glimmer

I don't wash my hands afterwards. I go into the living room and ask if I can help make you dinner. I put my fingers around your neck, including the nails of my right hand. The left squeezes into your waist. I inhale the particles of your skin.

The carpet's murky. There's rips and splotches in it. It should have been replaced years ago. The cats have driven their over-grown claws into it over and over again. They've vomited on it. They've birthed hairballs out of their throats on it. One of them's going to die soon and the other one snorts an arrythmically endearing tune.

You bring me a rose with a cockroach on it. The rose is pale pink which is my least favourite colour. The cockroach crawls all over the stained bedsheets, disoriented in a giant desert dune of mink. I watch its feelers recalibrating the space around it like TV antennae.

The sun goes down indigo over the Coromandel Peninsula. Someone screams from the backyard of a house further up the hill. I saw a woman drinking Woodstock at 2pm yesterday. Long weekend in New Zealand. Longer for those who don't hold down a nine to five.

The cat stretches its stiff paws out over me and sniffs at my knuckles. His breath smells like dead horse. My pelvis sinks down into the back of the couch.

Someone asks me how south-east Asia was. I'm dressed like a flapper.

We get stoned on the rockpools. A starfish crawls between the seaweed.

new salt

There's salt in my hair and she says I smell like Weleda. I've come straight from the beach and the ions are clinging to me. I feel my pelvis shifting and I feel my muscles stretching. The room is white. She turns off the lights. 

There's barres all around us but we don't hold back. There's something inside me I hold it back. I don't hold it back. I spill it all out. Everything comes out. My boyfriend pretends to be my counsellor he is my counsellor. He's practically a professional he's my professional. He gets on a plane, I go to the beach. I feel weird being around old friends. My new friends aren't dancers but they make me feel more creative.

I touch my ankle it feels like I might cry. I go to class it feels like I might cry. Because I'm so happy because I've lost so much because it hurts to grow a life. My body remembers breaking. It was five years ago but my body hasn't forgotten. My spine hasn't forgotten trying to hold itself up on a shakey foundation. 

I wonder half-heartedly if the surgeon molested me while I was under anaesthetic he could have done anything. I wonder if there were female doctors in the room I wonder if it's too late to find out. My rational brain tells me it's unlikely he molested me but my heart tells me - he cut me open without my emotional permission while I was vulnerable while I was broken he's the patriarchy a good guy who surfs and is goood looking has a medical degree - and they're practically the same thing. I touch the scar tissue. My boyfriend touches the scar tissue and I want him to keep touching it forever and never take his hands off because he's magic because he's my counsellor it feels so gentle and loving when he touches it the only way I can heal is by letting someone else serve me. 

He gives me a rush. I take it I let him do it. I wonder why sex and my ankle and my shadow side keep coming up in everything I do think feel especially when I'm high I'm high all the time and if I'm not high I'm ecstatic and if I'm not ecstatic I'm melting a slow death into myself into a puddle of fucked up thoughts. I smell like salt there's salt crystals on my face where the ocean evaporated the sun after I swam at the beach. I smell like salt there's salt in my hair I decide to make a show about it. 

indent

my head :

I had to indent it
to stop the Fury from rising,
had to roll my knuckles 'round the back of my skull
to avoid repeating fifteen -

(plate intersecting window;
she made me pay for it -
despite my first two orbits dizzy inside their fighting)

- supposedly its better
to damage one's self over material property

the Fury
surges
a current through me
wants to explode
                            OUT
but I push it down,
I push it down,
it boils in my abdomen
and rots my insides
and wrings my organs

the tumorous energy seeps slowly upwards
and clogs my throat, forehead, eyes

so far from flowing / or
giving without exhaustion
never hurting
always beautiful

always open
and radiant, abundant

instead -
I feel heavy
bruises forming inside me
lesions of agitation
scab my cheeks and chin

my world is insular
I forget everything outside of me

I'm well off the path
before I realise
I'm lost ...

head, meet ground
meet fists
meet shower wall

heels, meet floor
meet bed legs
meet air

forearms,
meet pile of blankets
meet thighs
meet ears

I can't hear
I can't feel
I can't feel
if I can't hear

end of winter, after summer

The light needs to sit within the darkness to be seen. Inside the cave of one's own body, one must position one's self opposite the flickering candlelight in order to see the circular prisms dancing on the ceiling of the world. The candle burns for several hours but never burns down - it just keeps sending its light onto the dark surfaces around it until the sun comes up. Once the sun comes up, the whole room is flooded with a cold orangey-blue - it's the colour of winter turning into spring.

