I don’t love you like I love
ten million dollars in my bank account,
peace on Earth, goodwill to all men
the corrective to global warming,
God,
me who is a normal person,
unconditional love love love, world without end, amen,
free, unfettered, blissful childhoods,
two good parents with two happy kids
and other things that don’t exist.I love you like I love
sunshine,
the sun in winter,
the sun in summer,
black coffee & a cigarette,
a friend,
another friend,
one of my other friends,
tower cranes –
such things as exist.I don’t love you like I love
the Frank Gehry submission for Te Papa
or Kengo Kuma’s, I’d heard, untrue, he entered too,
that it was more beautiful than a Danish museum of fairytales
like those books they wouldn’t publish and the plays I couldn’t write,
the kibbutzim I never lived on,
the travels I might have taken using sails instead of planes,
the trips throughout New Zealand I would have had by train…
Like an absence of trauma setting me sound asleep at night,
and all the things that should have been but never were.But I love you like I love
the 800-year-old leaning mosque in Mosul,
destroyed like all crooked things must be,
destroyed before I had a chance to love it any stronger,
the way I love the things that were and are no longer,
disappearing Richmond Stoneware china,
Erskine College, Bill Toomath in Karori,
Taputeranga Marae, Futuna here and now but for how much longer,
the blipping time of homogeneous homogenous homo sapiens,
destroyed like you or I will be.And I don’t love you like I love
contact with extraterrestrial sentient life,
or the colony on Mars that saves hugemankind,
parrots evolving to go to psittacine universities,
octopodes writing epic oceanic verse,
corvids discovering fire and bombing Dresden,
dolphins mastering the dative to outwit Leibniz,
the singularity, the cure for senescence,
and all my nonsense hopes that are beautiful but meaningless.
(They say that faith is for the future…But I love you like I love
contact with extraterrestrial bacteria,
that there are robots on Mars at all and probes in deeper space,
and that some guy is trying to grow spider silk from yeast,
that those psilocybinetic fungally infected cicadas collectively live,
the way all life eventually falls to the ground
on this cooling dust ball heliocentring a hundred thousand kilometres an hour around,
purslane porcelane lithophane lithops and the desert blooms,
this present beauteous, slight and realistic hope.
…and that belief is for the present.)I love you not tomorrow but today.
- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones