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

grading

Clarity comes tomorrow.

I'll burst from the moon's glare,
see both eyes level

Mercury and I,
backwards so long
(it feels like we-)
here now I'm forwards,
here I start 

and I felt

                something

                                  in my grip over you
and yours 'round my shoulders

        maybe there's the magic
that'll keep my nostalgia
   from wandering K' Rd
with that light in my eye
matching men who've
                                    fed
                                           my ambition, and
boys oblivious to/o
                                being under it

I worry.
because I know

comfort dictates
         / and denies
that habit of mine

and because I know

my lungs could still love you
and love inhaling the night
       an alternating respiring
of my aloneness
       and / pressing noses with you.          

"We live together we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes."

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. 

puddled

In the shower. Red hair sits hatched over my wrists, the strands like opened veins. Draped perfectly to demonstrate my anatomy, or at least as imagined; an indication of where my head would like to be: swimming swirling down the drain with the water dirtied by my skin. So much of me has slid down the drain in my lifetime. You could probably produce a life-sized sculpture from the parts of my body that have evaded me - my hair, my eyelashes, my skin flakes, pimple pus. My saliva into others' mouths.

I recall your forearms; their huge, vertical carvings that wield memories of your best friend running two kilometers to the beach to find you in fully-fledged panic. I had only just met you both and had no idea how to help. I probably couldn't have done anything to help. I sat at home bewildered. I tried to cry and couldn't.

Eighteen months ago I walked into Levin town, and thought how easy it would be to become part of the train. I could press myself into the steel and leave traces of me on the tracks, leaving no trace. I didn't feel like a person. I didn't feel like myself. I wasn't myself. I was the insides of you, a part of your organs and their revolting chaos - subject to your self-abuse and adopting it myself. As if I hadn't already swallowed enough into my own lungs.

Sometimes when I'm driving, I think of setting my route to chance. Especially on the motorway. But I worry I'd only sit again, this time forever, and that would be worse. I'm not sure if that idea floats around my head because you suggested it when I was sixteen. Before I had my licence, I berated you for it. And now I am it.

When I'm in high places, I feel like I could jump off them and my body would never touch the ground. I told you this on Friday night as we leaned off the building without barriers. I think there's a term for this feeling but I can't remember it.

One time, I said out loud that suicide is something everyone must have thought about at some stage. Not necessarily seriously wanted, but considered the possibility of. You said it had never crossed your mind. I felt like someone had prised my eyelids wide apart with their fingernails.

new ritual

I was birthed into this year

screaming into the wind,

drowned out by the storm of myself,

hurtling through the hours

and there, for seven days, 

I've stayed.

I'm still lying in the grass

next to the rickety fence

that knows to stand the gale

the tears in my cheeks haven't healed

in fact, they're

splitting wider

I wish they were smiles.

there's something awful in me

and I don't know what it is

there's some terrible

self-loathing

that manifests staccato 

bursts of breath

open-mouthed speech that

doesn't bear words

a foreign language announced by 

caustic 

silence

I hate it.

I hate mostly

that it makes me 

hate myself.

There's something awful in me

and I don't know what it is

I can't imagine where it came from

except, 

that 

it's riding on my back

escaped from another

a parasite transversing 

not only

bodies

but 

time

it's leapt 

from the year I couldn't

into the present

(so)where things are different, but 

still

the same.

I want it off. 

I want it out.

I've told it to go.

It's still clutching and leaving scratches

I saw them on his back

I knew it was it

when he said, "you did this",

pointing at the claw marks and

me, without recollection

"No," I said,

"it was the other way around -

you were the one

taking the back of your hand to my face

while it dangled off the bed -

I never marked you."

But he insisted I did

and I knew

it was her

that creeping little parasite

that sits inside my throat 

and glides between

my forehead and my belly

when she is bored

- and she always is

we gave her a name,

after he

and those colours

woke her up

Her name is 

Vanessa

She's got to go.

bflood

my brain is flooded, swimming in my
thoughts leaking out of my eyes

flooded blood-red fury
that blurry spot begging to be

re-energised
between the heads of my femurs

drains an achy relief
already laughing to crying

sugar cubes made redundant
I've resolved to alone

but I've not resolved anything
my head can't keep up

with my churning womb
my history burns itself

for what's at stake
(little more than my mistakes)

there's something breaking in me
much worse than spilt milk

leaking eyes the first fissure

haven't seen what
I need to see

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.

future nostalgia

The full moon reminds me of howling through your sheets. It's draped over me like the train of some ornate, luxurious dress - and indeed I did luxuriate in the moonlight of you: Intermittent intensity bearing a metallic cobalt hue. I liked our brevity; the pocketedness of our meetings. Little capsules of time that had space to breathe between them, whilst all-encompassing in and of themselves.

The moon bled a soft burgundy warning over your face. Dampening the blue. A last waning, I somehow knew. You were beautiful enough for me to be content with your brief appearance.