The city sits nestled inside the nook of a bushy valley - also emerging in the dawn from damp darkness into warm light. The streetlights flicker and eventually fade, just as the candles do. Something primal howls before dawn and then shifts to silence afterwards. The ferns snap crisp in the cool air, creating a knowing frame around the motorway in the distance. Car lights, too, dance up and down the horizon until the morning lifts them out of their fantasy and into the strange new world. The animals sit breathing at the window, shifting their own broken breath onto the panes of glass. They sit high, looking down - they have no illusions about their right to be here.

A heavy, yellowish cloud shifts its way through the murky new light and the whole valley becomes a restless catacomb of Friday energy. Tui flutter between the wooden deck and the changing sky. The morning is a dense shade of dark green and the light spills out behind the perimeters of the clouds, like the sun behind the moon during an eclipse - radiating out from the edges and sending it's bright colour sharply around the darkness in front of it.

My throat opens as I breath in the view. The cavities in my head become peaceful, breath flows through them easily once again. Everything is clear. I return to the sound that sits in my chest, I return to the knowledge that sits at my atlas, I return home. I integrate and re-integrate. I align my vertebrae with the journey its made - it will take some time before they're wholly here.

The morning remains quiet. The cat mimics my gasping and then, my stillness. The world feels beautiful for a moment, as the night carries its energy over into the day. I sit up. I become awake. I take my thoughts and I make them solid. I speak. I listen. I wipe away the salt from my eyes. 

summit / maunga

no one can hear
each other
in this place

that is the question

this isn't face
to face --
this is
no way for one human being
to talk
with another

this isn't personal...
or intimate, or creative 
I'm not talking in clichè.
I'm not orchestrating a revolution --
this is the reality I perceive :
of a fear-filled framework that seeks
to other
in order to protect itself
(and yet, most dangerously,
claims to do
the exact opposite)

I saw how it holds our tangata whenua in their place
suited and afraid to sing
lest they lose their pride
to the vast white ocean that stole their waiata,
or their own dark clouded ego
found in the debris
left by the hurricane of colonisation

this is no way to talk about well-being,
sitting in a sun-deprived chamber
for eight hours of the day -- that's
talking
without breathing, 
so we're all headaches and notifications

we're not in congregation
we're neatly ordered
in order of ranking
we're all
facing forward,
forgetting
to see
each other
in our periphery,
forgetting where we came from

(the little girl who wanted to tap dance
doesn't belong here, no --
she's up on Arthur's mountain
eating wild blackberries in her zebra costume,
lanyard around her neck --
a puzzlingly incongruous puzzle)

we artists give everything
we empty ourselves
of every inch of our atoms
every molecule of our meta
and in return we receive ourselves --
that conspicuously elusive treasure
which the privileged pay thousands
for someone else to unearth on their behalf
at the end of their lives

... but if you just moved a little,
stretched your insides just a little,
heard the music rumbling
through your own skin-kissing veins,
at a decibel almost hidden from the canals of your ears --

you'd have a life
when you came to the end of your life;
you'd know how to give life
to those
who are trusting you
to provide one for them

and we wouldn't need to talk 
about well-being
or being well
we wouldn't need to make policy for it
because we'd all have access to
that shrouded privilege
of ancient buried knowledge --
the true bringer of equality :
my education my revolution --

we'd understand
the policy is already written :
it's in your skin, and in your land, and in your children

and to echo yesterday's words spoken
I'm not here to blame, or guilt, or reproach,
or claim that I'm more woke
-- because then I would be making myself an other --
I'm merely here to provoke a conversation
to make, and to offer my creation :
to allow art to do what art is supposed to do
to do what I am supposed to do
to do what people are quintessentially here to do :
to unearth and divulge the primal knowledge existing within us

