Calling it as you see it

We’re desperate for endings and we’re
desperate for beginnings because

anything in between is a wasteland for
our high school dreams of becoming

a famous tennis player or driving fast cars
around Mediterranean sea cliffs for fun.

It’s an embarrassing truth to admit that
the present often isn’t enough. But

if we slow down quickly, we can see the
future’s smudge. If that’s too much and

the ticket’s too expensive, you can hand
over your palms to a street astrologer

and she will say: If you’re not careful, you’ll
always be leaving one fire for another.

What normally happens

You said I feel weird sometimes. It comes through my body and I don’t know what to do with it.
I said I think that’s very normal, what do you usually do?
You said not much and tried to blame the wind on the other end for not going into any more detail. I think you were afraid to let me in on how you were feeling any further, as though what you had said was already enough, the way you’ve always been, the way it might always continue.
It was a yellow afternoon. Yellow because the light was coming in through the balcony doors and I was tired, lying on a cushion on the floor and I missed you. Not in an immediate way, but in that slow ache, like a string trying to find its other end to tie a knot.
I’m tired, I said. Me too, you said.
You were waiting on the other end for me to say something soft and irrational like I always do. Instead, I just lay there a little while longer, not saying anything into the silence.
I was wearing the earrings you bought me for my birthday. You forgot to send the card, which you know is my favourite part, but wrote to me on Messenger and said — one heart is yours and one is mine. When you wear them both, we are together.
You’re leaving soon, and the light is changing, and nothing is ever staying the same, and it will be hard, and it will be right, and I will miss you.

— For E.

Falling short of it

You make me feel like
lighting Ponsonby on fire and
running away with the Lynx can laughing.

I wish I was a private school girl with an inheritance
and a house. We’d lie back and fold up together
like two deck chairs swooning.

Instead, there’s only this.
Cupping our hands around thin air smiling
about everything we don’t have.

For a while
it is everything.
And it is enough.

Late night, burning planet

Nights, it’s still cold and still quiet.
On our rented balcony and imprecious time, while inside keeps glowing. I’ve spent my whole life wishing I would end up here and still, its pleasures and dangers are not enough.

At work, I’m writing a document they’re calling, ‘The most important prediction of the future of humanity,’ which claims that everything good we used to have will eventually be gone. Sometimes, when the wind picks up its wild dust, it’s all I can think about.

I drink my beer. I play my song. I leave a voice note in case a plane goes down, and someone I love doesn’t know it yet. The yellow lights illuminate the thin trees below and everyone’s recycling spills onto the street.

At the end of everything, when we all turn into birds, I just want to fly over my own life, look back and know
I did everything I could.

Paris

(As part of the ‘Requested’ series)

I miss Paris today.
What a cunty thing to say.
I miss that I once was
that impossible girl
who didn’t grow up in a small
part of nowhere
but a big part of something
larger than herself.
Trailing along that romantic
road, all hot and unsure.
Being anywhere else
beyond right there and
right there an option so
desperately impossible.


High school boyfriends

(As part of the ‘Requested’ series)

I went back down to that dark place
The Veils were playing,
you and I were driving out to that wild coast —

me, behind you in my red car flashing
telling you how I was feeling around
those precarious bends.

You pulling over, touching me on the mouth,
punching me in the stomach and saying —
nothing like this again, ok?

We thought Grey Lynn Park was somewhere
in America, and forever a
terrible game.

You know what I mean when I say
I’ll never feel that way (about the world)
again.

Criminal that someone could ever be
so young
and not stay like that forever.

Go stealing

November in Maungawhau,
you should pull through the heat
and take the wild flowers
before they close for the season.

I know because I went up there
after a week of bad emails
that didn’t change my life
and took as many as I could.

Arms full, bright and dying.
That’s what they say –
Don’t make good ideas,
just steal them.

Cut their stems on a diagonal and
put them in a glass place
everyone can see - don’t think
about it further than that.

Up there, on the hill  in the
blue light. The wind picked up
in the high grass so
hot and angry.

What is it that’s turning over in me?
I’m tired.
I’m wonderful.
None of this will matter.

Te Paki

Remember how you died?
How I was so far away.
How it was to watch your parents pare each other down to the bone.
How unsure it felt to be alive.
How everything else just kept circling? 

In Te Paki there’s that same kind of
spiritual sadness -
a paradise being lost.
Up there in the dunes, the sky changes every minute and in one quick wind, you don’t know
where you are anymore. 

We hiked up there the other week,
the sun bleeding, lungs heaving. And
I’m sure it was you who came to me. Softly in the sand-wind -
that small weight, that anchor
that followed me all that time
lifted itself up and left.

Defying the odds

Let us go there then.

Sun drunk in the afternoon and
missing deadlines and being bad friends.

Cheap hotel lights on the highway and
sand chairs sunken in.

Coffee spinning on the microwave plate and
measuring my days with the lengths of your arms.

It’s what happens after the drinks and the
drinking and behind
the photos being taken:

you’ve rolled the universe between
two hands and still
you’ve chosen me.

We know the future will end 
but we’re doing it anyway.

Feel free

We go hiking and the rich people
bring all their things.

Portable fold-out things,
three-in-one clipped up things,
Kathmandu carabiners for
someone else to carry.

They talk about things in
plurals; holidays and houses
and that family, the
Brazen-broken-sowzers.

They know what yachts feel like
and how the European curves
of the earth look at seven pm
in June. We know because
they tell us. They like talking, too.

At night we slip into our bags
in rows of sleepy worms while
they’re still up zipping away all
their gold so no one takes it
in the dark, our own snap locks
quietly spilling out onto the floor.

We’ve all got our own sad eyes.
We’ve all lost one thing or another,

And here we are -
we are free.

Auckland love poem

There’s gold up there
pink streets
and wet nights
so blue
if the rain comes down
hard enough you can

forget you’re haemorrhaging
half your life away
on someone else’s
vision.

Experts
on the radio say
it’s impossible
to dream
small
here -

we’ve ruined nearly
all of it
except for the lights across the bridge,
they keep on
shimmering.

So living is impossible but
living is lovely.
Making money seems easy,
it’s the keeping it
that wedges that
gap between us.

Each morning I wake
before everyone else
to watch
the yellow light move its way up
the palm tree moving
in the street outside
our house
as though we’re in LA
and everything matters.

When it’s finished I rollover
and press secretly
into your skin.
Everything’s a mess
and nothing is
obvious
and yet

here you are,
still,
next to me.