I watched the city wake up this morning.
Shaking its legs like a new born calf;
A little wobbly/
A little cold/
A little wet.
And the sun glinted coolly and
glanced off the corners of
glassy buildings that
splinter and refract that
same cold light which
caught my eyes just now.
In retrospect it feels like the whole thing
was an elaborate alarm system,
A smoke signal made of crystal dust,
telling me to steel myself
for bad news.
What is the cost of one eye?
10 years of life?
Would a hand then be
15 years?
A section of skin - 2 years?
A breast, a ball, an ankle ...
Where is the divine catalogue
to name for me the price?
I am a patron in this disposable,
buyable world and I demand
to speak to the manager ... n o w .
And so, as I ascend the shallow stairs,
with a refreshed sting of awakeness,
I smile and curse alternately
as my foot hits each step
and bleed anger
into the ground
through my soles.
smile
curse
smile
curse
smile
curse
smile
Friday, June 18, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
full sirkel
I hop up on my mountain and cry "two years, two years, two years!"
My mountain slides at the top because of the sand. Like the dormant Tarawera.
I slip in to the crater and bellow from the bottom "two years, two years, two years!"
It erupts from my lungs and resounds in my ears.
My ghost canoe, Big Shadow, is you.
Want to grow wings, want to moulder with these boulders, become serene.
This time, this space, this gap, this hollow, is a bruise,
A trace of what was good and evil with us.
A huge fuss and a scene
An act and I was caught in the spotlight of the moon
With only myself in an empty street to deal with.
I remember the peace after that. And the years of rebuilding my city,
Collecting important remnants and sewing them together with a crude blanket stitch
To cover me when I dream.
The rest is ash. I burned it all. And the garbage man took it all away.
But years to heal.
Two years, two years, two years, and my heart is softened again, less wary. The gates opened
and the people came in. I wasn't as pretty as I used to be. My landscape is scarred
with basalt and obsidian, but new growth breathes new life in to me.
But my ghost canoe, Big Shadow, is you. Still and forever. An echo of caution calls out across the waters. Your arrival is tangible. Ominous. Thick and ever present in my mind.
Two years two years twoyears. It means nothing.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Opaque - first published in Death of a Scenester, Issue One - COVERS 2010
Opaque tea and a cold kiss of the apple and I breathe in the wet air at the outdoor setting. White-painted cast iron, looking delicate and antique, but drags like a dead beast across the ground when you try to shift it. Shit. Ashes on my feet. Silent and grey like a disintegrated feather. I smudge it away with my other foot and wipe both feet, both sides, awkwardly on the dewy grass.
You’ve been missing for four and a half days. Approximately 108 hours. I imagine you, lying in a creek, bloated and drained of all human colour. I imagine you, haemorrhaging in a gutter in a ghost town somewhere, where no one hears your calls. I imagine you, flying from a cliff above the sea with sorrowful thoughts, your last, sorry to the end. I imagined the worst and immediately, as soon as I went to bed alone.
Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove
I open that book and take a look with a quiet query in the secret chambers in my heart, a soft, skipping arrhythmia as I forget to breathe… looking for a sign of something, I do not know what. I turn pages sticky with old glue, looking for that clue, but frustrated with blankness I put it aside. It is crumbling now too, that book. Like the ashes. I feel deadened. Numb. Heavy. Translucent.
I stare dumbly at the flecks of leaf floating on the surface before I imbibe. It’s a warmth that bleeds down the throat. Do you feel me wondering? I am full of questions for you. They are pecking at me like Hitchcockian birds, frightening me and making me crazy. My head is composing a letter to you, years down the track, when you’re still gone. I imagine the worst. Begging you to come back… willing it. But curious about the life beyond it. Beyond disaster. Before disaster even. I am despairing at my own curiosity with this, always. It stares me in the face every day and I fight it. A ghastly, haunted reflection.
