sundays again and never

forever in the dusk
I want to be
dappled in evening sighs
and amber shadows, thighs
tanned and bare and hair
slightly wet

how much higher can we -- ?

your hands \ my ankles
I melted seven years through time
you took off your socks

that sweet relief

she runs over my chest
and into my hearteries
over my abdomen 
and behind my broken knees

I wish you would see me like this
I wish I would let you
I wish we
I wish I

october

I'm still wet with the tears of you
a year later,
little Ngaru

flooding forked rivers
across my cheeks
down the creases of my neck,
whenever the stream of possibility
runs between my legs

I still ache with the sharpness
of the loss you of,
little Ngaru

doubled over and dancing
my favourite dance on all fours,
four teeny misoprostol pills
clamped between my jaws

(perhaps that's why
my teeth are wearing down)

horizontal with grief
and grievous pain

a nook of love turned into a mile

you shook me up
good and proper

like nothing
will never 

and now I know
what I always knew

never.
again.

I must never
love another more than I love
my own womb

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.

deltora

and it's like time folds in and reverses through itself
back, back she goes
moon full and melting into orbit
mapping sorry saturn's incessant turning, 
a churning choke for the decade's change

she goes out, she bursts open &
floods herself red,
gentle streams and devastating torrents and
dreams of sleepless sleeping
and eyes across the hallway
it's all amplified now, it's
all on record, all recorded --
keep your bluetooth razor sharp
and your mind in the mush

green holographic haze 
and dazed fickle fingertip imprints,
(this is where it hurts,
she says, poking below the ribs)
inter-continental existence interrupted
by a never-ending wish list
and an existential hiccup --

well, here we are.
this is what we were walking towards
when we decided to enter the stream:
it's a brave new world now, darling
so dream whatever you can dream. 

blut

the farce and flare of coromandel chic;
a woozy misoprostol spell slowly leaks
through my bloodstream; my heart trickles down my cheeks
this wasn't supposed to happen after four weeks -
the doctor stutters behind his mask when he speaks;
my womb cramps, clots, cries and creaks
salt stinging down my cheeks
- psychosomatic, probably, doctor thinks,
embedded in these atoms, it never blinks
a foodless belly and veins full make me weak
return me to the rivers winding through forested peaks -
a motherless body needs space to breathe and shriek
this world, tumultuous, filled with grief
pre-masticated words stick sharp in my teeth ...

and still --
much safer, much more loved, cared for, respected, heard, held, supported,
than so many wombs here have been...
a small lick of blood flows a little more free
and for that, I am both grateful and guilty
oh! what heavy ancestry I am to carry
to heal these generations with a deep urgency:
but already there’s blood staining this life,
not all of us are getting out alive.

tendrils & mirrors \\ anarchy & lentils

I landed barefoot on this land --

touff, touff --

left then right,

a soft and gentle padding after years of ocean-spanning flight --

anchoring the arches of myself down, down into the soil...

I listened sightlessly through my soles

seeking to transplant Her DNA through the veins of me,

atom by atom,

taking back from Adam.

searching for a bottomless cavern, 

in which to send out the tendrils of me

sssshhhjjooumm

into the murky darkness

sssshhhjjooumm

searching a cushiony embrace to drown in the depths of

and stealthily like water

the tendrils made their way into every crevasse, every crack, every fracture...

seeking out every millimetre 

until nothing's left.

When I'm baptised, I run

and when I run, I keep running,

and I sprint

and I keep sprinting

until I'm back where I started

... because then I surely know, 

I've been everywhere. 

I've seen every corner, 

every signpost,

excavated every Every --

I'm the perfect Millenial

the rushing woman / searching soul

I want every Every

and what I want I want

now.

So where is that deep spaciousness?

That piercing sensitivity?

I lost her in the expanse of me --

some have restored it, others leeched it away

always restless,

morphing, 

metamorphosing relentlessly 

transforming through different shapes of me

endlessly, endlessly,

ebb and flow,

like the glow of the full moon.

Where is her deep spaciousness?

Her striking sensitivity?

I see it in the iridescent circle of the moon,

stained by little boys' charcoaled fingertips,

yet still halting time for those who stop and sit with her a while. 

I hear her in the stoic ancientness of the land beyond the water --

she knows my name and asks me to speak hers 

(when I do, others stand next to me).

I feel her in the shifting dusk, reminding us

that everything must die.

daughter of three

the body dissolves \
but consciousness remains

and while I am solid,
my head
sneaks into
every atom

here she is again
flooding red, again
inside out
on the last day
and
forever

my jaw aches from infatuation \
my back aches from deepening
the impossibly immersive curve
over and over

sunlight in winter

The world w[is] on fire
but it was cold
and we the guilty free
took to dismantling ourselves

he went light surfing
I danced heavy on the tarmac
the beginning of the end
and the end of the beginning

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.

cranium

There’s a perfect storm sitting inside my skin-shell; my face is the vacuous eye of it, taut with eerie calm, empty with stoicism - a silent nod yes without any gleam or flicker in the corners of my mouth, dull with acquiescence to a world that forgets time, forgets its own bloodline, forgets the location of the soul (it’s everywhere).

The little girl in pigtails who used to haunt my mother is sitting still at the bottom of the stairwell - has been for two decades - waiting with all her stories, drumming her fingers at the base of my skull. She’s glaring up at me through her lashes. She’s angry and she’s scared. She’s confused and refuses to age. She’s riddled with the holes carved out by her aggressors: rotting wads of flesh sit heavily in the pit of her womb, her throat, the back-half of her heart, her ankles, the flattened soles of her feet. From her open hands streams brilliant light, but she can’t walk so it ends up blinding her, ricocheting off the walls and circling back sharply into her eyes, illuminating the way for the people scurrying past her. Their thousand footsteps bog the track so she steps into their prints and sinks, drowning with the weight of memories that may or may not belong to her.

I glare back at her, an aged mirror with various cracks - to let the light in, of course - the ruthless aggression of a grown-up who involuntarily skipped childhood, who refused apologies and help when they arrived too late, who leaks salt everywhere whenever someone inevitably asks, “Are you okay?”

I’m sure that I’m okay, I’m just flooding myself clean ... but I want to pose the question back: Dear world, are you okay? Are you all quite fine ? I can’t help but hear everyone’s aching and it’s splitting my body into fractured fragments, so colossally disparate there’s no hope of sewing them up with gold. Perhaps I should make a mosaic of myself, and bury it in the ground, and someone could dig up the pieces and wonder how they looked whole. The earth could make nutrients of me and I’d finally be home. I’d finally be able to nourish everyone from the inside out.

I’d return to the ultimate cycle, and never again begin or end. I’d be forever; a quiet legacy.