Harbour Poem

The horizon is always a run on line,
running along, running away.

The line falls over
when we sail too far -

at which point we depart
from furrowed fields

and swing beneath
watered melon skies,

searching across all the spans
of golden oceans

for a hand to hold
that feels like our own.

The Crab

He's turned the crab upside down
and left her
pale plates of underbelly exposed -
moon pearls
on the gravel sand.

Beneath mango sky of paradise,
beside cream water,
no one can save her
from the greedy moisture suck of sun.

She's stranded in her 'turtle turn'
beneath raging palm trees
that line the shores like bilious daisies
from an Alice chapter,

beginning to muse on gardens of seagull beaks
and a cool emptiness of shell
when a ruffle of water hoydens her over
and sweeps her back to sea.

Reading the Much Acclaimed -

Barbara - I'm bored with you already -
your grey-gravel voice
in a heat cloistered room.

I no longer care to hear
of your French roots -
the rain sluiced smiles.

The downpour has cooled
ardent ears
with limp language
sighed in limpid pools.

My skull is awash
in galaxies of starlight.

Buttons and Holes

I see your eyes
have concentrated their intensity
to boot button black

and your brows
have ploughed
their frown furrow.

My eyes and mouth
have become
open wells of vacancy

above the crimson space
where my heart
used to occupy my chest.

Hope River

The river is muddy gold,
racketing alongside the road,
swelled with unseasonal rain.

They used to pan for gold in it too once -
long ago when the country was newly discovered,
divulging plants, animals, and people
never known of before.

Men in battered, flop-brimmed hats
and Amish clothes squint from sepia photos
in museums, alongside decrepit hovels
and shambolic mines -

left their mother countries
and journeyed to this New Zealand
in hope of finding riches
they could never have at home.

Now Japanese tourists laugh and jostle
for a digital snapshot of a genuine
gold rush river.

more synchronicity -

I've just finished reading Middlemarch, by George Elliot, and one of my students was talking to me about Christmas holidays. I asked him where he was going and he said, 'Middlemarch'!

I was so surprised I thought I must have misheard him and asked him to repeat it, lol. I didn't even know there WAS a place called Middlemarch in NZ!

Water Glass

As in watered glass -
a water glass -
we reflect
on how we are reflected
repetitively,
repetitiously,
ad-indendum
infinitendum
(some made up words here)
on the cubes, squares,
bubbles and boxes
we have squashed ourselves into,
ignoring
the blue watered silk
of the firmament,
the arch to wide,
a possibility for everything,
and hope -
a galloping horse that invites us -
come ride!

Kingfishers

I’ve found my home in you,
where light shivers
tiny rivulets and streams
through the grassy leas
to paradise, before the thorns
and serpents and the fruit
of the tree of knowledge fiasco.

I find my centre in you –
a deep pool where kingfishers dive.
Day by day, without my noticing,
roots have developed and grown,
and now suddenly here it is –
this sunshine flower
blooming in my heart.

Grrrrr

I really wish I could afford to resign my job!

I'm so sick and tired of the bullshit that goes on at work!