All at the same time I am lonely for your company, lusting myself into a knot for your body, breaking myself in to pieces with hopeless anger at your disappearance. So hotly blinding a contrast my hate and love for you in this horrible moment. Disparate. Desparate to see you. Why is the golden time gone? Things slip away like a ship to the bottom of the sea. I imagine heaven as scuba diving to the wreckage, to forever recall, reimagine the past happinesses, though they are now covered with coral and silt, with fishes moving quickly through it all like busy waiters in a big Paris café. Joy abounds and we float in the ocean, surveying all that pretty wreckage below.
I blacken my finger tips with apple ash before I pluck that green granny from the table and bring it to my lips for another go round. Numb it. Blunt it out. Soften the edges and dream it away. Fight through the panic when it rises and just go… run to that place that you’ll never get to, even when sleep comes. Did my darkness frighten you? Oh god… more questions. Squash it down now.
Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove
Dark skies make the earth look greener
And broken boughs
Stretch down to woo us
Weeping, cold tears dripping
In to age old knots
Rainwater rushes like a wall towards me
Clay falls like towers, like a city earthquaked
Hoist myself in a supplejack swing,
Trembling, sing this song to bring you home
You’ve been missing for four and a half days. Approximately 108 hours. I imagine you, lying in a creek, bloated and drained of all human colour. I imagine you, haemorrhaging in a gutter in a ghost town somewhere, where no one hears your calls. I imagine you, flying from a cliff above the sea with sorrowful thoughts, your last, sorry to the end. I imagined the worst and immediately, as soon as I went to bed alone.
Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove
I open that book and take a look with a quiet query in the secret chambers in my heart, a soft, skipping arrhythmia as I forget to breathe… looking for a sign of something, I do not know what. I turn pages sticky with old glue, looking for that clue, but frustrated with blankness I put it aside. It is crumbling now too, that book. Like the ashes. I feel deadened. Numb. Heavy. Translucent.
I stare dumbly at the flecks of leaf floating on the surface before I imbibe. It’s a warmth that bleeds down the throat. Do you feel me wondering? I am full of questions for you. They are pecking at me like Hitchcockian birds, frightening me and making me crazy. My head is composing a letter to you, years down the track, when you’re still gone. I imagine the worst. Begging you to come back… willing it. But curious about the life beyond it. Beyond disaster. Before disaster even. I am despairing at my own curiosity with this, always. It stares me in the face every day and I fight it. A ghastly, haunted reflection.
All at the same time I am lonely for your company, lusting myself into a knot for your body, breaking myself in to pieces with hopeless anger at your disappearance. So hotly blinding a contrast my hate and love for you in this horrible moment. Disparate. Desparate to see you. Why is the golden time gone? Things slip away like a ship to the bottom of the sea. I imagine heaven as scuba diving to the wreckage, to forever recall, reimagine the past happinesses, though they are now covered with coral and silt, with fishes moving quickly through it all like busy waiters in a big Paris café. Joy abounds and we float in the ocean, surveying all that pretty wreckage below.
I blacken my finger tips with apple ash before I pluck that green granny from the table and bring it to my lips for another go round. Numb it. Blunt it out. Soften the edges and dream it away. Fight through the panic when it rises and just go… run to that place that you’ll never get to, even when sleep comes. Did my darkness frighten you? Oh god… more questions. Squash it down now.
Down the gully creek
On black blood platelets
Black rings down the drainpipe
To the black walnut grove
Dark skies make the earth look greener
And broken boughs
Stretch down to woo us
Weeping, cold tears dripping
In to age old knots
Rainwater rushes like a wall towards me
Clay falls like towers, like a city earthquaked
Hoist myself in a supplejack swing,
Trembling, sing this song to bring you home
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
A Blue Black Light (An old favourite circa 11/2005)
A blue black light stood
All around us like a lynch mob,
Holding smiles instead of pitchforks.
You didn't know it, but there we were. I was back in my backyard,
Talking with my old friends. You could see them
And smell them
And hear me talking with them,
But you just hung back and observed.
