Dear reader,

I’ve selected a sheet of pale lemon paper and my favourite blue/green pen. I’ve never met anyone from your country. The islands I live on are lands of mist and myth. The culture here is young, borne on ancient islands where the last dinosaurs roam.

You and I inhabit the world of Internet, rubbing against the many strange edges found along a frontier. Golan’s Hair, Bad Girl’s Hotel, or Coq Roc, are border towns we can visit together if we desire.

I remember reading a story in a very old book I found when I was a child. It was titled, The Dawn Shops, and was about a child adventuring parentless in a foreign land who came upon these shops that mysteriously appeared at dawn each morning. The rest of the time they didn’t exist. Strange people inhabited the shops and the child went on many magical adventures there. The Internet is a little like this for me. A portal that appears in my bedroom when I switch on my P.C. which exists only in the moments when the switch is activated.

I want to write to you how the nor’west here wakes me from a sound sleep when the wind changes to that direction; to write of clean mornings like today with gulls harping overhead; and how the pines stand bleak and black on the cemetery hill behind my house. The cemetery sprawls about, dotted between blocks of housing, so that the house I live in is encircled by the dead, and beyond that, by sea and estuary where the land opens to the water, as though the aches in its bones can be exorcised by the saline backwash. I want to write something that will share with you in some way the feeling I have for my homeland, but none of these things have done that. If you have a place you think of as ‘home,’ maybe you'll know something of what I’m trying to say.


Moving into Uncharted Land

The sun rests in yellow dust
upon the black wedge of Mt Thomas.

Wind rattles tambourine branches
and rubs taniwha scales across roofs.

The silhouette of a man waits
with the glow of dusk behind him.

Half his face is blank,
carved in lines by rain, dying
in the hard circles of deserts.

The other half folds evil
between creases of mirror symmetry,
bound in a binary dichotomy.


See how life clings to him
and eeks, drop by drop,
through the slow death of light.