to do what my country taught me -
you see
we're pioneers, where I come from
in 1893
my country taught its wāhine
to raise their voices into the ears of men --
so here I am, standing to reach their height

my country -- or at least its weather -- made me resilient --
our flightless birds taught me how to ruffle feathers,
even if I don't fly at the heights
of those privileged enough to have wings

my culture taught me to sit
my body within its land
my whenua taught me how to dance before any teacher did

and where I have only a small voice
where I must take my lunch on a different floor
lest I do what I was told I was invited here to do --
where I have only a few minutes
but also the proverbial power offered by an audience
(and we all know that with great power
comes great responsibility) --
with this voice and these few minutes
I will find the stage on which I may stand
and I will hold up my truth
and I will be heard ...
we will be heard

and I tell you :
the world is not fractured.
so stop telling us that we are broken !
we become what we believe.
so go back to your countries
and tell your people
there is goodness
and unearth that goodness in yourself
and send it out into the world
use your power to lift up, to reach out, to connect, to create

to translate your words into action
dance them outside of these walls
give them life
hear them breathe
make your language move
let it connect you in
to a new global culture
that chooses diversity over difference
and action over apathy

translate your words into action
so that together we may thrive
a new global culture
that sanctifies being alive

opening plenary

I was conquering
I was using my body as my voice
I was speaking with tongues
I was holding my flesh bare against the heads that wouldn't bear me
I was taking back in the night what was daily robbed from me
a post-feminist Robin Hood

they didn't even know it

they thought they were still on top
even whilst convulsing underneath me

garden of Edin

the history of this place
sits nestled against the clouds
sending itself vertically into the ether
and high above the meta

there's stones that have stories in them
there's muddy bogs where witches have drowned
there's gallows where sub-people breathed their last breaths

there's paintings of the city's ancestors
struck up on the palace walls

and I'm drinking red wine
with the world's politicians

and I've twenty-two dollars to my name
and my dental debit bounced

and I told the waitress I was onto her,
that I knew she was an alien
and she told me that I looked cool
because she knows my biggest fear is
that I don't

and that's the only way to win the humans over
is to spoil them with flattery

one day, when we're all green
we'll drift on our own smoke
up into the other realm
that sits inside, above our own

and we'll share our hearts with the beings
that birthed us into this world
they'll strip us of our flesh
and we'll no longer need to be channeling
because we'll know that
we just are

I've drifted between times
I've shoved my body into new places
I've ached to be alone
I've felt the loneliest I've ever felt

I've dipped myself below my own eyes
I've given my tongue to another
I've longed for home
and swum in filthy plastic-ridden shores
I've sweated out all my grime -
it's come out through my skin
I am no longer black
but bright, pearly white
I've caught up with my own karma
I've been blessed by my birth place

there's nothing left in me
there's nothing left
I am hollow
I am out
I am inhabiting
my God/(l)ess body

flying

they were eleven,
and he was
perhaps
in his mid-twenties -
as old as I am, now -

and they were pale white, fair scandinavian beauties
who knew things - they really knew;
I understood
what he meant
when he said,
they knew - know:
they weren't children, they were
women
on the brink of womenhood
totally self-aware
as they pressed their lips, breasts against one another
in an act of permission
for him - they let him watch
independent of their own eyes
he was privileged
independent
of his own eyes
they found their navels searching one another

did the screens teach them to do that?
I doubt it -
I remember
being sixteen
sitting on the edge of bathtubs,
learning how my best friend's lips
were softer than any boy's I'd kissed
finding the complex of edge
of platonic intimacy

I also see that deep, aching beauty
that exists in certain adolescents
they know it's there
and how it makes them power-full
we all witnessed it yesterday
as a fifteen year old boy
lay down in the spotlight
and opened his throat, heart, body
and we all ached with wonder at his being
and ached with pity for the woman who birthed him

and I, too, wonder how far I could go
with manifesting my own fantasies
both in words and in body
and the corners my curiosity could drag me into
if only I let myself
surrender fully to my mantras
nothing is real, nothing actually matters...

the line, the line
he asks us where is the line,
if there is even a line at all
or just a fuzzy, murky blur









written in response to Bastiaan Vandendriessche's play, De Fuut, Edinburgh Fringe Festival

forest fire

I don't know where my words went. They just got up one day and left me. Not even out of my fingertips but just dropped out from the bottom of my guts, slurped up into some unseen void deep below me.

