sometimes
you crap in the bath
worry
about children with baseball bats
think of getting a gun
just for the noise
even if you’re prime minister you’re in
the nuisance class
everyone
thinks it unfair you have
anything at all
my advice
give away as much as you can
it will
buy you time
as pieces of my life fall away
each day smaller and fewer remaining
compressed
into this shrinking space the fire
burns more ferociously and the sky
has never been known to lend a hand
to an old lag in a tight place you know
even this is not enough a passion
so hot stone might forget itself
let alone desire I’m thankful
shut in these flames my heart
cannot last and so I escape
life as your victim you have no
interest in the dead
I have done this before
hours pull and twist while splitting seconds bleed.
(eat your damn food. you’ll be hungry later)
garlic sticks to skin
hours pull and twist while bleeding seconds split
as water follows my spine, bent down.
“This is your favourite! Why aren’t you—”
water follows spine, bent down.
needles of sleep bloom silver in my mouth
“It’s your favourite! Why can’t you—”
My throat cracks around a breathing tube
needlesleep silvers my mouth
(eat your damn food. you’ll be hungry later)
I split down the middle, eyes stuck with salt
I have done this before.
Ink blooms in skin
intent sketched down
in blue.
my blood presses up
against the nib.
fingers (his) brace
breast and knee and thigh (mine).
He checks left and right on his hands.
“I don’t want to get it wrong!”
I am touch-seen. Lined.
scars ripped and restitched
re-learned with new hands (yours) if
there is still breast and
knee and thigh (mine) for you
under iodine shadows
and broken fluorescent light,
“I don’t want to get it wrong.”
You are glass-voiced
smile coiling into cracks
as my blood presses
up against your hand.
F-sharp in my mouth
bright and shaped to
laughter as I stretch
lazysweet
and safer in my skin
now I know you
(you know, you—
—touch, if you want.
I am vain when I know
you look at me.)
I tell myself: save
your words and wait.
Wait to slip them
between kisses so
I can feel your breath
catch between us.
But they fall as I do
brimful and heavy
unkept and sung as
my own breath tangles
on how lovely you are.
Your voice like touch
that leaves me open
full-thick with hope
sunshine waterspill.
She smiled glass through sunshine, which
steals and swallows until
Pain like | hot wires coil
I stretch, unspooling, fingers long
empty space. Hollow as your throat
laughter licks up into
small spaces words have
left song
echoes or unprotected skin
she smiled. The needle breaks like new sound.
I haven’t seen a mirror in days
Anaesthetic | metal
heated and split, blood pressing up—
dripping down slow. Heavy as | the consent documents
word-rush, want-spill—no, don’t touch
on the desk.
light as | splintered bone
It seems only yesterday a disorienting sense
of unease, and the shrinking autumn sun,
and the scattering leaves of the plane
trees all told me it was time
to escape these iron-born, sky-wrapping clouds,
and drive, or fly, or take a (now impossible) train
journey to you. For years I’d needed to train
myself to deal with the singularity of your absence,
with the state of living under different clouds,
in a different city to you, my old, only son
– with having to face these longitudes and time
zone discrepancies – and not just jump on a plane,
and land on your doorstep. The dry, boundless plain
that stretches between us, spanned only by dead train
lines and gouged-out roads and sheep, stretches Time
somehow, beyond borders or meridians, or a sense
of reality, and is measured in megalitres of sun,
wingbeats of crows, claps of thunder, and clouds
– a barrier as tangible and solid as brick. It clouds
our thinking, this quantity of distance that only a plane
can take on (devouring the miles while it races the sun).
Walking’s too slow (Life’s too short) and you hit rain
squalls and rockfalls in four-wheel-drives. In a sense,
they’re partners in crime: fat Distance and hungry Time.
But everything had changed this time.
My room was a prison I couldn’t leave. Clouds
of memories cast shadows of doubt and my sense
of gravity failed me. My eyes lied. A passing plane
flew tail-first across the sky. A passing train
of thought reified, opalescent in the west-rising sun.
And now nothing remains, including you, my son,
or not for me. I’ve crossed a line in Time
that no-one recrosses. The curtains of distant rain
always stay away, and their dark, mothering clouds
forever float far beyond my windowpane, in plain
sight but unknowable in this, my eternal loss of essence.
I have a sense of it now: the relativity of Time
clouds the amplitudes of Distance on our brief train
journey across the endless plain and on, into the sun.
