Let’s make sure this remains a morbid fantasy not a fact. Vote on 23 September. – VB Fellow citizens, we celebrate today The Surplus. From all levels of the Survival Dome, we gather in solemn appreciation in a National Minibreak of Gratitude. Could all digital devices and personal teleportation equipment be turned to apocalypse mode. …
Category Archives: Poetry
Eastern Line to Manukau
Thanks to Jade at Books on the Bus NZ. Great idea for #NZpoetryday https://twitter.com/booksonthebusnz/status/900872374060544004
National Poetry Day in Dunedin
Reading at this event alongside some local legends
In the light
Two poems in Down in Edin
https://issuu.com/downinedinmagazine/docs/downinedinissue10/132 Thanks to Caroline Davies and her fantastic online magazine Down in Edin that features a vast range of local arts and creativity for publishing these two poems (and Caroline’s spooky photograph that accompanies them.)
Between Contracts
The weeks constrict, pythons around my ribs, under which the turbid valves of the heart pump on with blind certainty.Dreams of flapping wings outside windows.A nest of telephone calls, letters, deposits, routines in which I can submerge peacefullyand integrate with process, a limbed machine conferring golden fries, cigarettes, tins of ointment.Money is running out. No …
Economics
There was a commotion outside the window. A million people arrived overnight and moved swiftly to assemble petrol stations, delicatessens and strip joints. Signs point everywhere you cannot go. I think of the past to hold myself down. There are more products than you can imagine. Throttled streets lined with plates of black ice. I …
Commemoration of the Comet Hyakatuke
The front page notes a report of a comet and how it came darting out of the void, a small silvery fish in dark waters. It zooms over southern horizons. Named for its first witness, a Japanese amateur, he must have combed the night relentlessly to net his prize. It carries its speed against …
Congress
She was shifting form, encircling and seamless, swirling from moment to moment without apparent sense, with sudden violence and traitorous appetites, with knowing persistence, with perpetual conviction. He was locked within a severe carapace, contained by ancient heat, never acknowledging her lightness, nor her storms that could last for nights and nights, an urgent …
48° 14.5’ S, 168° 18.76’ E
(Person Overboard, 70 kilometres South of Stewart Island, New Zealand, 24 January 2004) It’s not a sea. It’s ocean. Brood black skies and so cold it burns. Vo Minh Que, 22 months of ship time, no kid, picked up by the whipping line and tossed like a doll into four metre swells from a floating …
Central Redux
Shadows flicker beneath the greenstone waters where the past is inundated by a billion litres of unobtainium, while a ghost road fathoms deep leads through the drowned mountains of an inland sea. Megafauna of state capitalist uberdevelopment plug the valley’s neck below waving constellations of tussocks, dusky anemones on a reef of ironclad …
The Prince of Darkness attends a Work and Income interview
Welcome, Mr Lucifer. Come up. Mind the carpet, if you could. I’m sorry the security guard had to ask you to step outside: but no smoking is allowed on premises and brimstone is prescribed under Health and Safety legislation. I see you have not been able to supply either a clean resume, or evidence of …
Continue reading “The Prince of Darkness attends a Work and Income interview”
Selene
“Her great orbit is full, and then her beams shine brightest as she increases. So she is a sure token and a sign to mortal men.” (‘To Selene’, The Homeric Hymns) On the silken mud of the estuary floor the sea is drawn from the channel’s branching veins, creeping semidiurnal under her spell. In this …
Port Chalmers
Port, Dogtown, Koputai, names good and ill, you look outward to oceans, waiting for the world. Cruise liners and log boats snuggle your wharves. A thousand trunks of Pinus Radiata are matchsticks piled before your crow’s nest lookout, the channel a blue stripe down ruffled green fur. Ships glide through the throat of the harbour, …
Ancestral Chant of the Sea People
Many steps brought us here. We wandered, we strode, we contained purpose within ourselves. We halted, stopped at fen and bog, fumid clouds hazing crooked walls and coarse sea language spoken. Northern islands clamped in thighs of fog that grasped and held our septs beneath umber cast of hills, soft ancient fields, hard-tempered crust and …
Victor Billot 