serious, silly, written for people and/or self-published
An Empty Temple for Kongō Gumi
Wargaming (Pub. Wet Grain #2)
“When loss betideth one, whose eyes are set
On gain, how great his passion and regret!”
-Firdausi
Ok, so here are the rules:
You might find it complicated at first
But the basic idea, is that
There are two sides and
They are at war
It all makes sense
1 Brother stands alone.
Dead: Immobile in failure
His elephant carrying
His broken crown
To be pinned to the royal board
The other, remaining
Weeps bitterly
Slowly carrying four divisions on
His back back home
2 Under siege
We fight with sticks and names
Until your brother, who
We playfully hate
Gets clonked by the log I
We enthusiastically drop on him.
We hear his skull.
He screams, runs back to the house and
I am
We are afraid
Victorious
3 An old man sits
Beating himself in the park
Moving his pieces backwards and forwards.
A young man sits
Beating himself in the PC-Bang,
Smoke drifts over ruins
People won’t watch.
4 /C: allisurvey
Kill-feeding in his mother’s basement
Gazing at the screen
Pulls right trigger
Another bug-splat in Waziristan.
In Jalabad. In Al Uwaynat.
Millions are pre-rendered as empires
Rise and fall in glorious real-time
/C: allisurvey
Peels his hand away, didn’t realise
How much he was sweating
5 Make us a mythos:
Make us an evil that is tangible but can also
Exist anywhere at anytime.
An evil with laser guns and an alien hive mind
That lives only to consume.
An evil that is handheld.
Make us undefeatable
Make us doomed
Make us the finest
Make our odds impossible
6 Open the vaults
…
Gaze upon your fathers’ treasures
thick and rich
7 The leaves lie
thick and rich
8 The blood pools
thick and rich
9 The land boils
thick and rich
So you see, it wasn’t really me
who killed him, mother.
His heart was simply defeated.
Nigel No-Mates (Pub. Wet Grain #1)
NIGE: falling from the air dressed to impress landing in the paddling pool sea struggling to the surface swimming in place calling out receiving no answer pulling himself on to the plastic riddled shore lying face down washed over by waves shaking hands down low, too slow Falling In Love trying to be more statuesque competing with the other mannequins receiving no answer standing sill whilst the days skim over him gently applying her makeup not knowing the myth of Pygmalion being a right Pygmalion exhibiting anti-social behaviour rejecting the friendship of others found the next morning lying still in the arms of his lover receiving no answer
“Dun-Krititunk” (Pub. Goodbye Scarecrow)
Dun-Krititunk waits, the old weather beater. Skulduggering on his corner stool upright, uptight …damned back excepting, rounding on itself: Wind-worn hilltop insisting recompenses As he, well wheeled barrow that he is Filchingly watches his shadow cast itself Realises he had not expected the sun, To fall quite so far behind. […] Wonders if putting His mind to it might make it draw out, Far enough from his false agate stone (on the middle finger of an Alderman) Until that untouched early dawn glimmer Is really all that: a. [Remains sitting] Starved as he is for lack of rats feet he sucks his tongue chews measuredly the ornery leather strap careful not to crack the unused surface. Scared if he did he would find no blood- No, not a little blood. [“For Moisture!”] Sucking the old skin Shedding and reborn again in tiny clickin’ parts. Chrysalis with no butterfly nor caterpillar So In SO ‘of and So on
The Great
Believing himself the last of his kind
The Great Modernist Icon clings to his high perch
watching across his Agean to Titahi Bay
for white sails
from white spattered cliff.
Desperately displaying to the birds.
“No time for fake people!”
He repeats
and watches
and works on her bone structure
and remembers how
he once growled through the crowds
white feathers reeking of motor oil and leather.
spit and
-spit preferring eyes as much as salt water-
listen for speakers blaring out People Noise
then swill and down and (winking)
make his way over.
And we, all decked out
in green, in purple, in leopard
would listen;
He was the smartest thing in the room
by default.
Now he is the smartest thing in the room
by default.
What he doesn’t know
Is just how many we still have to work through after him
There are still so many bones
strung to this desolate post, embedded so deep.
The Great Modernist Icon
picks through whale guts
in search of things for the display
that will finally win her
from plastic, from seaweed, from driftwood,
he builds his honour
“They called it Mana.”
His voice catches on the wind, tears
and she cannot hear.
The Great Modernist Icon
watches the giving of flowers
and does not cry.
Road Code
These ways, emptied for now
Will soon roil again
But it’s a nice way to spend time together
Later, you jokingly say:
“I think my greatest contribution was remaining calm.”
He makes the same joke twice, to the same person
It is untrue both times
Signals warn and inform other road users
Warnings are separate from orders.
