lavender and sage smoke

I feel my sexual energy come back to me -
winding her way through the grungy labyrinth alleyways
of some depths of my mind -
with a sharp, burnt orange melting
that gorgeous, wild woman
slides back into the bowl of my pelvis
with her silky skin and shining teeth,
stretching her beautiful ankles.

I'm in his neck,
my back body the crescent moon
against his swallowing sun. We're moving
deeper and deeper into the shadows.
There's gentle warmth,
a lot of it.

We're smiling.
Easily.

I'm back in the possibility of creation,
words flow again from my fingertips;
one and one make three.

I'm back with the artists and the makers,
the dreamers and the doers -
the ones who've learned to transmute
their love and share it with the world...

I've always sought out these spaces and knowing faces,
warmed my feet by the fires
of cosy beaches and backyards,
drank the sweet smokey scent out of my clothes the next day,
passed the Garden around from right to left.

He leaves and I return,
we all Come Home.
He moves to go home; I become it.
I beckon her back to me, that fiery Wildess,
a crooked little finger waggling underneath the dinner table.
We eat a feast, and she eats me.
She devours me from the red up -
and when she's finished, there's just light
shining top down, brilliant and blinding.
The particles of me scatter themselves wider
and traverse different realms, drinking from every ocean
until she's tasted them all.

here I go,
biting off pieces
      of my own salty flesh
      one by one
I'm severing
      my atrophied limbs
I'm draining my own blood,
      wallowing in a bath of
      milk and tears.
I'm stoic
      but I'm fractured.
I'm a house without foundations.
I'm a mountain that can't be summited, for I have
      no base
      and no peake --
   I'm the rocky ground in between;
      a few stray trees
           leaning into the wind.

I'm a heart on ice,
      waiting to be transplanted
      and even when I arrive,

I still won't belong,
      mis-matched to some body
the doctors deemed me suitable for.

I'm a map
     with no directions
I'm a compass
     unable to point north --
     the arm comes close, but ticks over
I'm a head without a body
I'm a face without a name
I'm a fire without fuel
I'm a sleepwalker
      caught in the middle of the night,
      pants down,
      climbing over the fence,
           feet covered in mud and
daisies.

I'm a receptionist's desk
      without a bell for help
      and everyone who arrives at me
      must wait
      for service
      -- including myself,
          I am the end
                  of the queue.

I'm a vast garden
      without
      any flowers
      or vegetables
I'm a groom
      waiting at the altar
      for a bride who never said yes
I'm a planet spinning infinitely
      into a black hole
      -- or worse,
          the sun

I'm a single perfect note
      followed by
      a deafening silence

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

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.

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

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

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

bump

I don't have a Wednesday.
Wednesday disappears from me -
it scampers away like the mischievous child
that time is, climbing up the rafters and
tripping people over when they least expect it

Wednesday is the steam evaporating off the bathroom mirror:
I wipe a small clearing with my perfumed fingers
so I can see myself better,
stare into the forever-abyss of
my own reflection

time winds back and forth and back
and forth

My Wednesday is
the last pages of a very good book,
but my weekend is the world
in which the main character comes alive.

Anawhata - 2

I love how open we become
the words flood from your head
(and mine from my fingertips)
your senses made manifest
a private exhibition for my curiosity
(mine published on the world-wide web,
a public reassurance for my inner existentialist)

Anawhata - 1

I love how wild you become
blinded by a vision of white,
your forearms braced around my chest
in hap-hazard triangles,

how far my back can turn to meet you and
the way your hand sometimes creeps up to my throat,
the window almost always open and
space flooding in, the night
flooding over us - and even the
ocean crashing softly in the distance
- or sometimes just cars -
the manic pursuit of exhaustion,
followed by the beautiful rest...

waking in the morning
and finding ourselves still skin-to-skin.

21st century zen

Nothing will let me go under.

I promise you, I'm not trying to run away.
I'm trying to run into.

I want to run further into myself and further
into us, I want to
      get lost
in the labyrinth of the world -
                  but in a good way.

I want to know before knowing
I want to see without ever having to
     open my eyes
I want to hear everything
     but still
take part in the conversation

I want to cut off my own ears.

Nothing will let me go under.

I chew it
I smoke it
I bake it I
grind it
I blend it I
extract it, I inhale it
I
avoid it
I digest it
I tip it from the bottom of a
brown glass bottle
into my throat;

nothing will let me go under

even though I've been on top of it
for so long (so long),
so good
so good
so well-
behaved...

Nothing will let me go under

It's as if
I'm meant to be here.

But it's not that I don't --
I mean,
I'm just trying--
to go
    deeper,
really, I'm...

and then ...
when I'm sitting in my own silence
in the after-stench of glutton

it comes to me

there's just too much
nothing will let me go under
'cause I'm already swimming in it
already bashed about by the current
already
miles beyond my own body,
chasing after my
mind.

i.
sometimes all it takes
to feel powerful again
(read: normal)
is boots and a denim jacket
a short puff on a small blunt
and walking in to a dimly-lit, music-less bedroom --
alone --
while the rain hits the veranda

and I wonder how I could
ever
not be
good


ii.
when I was getting high
and writing foreign poems
late at night
every night
about the night
and didn't have steel pins in me
and didn't mind getting caffeine\drunk

then I felt like an artist
then I felt like I's creating things

then I felt
like a
human being


iii.
I feel like i'm on the precipice
of being 18 again
thick in the hea(r)t of it
melting into regular epiphany
bordering on genius,
all the while complaining
about being 18 again --

but here's the trick:
I knew more then than I know now,
but I didn't know it

san/

you keep talking about that trip
like you didn't experience the paranoia
I did
like you
weren't afraid of burning the house down
a second time -
I was

you keep talking about it being earth-provided
but there's nothing natural
about my head

dancing out and away from my body
a tiny me-ghoul reminding me
of my own
creeping mortality

every time I am high now
I remember I will die
and I imagine all the ways
it might happen

including you turning a knife on me

there's nothing natural about that

and when I am awake,
alive and
not in other states
I'm caught up in the most
unholy, unworldly of heads -
I'm not even here
I'm culling myself thin

thinner than when I vomited for two days straight
thinner than my bones feel on acid
thinner than the line that's driven itself
between I
and
you

thinner than my bank account
thinner than my ability to talk sense
thinner than my ferritin levels
after rice-bread-potatoes
for three months straight

thinner than the space between my eyebrows
as it slowly collapses in on itself