Big elephant swings his trunk as he promenades along Bondi boardwalk–stripy suspenders holding up his pinstripe shorts, his matching bullseye earmuffs. Little elephant swings his trunk as he promenades– shorts, suspenders, bullseye earmuffs. Big orders a single scoop pistachio in a sugar cone at the best gelato shop at the beach. Little winks as he tells the tanned vendor, ditto, ditto, ditto.
Big and Little fly Business Class. Big money. In Venice, Big asks, di, dei, dello or dell’? Little asks, della, dei or degli? Agreement is important, says Big. I agree with you, says Little. The gleaming gondola has red plush seats and the vase of artificial roses. Big orders pistachio at the best gelato shop in Venice. Little orders a triple choc chip mint. They gaze at each other’s cups.
Back at Bondi, Big buys a red tee-shirt like Little’s. Little buys an orange tee. Big buys a beach umbrella, with pizza-shaped wedges: red, orange, red, orange. Little joins the best gym in Bondi. Hang on, roars Big.
Your displeasure encircled,
like descending mesh, that first occasion
we called a conversation.
Was I the blanched insect
and you the hunter,
with your barbed question-net?
The gendered metaphor
flutters weakly, but does not die
No feminist assertion
swoops down to devour it.
This is new territory.
There is no theory that can
rival this, me splintering
under your gaze
like last century’s woman
As if you had pinched the thorax
of a butterfly,
fastened me to a board
with each quick piercing
of disapproving thoughts,
like an entomologist’s
single-minded enamel pins
Pins in a woman’s dress,
pins in her hair,
pins, pins, to fix, to fix her –
with a needle and thread
she sits, sewing her silence,
an inheritance passed on
I hold her in contempt, but here I am
weaving quietude and guilt
while you tell me how you feel.
Still, it seems to me
your mouth is a wound
I want to stitch up
Your eyes, once seamless,
now full of gashes
that refuse my useless craft
I wasn’t trying to convince you.
I just needed you to know
how it felt to cradle this heavy speck,
the frightening consequences
of blood and semen.
To hear of hormones,
caressing me like warm heroin
or the voice of a hypnotist
I couldn’t describe it. I was slipping
from your downturned mouth,
like a stitch from a knitting needle
now futile and crooked.
I told you later that I would do it.
“Fuck the world” I said,
and we fucked,
and I pulled up the blanket
so you wouldn’t see the question mark
hovering like paused scissors
over my terrible belly
I unravelled.
The safety pin inside,
coming loose, lanced me.
And guilt formed, like a clot.
Guilt grew at a faster pace.
I cowered before guilt,
and its threat of emptiness
that gaped at me
like a hole in my stocking,
widening, widening.
Grief-struck, I messaged you.
I don’t know what to do, I said.
You explained, over text,
the procedure to me,
gleaned from a doctor friend:
“The first pill detaches the embryo
from the uterus.
The second pill flushes it out.”
As if it needed explaining.
As if I had not thought about
running away with
the possibilities in my flesh.
As if I had not scrolled through
countless internet pages,
every medical point a pricking,
drawing blood in advance
When you sent me that text,
matter-of fact, cold, like a needle
through my frayed cloth-mind,
did you feel any sadness,
for the lump that was us, nascent,
for the girl who stroked your hair?
And so I bled, and bled,
and released the tiny burden.
You were sad, you did say,
after I lay in a hospital bed
empty of the loaded clot,
you were sad because of how I felt.
I know men don’t feel
the body’s cushioning response,
its demands, but you demanded too
All feminist affirmations
bounced off the glass or lightly stuck
and slid away.
No rally sign or slogan badge tells us this.
You’re either for, or against –
there is no messy space in between.
No one explains, and I tried to.
But when you explained
the procedure to me,
so calmly over text,
you dropped my heart, like a rag,
in a pool of dirty water.
I didn’t know
you were carrying it.
When siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground
an air-tight pouch vibrates beneath each chin.
Upright primates gather, marvel at the sound
and over-acted gestures. Rounded mouths
shape reverb like a didge’s barking din.
When siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground
one sprints a rope bridge, scales a tree, a bough
so high and so improbably thin
upright primates, three deep, marvel at the sound
and swing bravado of this acrobatic clown
and they applaud. A young boy cries, “Again!”
When siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground
the display’s recurring, urgent, loud
that in the wild occurs just daily, after dawn.
Upright primates gather, marvel at the sound
and crowd the moat, three deep, as vain apes bound
to stand guard every hour of the sun
when siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground.
Upright primates gather, marvel at the sound.
My father was insatiable salt, pickled
against his maimed leg and mislaid love
with litres of cheap whisky, smoked
joint after joint until the cabin was a cave
and there he squatted by the fire
trying to make sense of shadows.
