You lit me up
A stroke of a match
The flame
Needed warmth
To light my way forward
Enough to fall off the edge of the world
I fell apart
Gathered up the broken pieces
My hands cracked
Trembled
Placed it back together
Shows I’ve been looking in the wrong place
I have no books or poems
For the political intellectuals
Instead
You scribe a wealth
I shouldn’t fight it
If I don’t know what is
I had the nerve to talk
and the presence of mind
to hear the reply,
which pierced the ear
and fell and swirled
about the entrails.
I could not understand,
but I saw a smile and a shade
of pale skin glow, and now
you’re down on me like a shadow.
Maybe I too
am on my knees:
scrubbing the pavement;
or at the table; the traffic lights;
pumping gas at the station,
thinking of you.
At night – it’s like the Christmas lights
I saw as a child long after my eyes
were shut tight.
Our star-struck eyes first met as the sun cracked
the dawn sky, and I, long lost to the mist,
fell for the radiance of your smile. You lacked
nothing I ever wanted; you eclipsed
the glorious day, and the darkness fell
as the shadow crossed your pallid brow.
You turned away, and I’m burnt – a spent shell,
and I shed dead skin like leaves from the bough.
But you suffer now the dark countenance
of my love; and what is that but hurt pride:
a regret, the bitter sore remembrance
of better times? You turn but cannot hide.
So look me in the eye: only your tears
can mitigate the pain of all these years.
note: my take on sonnet 34 by WS
*
I was going to say compare
the aborting of emotion
richness complexity and compare
a pop song
to the symphony, Haydn, Mozart
then Ludwig, Mahler, fleshing it out
to over an hour and more,
when I realised we sit that, twice,
and longer, in theatres, and Beethoven
is Kubrick, or Spielberg, you
don’t have to like their work,
but the reach is impeccable,
in to the dark end of dreams
before 40 foot screens, or a laptop,
and follow their journey through
rich emotions, into comprehension,
insight, incomprehension, the desire
to see the whole thing, watch it all
again, pausing, taking the time to research
what a certain symbol means; so nothing
has changed, I take it back, through all
the autism, new methods of attack Nothing
has changed, everything is different
Everything has changed, nothing is different,
know what I mean? Nothing
today is not the same no-thing that it was,
a comfort, a stillness, a
i…We, are
the gaps between things,
we, are
where natter is not, no
noiseless
chatter, pointless sparkle
bling: and women
are not our bitches, boys, they are
our mothers,
suiters, sitters, our sisters
and our friends—together
we are the over-all observance
of each other: Recognition,
the property exists between
electrons, the space between
a moon and satellite,
the area the sunlight
fills with Room.
*
It is good, yes?, to be reliable, and
bold, like the engine, feed coal,
soil, Mr. Diesel’s modified; or a coil
humming particles, muons excitation
in the gravity of time
pulling everyone wired so, a round
sub-molecular redundancies: nought;
the armed guardsmen, the drivers;
class; system; Courts, of Papacies,
and vested interests; sound ideology
or not; so long, ago, the train,
a tunnel, a chapter in the ocean,
the obscured notion of some ‘coming’
making it out the other side
of Primitive, into knowing: New Fuel,
Progress of interstellar travel: my guess
copy and paste—the ‘best minds
of the gene-rations, starving, hysterical,
bare-alls funded by intelligence agencies,
the Beat compromised, the Rhythm
sure jerked around a lot, we like to think
our train is not alike, but the Sun alone
a long time by itself is swirled powerless
along in the submission of all things,
nebulae, horizons, swung about a hub
defies location is the power of the old
non centralisation, this is the hour
of a new transmission, minutes lasting years…
They tell me I have PTSD
I look up at the paint peeling on the ceiling
I do not believe them.
One leg up and one down,
two fingers at the keys.
It was the way, then,
to tell the world about
frozen lakes and big winds;
how the officer was a crook
(or so they said)
We sat in rows
when we were there,
and the sports boys
told a good tale,
swung imaginary clubs
among the jottings.
Pull up a smoke, lads
and I’ll tell you how
we went to a robbery
then got pissed.
What a hoot: mind you
we were always pissed.
Part of the job, really.
Can’t write on an empty tank.
Not a chance.
Well, not one we took.
Yes, we’ll have another.
And one for him.
Good bastard. Bent cop.
Know what I mean;
nod’s as good as wink.
We spilt words on pages,
the keys dug in deep,
we filled the stories
with dashes.
Emphasis, you know.
Old reporter’s trick:
make it sound worse
than it was. Well, you do.
Or we did. Then.
Today I left work an hour earlier,
still, I did
an 8 1/2 hour day. I didn’t need
to leave
early, but there’s a lip-sync
rehearsal an hour
after normal finishing-time and I
have the urge… I could feel it
would be the day I bring the
loose
un-poemed verses together
while high on the first
three coffees, like a cowpoke
in a two hour wrangling
return the stragglers
and join them
with the herd.
