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. 

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

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

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.

in a car park in Rai Valley

Chet was there then, too

nestled in amongst those dark blue giants

hovered by lightest grey clouds

and held in the hands of the youngest man

I asked for him by name at Te Kainga

but I was the youngest girl, so

The Shins rang out instead

and that was okay, except

now they make me nostalgic

and are mandatory listening on South Island road trips

(just as The White Stripes were, briefly,

for a short while 'til Chet fixed it)

and so there’s something unnerving

about the unfinished house in this paddock

and the rolled joint sitting in your ear …

except you’re reading me a book and

cooking me a meatless meal.

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)

a poem that shouldn't be written but I'm writing it anyway, in what I'd like to think is a moment of bold honesty, but probably is more like embarrassing stupidity

i.

I want to fuck you
like the dirty fucking whore
I once was
/ still am, but
not practising, like a bad catholic who's
skipping church

I want to
open my mouth
wider over yours, and take giant gulps of you
run my tongue along your teeth
and smash my jaw on your edges

and even though I get off
every time with you, without fail, and even
almost always
more than once, I just...

feel complacent in my climax
coz it's just so
goddamn easy

I want the performance back.

I want to dress up in thigh-high socks
and short skirts
and still be wearing them
when you come inside me
(my top off,
but in my bra)

I want to find you in a gutter at 4am
and lick drugs from your sticky palms
I want to wake up on your floor
with broken wine bottles everywhere
and stains in the carpet
that aren't from the wine

I want to smell myself on you
when I walk back into your room
after pissing in the morning
and walking back through your lounge
your conventionally good-looking flatmate
half glaring, half gawking

I want you to smack me across my face
I want you to dig your nails into my spine
I want you to chuck me around your living room and break a
very expensive heirloom

and tell your girlfriend all about it

and write poems about it

I want things that grate entirely
with my actual
ideologies

I want the sordid satisfaction
of you thinking I'm something I'm not
and knowing you can't comprehend
human duality

(or you know it entirely, and
that's why
you're here)

I want the pleasure of having power
over giving you an alter-ego
like, fuck yes this same
binge drinking, cock-sucking slut
also votes green, shuts down the patriarchy and
recycles correctly

and sure you can take me home
if you buy me a vegan burger first
coz I'm a dirty little hippy
with zero dollars to her name
but you're gonna buy me breakfast -
not because you're the male
but because you fucking owe me,
because you already want to see me again
and it's only
the morning after

and I'll answer your 10pm texts
coz it feels like summer,
and we all want that

I'll walk through the park at night for you
I'll risk my life to open my legs
I'll play the right song
and postpone sleep

just to feel in control
just to feel like the mad seductress
just to bear the weight of your form
and hear the aliveness of your breath

and conquer
and know
and decipher
one by one


ii.

here's what I don't want to do:

I don't want to go back to your windowless apartment
I don't want to hold your soft, spineless back
I don't want to pretend I'm enjoying it
I don't want you to shove yourself inside of me
I don't want to eat your fucking pumpkin seeds
you sad excuse for a vegetarian
I don't want to
go fucking slowly
I don't want to be fucked the way you want to fuck me
I don't want to wear a short skirt because you told me to,
I want to wear it because I fucking want to wear it
I don't want you to tell me to be quiet
I don't want you to be such an ugly, pathetic excuse for a man
I don't want you to
have me

I don't want to cry on your bed afterwards
and try to politely, kindly
explain why i feel revolted,
disgusted,
sick to my stomach
in a way i can't even comprehend, yet
and tell you sweet little lies
about not being attracted to you
when really the truth is

you fucking shoved yourself inside of me
after I literally said no
what the fuck was that ?
what the fuck was that

the time I stepped outside of myself
the time I played the game but no longer for the game's sake
the time I put myself in danger
the only time i wish i hadn't


iii.

