november nostalgia

legs up the wall reading poetry
as in twenty fifteen
except
I am sober
and less licentious

winter, sick as anything,
Pōneke, carving shapes into bodies
the composer, brilliant and
grossly underpaid

there was always
"success" 
and then
a dead end

start again, start 
again
this week, how the bills ?
dumpster dive and sublet
I didn't need anything
just a body beneath me, now and then

I miss the volatility of it
I miss dreaming and dancing it into being
I miss ___________

but I do not miss
smoky eyes, volcanic skin, asphyxiated lungs
I do not miss
the volatility of my own head

strange-r

 1.

and I wonder -
when it's time to fold into you,
will I open?
will the tears of my old wounds allow you in?
will we entangle ourselves in one another with ease?
will I still be able
to be gentle and gently led?
or will I demand you rough me around,
wilding out the nostalgia
of a hundred million lovers' hearts
and a sweet sigh of satisfactory silence?

on paper we're all a dream
but in the flesh, we're something
beyond this world entirely

my heart aches with the sun that never shone
and the warmth at the centre of me
burns with the fire
of every woman who's ever
melted her ribs into this earth

the sand is a thousand trillion tiny glittering pieces,
and so am I. 


2.

I know
I'm impatient
to know you

and I have no idea who you are

I'm wondering about our capacity to melt into one another 
when the sun comes up again
- will the forest breathe her spirit into our lungs
and teach us how to sing together ?
or will she sharply dig her branches into our sides
reprimanding our impatience

it's the apocalypse, tomorrow
and I can't wait to drown in the ecstasy of it all
do you wanna come with me to the end of the earth?
it lives between my legs
I've seen it all die so many times

and yet I'm still blinder than the bat
that fed the soup of this whole damn mess

yes, we're on the ark
it's time to drown. 

3.

go in there at night
and flesh out the skeletons
sing the bones back on 
and don't be afraid of the creature your skin conjures.

elmira avenue (in autumn)

     
       || -- something comforting, nostalgic
       in the micro-mountainous footpaths,
       disrupted and distorted
       by the ageing roots of searching trees ---


                                                 stronger than cement &
                             reclaiming the earth below the earth
                                              restoring urban to jungle,
                                                           & chaos to order


                                   I   t r a v e l
b  a  c  k       i    n            t  i m  e


   I have a pink-and-white bike;
streamers flap from the handles
                                                   on either side,
     
       beads clinking in the spokes of
       wheels clinking over footpaths:
       ||
       an obstacle course
       crafted just for me
       by my friends, the trees, the trees, the trees
                             and in the autumn, crunch-crunching
                                       reddish-yellowy leaves, leaves

        || 27 ||||||||
        alone
        barefoot through the breeze
        folding my entire self in slow heartbeats
                                                       of the trees,
                                                       of the trees.

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

illuminated

here's walking on water:
          two rugged cliff faces,
          white crests in between

here's walking on water
                              on water
                                    on water

my head floods green
         with a generous gift
          from the man with / out his pounamu
          (his green talisman shifted itself
          while he shifted green energy with green plastic...)

... and I think about touching
           your quiet ribs,
           your hair gently at the edges
                   of my smiling face

and I feel green,
         not with envy, but grounded
         green in the earth

         my head is misty, like
         a morning in the tomo,
drinking elixirs and inhaling smoke
in the portal.

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

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

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'

Isy

I remember the holes in him when we first met -
recognising the beauty
but seeing it so distant,
like his body had left his heart behind
when it shifted hemispheres

knowing - feeling it - diluted
and now seeing
the completeness that comes
with one's own home, lover, vitality ...

