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. 

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

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

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

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

a poem that shouldn't be written but I'm writing it anyway, in what I'd like to think is a moment of bold honesty, but probably is more like embarrassing stupidity

i.

I want to fuck you
like the dirty fucking whore
I once was
/ still am, but
not practising, like a bad catholic who's
skipping church

I want to
open my mouth
wider over yours, and take giant gulps of you
run my tongue along your teeth
and smash my jaw on your edges

and even though I get off
every time with you, without fail, and even
almost always
more than once, I just...

feel complacent in my climax
coz it's just so
goddamn easy

I want the performance back.

I want to dress up in thigh-high socks
and short skirts
and still be wearing them
when you come inside me
(my top off,
but in my bra)

I want to find you in a gutter at 4am
and lick drugs from your sticky palms
I want to wake up on your floor
with broken wine bottles everywhere
and stains in the carpet
that aren't from the wine

I want to smell myself on you
when I walk back into your room
after pissing in the morning
and walking back through your lounge
your conventionally good-looking flatmate
half glaring, half gawking

I want you to smack me across my face
I want you to dig your nails into my spine
I want you to chuck me around your living room and break a
very expensive heirloom

and tell your girlfriend all about it

and write poems about it

I want things that grate entirely
with my actual
ideologies

I want the sordid satisfaction
of you thinking I'm something I'm not
and knowing you can't comprehend
human duality

(or you know it entirely, and
that's why
you're here)

I want the pleasure of having power
over giving you an alter-ego
like, fuck yes this same
binge drinking, cock-sucking slut
also votes green, shuts down the patriarchy and
recycles correctly

and sure you can take me home
if you buy me a vegan burger first
coz I'm a dirty little hippy
with zero dollars to her name
but you're gonna buy me breakfast -
not because you're the male
but because you fucking owe me,
because you already want to see me again
and it's only
the morning after

and I'll answer your 10pm texts
coz it feels like summer,
and we all want that

I'll walk through the park at night for you
I'll risk my life to open my legs
I'll play the right song
and postpone sleep

just to feel in control
just to feel like the mad seductress
just to bear the weight of your form
and hear the aliveness of your breath

and conquer
and know
and decipher
one by one


ii.

here's what I don't want to do:

I don't want to go back to your windowless apartment
I don't want to hold your soft, spineless back
I don't want to pretend I'm enjoying it
I don't want you to shove yourself inside of me
I don't want to eat your fucking pumpkin seeds
you sad excuse for a vegetarian
I don't want to
go fucking slowly
I don't want to be fucked the way you want to fuck me
I don't want to wear a short skirt because you told me to,
I want to wear it because I fucking want to wear it
I don't want you to tell me to be quiet
I don't want you to be such an ugly, pathetic excuse for a man
I don't want you to
have me

I don't want to cry on your bed afterwards
and try to politely, kindly
explain why i feel revolted,
disgusted,
sick to my stomach
in a way i can't even comprehend, yet
and tell you sweet little lies
about not being attracted to you
when really the truth is

you fucking shoved yourself inside of me
after I literally said no
what the fuck was that ?
what the fuck was that

the time I stepped outside of myself
the time I played the game but no longer for the game's sake
the time I put myself in danger
the only time i wish i hadn't


iii.

I want them to enact my nostalgia

I imagine them sneaking across the hallway
at unholy hours of the night
mis-matched lovemakers
sharing rooms within a shared home
existing between the spaces of the house's other inhabitants

I imagine them indulging in the easy tension of holding a secret in the kitchen
the morning ritual of opening the fridge
and boiling the jug
the sterile intimacy
the stoic lust of taboo
the heroic triumph of doing the forbidden thing

sometimes the only way to appreciate someone you don't get along with
is to put yourself inside of them,
let them wear your skin
and shower together afterwards

revisionalry

I wonder if I should
                                 send my poem to you,
                                                                      Ella

   .

imagine
every'neI've
ever
   written
      a poem about

reading
             about
                       themselves

and knowing
                      all their own

secrets,
and

maybe that's why I 

                                           

                                                  (of course it's why I)

,why I                                    

tipped you off, Nicholas

                            because 

                           I wanted

                                     to

I wanted

you

to

know

the things

you didn't know

I 

knew you didn't

know

I knew about you

\ so 

that in 

twenty seventeen

I could write poems about

yearning 

about you

forever

whilst being

perfectly

happy

in love.

in the first line of a poem

in the first line of a poem
there's so much
pressure
              \
                anxiety
to grab you, reader --
especially after
eight hundred
and
     no one
                even
                       reads them
                             
     anyway.

san/

you keep talking about that trip
like you didn't experience the paranoia
I did
like you
weren't afraid of burning the house down
a second time -
I was

you keep talking about it being earth-provided
but there's nothing natural
about my head

dancing out and away from my body
a tiny me-ghoul reminding me
of my own
creeping mortality

every time I am high now
I remember I will die
and I imagine all the ways
it might happen

including you turning a knife on me

there's nothing natural about that

and when I am awake,
alive and
not in other states
I'm caught up in the most
unholy, unworldly of heads -
I'm not even here
I'm culling myself thin

thinner than when I vomited for two days straight
thinner than my bones feel on acid
thinner than the line that's driven itself
between I
and
you

thinner than my bank account
thinner than my ability to talk sense
thinner than my ferritin levels
after rice-bread-potatoes
for three months straight

thinner than the space between my eyebrows
as it slowly collapses in on itself

eve

We're lying under
the vast stars of pre-historia,
our eyes see the colours of Christmas,
backs arched against impossibly-held rocks,
precariously heaved into each other
like consoling lovers.