There's a little part of you still residing in me. I'm sure. It smells like summer at the fading end of summer. It looks like persistent winter tan lines ridiculous enough to be churned into "cute". It loiters in the park, marvelling at the chlorella earth and azure sky. It has the face of Anakiwa in a record-cold August. It grabs onto youth with innocuously venomous fingertips and taps itself against the floorboards of basement buildings. It anticipates a future of rushing lungs and twisted heartbeats; that December rain-earth smell and nights with the covers kicked off.

I wish my whole life could be made of these moments. I'd be satisfied without continuity. I'd have the constant of change to hold me down, to ground me into the ground, to anchor the weight of stability into me.

cricket

I drove you home because you disgusted me. I couldn't handle the thought of waking up with your pale, wiry body in my bed. In my bed.

I felt annoyed that you didn't want the lamp light on. Your kissing me on the balcony was horrifically cliche, boring, impatient. Your hand on my knee within five minutes of meeting me was infuriatingly boring and impatient, and your impatience to get home at an ungodly hour made me feel cheated of my desire to revel in my intoxication. You stole everything I love about fleeting trysts: the conversation, the departure from sanity, the meeting of bodies. I resented you for it, so I insisted on driving you home. You insisted on feeble excuses.

Your maleness seemed pathetic to me. I flinched not with vulnerability but with voracious anger when you reached between my legs as we walked home, because you were uninvited. How dare you. And still, I let you loom over me. I sincerely believed that once we undressed, it would be fine. That like others, our bodies would match even if our heads didn't. I was unable to fathom that anyone - anything - could be as grotesque and dissatisfying as you were. As always, I overestimate people. I couldn't help but laugh feeling your wrist's poorly-suffocated retraction, as your hand crept under my long, lissom hair and stumbled over the shaved undercut. I imagine you are the sort of person who would have resented the hairs over my pubic bone but imagined some fantasy to combat them in your mind.

"God, how long has it been since you had sex?" I asked, as you breathed your disgusting air all over the space in front of me.

"Two weeks," he said.

"Shit, and I thought I was bad at three..."

He raised his voice. "TWO, I said!"

"Yeah, exactly.. and I thought I was behaving desperately," said I.

Eight always defaults to humiliating people when she finds herself in a situation she doesn't want to take responsibility for. I had a choice. I made the wrong one. Then I rectified it best I could.

I drove you home because you disgusted me. I'd rather sleep alone than alongside self-involved, invasive hunger.

1 -

how typical of me
to bury
so far into ecstasy
that I emerge empty,
unable to feel it's current
but for small, sharp, static bursts
incensing my calves, heart, feet

and having needed so badly
all week long
some body pressing into me
(so much so my dreams were riddled
with unwanted past lovers
and future mistakes,
I was melting with disgust
whilst awake)

how typical -
how unbearable -
that I should falter in my own concoction:

of barely cinnamon pseudo-Red
(how fortunate that science
approves my nocturnal pursuits -
as willed by my insides
beyond my brain's haunts)
and glistening with white,
one palette above my teeth
a dustier kind
than my solid-ground molars

finding at dark intervals, lucid, us
glistening in our toxicity,
odd and beautiful entanglements...
a delightful shock
to execute morning pages here

and I am grateful for these departures
however the repercussions fall
because I'm built of all I've known
and I've a glutton for humanity,
more alive for sleeping less
for passing Saturday's rhythms through me
- Sunday's head could almost convince me
I dreamed it, but,
Sunday's life knows
night's morning secrets -

and despite drowning in my pulsing self,
despite omitting the key arrival, I'm
more alive like this - subsisting
on skin
and conversation's complicity
revelling in the blurred moments
between self, ish and less

revi'ered

She's right, I suppose 
about the five week famine - 
I admit I've found liberties
having my skin all to myself
satiated by possibility
instead of craving what's before me 

so I've three more weeks'
untouching, lest I turn inside out 
from needing
to be turned
outside in 

three more weeks swallowing my own mouthfuls
inhaling my own air
pawing at my own pillows, instead of
devouring some other
I'll feast on carefully arranged bodies
who are writhing with another ecstasy 
and looking ferocious for it 

my only children are my unspoken words
and my favourite lover
the note that they were born from  

and again, sunday

I knew I
was going to
see you
before I actually
saw you

I don't know how I knew,
I just -
did.

(this has happened to me
before
but the subject
didn't believe me

"you're just drunk," he said
but I knew
that I knew
that I was going to meet him that night
and then:
I did
(and then, after a five-year hiatus
he turned up on a KFC commercial))

and then
I had the same
surge I had the night I didn't see you
and cut my hand bone-deep
on all of our
empty
wine glasses -

but it was probably also
two years'
first coffee coursing through me
and it being the week for yellow pills
and the fact that I was
rushing around
on only a croissant and a banana
gathering terrariums and
friends and
airports,
etcetera

and then suddenly
really happy
in the queue for 'Twelve Items or Fewer'
like, glad that I've arrived now
and thanks for helping me
get here
and thanks for
departing 

or something along those lines
except
much less
final

perhaps, more like:
revelling in my own stories
because they are mine
like little secrets pinned up
in the crevasses of my own self

and for all who've been written into them:
thanks for making an appearance.

and you forced me to sit still and look you square in the eye

I want to write things 

(archive, rember)

but I don't know what the things are

the things in my head need decoding

just like I do

just like I want to 

but don't need to

with you. 