He was man out of time, could have been
a great victor—dragged his mauled corporeality from the fray of horse
and mud and sword into the heroic—now only ridiculous
in the mirror, a limping giant left smashed
by the roadside while history sped off
without a backward glance.
Still, he had his man-out-of-time personality:
stalked the dark depths of himself
like a ferocious deep sea fish, baited
women with his charm, the glittering dangled light
drew them through black water, through the maw
of his misery, past the laced tongue
of his anger until they were in too deep —
Snap! Off with their heads!
Snap! Off with mine!
It grew back so many times I was
a cat with nine lives balanced on the wave-beaten gunwale
as we fled and fled and fled
from his father his mother his happy-faced family
in the clench-shouldered house in Highgate and that wild spring
heath of the Sixties he strode as my mother’s lover
and how that brief lucid spring
ended one morning in a helmet viscous with blood
ended one morning with this,
our endless wandering in the cave of love.
Terracotta Warriors guard their Emperor. Fifteen
archers in the al fresco dining area, a four-car garage
full of foot soldiers. The Emperor is damp
with middle age and dawn dew, askew
on a banana lounge, his dressing gown unhitched.
The High Chariot and team of bronze horses
spent in the master bedroom. Bins line the street,
neighbours sleep. Soldiers will decamp with the sun,
night shadows lost in the civil dawn; he’ll miss them.
He’s found affection for their sandalled feet,
learned to accommodate their placid foment. The sun
will rise over half built mansions. His daughter
has not returned. There have been boys aiming rocks
at her window, quartz pebbles through the night air,
neat parcels of intent. The infantry have reported.
Secrets have passed through the ranks, a ragged, worried
line to his ear. She carries his devious blood. The only
heartbeats in this house belong to his wife and their dog
as it wanders between the ranks. They are a family shuffling
toward roundabouts, born in the first dust of subdivision.
His daughter has outgrown the suburban vista,
outlived artless childhood devotion, now a tussle twists
in every conversation. She rails against these ancient guards,
their empty hands, their ceramic topknots. They
are his alone. The troops bear eight faces of despair.
Rumours arrive hidden in sheafs of silk,
hugged in the dimple of lacquered bowls; cradled
by foot soldiers who lived through the nuclear birth,
The Long March, had their memories cleansed
by one hundred torrents of mercury. They say
– silver will bring gold, the canopy of wealth; still,
young love will arrive with a darkened tooth, a tattoo
behind the ear, a labourer’s inflection. These desires
deboss the blood. He hefts himself from the banana lounge,
takes a step toward an archer, stands eye to eye
and tilts to kiss; holds his lips against the cool surface.
When he draws away there are flecks of ancient paint
on his lips, the taste of clay and fealty; these mute servants
are the body of another epoch. The morning birds start,
the swimming pool filter churns. He imagines kissing his wife
with terracotta lips; wonders if she will remember
his fingertips on her, each touch a scalpel of morning dew.
The self is uncontiguous, undone,
parceled out, then simmered to a sum:
a rivermix of round-run rocks and foam,
cattle piss that tinges a green stone.
One can’t believe in monsters, being one,
or else one’s self would cause one’s self to run.
More than forgiving trespass, God forgets.
We know this; it is written. Still—
the art of self-abridgment
is removal; our essence, the perusaled gift
that stays beyond the shards of what it shatters,
where only what still could’ve been still matters.
Moon, all these years
we’ve circled each other:
me, for the most part, indifferently
-‐ obiter dicta, the back of my neck
-‐ you, elliptically; that sidestep dark face,
the pale face you keep for daylight,
the sometimes red flush we all live under,
the way you’ll cling to sky
with barely a fingernail.
You hosted us in the classroom
TV honoured guest,
the astronauts strange as starfish
then bouncing around the screen
like little children on a trampoline,
the power glow of pedagogic light
reflected off our shiny foreheads
and back to that visible horizon,
showers of brilliant black and lunar
white. Not bone, far from it,
yet the rocks in your head
have so many names, Moon,
each of your proliferating phases
labelled, no doubt, with exemplary
diagnoses written up, and down,
in some swollen Book of Manuals.
Moon, you are the big pill
day swallows to face the sun.
Though guess what?
I’m no closer to a cure.
Now, this morning’s bag of fog
spills loose across the treetops,
more chill up there than underneath,
and I’m wondering how you’ll fit;
but you do, as ever,
zeppelin descending, drone cold, obese,
easing gently into that bath of dry ice.
