from Workers Of The Hours » New Zealand Poetry

I have brokered time out of a rut
to forage for poem in the half caste,
half-pulled down places, where the yellow and dark,
the golden sheen, of some, their faces,
lean, or fed the red meat

white men grow empire on: extreme
rut of a dream,
rut of emotion expressed,
rut of a bad decision, how I am dressed
everyday, workday, hiViz
and steelcap, or gumboots
up to ma’ kneecaps,
white-soled fishing roots,
the rubber yellow and blue suit;
a comfort of known groove,
how to act, and to move,
and move where, at what cue;

a hundred hooks, and 90 fish;
that this is how the needle tells you
I said, poeting time out of rut,
how it stings—to not move, the whip
sings in the air, you feel
these things I feel: ‘things’, I said
repeating what I meant,
comportment of a wheel,
resistance of the stanchion

at the wharf, the pull within the flesh
at the whip tip splitting your wetsuit;
the moist suction of the mudfoot,
the feel-remembered kisses,
the weighting diamond needles
with the gravity of coins;

stillness, all I ever meant
when I drank beyond the usefulness
of alcohol, people getting drunk
happily, releasing as they go,
the feared absolute silence
of Eternity: telling me,
be skilful, taut, be full
of flex, shock-absorbent
pacifist, but not forgetful,
develop an excellent left; kill,
if you have to, the wasp or mosquito

of memory, do something
unexpected, foster an evil
you can trust to haul you out of trouble
when emoting or receiving hurt
and no one offers transfer
from yourself, in time out
of an expectation
to be ‘good’, these coins
keeping noses in their groove,
in the black dust of mines,
in the uplift in the Van’s suspension
as 6 Samoan Bro’s
exit Sth Auckland,
shopping menfolk, made reliable,
in matters as arranged,
man-manoeuvred, through whatever woman
‘it’ is, what their’s means: They: magnetics,
of an earth moved, be still, within, the field
spin,
exist as attraction, as yourself
and your duties, once perceived as much a
pleasure as the sandfly
to the touch, light as this is actualised
existence.