You watched me rough their skin with my smooth palm
And internally balked as I skipped in giant sized steps
Through their dead, shed needles.
If I could have I would have kissed your hand there
And pressed it to my forehead.
Your thoughts all intermingled with mine.
We were trees for the briefest of moments and I never wanted to leave.
Making not love, but truth.
----- this is what making truth feels like:
-------------- (and remember, this is REAL)
You were the bottom of the sea and I am sediment.
We both inhabit the entire earth because land is land
An infinite circle.
I settled on you after a long time of being disrupted by currents
And being sucked in an spat out by various creatures.
Here I come, can you see? Shut your eyes, ocean's end.
I have found my way by pure accident to your deepest nook,
To lay for a while in the cold dark calm of your hidden imagination.
While I am here and focused on you, nothing can intrude.
The dark means there are no expectations.
We can only find our way by feeling how I have fallen on your unknown contours.
The unseen is truthful because only our imagination knows it. Verification seems irrelevant.
The only products of our union are trust and enlightenment;
Dreaming the same dreams
And caring for an others' soul
As if it were your own.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Friday Euphoria
Feel like a kid today. Feel like a kid but with the knowing of an adult. When you lay your new joy over past sadnesses, did you ever notice how it makes the joy EXPLODE off the page - like fireworks... technicolour and bold, you can almost taste them, they permeate my being so.
Today I saw chandeliers hanging from under bridges, chandeliers glowing in the boughs of great gum trees, I felt the cool calm of those trees breathing on me as I stared up in to their beautiful shapely arms. I saw the blueness of the light there. The heartbreaking subtle pink of the toon tree. The intense azure blue of a cateye on the road and the bright, lush, downy green of a maple, bursting with new leaf, the lovely pooled black of vintage VW beetle.
All these things I see with no stimulants. None of that black coffee, none of those other vices... All these things bring amazing happiness, it swells and my heart feels like it's the size of my whole being. I want to hug my heart. I drink it in - eyes willing to look at things like it's the first time and my heart seeking joy like a missile locked on its target.
Today I saw chandeliers hanging from under bridges, chandeliers glowing in the boughs of great gum trees, I felt the cool calm of those trees breathing on me as I stared up in to their beautiful shapely arms. I saw the blueness of the light there. The heartbreaking subtle pink of the toon tree. The intense azure blue of a cateye on the road and the bright, lush, downy green of a maple, bursting with new leaf, the lovely pooled black of vintage VW beetle.
All these things I see with no stimulants. None of that black coffee, none of those other vices... All these things bring amazing happiness, it swells and my heart feels like it's the size of my whole being. I want to hug my heart. I drink it in - eyes willing to look at things like it's the first time and my heart seeking joy like a missile locked on its target.
Friday, September 4, 2009
A Letter (Sept 4 2009)
Dearest,
It's raining like never before. It's so beautiful. The sky is like a layer cake in grays and lemon yellow, pale and sad. I'm perched up here, sipping my lebanese coffee and just watching it all fall in the sweet, downcast silence of the afternoon. Lately, I like to just be at home without music playing. Just to have the peacefulness of the day; that clean, clear gap around four o'clock when there's no one else around - I shut my eyes and I try to hear as many sounds as I can:
- Rain on the roof, on the street, on the trees
- Cars going slowly by in the puddles on the road
- Birds eep-ing, hiding in their nests. I imagine them nuzzling each other for warmth, little
ones tucked under wing
- The plants - flaxes in the front yard, lapping up the rain with thirsty tongues
- the sound of sunlight breaking like sheet diamond through the clouds on the horizon, sounds
something like silent thunder
I had thought to myself, "imagination's gone". I look down to count the knots in my stomach and think "this day... sometimes it feels like this goddamn day is like driving arrows in to the dirt.