This could be a good time, Moon,
to roll up, show the world a clown face.
Upon the eviction and relocation of Housing New Zealand tenants as part of
the North Glen Innes ‘Regeneration’ Project in Auckland, New Zealand
Not past but present
Not present but protest
Not protest but asset
Not asset but upset
Not upset but redevelopment
Not redevelopment but real developments
Not real developments but housing shortage
Not housing shortage but sanctuary
Not sanctuary but opportunity
Not opportunity but community
Not community but tax credit
Not tax credit but security
Not security but eviction
Not eviction but action
Not action but auction
Not auction but exploitation
Not exploitation but economics
Not economics but envy
Not envy but opportunity
Not opportunity but community
Not community but gravy train
Not gravy train but tipuna
Not tipuna but trickle down
Not trickle down but safety net
Not safety net but progress
Not progress but political redress
Not political redress but freewill and freehold
Not freewill or freehold but family
Not family but opportunity
Not opportunity but community
This side of my eyelids is a dark that lacks
density, matt patches of light tempering
the spread of shadow, wrinkles of glass-shatter
frozen just short of a drop, a millimetre
of airy perspective with a hint of
comic-book stars that follow a knock-out punch
or the thirty-six candles of the French
translation from the graphic, a black and white
negative of the New Year pyrotechnics,
son et lumière, fridge-hum and a faint spill
of streetlight. Bonne Année indeed, bonnier
than the last one or the one before, if I lived
my life backwards or were legally blind
to all the evidence. I wait for sleep to shut
the world off like a falconer’s hood.
you think there are no strings attached
you tear up the coast on a whim
on a belly full o’ thunder
rumbling iamb iamb iamb
o’ the world four strokes to a line
on the road like me! a belly
full o’ thunder like me! just-strung
like me! poorly tuned saying no-
thing echoing what tugs in the
blood like a song that even now
is our only drum beating no-
madic! & each step is a-tom
a-tom to nothing just say yes!
be a fork in the wind over
a few jars & though each word’ll
jar each word will jar! it’ll be
a song when it’s late & Friday
when you’re rounding the last bend out
o’ Aubury when I’m losing
light just out o’ Winchester there
hiking listening: making a flat
strum of dust on a river bridge
thunder iamb iamb iamb
Reeds move. Might such eavesdrop
hearing forest: hide the bruised hips.
Slug hands call the shell its shadow—
never phone baby, but I pear. Light the seasons:
sleeping of collapse, slight bending,
five white in trees rather than puddles
warped away.
Symmetry of violet. Museum ahead:
analogue yesterday. Witching meat
but swim daughter, noise: the rain, the rain.
A flask is laid on the electronic scale
and tared to zero. I start with a small job lot,
topped up with smaller and smaller
increments. Index finger gently taps
the silver spatula’s side, loosing a miniature
sheet of fine unseasonable snow.
In nature this white powder begins
as millions of tiny skeletons, compressed
by their own multitudinous weight
and the roaring bulk of the sea. Now it will buffer
the pH of the medium, allow me to cultivate
many crinkled circular sheets of mould.
I don’t know why I’m growing mould.
I don’t know what I will do with my life.
But watching and measuring I accrete
habits of precision, observation; learn
the power of purposeful repetition, the thrill
when the first portion added is exact.
Sandro Boticelli, c1485
Awake now. Remember our love
in the shade of a wild myrtle forest.
Your red, silk pallium softens our bed
of bracken and leaf. The air is cool here,
broken by swallow song and the hum
of wasps that swarm and crown
your abundant hair. I study your ecstatic
slumber-a sole crease of brow, an easy
parting of lips, your brave span of chest.
I want the burn of your eyes, the brine
of your skin. Far from bloodshed
and the din of battle, you abandon it all:
your lance, cuirass and beloved blue helmet.
Naked and fearless you surrender to me.
A little death that strands you oblivious
to lewd taunts of drunken satyrs. Fat bellied
with goat leg and horn they thieve, thrust
and sound a conch but still you do not stir.
This is no time for sleep. Gather your strength.
For I am your bright star and when you wake
I will ruin you again.
Down the straight path, love is nudged by DESTRUCTION; donald Satan trump has the reverential space of hard news, while COPS KILLED JOHNNO!!! every decade. Beyond rosy joggers and a barking terrier (moulting, like its owner, from an overdose of city), a rebel finger salutes: O WET CONCRETE, HOW I DO LOVE THEE. At the very end, a mapmaker blows back incoming dust to chisel a telegram just for you: THIS IS NOT PEACE.