At first, I told myself I'd shed some ego. That was partly true. Also true was the fact that I'd gained some new padding to replace what I'd shed. I'd reversed up one path to walk down another alongside it.

But then I would go into the forest and they'd come back. My words would start floating towards me from somewhere inside the tree canopy, and nestle themselves into my head, winding around and around in circles like a dog finding the best position for sleeping. Maybe that's it - maybe they've just gone dormant and wake up when absolutely necessary. Genius is a luxury.

My words are the opposite of light sleepers. When it's quiet, they rise. When it's chaotic and loud and all the lights are on, they slumber.

To let yourself become totally absorbed in something
is the most beautiful thing.

wasted in 12 at 30,000

we're seeking out that elusive figure eight :
something yet to be revealed and something oh so present
merging through the crowd
I feel so scattered and put back together

and what's been tried and tired
is all so inspired
the waves are crashing down in the other hemisphere
(it feels like we're searching
for that needle in the hay)

and at the day's end there's no way, no way
to repurpose the notes
that have gone astray from our heads

except to convert them, to turn them into
some oceanic assertion
something folding back and forth
like doors opening and closing
knowing only that this portal
leads somehow to the next...

and if I see where I'm heading
then maybe I'll know where to go;
then time will somehow show me how
to traverse this giant space
to find the places I might call home -
because they don't exist on this land, they're
found only in people

and meantime I'm seeking, seeking out
an unopened time, a mind
that's wandering, wondering, undoing
and learning how to still be
amongst all the unravelling

it keeps the globe turning
it's in flight from dusk til dawn
-- the bright orange flash pierces its way through the tunnel
and washes over the rows of us all
like a fucking woke baptism
funnelling through our eyelids
until they droop onto cheeks

the only thing that brings us together, really:
overpriced snacks and a desire to be somewhere else






feelings repurposed from Doprah's 'Will I Be A Figure Eight'

shamebelles ramble

if I indulge, I have taken away my indulgence
and if I die, then I have taken away my death
if I subscribe, then I've cancelled my subscription
if I put distance, then I've come closer
if I am awake, I must be sleeping
if I cry, then it is because I am happy
if I hurt, it's because I am hurting
if I suffer, it's because I is suffering
if I am

then I am channelling

Isy

I remember the holes in him when we first met -
recognising the beauty
but seeing it so distant,
like his body had left his heart behind
when it shifted hemispheres

knowing - feeling it - diluted
and now seeing
the completeness that comes
with one's own home, lover, vitality ...

.. and wondering if the same sees itself in me,
 a recognition that I am
at once
whole and with holes in me
so complete and yet
missing my completeness

wandering for something close by
and also forgotten
holding it once in my own body
and in my head-mind,
on the edges of my limbs, or
at only my fingertips

we're all seeking, seeking,
lost and found

"The mystery of life
is not a problem to be solved
but a reality to be experienced."

- Uncle Alan Watts

berlin 2.0 / 3.0

this whole city hold echoes of you, now
-- like those denim shorts did for five years, after Ohope
until they literally frayed apart -- and then I'd
gotten new atoms, anyhow...

falafel smells like the nostalgia of you
and anxiously holding my bag close seems
less inconvenient
but more achievable
than containing my unkempt heart

and the whole city feels
like the achingly-full emptiness
of knowing you briefly
and of knowing another for many past lives prior
and wondering
about the interchangeability of souls
across time and space
and the faint foreboding echo
of home-songs
whose authors have long departed,
cradling the surreality of it all,
reassuring me I won't spill red
all over the floor
(just water
and shame)

and I hold on,
though the arms of my womb ache ;
I breathe in the salt that sits in the corners of my eyes
I press myself into the frames of old lovers
and echo their names
until I pass out
with love

beer - bus - bled

quietly fucked up in public
the ultimate serenity
the most private of secrets
more intimate than stewing in love
the furtherest from Earth whilst still
/ anchored in the planet
the deepest adventure into my own
/ capabilities and composition
a subtle "fuck off" and "fuck yes" : to and for the world

sometimes I can see myself / easily an addict
festering furiously, wonderfully, in the corners of my mind
venturing with too much courage into the flight of my veins ---

but I also enjoy my coherency, my health and my innocence
--- so I stick mainly to coffee, and marijuana
(and sometimes adultery, though that's far too close to love)

