travel to be with anyone
whose head matches mine,
I wait until my lovers are asleep
and then wake them up inside a small sphere
known as the universe

I coax them to put their hands over my flesh
and intimate kind words to them

I never make them breakfast
I never do their laundry
I always tell them they're beautiful
I never tell them
               that I love them

but I wonder what might happen
if I dragged them into the living?
would they come out and still love me, or
would they scatter back into the night?

banks peninsula

-- I press myself into you,
and the birds make themselves known;
the waves lap up towards the edges of us
and we fall in and out of sleep -
the wind winds its way through the open roof, and
through my hair --
                      and yours--
--knotting our salted heads
as they nod left and right,
my mouth slightly open and sharing itself with your sleeve...

children howl down the hill,
dragging skateboards, push-scooters, other apparatus behind them
and eventually being dragged behind them, themselves

everything seems simultaneously
hectic and quiet

We wake, and the wind's subsided;
we eat a hundred pieces of fruit
and follow the winding road
back up to the lake to sleep at it's shore
pressed into each other, in the back of our small van...

everything is good,
everything is safe,
everything is full of love.

in/hale

After I inhale,
all of that leaves me -
I feel heavier and lighter all at once,
I feel clear and yet hyper-aware

but the next morning, I'm still
there, though every now and then
I feel the daily state and its
slow creep of reality
etching its way back in

it lives in me but sometimes
I wish I could live in it.

Everyone sits calmly outside
and does what they do -

sometimes I feel so lost
when I'm not high.

I like to go travelling inside my own head
the safest and furtherest place
from home that I could be.
I've no idea how to get there
but it's so easy to return

I've a road map inside me
that points to all possible destinations
it goes around in circles
and then spirals
up

I like the mountains because they're unascendable,
the oceans because of their vastness
I like the places that are endless
I want the trip that never ceases -

but that's known commonly as insanity,
and generally disapproved of.

Purakaunui #3

Most people have coffee and cigarettes
but we have coffee and marijuana -
we don't quite wake-and-bake,
but we get-up-and-potter-and-do-the-dishes-and-get
-stoned.

We get low on the high
and then bump it up with caffeine,
jumping about
from one fork-edge to the other

and even though we're far from home
we're more than home -
smoking local air,
swimming local beaches
and sitting next to friends of friends of friends.

We're in the thick of it, this summer
and it hasn't even started;

we're in the heat of it, this summer,
and it isn't even the solstice.

I hear the waves of my own world
pouring out around me
and it pleases me to see them
running out of my fingertips.

Purakaunui #2

Even in the cold, my hair dries within minutes -
the heat comes from the inside
out: the hot goings-on
of my head,
blood and oxygen circulating
and the thick, muggy humidity
of long, grey cloudy air...

Even in the cold,
my hair dries quickly
it feels beautiful and earthy
even though I've
not washed it in weeks.

Purakaunui #1

We submerge ourselves under
the shattering icy glass,
it breaks over our heads and
spikes the surface of our skin

my toes search upwards
and my lungs become the centre of myself,
two lumps of flesh floating
within a blue body, my heart
makes itself known

my hair scatters in lines out from me
my head a Medusa of snakes and storms,
the salt clings to it and
eats at my scalp pores.

It seems easier to bear alone,
it feels almost baptismal,
a perfect morning ritual, a perfect
offering to Tangaroa,
a quiet unsquealing,
an un-uttered gasp.

We submerge ourselves under
and the ice shatters overhead

I feel my blood boiling over
and then I put on a beanie.

Cascade Creek

We sleep in the most shaded

corner of the campsite,

we sleep -

before seven’s become eight,

most people have risen,

undertaken their morning rituals

and left to make their days.

We have no plans, no structure,

no timeline to adhere to,

we wake when our bodies

have taken the rest they need

(we were the last awake, too,

howling around the campfire).

Dreams nor goals even stir us,

the day stretches safely into the forever-eve,

night becoming day long after the clock would say so.

I enter the day quite before them,

spilling words and coffee around the campsite,

already strewn with relics of the night before

and dewey from the shadow of the mountain.

Dawn at Shotover River

There’s light, everywhere;

it stretches into the all the forever-corners of the long, languid day -

as midnight draws near, I see

still a hint of yellow on the horizon

and it creeps back into my other eye only five hours later

The light is everywhere;

it saturates the day

it pushes our dinner backwards

and shakes us out of morning’s bed

as if we’re food in a hot pan

It changes the colour of our skin

it changes the colour of our insides

it makes us see better without carrots

it prises open our lashes with it’s soft, ob-long fingers

It opens its arms wide to encompass vast mountain ranges,

wild oceans, icy lakes;

it shows us everything in blue and green (and colours thereof)

There is light, everywhere...

For too long, I’ve been looking with my eyes shut.