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. 

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

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

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'

hEART

heart is dancing

heart doesn't know how but

it still / moves 

it's supposed to keep rhythm

but it's out of time

it's growing old so early

and refusing to grow up

it's stuck in the centre of the spine

green but not with envy

it's breaking its host body

refusing to mimic regularity

its swinging blood around this miniature world

but it doesn't work towards a life

it permits organs of sadness

and cells of confusion,

atoms of melancholy

to float around, meandering

it desperately needs coffee

it knows it's not good for it but

it wants to fuck itself up

it wants to lie on the floor

it wants to feel allowed to fail

it wants to stay at the bottom --

why must it climb 

to sit so high on the spine ?

it feels embarrassed about being a heart

it hurts to beat

it throws itself at others, not out of need

but out of a desire to touch, to connect, to feel..

that's different, it insists :

a heart needs a ribcage to sit within,

it needs a pulse to follow

it needs hands to hold it

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

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.

"You are dancers, all of you. Life moves you. Life dances you. To dance is to investigate and celebrate the experience of being alive. Like life, a dance creates and destroys itself in every moment. Like love, it is beyond reason. Ephemeral as breath, concrete as bone, dance is made of you. You sculpt space. You write with your body in a wordless language that is deeply understood. You grace the space within and around you when you dance. Force, trajectory, inertia and recovery - dancing is a ride. A duet between your instinct and imagination. To dance is to heighten your experience of the present moment. Your body is your location. When you dance, you are profoundly engaged in being there."

- Crystal Pite, Choreographer.

liive

on stage
I've committed many suicides
and had others commit them for me
knowingly and
                         unknowingly

I've died many
tiny deaths, I've
melted into the
masses, drowned
in their arms.

I've performed my own baptism
I've held a chalice to my lips
I've swamped myself
in a duck-shit-filled lake
in the name of art
I've snuck around the sleeping
I've begged, borrowed and stolen
I've clambered through labyrinth limbs of strangers
I've lived inside a tiny box

I've stood for five hours, freezing
and rinsed myself blue
I've broken bones
and worn out tired kness
I've scraped the inside of my stomach
I've let strangers put their mouths on mine

I've breast fed plastic dolls
I've stood on giant pedestals
I've exposed my flesh
over and over, so many times I've lost count

I've been lifted up, trodden on, dragged
                                                                by my hair
I've let people cut my hair
                                           off
I've let people
                       etch signs into me

I've left my sweat in foreign cities
I've stuffed food into / onto my face
I've flown giant birds
I've borne the the onslaught of abuse
and made many people smile

I've written countless bad poems
and never spoken one.

I've died many tiny deaths
and orchestrated countless suicides

I want the certain ritual
of being
reborn.

day / eight

there's these arms
wrapped around
each others'
heads
and at times they look like lovers
but they are daughters, mothers

the arms - three - cut,
choke, slice
they form diamonds over purple eyes

wailing, shrieking, leaking salt
(both in and out the designated space)
index and pinky
strike, point; blank; fight
and all we've seen within our seven sights
manifests,

these women know
the All that all women know
and with the fleshy parts of them allowed to speak
they are
Speaking -
fleshing words out of stacked fists
as their brothers do
scratching sentences from throats
carving mouthfuls out of teeth

for centuries we've been taught
to be seen and not heard
so we will be seen.
and we will not be unseen.

We wanted to see, but were made blind. 

So electrified by the infinite possibilities, we rendered ourselves useless, unable to motion a single step towards greatness. 

Our flesh fatigued and our heads weary but wired, we gave in to the exhaustion of our own expectations.

All images by Blair McTaggart.

Everything Anyone Ever Wanted | Black Sheep Productions 

21 - 25 June 2016 @ Q Theatre

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 ?

in-Orchid (II)

we begin in an empty space
we birth it a life
we root umbilical chords out through our feet and into the ground
when they emerge,
   we hold our children upside down

we run into walls
we navigate one aother
we speak an unspoken language
we pick apart the symbols woven into our bodies

we place our hands on ourselves,
   each other, our foreheads,
   between our own legs
we comfort ourselves by stroking our own hair

we incite mythical deities
   and ingest orchids
we curl our toes towards our faces
we conjure the devil herself
   up through the floor
we drive knives through our ribs
we smash our knees into our cheeks
  not to punish, but to feel
  the empowerment of purging

we study the alchemy of life
we gargle spells to ourselves
  laden with eights, memoirs, directions
we are kings, magicians,
  maidens, witches
we are women, dancers, orchids:
  we cling to dust
  and flourish in dark spaces.

dreaming of sleep

All the bodies that were ever present on this earth are still here on this earth. Body-less bones sit strewn across the land, underneath its skin; or are pelted into dust and carried whistling along desert air.

