Last night we tiptoed in laughing circles
around the truth we both know
a sound
a syllable
a feeling lighter than air,

a helium delirium inflating the balloons in my heart with joy.

It's hung suspended between goodbyes and goodnights,
a weightless pause spun heavy in meaning,
words made shy and sweet by the newness of it all.

And last night you rambled through your hiccups
about the importance of getting it right,
of furnishing words in fireworks and gestures  
lamenting your romanticism,
which I hang in garlands around my room
and through my mind,
throwing open the windows of both
to shout,
a sound
a syllable
releasing a feeling lighter than air,

a helium delirium of joy.

two weeks of little loves
began,
with the smell of wet beech forest and moss
in the back of your van,
your hands were moonlit spiders
around my waist
laughter bubbling up around us in the dark,
and you tasted like smoke and smiles I couldn't see.

little loves took root
on my birthday,
running barefoot through the park stealing kisses and road cones
after sun drenched beers wrapped around my brain,
leaving me hazy in the heat and hops
and dormant hopes
I had forgotten,
taking form in the scratchy sounds of a vinyl
you gifted the night through my open porch door,
to combat the sound of cicadas.

Little loves grew roots so slowly
I didn't notice until you were gone,
We'd grown a garden instead of apart.

too lovely
you were to stay for long,
instead
you left a tidemark on my walls,
a gentle swell and retreat I welcomed with delight and open arms
through the doors and windows,
awakened by the smell of salt and quiet happiness
and by your laughter in the waves.

And the little treasures hidden beneath,
the rocks and flowers bumping and rolling in the current
you left for me to find on the floor,
tiny keepsakes of a happy time,
reminding me
how sublime it is to float.

She drifts in and out of lives
a stray comet offering brief illumination
before setting off on another lap about the world.

how are you so heartless,
asks the earth of her lofty voyage,
here to spark heat and small hopes,
the nonchalant aftermath of your visit,
only to leave as a flash in the night.

oh to stay a comet-
if you move fast enough,  
it's easy to forget you are dust in orbit,
if you move fast enough
you are not heartless but frozen,
in constant motion to forget
your heart only exists on earth,
in those fleeting moments where you allow the ice to melt.

I was listening to Kings of Leon  
trapped on the bus for 2 hours
between a lady who had fallen asleep
and endless beech forest skimming past the window
green green grey green green grey,

until we broke through into farmland
past the national park sign
(ka kite ano ko Te Waiponamu),

and a shock of yellow broom flowers
waved us onwards past the lambs
and streams idling through the paddock.

40 minutes from home
it's stuffy and I'm carsick and hungry,
but it's Spring,
the sun's out and I'm just happy to be here.

I laid a galaxy to rest today,
A journey of discovery,

Through stars and feeling and ultimately to tragedy,
It burned out from building planets into nothingness,
comet fire dying quietly in the atmosphere above.

And I buried it in the ground to feed the roots of a new universe,
Leaving flowers on headstone for the Galileo in my heart.

world-weary,
we sipped coffee,
one black,
one milk and sugar
brewed tentatively by hearts not quite unbroken
in an effort to mend the damage.

As usual you are fluent and fluid in words my tongue could not replicate,
You are a waterfall when I am a drought.

One day, maybe you'll speak to me, you say.

One day maybe I could tell you,
I held earthquakes and landslides in my bones
and clawed my way above the mud and debris to breathe again.
I emerged the sun of my own universe
and I am afraid to ever let that go.

Can't you just love me again?

A whisper-wisp through the dark,
spoken in the night to familiar walls
you're helping your brother
paint a different colour,
masking forever words those walls have heard
and the time
I took acid
at your birthday
and watched the 70's wallpaper you've covered up melt like heated crayons
to join me on the floor,
rolling rainbows and laughter through the air in a technicolour soup,
in an effort to forget your face in the next room.


But can't you just love me again?

You want more than friends who are occasionally lovers,
to find meaning in the familiarity we sometimes share,
to amalgamate two bodies confidential in their knowledge of one another,
to illuminate my heart with another chance.

But you forget I say
into the silence and the drying Irish linen,
I've repainted the walls within
to erase a love which rendered us strangers,
built my heart its own house with no room for a former life,
so your words can do nothing but knock,
at a front door
now forever politely closed.

Sometimes I find myself
wedged inside a conversation,

comparing wallpaper and mortgages,
company vehicles and baby names,
struck up by friends,

over the same beers we drank discussing
politics and *** noodles,
life after university and ******* on acid

marvelling at the galactic deviations that occur
in the crevasse between your early twenties and
twenty six.

You confuse me he said,
you with your gypsy heart I couldn't ease
and the reckless galaxies inside your mind
bursting like comet fire through a black sky.

I confuse myself I think,
inside a whirlwind of love and debris
I am growing like a **** towards the sun,
and yet each new flower still holds the embers of an old flame.

Always I look to you as the sea looks to the shoreline,
trace your stoic edges and retreat, leaving seafoam and whispers,
or crash with rage and waves against your certainty
that I do not understand.

Today I am a galaxy, maybe tomorrow I am the moon,
but always I am saddened by the tides that pull me back from you.

Under the mountains
it smelled of snow,
and I brushed summer's leafy retreat off the hood of my car
in swathes of yellow and red.

