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.

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. 

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

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

Purakaunui #3

Most people have coffee and cigarettes
but we have coffee and marijuana -
we don't quite wake-and-bake,
but we get-up-and-potter-and-do-the-dishes-and-get
-stoned.

We get low on the high
and then bump it up with caffeine,
jumping about
from one fork-edge to the other

and even though we're far from home
we're more than home -
smoking local air,
swimming local beaches
and sitting next to friends of friends of friends.

We're in the thick of it, this summer
and it hasn't even started;

we're in the heat of it, this summer,
and it isn't even the solstice.

I hear the waves of my own world
pouring out around me
and it pleases me to see them
running out of my fingertips.

Purakaunui #2

Even in the cold, my hair dries within minutes -
the heat comes from the inside
out: the hot goings-on
of my head,
blood and oxygen circulating
and the thick, muggy humidity
of long, grey cloudy air...

Even in the cold,
my hair dries quickly
it feels beautiful and earthy
even though I've
not washed it in weeks.

Purakaunui #1

We submerge ourselves under
the shattering icy glass,
it breaks over our heads and
spikes the surface of our skin

my toes search upwards
and my lungs become the centre of myself,
two lumps of flesh floating
within a blue body, my heart
makes itself known

my hair scatters in lines out from me
my head a Medusa of snakes and storms,
the salt clings to it and
eats at my scalp pores.

It seems easier to bear alone,
it feels almost baptismal,
a perfect morning ritual, a perfect
offering to Tangaroa,
a quiet unsquealing,
an un-uttered gasp.

We submerge ourselves under
and the ice shatters overhead

I feel my blood boiling over
and then I put on a beanie.

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.

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.

birth / day

there are things that cling to me
that are not mine -
things that have come
from somewhere
else

they like to latch on to the tendrils
of me, at first I don't notice
the scratch at my periphery -

suddenly, I feel
my brain
dragging,
my
reproduction organs
tugging themselves into swollen knots

and I know.
I'm
holding
within me
a parasite

at least
I know.

it's still revolting.

at best
I can stand
by the window,
and invite
the rain to wash over me,
to wash them off

at worst they'll cry through the tips of my fingers
make their way up
into
my throat

and flood out my eyeballs

mostly, I don't mind.
I'm so good at playing host.

but other people mind
and they mind that I don't mind
they will encourage me
to fix, or
get fixed,
"okay?"

though I know fix begins
with staying, still.

I feel the parasites out,
their little footpricks on my skin hairs -
trying
to get
somewhere, too

They also want out.

They've another destination.
it isn't me
and I'd be self-absorbed
not to realise

A place that isn't even at this volume of gravity -

and eventually, after climbing
beyond capacity to fill
they'll slip down my
face, rest
briefly in my mouth
and continue back down
through the earth
to inhabit some other soil

I'll be empty
again.
and I'll wish to feel
the echoey ding
of those ferocious ghosts

whito

we were in that other plane
as we approached that cave
end of the beach, the
darkness shook us --

I was the first to say it
because I was
unravelling
but you concurred immediately
there's something there
we knew it:
the land was holding.

so we turned swiftly in our sluggish bodes
"sorry," I said aloud
because it was necessary
for it to know
we knew our error.

I wove the reo into my speech,
talking of "tapu"
so it would know
I was friend,
so it would forgive
me, us

I'm trying

-- back to our designated place
where we exchanged money
to sleep by the pou
I wrapped my blanket tighter around me
in lieu of a coat
in lieu of cup of tea
the thing we want
the most
right now

cold enough to know we're here
high enough to know the difference
centred enough to know the thing
and white enough not to see it

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.

away

It's because going somewhere else is like taking a step back. It's like pouring your thoughts onto another's ears so they can speak fresh words into your hands. It's like showering the day's chaos from your surface before entering the nightly catafalque. It's the same as stepping into the ocean so you can forget land for a while.

It's like pushing that tiny triangle under your tongue to both leave this place and sink deeper into it. It's like gripping someone else's back and learning the etchings of their skin, so your fingertips remember them when they're not there. It's like recalling sixteen and aching with your future self's nostalgia for now.

In the end, time and place are nil. They are not anything except arbitrary configurations of our desperate, grappling minds. They are paradoxically the most quintessential and least tangible things we have. And yes, those of us who bleed are the lucky ones - we're not sitting below ground. We're melting into the same universe that the world's air is snaking its way through. We're necessary to everything else as everything else is necessary to ourselves.

Without us, there is no world. We're the stars that guide the earth's orbit, and we're the gravity of our own souls. Indeed, if it weren't for the hollowness of my body, I might float away, and see it all for what it really is.

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.

trip #8

All the things that have manifested are

ugly. (but they are beautiful at the same time). 

And they are not so different
from what I know of myself
in the light. 

I'm the same but with a new opened channel

to articulate it all, or rather:

the mode by which I output

becomes unlimited,

  ideas are free to flow, just as they need.

even here, now in this morning-after writing.

That's why wrath for self and/other 

were made from June, 

though I'd intended something different -

because I had opened.

and fortunately I stayed opened long enough
to pray the pretty pictures of my head

onto the others' bodies

and they danced the dance that was made in me,

they told everyone that which I couldn't speak,

not for lack of ability or words,

but for fear.

That tiny 'Fraid which resides in me,

she underpins everything -

she's still hanging around. 

return to paradise

It's 5.45am on a Saturday and someone's trying to jump off Bond St. Bridge. It's for real this time, not because we wrote it into the script. He's not even drunk. He's almost smiling. Welcome home to Auckland.

The airport shuttle drives past and I think, surely the iron-blue uniforms inching towards him are only encouraging his defiant, almost laughing fingers to gently lift themselves from the condensation-soaked handrail. Reaching towards the transient car bonnets conveyor-belting along the dewy tar seal lanes below.

There is no depression in New Zealand, ladies and gentlemen.

A tourist sitting in front of me marks the sign of the cross over their own body, as though they themselves are the one destined for great things. Their partner points out any slightly interesting sight  - houses, parks (there's no Skytower here) - to distract them both from a weighted first impression of Aotearoa's grey slump of dawn sunshine.

from the horizon

there's a small piece of my aliveness
floating in the waters of Anakiwa

it's swimming around
looking for itself

it doesn't know where its whole is, but
it knows
that it is
Home.

it is torn between
all the things it loves, of which
there are
many -
too many, perhaps -
and found in various places,
moments, people:

nestled in the embrace of many beautiful arms,
sitting in the corners of many beautiful smiles

- and especially, in this moment, in the
slightly ochre cheekbones
of some ridiculous but successful
luring tactics
who I'd have happily stayed put for,
who neglected to remove the glitter from my eye

who was part of this week's opening,
heart-pouring
beside the ocean

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

ravenous

for words, and skin

(my own, and theirs)