There is no purpose to this! how many times should one ask themselves 'what the fuck am I doing with my life'? before they get on with it. I am forever asking myself this question. It's a loop". I look out the window and the rain is bleeding down the pane. I look out the window and I search for a rainbow - Kerouac says 'What is a rainbow, Lord? A hoop for the lowly'. I stumble and choke over the beauty of that phrase. It grabs me and shakes me and makes me know that life is for living. Keep Going.
On these days when I feel overwhlmed by the bleakest, darkest feelings, I know it's time for a shake up. The winds of change, as they say, will inevitably blow through this dusty place, dragging all things lying lazily about to a swift end at a high cliff, leaving the tiles, walls and wooden shelves clean... ready for a bit of a sweep, then a deep breath and start again... futility forgotten. I want these days to be filled with bright colours. Hot Air Balloons of hope elegantly traversing the skies of my life and brilliant adjectives and adverbs gracing the pages of my days. Swirling lights and movement, strong winds on tops of hills in a rainstorm, clandestine kisses in such moments, desperate and holy and transcendental - moving me - sending my stomach in to a flurry, like it may be chasing it's own tail up in to a tornado.
My wild-fire nature will flare and rise from the pit, orange and yellow and white, climbing so high it will reach the stratosphere where the sky is at its most midnight blue, I will throw my arms of flame up! IN to the air! and praise the creation below... Oh! the colours I can see from up high. Inexplicable! The seven sisters smiling down on me and winking at each other "She's figured it out again"! -"Let's help her hold on to it this time". So - charmed by the stars that look on, I will convert this gray husk of a life in to a brave aura of strong colours; every word I breathe out will be a stream of incredible light - My arrows! My arrows! Piercing the clouds like the sun!
It's raining like never before. It's so beautiful. The sky is like a layer cake in grays and lemon yellow, pale and sad. I'm perched up here, sipping my lebanese coffee and just watching it all fall in the sweet, downcast silence of the afternoon. Lately, I like to just be at home without music playing. Just to have the peacefulness of the day; that clean, clear gap around four o'clock when there's no one else around - I shut my eyes and I try to hear as many sounds as I can:
- Rain on the roof, on the street, on the trees
- Cars going slowly by in the puddles on the road
- Birds eep-ing, hiding in their nests. I imagine them nuzzling each other for warmth, little
ones tucked under wing
- The plants - flaxes in the front yard, lapping up the rain with thirsty tongues
- the sound of sunlight breaking like sheet diamond through the clouds on the horizon, sounds
something like silent thunder
I had thought to myself, "imagination's gone". I look down to count the knots in my stomach and think "this day... sometimes it feels like this goddamn day is like driving arrows in to the dirt.
There is no purpose to this! how many times should one ask themselves 'what the fuck am I doing with my life'? before they get on with it. I am forever asking myself this question. It's a loop". I look out the window and the rain is bleeding down the pane. I look out the window and I search for a rainbow - Kerouac says 'What is a rainbow, Lord? A hoop for the lowly'. I stumble and choke over the beauty of that phrase. It grabs me and shakes me and makes me know that life is for living. Keep Going.
On these days when I feel overwhlmed by the bleakest, darkest feelings, I know it's time for a shake up. The winds of change, as they say, will inevitably blow through this dusty place, dragging all things lying lazily about to a swift end at a high cliff, leaving the tiles, walls and wooden shelves clean... ready for a bit of a sweep, then a deep breath and start again... futility forgotten. I want these days to be filled with bright colours. Hot Air Balloons of hope elegantly traversing the skies of my life and brilliant adjectives and adverbs gracing the pages of my days. Swirling lights and movement, strong winds on tops of hills in a rainstorm, clandestine kisses in such moments, desperate and holy and transcendental - moving me - sending my stomach in to a flurry, like it may be chasing it's own tail up in to a tornado.
