you was here i know. your dear bones years hence – the impossibly distant future. not even stones are what they was & lingo so dumb! hands tabled drums – – / anapaests scratched on skin, hotel doors, spondaic fist falls: Will Not alter…
From Rotoiti’s Heart
Fishtail’s fangs dripping white blood from a passing cloud. The Richmond Ranges biting into the cool blue sky. Wairau’s braided arteries spill shining into Cloudy Bay. A bronze beaver stands, sterile. An artificial, rigid, vigil. While sleek black eels seethe under Opoua’s dark glass.
Blue Ribbon at The Brine
The river here bends on itself It sprawls on gravel, tumbles on log and stick It is at the end of its run It has come through gorge and shingle fan; it breaks around the skinny legs of birds, then deepens as the braids conjoin Now it is not a river, but a slow deep…
from Short March Walkabout #2
I’d misread the map and got off at the wrong station. it had an elevation which satisfied my sitting out the morning watching the trains leaving squealing into fog lit spectacularly; a lady crying, a barking dog, a shopping trolly shepherd in a hiViz, humming wires clicking above the tracks bolted into place on cloud-coloured…
xy
live, then, w wife, midlife crisis & god knows what but doesn’t care & i don’t. the philosophy’s good – pushed hard but good. more fact than truth; useless but good. thinking is my enemy, & drinking; friends, venereal abstinence; inflexible morals; health is The Most Important Thing tho…
Tears Salted The Earth
He was from a farm which promised much and delivered little It sat in the low hills inland from the coast, all shadows and bullrush and dripping gullies A four-room home – two at the back, two in the front and hardly a chair on which to sit They were, he said, poor in all but…
i wish it was the winter of discontent
I know what i’m doing but i don’t learn from experience. What hope! when the moon’s horn penetrates Venus & Ur anus [typo] presents itself in my House. It’s a joke. a misfortune; i’ve the fatal flaw Aeschylus dreams about. They fall on the pavement, slip thru my fingers & i’m fixed…
The Harbour
A great concrete arm reaches into the sea It controls its temper A swell surges at it and spray floats It gives no ground In its lee fishing boats sit low They roll and tip, pastel sides dipping Children swim to a pontoon – a collie, too, his coat a furrow of black and white…
The Winds of Change
I listen to the rain – on the roof – I hate the fucking rain!!! Most people find it soothing.. they tell me – Again and again – You must be mad!!! If you don’t enjoy… the subtle lullaby – Rocking. rocking. rocking… Even as a child – I used to put my face close…
dioscuri
i’m skint pale skinned, fit until someone claims me bitch; sticks his jack in. take pity because it’s better than nothing. what is it? but pre-emptive this effacement. i do it good i do it w/out thinking. let the whip fly flail my skin like it’s paper. cut me down…
from Short March Walkabout
IV to lay—in the dark intoning in tune with the waves moaning in purposeless calm is to know this, I cannot, in the object hold (the) ‘myself’ inside this busted-lock of surf beach changing room without the cold suspicion that the ‘I’ who moves the green pencil across the narrow page of an complimentary Agriculture…
unfriend
Lead me on when the house is still, nights long. I was here, in your dream once when the trees danced to the wind & the yellow moon looked on. A board cracks. Airs enter the rooms. You left a shawl, a pair of shoes. The skin that out-lives you.