We imagine aliens might have passed through these
enigmatic landscapes
-- or at the very least, dinosaurs...

a Very Yellow Lights darts right --
"Look, Tom, a shoot-- ... a satellite...," I say.
(My Christmas eyes must have deceived me.)

But it hovers a while, then
comes to a stand still.

My Christmas eyes deceived me. Now it's
stopped, completely.
"Oh, it's static," I suggest.
"Just a Very Yellow Star."

A very yellow star.

We imagine xeno-scandinavians
landing from expansive avian pursuits,
we uncover possibilities for beaming telepathic calls
into space; we let our consciousnesses leap
from mountain peak to mountain peak,
following the soft pad-prints of Hanuman.

The Very Yellow Star
starts across the sky
impossibly swiftly
it flares into a
Large Yellow Sun, a
nod to the yellows and twinkling golds
of the wrists below it.
It disappears instantaneously
into a hidden black hole --
it's
Gone.

My Christmas eyes blink, my heart
swells with the same fiery yellow light
and won't shrink, won't
follow the disappearance
but stays loud and thinking in my chest

"That was a U.F.O.!" says I, stupidly
stating the uneasy, alluring, impossible obvious.

We sit a while in silence
taking in the expanse around us
then make our way back to the house.

Gokarna

The distant, floating echo
of some disillusioned psychedelia
hovering behind
the shattering click-clack-crash
of metal wheels
jarring against metal tracks
[if-out-of place Palm trees
made a sound
it'd be semi-tropical green]

the settlement

This place is filled with echoes of you.

I wonder why the fire isn't going.
I wonder where the guitar is.
I remember to boil the water first.
I imagine the chaos if you'd done
what you said you'd wanted to.
I imagine if I'd fallen into habit, instead
       of saying no (thanks).

I imagine -

I fall into habit
       anyway,
But I insert You into the conversation.
      open, I flow,
I flow with loquacity -

This place is filled with echoes of you
I remember dropping anchor
Six-teen-times,
      I remember
being woken at 2am
to make polite conversation
with a stranger
I remember this oceanic palette,
these fabric folds of the shore
I remember
reciting
my vows to this place,
myself; these thirteen

I remember these same blisters
in the palms of my hands, like small jewels
now I hold
two sapphire shells instead

I remember walking to the end
and finding you behind me
and feeling afraid
and feeling alive all at once
(the same reason I ever do anything)

I remember these soft orange colours
over these wintery forest peaks

I remember two-fold
calls on the walkie talkie: do you
copy?

I remember the smell of you
and I wish I'd brought
your shirt as you suggested

I remember
your warmth
I remember your arms locking mine into my
body

I remember
kissing your cheek
I wonder how many people here
saw
She certainly knows.
(for the first time ever, I lied
at exactly the right moment -
or at least, I choked
just in time
on the truth)

This whole place reeks
with the smell
of you
And still I invited you in -
I allowed you both to kiss my cheek
- why do they
insist
on doing that?
after
everything?

On paper, on paper,
but we didn't see
into the water together

I've borrowed from you a-plenty
to give everything
to him.

en Pinnacle

Tomorrow

I will emerge into the forest
and I will wonder how I could ever
not be okay

or,
I will be
traversing
the phlegm-caught lungs of my chest
and wishing
i were alone

I will be

carrying the spaces for us all to sleep
carrying, again

I'll be thinking about her
and him,
him, him

and all of them
and all of that

I'll be

(I'll be)

standing in the puddles of myself
without your kiss on my forehead
but
with someone
who gave me one, once

(because I coerced him into it..)

S16

not many people like
the smell of Rotorua
but to me, it's lovely,
like

the earth's come home
from a hard day,
or,
just woken up
mouth laced with the night's dreams,
like

resting my face
against you, softly breathing
in the scent of you,
after / wards, like

catching us
on me
for the better part of the next day,
like

when my flatmates
burn flesh
I don't want it
but it fills the room

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.          

karamea

We're at the top of the West Coast. I've never been here before.

Last night being a de ja vu of 10 years and one month earlier - strange humanoid shapes in the sand this morning. A full metallic moon arching over the vicious waves. Short shorts that do nothing to keep the sand from the creases of my skin. With an almost/not-stranger and much more self-awareness, more assertiveness. Still a healthy dose of youthful naivety. Running away in order to arrive home. Your friend inadvertently tagging along. Jumping in when it's cold. Walking towards bonfires (real and imagined). History repeats.

And actually, there was the start of the words. Not the very start, but the conscious beginning. Deciding to write. The first of what would morph into hundreds of moments inscribed, thousands of secrets etched. It began with a list. How very pedantic.

Not a list of things he finds difficult about me (which could include: the destination; mumbling; refusing to say "pardon?"; speaking cryptically; slapping; being forgetful / taking for granted) - but a list of self-improvement to-dos. Similar but not the same to those existing in my head now.

... You keep referring to a future. Maybe ours. You're worried - but for yourself, not for us. "I hope you don't become sick of me." I find that peculiar. I've always needed the ones I can't quite figure out. I'm not sure if this is problematic. It's probably self-sabotaging.

Maybe that's why the other, for all his honesty, doesn't quite sit right. So beautifully transparent in his goodness.

But then, glimpses of the palimpsest himself. In which I see a self-certain mystique that I like. Maybe it's his elusiveness that is elusive.

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.