My wild-fire nature will flare and rise from the pit, orange and yellow and white, climbing so high it will reach the stratosphere where the sky is at its most midnight blue, I will throw my arms of flame up! IN to the air! and praise the creation below... Oh! the colours I can see from up high. Inexplicable! The seven sisters smiling down on me and winking at each other "She's figured it out again"! -"Let's help her hold on to it this time". So - charmed by the stars that look on, I will convert this gray husk of a life in to a brave aura of strong colours; every word I breathe out will be a stream of incredible light - My arrows! My arrows! Piercing the clouds like the sun!
Thursday, September 3, 2009
A Letter (Circa 2005)
(On the envelope it reads:)
Attn: Shroud of Joy
at the door of imagination,
first galaxy on the hard right.
Ripped from the belly of a
curdled canvas and delivered
in friendship and love - not to
be confused as one of those secrets
.this is REAL.
.LIKE THE COFFEE SHOP.
always Sincerely, but not without
my smile,
Ladie Dee
(The letter reads:)
Tonight my glass is raised in anticipation of you accepting me in to your arms - space - dark eyes and skin we are both, burning. Holy heads, you and I. Solely lovers, not destroyers. Naturalists, Spiritualised in a vapour of sensory awakening... and to think of it all my stomach swirls - and somewhere deeper in - so deep I don't even know it so well - I have a warmth.
OH KINDLER, YOU ARE MY CURRENT MAGIC - BARE CONSCIENCE, LEAVING ME IN AWE.
I would hope my heart never leaves yours entirely and that for the short times our minds and souls and black irises fused, we were common to each other as the very skin we were born in to.
This is how I feel:♮//♪♪♪♪𝄐!!★☒ I desire intimacy because I am confusingly and stupidly human: but intimacy is fleeting compared to an exacted and solitary expectation of each other:
TRUTH IS OUR KING;
LOVE HIS QUEEN;
OUR BISHOPS ARE LOYALTY;
OUR KNIGHTS ARE
F R E E D O M;
and we build CASTLES of relationship as a beacon to the ships of endless horizon.
(A Code:)
Each comma means "focus on your breathing", each period (.) means clap twice. each semi-colon means you are so cool and I will miss you heaps and each dash is a burial of my days as an eater of fish - - - xo
ho retsabala dloc
ho arua gniwolg dlog
ho won m'I ffo eht kcart
ho won I edaf ot kcalb
Attn: Shroud of Joy
at the door of imagination,
first galaxy on the hard right.
Ripped from the belly of a
curdled canvas and delivered
in friendship and love - not to
be confused as one of those secrets
.this is REAL.
.LIKE THE COFFEE SHOP.
always Sincerely, but not without
my smile,
Ladie Dee
(The letter reads:)
Tonight my glass is raised in anticipation of you accepting me in to your arms - space - dark eyes and skin we are both, burning. Holy heads, you and I. Solely lovers, not destroyers. Naturalists, Spiritualised in a vapour of sensory awakening... and to think of it all my stomach swirls - and somewhere deeper in - so deep I don't even know it so well - I have a warmth.
OH KINDLER, YOU ARE MY CURRENT MAGIC - BARE CONSCIENCE, LEAVING ME IN AWE.
I would hope my heart never leaves yours entirely and that for the short times our minds and souls and black irises fused, we were common to each other as the very skin we were born in to.
This is how I feel:♮//♪♪♪♪𝄐!!★☒ I desire intimacy because I am confusingly and stupidly human: but intimacy is fleeting compared to an exacted and solitary expectation of each other:
TRUTH IS OUR KING;
LOVE HIS QUEEN;
OUR BISHOPS ARE LOYALTY;
OUR KNIGHTS ARE
F R E E D O M;
and we build CASTLES of relationship as a beacon to the ships of endless horizon.
(A Code:)
Each comma means "focus on your breathing", each period (.) means clap twice. each semi-colon means you are so cool and I will miss you heaps and each dash is a burial of my days as an eater of fish - - - xo
ho retsabala dloc
ho arua gniwolg dlog
ho won m'I ffo eht kcart
ho won I edaf ot kcalb
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