I want my body to bounce around between higher spaces
I want to unravel in front of people
I want to remind us all that nothing's real

hEART

heart is dancing

heart doesn't know how but

it still / moves 

it's supposed to keep rhythm

but it's out of time

it's growing old so early

and refusing to grow up

it's stuck in the centre of the spine

green but not with envy

it's breaking its host body

refusing to mimic regularity

its swinging blood around this miniature world

but it doesn't work towards a life

it permits organs of sadness

and cells of confusion,

atoms of melancholy

to float around, meandering

it desperately needs coffee

it knows it's not good for it but

it wants to fuck itself up

it wants to lie on the floor

it wants to feel allowed to fail

it wants to stay at the bottom --

why must it climb 

to sit so high on the spine ?

it feels embarrassed about being a heart

it hurts to beat

it throws itself at others, not out of need

but out of a desire to touch, to connect, to feel..

that's different, it insists :

a heart needs a ribcage to sit within,

it needs a pulse to follow

it needs hands to hold it

mandala

There's this tiny ache in/side of me
         but it is no longer a Fraid
                 instead, it is
    a want :
it aches for all the things it cannot have
and in doing so, loses sight of the Is
     -- despite insisting on the present, it
drains the battery on my phone, gnawing at perused possibilities
it empties my bank account, hungry to taste every/thing
it throws itself at potential new foes, entities
showering them in giving, gifted, gone... 
                      so that I AM left smaller and also
larger
at the same time

it empties my body
of all its vital pulses
surging my blood down through the veins of my feet,
into the earth
singing my head up into the clouds
               floating on my heart rhythms...

it's like post-show depression
without the show

it's like saying goodbye to a lover
knowing when you next see them,
it'll be different

opening is the new opening

I'm holding in my head
               a body the world won't call mine
   
but he's been here before
and I saw them all, when I was born /

and passed through the skin of both last night
to discover what I already knew:

that each body-being
resides in the other

I saw their faces merge
- and it was the same
                     just like the other,
the Muslim man smoking marijuana with my self in Christiania

                                                                               (his heart just beat so fast

                                                                                and when he touched me  

                                                                                my body flew backwards) -

I heard them speak with the same tongues,
that same slow, gentle weight
                                of words
                                    working their way
down
their limbs
from their mouths
and into their fingertips,
hands on the skin of my abdomen --

the space around me
                                   buzzed with my thought field
I came into my own God Body
and I was traversing time itself;
hearing the full ear/thly sight of sound

I arrived in them both -
singular in being
we all know that we've met before
but / and / whilst
                             without having ever laid eyes on...

neither separate nor joined
everything sat in harmony.
there was no line to cross
except for penetrating myself --

and I remembered the total truth:
emerging out
means going in

we are all one entity.
that is all there is.

and so, everything is good
everything is full
everything is love

lorstE

I go to put words down
but in fact there's nothing to say
because she's already said it all

spotted in Christiania

Only freedom is holy --
nothing kills like religion.

The garden of Eden is filled
with green smoke
and brown grass
and a million different languages
each body undergoing an exorcism,
their hearts beating the ahrdest
of any living beings -- so hard
they fall through the ground
backwards
forever
until they reach the other hemisphere:
reborn
into a parallel future
that's insisting on repetition
birth-death-rebirth
for all eternity...

I stepped into Utopia
and sat there awhile
I didn't even breathre
-- no inhale,
just sight.

caspar

it's like your head
swallowed his face
after he sank down through the earth -
and came out the other side :
the underworld of the other hemisphere --
a fearsome fairytale
of the same old shit /
repeated self-helplessness
that cannot be counselled

that doesn't accept breath, or
silence
or self,
and wants only
the things that
kill him surely ...