.. and wondering if the same sees itself in me,
 a recognition that I am
at once
whole and with holes in me
so complete and yet
missing my completeness

wandering for something close by
and also forgotten
holding it once in my own body
and in my head-mind,
on the edges of my limbs, or
at only my fingertips

we're all seeking, seeking,
lost and found

mandala

There's this tiny ache in/side of me
         but it is no longer a Fraid
                 instead, it is
    a want :
it aches for all the things it cannot have
and in doing so, loses sight of the Is
     -- despite insisting on the present, it
drains the battery on my phone, gnawing at perused possibilities
it empties my bank account, hungry to taste every/thing
it throws itself at potential new foes, entities
showering them in giving, gifted, gone... 
                      so that I AM left smaller and also
larger
at the same time

it empties my body
of all its vital pulses
surging my blood down through the veins of my feet,
into the earth
singing my head up into the clouds
               floating on my heart rhythms...

it's like post-show depression
without the show

it's like saying goodbye to a lover
knowing when you next see them,
it'll be different

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

somewhere just outside a small town, on a windy coastal road

The traffic flows past our picnic spot
in waves, crashing over us in the same rhythm
as the tides of the ocean.

Large campervans, stock trucks, cars with boat trailers,
all seem to have the same gravity as
the burgeoning moon,
collecting a long line of vehicular planets behind them,
their collective orbit
snaking along the windy põhutukawa-lined perimeter
of the Coromandel coast,
for kilometers
and kilometers...

Their patient celestial dance
interrupted by small-town adolescents
with a big-time exhaust, or
a born-again boomer
made agile by his motorbike,
thrust into the wild future
with the spontaneity of middle age...

We sleep with our heads
pressed against either
the ocean, or the traffic -- they
both sound the same, but
what matters is
knowing -- a feeling, 
a search for
present-nostalgia,
the thin veil of reality made
tangible
by daylight
glimpse.

The sun goes down
at eight one night, six the next,
and I'm sure
the slow summer sadly descends with it...

the traffic all goes back to Auckland,
that sprawling volcanic hot-house
where one third of our tiny population
insist on clambering over one another...

We go back to planning:
our next free meal, retrieved from the bins of Countdown;
our next work of art;
our great escape
to the summer
of another hemisphere.

astro lovers

when I lay down to dream,
I invite them all into my bed

I wind my tongue around the mouths of un-strangers,
beckoning them to come and lie with me
(or at least, to omit the truth)

I astro-travel to be with anyone
whose head matches mine,
I wait until my lovers are asleep
and then wake them up inside a small sphere
known as the universe

I coax them to put their hands over my flesh
and intimate kind words to them

I never make them breakfast
I never do their laundry
I always tell them they're beautiful
I never tell them
               that I love them

but I wonder what might happen
if I dragged them into the living?
would they come out and still love me, or
would they scatter back into the night?

banks peninsula

-- I press myself into you,
and the birds make themselves known;
the waves lap up towards the edges of us
and we fall in and out of sleep -
the wind winds its way through the open roof, and
through my hair --
                      and yours--
--knotting our salted heads
as they nod left and right,
my mouth slightly open and sharing itself with your sleeve...

children howl down the hill,
dragging skateboards, push-scooters, other apparatus behind them
and eventually being dragged behind them, themselves

everything seems simultaneously
hectic and quiet

We wake, and the wind's subsided;
we eat a hundred pieces of fruit
and follow the winding road
back up to the lake to sleep at it's shore
pressed into each other, in the back of our small van...

everything is good,
everything is safe,
everything is full of 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.

sgel

oh, I know
                   that sight lingering in the eyes
               that heavy breath,
           those off-hand truths spoken
                                                      in and out
                                                                 of context 
that gently self-loathing
                                  emergence from the bedroom

the Sunday morning, next
      as you rummage through your own vomit
         a brief flutter in a spate of normality

the waking up early, cold secrets
that soft melting 
                     in the corners of the eyes
that horrible crash 
                               of parallels
oh, yes
             I've known it

that intimate and (unavoidable) forever
that trip to the shower 
cold
I've felt it;
                  I've wrung myself out
                  down someone else's
                                                   drain
 
That shattering quiet, that
              shared omission

that piercing stillness --
that nervous withdrawal,
I've also 
               agitated it

that space
           alone, afterwards

that fumble with the light/s off
that listening for the right timing
that 9am escape trick, I've also
                                                  attempted

I've spent Saturdays 
                            not eating
and Sundays watching
                                      sad films
just to hold some skin afterwards
                                                       - trust me, it's not
                     worth the wait.

I can't help but berate
                               my tired nostalgia

I can't help but want

unfolding infinities
my future my past