I want them to enact my nostalgia

I imagine them sneaking across the hallway
at unholy hours of the night
mis-matched lovemakers
sharing rooms within a shared home
existing between the spaces of the house's other inhabitants

I imagine them indulging in the easy tension of holding a secret in the kitchen
the morning ritual of opening the fridge
and boiling the jug
the sterile intimacy
the stoic lust of taboo
the heroic triumph of doing the forbidden thing

sometimes the only way to appreciate someone you don't get along with
is to put yourself inside of them,
let them wear your skin
and shower together afterwards

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.

eve

We're lying under
the vast stars of pre-historia,
our eyes see the colours of Christmas,
backs arched against impossibly-held rocks,
precariously heaved into each other
like consoling lovers.

We imagine aliens might have passed through these
enigmatic landscapes
-- or at the very least, dinosaurs...

a Very Yellow Lights darts right --
"Look, Tom, a shoot-- ... a satellite...," I say.
(My Christmas eyes must have deceived me.)

But it hovers a while, then
comes to a stand still.

My Christmas eyes deceived me. Now it's
stopped, completely.
"Oh, it's static," I suggest.
"Just a Very Yellow Star."

A very yellow star.

We imagine xeno-scandinavians
landing from expansive avian pursuits,
we uncover possibilities for beaming telepathic calls
into space; we let our consciousnesses leap
from mountain peak to mountain peak,
following the soft pad-prints of Hanuman.

The Very Yellow Star
starts across the sky
impossibly swiftly
it flares into a
Large Yellow Sun, a
nod to the yellows and twinkling golds
of the wrists below it.
It disappears instantaneously
into a hidden black hole --
it's
Gone.

My Christmas eyes blink, my heart
swells with the same fiery yellow light
and won't shrink, won't
follow the disappearance
but stays loud and thinking in my chest

"That was a U.F.O.!" says I, stupidly
stating the uneasy, alluring, impossible obvious.

We sit a while in silence
taking in the expanse around us
then make our way back to the house.

the settlement

This place is filled with echoes of you.

I wonder why the fire isn't going.
I wonder where the guitar is.
I remember to boil the water first.
I imagine the chaos if you'd done
what you said you'd wanted to.
I imagine if I'd fallen into habit, instead
       of saying no (thanks).

I imagine -

I fall into habit
       anyway,
But I insert You into the conversation.
      open, I flow,
I flow with loquacity -

This place is filled with echoes of you
I remember dropping anchor
Six-teen-times,
      I remember
being woken at 2am
to make polite conversation
with a stranger
I remember this oceanic palette,
these fabric folds of the shore
I remember
reciting
my vows to this place,
myself; these thirteen

I remember these same blisters
in the palms of my hands, like small jewels
now I hold
two sapphire shells instead

I remember walking to the end
and finding you behind me
and feeling afraid
and feeling alive all at once
(the same reason I ever do anything)

I remember these soft orange colours
over these wintery forest peaks

I remember two-fold
calls on the walkie talkie: do you
copy?

I remember the smell of you
and I wish I'd brought
your shirt as you suggested

I remember
your warmth
I remember your arms locking mine into my
body

I remember
kissing your cheek
I wonder how many people here
saw
She certainly knows.
(for the first time ever, I lied
at exactly the right moment -
or at least, I choked
just in time
on the truth)

This whole place reeks
with the smell
of you
And still I invited you in -
I allowed you both to kiss my cheek
- why do they
insist
on doing that?
after
everything?

On paper, on paper,
but we didn't see
into the water together

I've borrowed from you a-plenty
to give everything
to him.

south

The houses here are nestled into the base of the mountains, like tiny pups sleeping, curled into their mothers' soft bellies. The snow shines ultra-violet against the rose morning sky and it's easy to understand why these giants were personified by the land's tangata whenua. They are indeed alive, carrying the wisdom of an old kaumātua and the stillness of a person who speaks only when of utmost necessity.

The cold is different here - it's exhilarating, flushing your face with the crisp foreshadowing of afternoon sunshine. It's the kind of perfect air that makes you want to thrust your torso through the open window, forget your mortality and spiral around icy corners just to feel your blood accelerate in lieu of barista-made coffee.

We arrived in the dusk; Now we're leaving at dawn. Last night we turned off all the lights to let the fullmoon-lit snow flood us with its generous ambience in our tiny two by three cabin, inflated by the ski season and allowed by our desire to escape, if only for a few days.