How to calculate total stopping distance:
Our long broken white lines
Stay between
Keep to the left
Only overtake when ready
You should always jkkfjhlsfalsjdfadgfajshf
“It’s nice to actually look out the windows for a change.”
Mum tells me he takes a lot of long walks now
All these different crossings, its hard to remember
Tui and the Supernatural Talent
Slowed but still crawling over the crest, Tama-nui-te-rā pauses His beaten face turned to the houses built on loose earth As light-warm floods the basin, small songs rise to meet it From behind the shiny anti-predator fence Amongst evergreens, the unoffending natives Who never met with the spite of God The little opera singer Bobs anxiously in black tailcoat and white cravat On stage, but no song Until suddenly, as if with supernatural talent His performance begins Imitating perfectly the eloigned languages of his fellows Stopping and beginning again another abruptly anew He knows he must impress; He’s in all the expensive cards, a favourite on the radio So is utterly unapologetic in his plagiarism, but You certainly can’t deny the panache of this glorious mimesis Presumably, other tuis must tell the difference, Or the whole exercise would be rendered pointless. For now, we surround the expensive boundaries Hacking at the supplicant branches For fear of “Introduced Invaders” We toast the fire-stealers. Later when we are gone These green trees, at last left alone Will quietly overreach the boundary Our hunters will overrun the border And amongst all that frightful innocence Obsidian blood-warm of Hinē-nui-te-pō will follow her cousin But there would still be songs preserved Repeated for a time With endless variation With supernatural talent
Far bror
Morning hooks in and I dance my sun dance
tournequays round lower intestine
But still
My innard has escaped
Thinking about souped up scooters
As fast as any bike
Now
They cannot legally force him to remain there
So, looking to visit his ex wife’s house
his little red Volvo sits by the frozen lake.
“They’ll be ice skating!”
They explain kindly, that it is an unprecedented summer
He says:
“They’ll make the ice as they go along.”
Sure, he’s been seen clutching at lamp posts
Crying and not knowing where he was
Would you trust
Anyone who wears his skeleton
outside of his body?
The problem with longing is that
It makes you far away
Now
Please hold tight while we do these cartwheels.
Right There Mountains
I
There is a moment held right there
where we know something
tremendous is about to happen.
The elasticated young buildings shake.
The spots where (right there)
Our boyhood prophet once waved up
to the world from his Sun pit, tremble
from the feet of Thursday drinkers.
II
Mine lasted an hour and a bit
Your announcement comes suddenly
You didn’t want to tell me
You didn’t want to tell anyone
But I count:
Foursobsup-foursobsdown
Right there: Shoulder heaves.
I realise that in this land of memory
this is something without reference
and suddenly-
The clouds overrun the hills,
Skimmers invisibly create ripples
On the stillest part of the river
That wiped out all of Mike’s fences last year
Obviously you didn’t need a physio for that.
III
Mormor feeds the kakas sugar water
Frantically sends heirlooms
to step children,
Insisting on vacuuming any floor
she comes into contact with –
Determined to leave no trace
IV
Old mates new garage and the game is:
- Take a shot,
2. Do all the presses of the bar you can
3. Smoke a durry as quickly as possible
Yeah yeah mate.
yeah, up to mate,
yeah nah, yeah, nah
yeah, yeah, yeah.
They debate the practicalities of children
at current mortgage interest rates
Life superimposed over their boy-ness.
(The goal here is not speed
-nor number of presses.)
V
The homes here are detached.
The roads here run red with roadkill
and pohutukawa petals.
VI
There is so much joy
We run sodden with joys moss
Joy carves deep valleys
as it runs through us, down
From right there mountains to the sea.
You hold your hands up
grinning as
One waggles less than the other.
Birthday Hues
(Ted collage for C)
First fruits of her own ground. And their flavour
Was the first legend. Pioneer
In her own life, those mornings
We didnt find her – She found us
She sniffed us out. The Fate she carried
Hammocked in her body over the switchback road
So she began to make her rag rug.
She needed to do it. Played on by lightnings
She needed an earth. Maybe. Or needed
That ‘jewel in the head’ – her flashing thunderclap miles
She drew doggedly on, arresting details
Till she had the whole scene imprisoned
Raving exhilaration. A blueish voltage –
Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura
She revelled in red.
Anything wild, on legs, in her eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
She carried it all, like shards and moults on a tray
To be reassembled
As the air swayed it. Here was her stair –
Alcehmy’s seven colours.
Maybe it’s the earth
She said “Or maybe its ourselves”
Oiling the unfailing logic of the earth
In a little earthen vessel
On a most earthly river
As the Thunderhead of her new selves
Tended her golden mane
Sam is, unfortunately 