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.

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.

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. 

To let yourself become totally absorbed in something
is the most beautiful thing.

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

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

"The mystery of life
is not a problem to be solved
but a reality to be experienced."

- Uncle Alan Watts

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

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

spotted in Christiania

Only freedom is holy --
nothing kills like religion.

The garden of Eden is filled
with green smoke
and brown grass
and a million different languages
each body undergoing an exorcism,
their hearts beating the ahrdest
of any living beings -- so hard
they fall through the ground
backwards
forever
until they reach the other hemisphere:
reborn
into a parallel future
that's insisting on repetition
birth-death-rebirth
for all eternity...

I stepped into Utopia
and sat there awhile
I didn't even breathre
-- no inhale,
just sight.

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

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.

in/spiral

and those of us who have so much
will profess that we have so little;
and those of us abundant
will always cry that we need more;
and those of us well-fed
seem always to be hungry,
while those of us hungry
know others still are starving.

Somehow, those of us sleeping
in the warmth of comfort
will still, in the morning, be tired and cold --
while those of us awake
will see the sunlight pouring in
and feel it coursing through our veins
and know the day is opportune, full, open, alive ...

and instead of shutting our ears,
or allowing the slow droop of our eyelids,
we'll take our fingertips out into the world and manifest magic,
conjuring the transparency
that open eyes seek

and we will know each other better
for having known ourselves,

for having touched some quiet, intimate sphere
that only solitude knows,
that only hunger knows,
that is only seen when life is stripped back
to today's moment; to shedding, to being bare,
to being comfortable with vulnerable --

but that tiny glimmer of goodness found in a stranger's eye,
when he recognises himself in your freckles and
sits beside you on the grass,

or when you submerge your body into the ice-cold ocean
so that even your organs go numb
with the quiet of being

-- that's where we should find ourselves
because that's where we will be fed,
that's where we'll find our energy, bursting from within
the molecules of the earth,
rich and abundant, residing
in the folds of the fabric of time itself--

That is where we actually live
and living anywhere else is discord.

When tomorrow wakes,
time will still move in spiral - and I will be
somewhere,
sitting subtly in the earth's body,
and I will have chosen to be happy.

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?

in/hale

After I inhale,
all of that leaves me -
I feel heavier and lighter all at once,
I feel clear and yet hyper-aware

but the next morning, I'm still
there, though every now and then
I feel the daily state and its
slow creep of reality
etching its way back in

it lives in me but sometimes
I wish I could live in it.

Everyone sits calmly outside
and does what they do -

sometimes I feel so lost
when I'm not high.

I like to go travelling inside my own head
the safest and furtherest place
from home that I could be.
I've no idea how to get there
but it's so easy to return

I've a road map inside me
that points to all possible destinations
it goes around in circles
and then spirals
up

I like the mountains because they're unascendable,
the oceans because of their vastness
I like the places that are endless
I want the trip that never ceases -

but that's known commonly as insanity,
and generally disapproved of.

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.