The radio, for the serial, ’s propped
against a turnip to maximise reception
It’s a kind of stereo for the neighbour
My very head’s a paddock he says
checking a hedge for catching pricks
He’s been crutching poems since six
Let’s see what the surface’s doing, its
job’s to hide the depths. Turn to me
reflected image: you are nobler
than a pineapple. This fence is the fence
from my dream, the one I wrote the Queen
I sometimes see her reply winging
over the cliffs so dolce, as they say
He makes shade as the hay dies in Jersey
jaws, as trinkets spill off ferries
scoffs red cherries. If his name was Raymond
he’d be a diamond, cutting up rugs
like ice. Lyrebirds flayed his shower
curtain, now he’s condemned to do
the same. He takes his kids to boxing
school so they’ll protect their lunches
from thieving roos. A tulip’s worth
its weight in Chinese takeaway he jokes
His bread is heavy. I’m not gay
like Tennyson he says in town
Pass the gravy. WW-
I didn’t weigh down my
lip. Skip sympathy, with its rotten bags
of laundry and defunct toasters. He waves
the flag but wants to secede, to be
a king of cane, to ride into glory
on a black swan with slippers of cygnet
down. Ugh! See him on his
ride-on mower having
a heart attack. No, he’s just grabbing
his hat, which has flown like a bat into
the cucumber patch. Felt is a kind
of feeling. So is a hearty greeting
or memory of shaking a black man’s
hand while flying a kite. He’d
never felt so white as when
he saw the clouds go over, spelling
his name, forming his face, raining
on his drought-stricken self-parade
He had an orangeade spider
later to celebrate. He went off
the juice when he turned forty-two
I want to survive my second marriage
he claimed. In order to write the novel
he explained to his mates. They were great
not like some. He always knew what they
were on about, even when
they were sketchy. The judge not
excluded. He finds a painted
egg in his dressing gown pocket
Must be Easter. Happy chocolate
he says to his indifferent ex-wife
when she rings about the shares
portfolio. Get ex-
husband sectioned she scrawls, along
with a camel and an upside-down
umbrella on the pad. Get
well’s all she says. She has a rabbit’s
foot in a drawer somewhere. She walks
to yoga but accepts lifts home
from instructors. She pulls out weeds
in the late afternoon singing Barbra
Streisand to the wrong tune for the hell
of it. I want to dance with some-
body she tells the dog in a ro-
bot voice. She has a shed
of her own and a secondhand Rolls
Royce. She stares at goat videos
like she’s the wicked queen of Disney’s
Snow White. This is what
being out of love’s like. She writes
a sarcastic review of a rest-
aurant and a movie. The reviews are
the same with a verb or two changed
Let nouns be metaphors
she concludes. She takes off her shoes
Let shoes be the blockers of the honey
of life. She squeezes them like
daffodils for their wisdom or wine
for Michael1
1
Your cover is the khaki-green of earth, a colour that
distills soils and hints at your vocation. It frames a landscape:
Pencarrow – bisected by a dark defining strip,
the land reclining on its hip, before narrowing to a tail.
Somewhere further off it will vanish, as you vanished, an otter,
into the sea. Clouds are streaked with guano, although the birds –
there must be birds – have been absorbed. The foreshore
is bleak, stripped of all but breeds of bush, which angle
themselves against the wind’s unbroken onslaught.
But the sand catches fire, there is a light coming off
the sea and even the sky looks ready to ignite,
were it not for those earth-coloured bands
that marry with the scene, holding the present steady.
2
The question is not whether, but how it will come back,
the land, the winter afternoon. Will it return in its raw state,
as a plenitude of little bays, each joined to its horizon,
the primitive, the unconstructed moment? Or shrink,
the instant you start trying to recall, to a handful
of windswept crescents – each one of which tugs at you,
eyes, mind, heart, and demands of you language?
Remember how, expended, a shimmering spot will dwindle
like a star. Words that hatch in its place let in contrast,
other homes and habitations that wash alongside
in your bloodstream. Washing Pencarrow out?
Someone will ask. Shaped by encounters with elsewhere,
you possess answers. No one more attuned to catch
the twang of solitude adjusting to the ancient, variously
grounded, call of home. But let them turn your cover over.
You were born to that backdrop, to rock-littered bays
where tussock grass is blown towards the shore. There,
puffs of pale colour transcribe the wind’s elation.
Ivory through yellow, they light this stretch of beach,
witness to a kind of rapture in this unpeopled landscape,
passed on to your daughter, resilient as a gene.