It is not the high marshmallowing
cloud I know of in Texas, but fog,
a long gluminous snake
when I look from the rocker
by the window, on the flat blue
ocean
and up against the land
over the few meters blasted
to make the highway
like what I know of California
sharing the fault, mountainous
upthrust
crinkled special by friction
and we populate, alter, and go
through
our herdings, hardy with
escape
scenarios, tubular swarms of
movement,
one person is all it takes
to start a ball rolling, one
composer to change how we
listen
to the symphonic, a single
anybody
passionate enough, who is
a transient
constant of reflection, sameness,
& change.
Indeed: even this close, existence
is a comfort
and a curse of recognition; shaping
our mouths
to the verse of better singers, aware
of the spotlights, caution,
fear,
concern, Canadian orphans, at dawn,
you’ll feel the join?, the golden,
rosy mornings
of monarchy visited on the
commoners,
the bottom torn from childhoods
unprotected
from the janus mercy on high, the
complicit
conSTABulary—late apologies,
botched
troubled inquiries, G
Hallett’s ‘Blackmailers…’ it looks
calculated, determined
by necessity of fuel and
motivation precisely
to a spot, date, time, but not if
you look at the sperm,
ka-ziggly zoom, hardly
something there
to amount to much,
globs made of worms, those
made of codes, that made of spirals
spirals made of movement, movement
like the happy of the moon
to have somewhere to park…A
life
in walking distance. What of the
fabulous
spans of achievements?, the clean
spark plugs of momentum?
momentum on course, a
consequence…
Undeniably above it, the sky
webs, diptera
aeronautic, you Agreement, you
uneasy
inner marriage—the horse wants
in the carriage,
the head, upon the coin, the last
word
has: the specie, & its currency,
want to spread & double, dominate or
half, and halve it all, this
space, this seek a
spoken mode of true dominion
on this alpha-planet—located
where it joins
a greater system, not of words,
blood, & sacrifice—
the family kind, where the artist
chugs
away, at minimum wage, to buy
the ones
he loves differently some nice
surprises,
short holidays of good food and
movies,
a new game, brand shoes, a
hoody
with a smooth straight zipper.
stone-drop prayer
was it not
compassion
that we were
put here on the
hearth of a warmth
precious flaw
in the vast set
crystal of all
there is
infinitely
cold?
was it not
compassion that
gave us eyes to
see beyond the
sun into the
dark sea floor
of our own heart
the rich mud there
spawning the
manta ray
the whales of
relief?
was it not
compassion that
even in the cruellest
of battles we could
learn to reach hands
toward each other
to cradle the wound
the nurse of tear
the stitch of
blood?
let the wave rise
in the one heart
to wash warm and
clear through all hearts
to tumble apart
thought that hardens
to weapon to feel
the warmth of
one self not as
body and soul
broken apart like
hard dry bread
for birds but as
each and all
together
was it not
compassion that
we were
we are
let us know it
again in the
sun’s warmth
and in that
our own
precious flaw
in the vast set
crystal of all
there is
infinitely
cold
august 2015
ware place, pakuranga heights
Across the country brow
a jack hare, ramrod straight
before a hill edged in pink,
big eyes backlit in terror
The White folks running
back to their neighbourhoods, prisons
are carrying the gene,
carrying the dream of capitalism’s ghost
carrying the flea that pulls down a fence
There’s no stopping something invisible so out
it will be made.
The perfect first step
in any democracy re-take
is the founding of debate.
Platforms that can take civil indifference, hate
exercise civil love -extricate civil abuse
indifference re-cast as interested
both sides. In, out difference
maybe Out difference our
man/woman trans/mix gendered
candidate dressed
to vote
word
unite
under attack
victory
in identifying
the enemy
dressed in our clothing.
breathe in, let the trenches be dug
before we flood them
from the sides
swim
share a drink
coat
dedicated to the staff and residents of the Switzer home, Kaitaia
never having been there
i’d always thought old age
a coat you would put on
when you felt the
time right
the right time
come
tawdry but stately
you having become
the beggar in a velvet gown
at your own door
something come back
from so far off
that was
always there
a childhood rhyme
would see myself
stood at the window
because i chose
to look out
from this point
of no vantage
seeing it
all astern now
the wake of those
gone, the journeys,
the mantelpiece,
hearths and
the friends who
have gone
under in this
life, waiting on
the next if it
comes
their mind gone out
like a tide
i never imagined
myself with
my back to that
glass simply because
i could not turn
for my joints were as stiff
as swollen wood.
this coat
obscures me
and whatever
i was some know
me still the children
washed to the four
reaches and eight
points of the wind
you can only
lay out the things
once known before
them for they are
their own lives
and i can only guess
the chains they
make of them
or how
they are free to
sit in airports
and other cold places
of distance.
was there a path
i came here by?
it seemed just
to have happened
so very strange
that the whole
round of a life
just happened
my own life
no more than
a ragged knit
that hardly
covers my
shoulders
something
someone else
once wore
this coat of age
replaces.
and the nurses
crowd over
me with light
or is it
darkness in their
kind hands.
houhora
june 2010