The only bodies not still here on earth are some belonging to astronauts. But mostly, the earth is a vast gravesite. It absorbs the bodies living here, continually; it feeds on them and then feeds them back to us. We are sustaining ourselves via long-distance cannibalism.

All the bodies that ever existed are still here.

When I die, I will join them - all those bodies held captive by our God mother earth. One of them will be me. Maybe it will be soon. I feel my flesh weary enough to become voluntarily battered. The lumps of me are gravitating towards the outside edges of me, trying to escape each other. My body doesn't even want to hold itself together, or to hold me inside of itself any longer. It's too exhausting. All of me wants to lie down alongside the world's many billion other skeletons. It would be so easy to lie still and reset a while, rest a while, rest white.

All the world's bodies are lullabying me to sleep. They mouth wordless words gently into my eyes, lips curled around my sockets, a few hours into each day. I begin living and then I am tired, and they are so courteous beckoning me to sleep. They are the earth's hosts, recruiting permanent guests. Most people don't have ears, but I've spoken their language since I was eleven. I hear their invite. I'm ready to lie down.

too many beginnings and
too many ends,
as usual

get bigger

oh, there's a poem 

in this irony

that I'm dressing up in silver 

and gold glints 

each night

and feeling like 

the biggest fraud

feeling weak

feeling dull in my eyes 

soft of voice

barely able to cope with the day itself

shedding tears before breakfast

like I'm a child back at Uni

crying my way

through my un-favorite thing 

failing only because

I think that I'm failing

my body always betrays me

it won't let me lie

I can put on a face

but my body will yell the truth

until everyone is listening

and me -

reveling in my humiliation. 

containe(d)

burying myself
in the sound of you, despite
having matched my shy eyes
with yours infrequently

... delivered by love and rain
to five years earlier
(I've already moved with you
in yellow) - I'd like to be longer, now,
stretching languidly across time-
and maybe that's why

my shoulder blades featured
in tonight's videoic brainstorm
(I like to notice coincidences
like that, and
make mountains of them)

and the bending of my neck also:
(I suggested imaging my skin;
he suggested tying a skeleton around it)
not just in art, but in totality of ecstasy

heading into water
with someone I barely know -
as I did at the moment
last year became
this one:

wading through that tiny river
until we arrived in the sea
(though this time, by myself,
'til I master sending stones)

and don't worry,
I know he knows - I know
how transparent I am:
I'm in my own head
wearing my own skin
hearing my own mumbles
I feel my own gauche halo circling every inch of me

what is it with me

that I can never rebirth my courage
in the moments that matter to me?
I'm only brave
when I've nothing
to gain

re-viling

lumpy throat

because this song is reminding me

that I have to go and

own something

half finished

and tell them 

how well they've done

and I know their bodies are crowded

but I'm still disappointed

I wanted to cradle my baby

'til she ventured into places

but I couldn't; so it was

I know all this, yet

I'm still disappointed 

(in myself? or in circumstance?)

my ego knows better than that, but

it's fluffy around the edges

and success was in its clarity

now the angst feels unwarranted

and least we sound good

even if quietly

so we go back to red

and hold off the smudgy black

revilery II

There have been few words
these seventeen days -
my words instead
riddling in their bodies,
writhing around their arms,
fluttering in their oesophaguses

my words have been spinning
in their pretty little heads, their wrists weighed
with the binds
of my gravity,
done up by the ribbons
of my mind

out from their arms fold my thoughts
I have unwittingly asked them
to hold a mirror up to me

and so
instead of talking
to the page, I have been
talked to
by my other

- that angry
dark-haired faerie
has let loose, in the dripping walls of
this third floor on Cuba,
rattled by tens of tiny ballet shoes
and buskers' strings. I have
held white up to my eye
and though those whites weigh heavy

I am all the better
for not having slept. 

everything

Kind of lovely to be creating melancholy inside the rain.