Grey Lynn epiphanies

Almost everything I own was once owned by someone else.
I know 60 - 70% of the previous owners.

I love walking through the streets leading up to Ponsonby on Saturday and Sunday, and seeing all the discarded half-finished beer bottles left behind by weekend town go-ers.
This is completely contradictory to my attitude on littering.

All the streets I walk through remind me of past lovers.
The clubs and bars remind me of past friendships, or my own younger self.

I like the view of Pt. Chev - the city sprawl, or at night, the lights, and then the water - from the top of Cockburn road. I didn't notice this until I'd lived here several months, because I was always looking down at the footpath or noticing the trees that smell like weed and trying to figure out if it actually was pot or the trees (still not sure).

Locals will get angry if you pronounce it "Cock-burn".

My house is probably worth over a million dollars, despite the floor sinking and it being frikken cold and the fence falling over onto the neighbour's property.

I like it here.

to home

being drunk by 1pm feels
much like sober at the clock's opposite -
both some schizoid kind of absentness
both equally displaced
(from whatever, and who...)
both reminiscent of summer's length
and best accompanied
by walking,
abrasive music
or, preferably, both.

Sunday, again

Sometimes

I feel

so electrified by possibility

that I become restless enough to

render myself useless,

unable to take 

even 

the first step 

towards great things. 

departure

I have to confess,
I love this hypodermic walk home
with the moon spilling larger light than usual
- though a large chunk of it
has already been eaten

I miss being out of my mind
in that totally controlled way

I miss wasting whole days
in the
only town I ever allowed myself

I miss living
on three hours' sleep, some
self-destructive ritual

I don't miss the rain

but I miss the feeling it gives me
when it floods out at this midnight hour
(and so lucky I just missed it..)
though - there's something sensual
in arriving
home, dripping

St. Vincent, she put it neatly
when she said bring me
your loves - I wanna love them too

I want to know everyone
and I want to have felt everything
before I depart this earth
for the place that leaks into it
when I'm most me
when I'm treading my mid-brain

swim

Home Bay is no
Lake Taupo, but I still felt the
orange coursing through me
this time lashed with salt
and flanked by
three on-lookers

this time I was prepared, bikini bottoms on
(which was just as well, due to the un-company)
and black attire, so as to avoid the water
seeping through (or at least, the appearance of...)

the cars climbing up the bridge's slope
whispering to me still here, just changing
and I knew in this moment
there are things coming in the future
and they will be
great

I just knew.
(there is power in my adult-ish youth, I can
feel it)

and
this time, I ran:
all the way
home.

ritual/s

Tonight I washed
four days of stories from my hair:

Wednesday night's hurtling through One Tree Hill,
demanding some over-carbonated inebriation
from the hand of my instigating passenger
(afterwards I said, "that was naughty, I know, but...")
and lying under the pseudo-stars,
deciphering some thick German accent that wasn't father's
and then deciphering the ambiguous labels
on the condiments at the dumpling house

Thursday's venture back into the body
with a less than pretty abdomen and the
sweat of some stranger rolling over me, first on the Tarkett
and then in another's bed

Friday's collecting of summer's last salt
which clung to my pores like a child
coaxed from its parent
on it's first day at a strange kindergarten,
and the sand dunes that rolled somewhat like New Year's 2013
and the river-reminiscent towel-bedded grappling
which happened with the same

and finally, Saturday's
habits. Yog-esque sweat
and mud on the edges of me, a large step
above Karangahape's wo-men's ventures
and the gloating run over
Ponsonby's well-endowed diners.

Finally after four days of collecting
my head is heavy, so I give in.
it all slips down the drain, and for a brief moment
the palimpsest of myself is fainter
- but still, when squinted at 

- visible.

revelry

I have to document you.
Because I hope you will be around later.
and when you are,
I want to be
flicking back through my posts
and find that day
(this day) and remember

how you kind of whirled me into a kiss
on the corner of your street and
I fumbled out some words, not really expecting anything
and then,
then I was kissing you back
and wary of future leaving
but actually
would have very happily
just kept kissing you on that corner
for a long time - I feel sad like I forgot to
let my palms drink you up
but I was wary of a car approaching (with its lights)
and also hadn't really expected you to -
but very happily could have just kept
talking to you, and holding
your head in my hands
and your neck, in my hands
all night -

that would be quite nice, yes, but, it is
Tuesday. Tuesdays are not for staying awake all night
with strangers (though mine could be and has been)

Your back was warm and I
like your height, even though it doesn't matter
(but everyone seems to think it does) - but yours just
suits you
and you were the perfect small amount of
shy, so endearing - but
luckily not too shy to
kiss me
goodnight