Here, I realise the things that really matter are:
people
being
feeling
releasing.

old

I want to be not sleeping again
and be alive in it
and be alive in it
and be alive in it

I want to feel the endlessness of night
and still
hear the sun
in the morning

I want to spend hours curled into you
and still
hear the sun
in the morning

I want to create hundreds of versions of myself
and still
hear the sun
in the morning

I want to be not sleeping again
and be alive in it
and be alive in it
and be alive in it

everything

The base things that anyone ever wanted can be reduced into a few simple words: Love. Happiness. Fulfilment. Simplicity. But these are not simple concepts. "What makes me happy?" is not a simple question, nor is it one that many people can even answer for themselves. Love often doesn't arrive - not from ourselves least of all - and doing that which fulfils you isn't always sustainable enough to fulfil you totally.

If you could have any one thing in your life right now, what would it be? How would you reduce the thing that brings you happiness into a single word ?

wading

This is the second time I've waded naked into these waters. The first in broad daylight, a baptismal ritual. The first cleansing from love, the second falling into. With, and alone - in oppositions of literal and figurative.

The first; dragging him in with me to escape the shift of the years, but very much in my own orchestrated realm. I am so good at that. I instigated, I decided, I enacted, I fulfilled, I regurgitated it back out. I watched him squirm in the hours that followed, coy around the campfire, gauche as his parents anchored ashore the next day. Messages unanswered, him being too young to understand the notion of play - especially from my female end.

And this time, by my own proximity and with joined heads. I have confessed my secret to those with me but in terms that bear no weight for them. They only know forevers, ongoings. The water holds my gushing heart; my body feels lithe with love. It speaks to me throughout the night, crashing: "I know, I know."

I'm glad it knows.

A pod of dolphins swim past us, mum is squealing with feigned delight - this is the perfect story to impart in weeks to come. I'm quiet with love, much in the way that I was when I became awash with bloodflood in the carpark of 2013. Where I sewed myself together and picked him and I apart. A mistake to be repeated.

You've the same triangles as those three, but you know the geometry of yours. And for that, I already love you.

karamea

We're at the top of the West Coast. I've never been here before.

Last night being a de ja vu of 10 years and one month earlier - strange humanoid shapes in the sand this morning. A full metallic moon arching over the vicious waves. Short shorts that do nothing to keep the sand from the creases of my skin. With an almost/not-stranger and much more self-awareness, more assertiveness. Still a healthy dose of youthful naivety. Running away in order to arrive home. Your friend inadvertently tagging along. Jumping in when it's cold. Walking towards bonfires (real and imagined). History repeats.

And actually, there was the start of the words. Not the very start, but the conscious beginning. Deciding to write. The first of what would morph into hundreds of moments inscribed, thousands of secrets etched. It began with a list. How very pedantic.

Not a list of things he finds difficult about me (which could include: the destination; mumbling; refusing to say "pardon?"; speaking cryptically; slapping; being forgetful / taking for granted) - but a list of self-improvement to-dos. Similar but not the same to those existing in my head now.

... You keep referring to a future. Maybe ours. You're worried - but for yourself, not for us. "I hope you don't become sick of me." I find that peculiar. I've always needed the ones I can't quite figure out. I'm not sure if this is problematic. It's probably self-sabotaging.

Maybe that's why the other, for all his honesty, doesn't quite sit right. So beautifully transparent in his goodness.

But then, glimpses of the palimpsest himself. In which I see a self-certain mystique that I like. Maybe it's his elusiveness that is elusive.

from and to

Remembering being with you sends that warm, melty feeling down my legs. It's not just sun. I've felt like this with you in the dark - and in the rain. I feel like this with you inside four stark walls. I know that there's something in the waves matched with my memory of you. I'm very aware of the distortion and I'm okay with it. I suppose because I hope there'll be a future where these two circumstances co-exist. It is certainly moments which I fall in love with, and with recognising myself in others. Even just a glimmer. It is in our mouths inhaling the same breath that us lives. We should bleed if we are to know where we are. Otherwise, I am here on the beach's edge alone, falling in love with the sound of the waves, permeating a final sunset.

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.