...
the softness of tears
with the immoveable hardness of ego

suffering in suffering

copenhagen

There was a time when it all poured out of me,
            because there was nowhere else for it to go --

now,
   things are open
       and so my mouth
 speaks the words
my fingertips used to

my dreams go on
             and on
                 and on
                      and on ...

we'd both dreamed of each other
      and I saw you in him
we started talking like us
-- and there was the gentle touching of hearts,
that impossibly palpable organ
    churning through a body
          making sure we feel alive
so close and
    yet so far.








italicised words are lyrics from DUAL

skyttevu

Everything keeps giving
echoes of itself :
I've seen - heard - met - felt - tasted
this instant before --
and not even in the accepted plane
of time -- it's happened elsewhere ;
it's engrained in the memory
of my body's intricate cells

so that when a moment presents itself
I get lost in the infinite order,
the ten-dimensional web
begins to weave its way
through my consciousness ...

I travel along the strains of light
until I reach a thousand intersections of possibilites
and then I play them all out simultaneously
and watch my multiple lives
unravel around me.

somewhere just outside a small town, on a windy coastal road

The traffic flows past our picnic spot
in waves, crashing over us in the same rhythm
as the tides of the ocean.

Large campervans, stock trucks, cars with boat trailers,
all seem to have the same gravity as
the burgeoning moon,
collecting a long line of vehicular planets behind them,
their collective orbit
snaking along the windy põhutukawa-lined perimeter
of the Coromandel coast,
for kilometers
and kilometers...

Their patient celestial dance
interrupted by small-town adolescents
with a big-time exhaust, or
a born-again boomer
made agile by his motorbike,
thrust into the wild future
with the spontaneity of middle age...

We sleep with our heads
pressed against either
the ocean, or the traffic -- they
both sound the same, but
what matters is
knowing -- a feeling, 
a search for
present-nostalgia,
the thin veil of reality made
tangible
by daylight
glimpse.

The sun goes down
at eight one night, six the next,
and I'm sure
the slow summer sadly descends with it...

the traffic all goes back to Auckland,
that sprawling volcanic hot-house
where one third of our tiny population
insist on clambering over one another...

We go back to planning:
our next free meal, retrieved from the bins of Countdown;
our next work of art;
our great escape
to the summer
of another hemisphere.

in/spiral

and those of us who have so much
will profess that we have so little;
and those of us abundant
will always cry that we need more;
and those of us well-fed
seem always to be hungry,
while those of us hungry
know others still are starving.

Somehow, those of us sleeping
in the warmth of comfort
will still, in the morning, be tired and cold --
while those of us awake
will see the sunlight pouring in
and feel it coursing through our veins
and know the day is opportune, full, open, alive ...

and instead of shutting our ears,
or allowing the slow droop of our eyelids,
we'll take our fingertips out into the world and manifest magic,
conjuring the transparency
that open eyes seek

and we will know each other better
for having known ourselves,

for having touched some quiet, intimate sphere
that only solitude knows,
that only hunger knows,
that is only seen when life is stripped back
to today's moment; to shedding, to being bare,
to being comfortable with vulnerable --

but that tiny glimmer of goodness found in a stranger's eye,
when he recognises himself in your freckles and
sits beside you on the grass,

or when you submerge your body into the ice-cold ocean
so that even your organs go numb
with the quiet of being

-- that's where we should find ourselves
because that's where we will be fed,
that's where we'll find our energy, bursting from within
the molecules of the earth,
rich and abundant, residing
in the folds of the fabric of time itself--

That is where we actually live
and living anywhere else is discord.

When tomorrow wakes,
time will still move in spiral - and I will be
somewhere,
sitting subtly in the earth's body,
and I will have chosen to be happy.

"You are dancers, all of you. Life moves you. Life dances you. To dance is to investigate and celebrate the experience of being alive. Like life, a dance creates and destroys itself in every moment. Like love, it is beyond reason. Ephemeral as breath, concrete as bone, dance is made of you. You sculpt space. You write with your body in a wordless language that is deeply understood. You grace the space within and around you when you dance. Force, trajectory, inertia and recovery - dancing is a ride. A duet between your instinct and imagination. To dance is to heighten your experience of the present moment. Your body is your location. When you dance, you are profoundly engaged in being there."

- Crystal Pite, Choreographer.