Month: April 2017

2

I haven’t
put them

in Producers’
letterboxes

for recording
studios

in times of lyrical
shortage.

I did stencil
some

on placards
of low tide

sand, leaving
behind the business

card of the lonely
calling

love of Poetry.
Left alone

they aren’t
even printed—

Schrödinger’s
poems

in a
laptop.

3

When I take
my Hobo
walkabout

again
it’ll be
with a coin
-toss
of which didge
& one
or two of those hex
shapes

to open bins—
everything
you’ll need
you’ll get:

munny, food—
unopened
items in their use-by
dates, clothing,
water, shelter,
though, by time
within yourself,
the body emits
intention
from the plough-shed
of the male
earning wages
to the prepaid
itinerary of holidays
and I’ll suppose
it looks like
bravery
to the guilty—as I bath,
bask, in
the pitying looks
judged a creature failed
by the passing Shodwells,
who see a homeless nodevout,
but sister, it’s a new
and living manuscript,
a hatful of cooling coins, a plan
to place an architect
ahead of time, to scout the
brother-minerals to feed
a body singing

into death
the simple, light travel
of sound through a stick
and symbols from a writing
tool
spoken more in jest,
a sign, that I may aim for
align this moment now with.

 flower shop
to Naran and her daughter

that flower shop
at that corner of the
avenue flowers in
coloured buckets of
water stood before
dirty glass windows
not a shop for
exclusive shoppers
but anyone simply
in that dusty town
who needed flowers
for whatever purpose
flowers had, in night-clubs
gifted across beer-spilt
tables or laid in a
hand girlish for
that moment
at the door,
the sole flower
shop of that
dull stretch
of avenue
at that shop
she told me
we’d meet
and she waited
there i found
the place the
only one looking
up and down those
streets she told
me walking how
she waited for her
mother there who
worked inside among
those flowers behind
the dusty glass she
waited her mother
in gladness as glad
as a flower drinking
in water her mother’s
hands must have
smelt of pollen of
brown paper her
mother who died
so young and left
her to a step-father
and soon step-mother
she told me how
she’d even come here
years after to smell
the flowers in buckets
and recall that fine
woman, the singer, the
woman who taught her
the russian word for everything
she put into her hand the woman
who was singing in the yurt and
a child she saw through that
opened flap at the apex
the snowed in peaks of
the altai those legendary
mountains that smote
asia apart from europe,
she’d remember her,
her mother, kneeling at
the bucket looking
at the flowers
settled with dust.

i’m sure she’d told
told her own daughter
of this shrine she’d
made of coloured buckets
and flowers for a face
not shown there,
a daughter who
who goes remembering
past that corner now
how her mother waited
for her mother there and
she pauses there fresh
in age and thinks of
her mother who would
run to the ends of the
earth for her, of everything
that happened to her mother
as much as she knew her
and finds maybe kneeling
at those same buckets
in a dusty wind
and i too have to hold
her mother and her mother
both in mind and
not spill a drop
for a flower needs
every bit of water
in such a place
every drop
of her, of ‘she’
who i once
called ‘you’.

  2004 – 14 october 2013
ulaanbaatar, auckland

Man sleeps

Dog sleeps

Cat sleeps

Snoring sounds

Whilst washing

swishes

Dishes sit soaking

in the sink

I sit

and think

Cars flash by

Lights flash

in the night sky

I sip my wine

Contemplating…

Meditating…

Soul finally

at rest

Comfortable

in my nest…

A purple glow

in my heart

Resonating

to the sleeping souls

Replete

in their slumber

deep end
to ‘Auntie’ Wanda Kiel-Rapana

out Tolaga Bay way
my auntie’s hearth
and homestead earth
there’s a wharf you
can walk out beyond
the breakers, a wharf
to take you over the
line where the tide
changes colour as the
sea deepens and the
swell lengthens,
a wharf you might
think is a fiddle of
the lens, the short
warped marvellously
long, a mirage like
a headland that breaks
off into the shine of day
and dallies above the ocean,
yet it’s real enough, you
could picnic out there
above the waves that
glide in like gulls
coming in to land
a wharf like any other
running out however long
leaving you nowhere else
to go except back over
the sea-scoured cement
or off the deep end into
the dark strained with
sun and the cold of its rays
down above the fluttered
sea bed, the wind out
Tolaga Bay way lifting
the dandelion web
of a reaped soul
into the dawning hearth
and homestead light.

april 2017