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.