I drove for two hours the other day
hungover and heartsore
because of beer and veins still filled with concrete  
to soothe the weight I feel with the sounds of the sea.

An hour from my town
is the furthest point I could be from the ocean.
Under the mountains,
their shaky doubles ripple in the lake,
in of itself a shaky reflection of the sea.
There's a push and pull woven in my bones
tied to the tides and the waves I crave.

Eventually they fade
they really do.
Until what you miss is the corflute outline
of where a body used to stand.

You reminded me  lately,
of how my name sounds
on another person's tongue,
spoken softly and with lust

and you reminded me of intimacy,
without the need to be in love.

A broken heart one year on looks like
a life I'm quietly putting back together.
Stitching contentment and peace into
the lining of curtains that open onto new landscapes,
growing bold in solitude.

Loneliness is still a ghost in the corner
but these days he is more polite with his interruptions,
and I breathe in more oxygen than lonesomeness.

You still find me in the quiet hours and sometimes I give in,
sinking backwards in the surf and noise of lost love.
but these days I float more readily,
back to the surface.

How could it mean nothing to you?
you ask me,
of the way our bodies moved together
surrounded in blue midnight and the sounds of revelry

How could I feel nothing
for your weight against me and your mouth on mine,
wrapped in the twilight bubble we made from gin and hours of dancing.

I feel nothing because
I still stand across the ocean I created
to distance myself from the hurt you flooded me with,
and I refuse to meet you in the middle of it all
to drown ourselves in the love we lost.

That night I felt drunk and expansive
and I missed the way you touched me
but the ocean still remains between us
and we now stand on different shores.

Sometimes you reach out
through phone cables and the distance of towns and topography,
to tell me you are sorry
for your carelessness
and the barren landscape it created
where nothing could flower

and I add your words to the compost and topsoil I've nurtured
alone
over time and distance
from the heart you broke, sadness and rust and the words you spoke,

to grow my own garden
of flowers and fruit.

chloroplasts are absent in a human body
the green ability to turn sunlight into energy
known only by the plants
deep-rooted in the earth
growing quietly on slower time

but photosynthesis
is the conversion of light into energy
and I like to think
I am more rooted in this quiet greenery
than the bustle of a human landscape,

and the feeling of sunlight
on my face and my arms and my bare feet in the dirt,
makes me feel like growing.

Come home,
my mother's voice suggests along 2,581 kilometres of phone cabling.

Come home to the hazy heat
that beats off melting pavement and wilting plants,
to the smell of exhaust
squeezing between buildings
and suburbs and rush hour and neon lights,

Come home to the aggravated traffic
wending its way through concrete landscapes
eight lane snakes placating
the clack and hum of underground trains
packed with people and briefcases and beers and graffiti
spilling out onto the streets like cough syrup glugging out of the bottle.

You sound like you need to come home.

Nah, I'm good Ma,
because I don't know how to tell you
the city makes me feel trapped

a little creature with an anxious heart
boxed in by the tarseal and the fumes and the noise.

I like knowing the borders of a town
that doesn't stretch to the horizon
driving quietly on sleeping streets in the night time
and tracing the coastline with my feet in the water

I need the sky to touch the ground, not the ragged edges of a skyline
to walk until there's nothing
but me and the bush and the birds,
and the smell of mud and dirt and rain.

I like it here, I suggest along 2,581 kilometres of phone cabling,
but I do miss you.

There's a museum
where love once welled freely,
a collection of relics and odds and ends,
carefully preserved behind glass panes and neat labels
gathering dust and history.

Sometimes I walk the quiet aeortic halls
treading familiar corridors to the echo of footsteps,
to read the plaques and leave fingerprints on the windows
exhibiting the old lives and old loves,
which have traded technicolour for antiquity

the night watchman of my own heart.

Do you remember when your voice held my name
not at ransom but aloft,
and it lulled me to sleep to hear those syllables
cocooned in comfort.

You blew back into your hometown this week
trying to hang the language of your new life in the doorways
I've repainted
on the furniture I've shifted
and in the corners of my mind
now reserved for little plants bravely growing in watery sunlight,

they're replacing your absence,
and the taste of your name on my tongue.

Sphynx-like they move,
lions in the dark,
where they watch her
through hungy coals set in gaunt faces,
licking their chops for her bones.

But she is a lion tamer,
with no more bones to spare the unfed worries yowling in her peripheral,
and a tinder spark now lives where the dark once crept
to keep their hunger at bay.

Take your time they said,
to learn but
don't take your time to work.

I'll take back my time I think,
and take time to explore the earth.

Do you feel the pull away?
The crashing tides receding,
to run as tender rivulets along the beach
as if to say an inter-tidal goodbye to the shores

Back to the ocean
the water will run  my love,
a reminder of the times
the sea intermixed with sureness and the stones
only your shorelines could offer
a pelagic mind adrift.

What is it like
to wear feelings like garments,
so boldly projecting the colours
in your mind
with no fear of respite

to wear your heart on your sleeves
like cotton,
instead of a millstone round your neck.

My new lover is an old ghost,
who picked apart armour
left bereft by rust and rain,
to sit inside my ribcage
once more throwing pebbles at my heart

I did not welcome them
to my table
or to my bed
but this ghost holds me close inside my bones,
and each morning,
I entertain a phantom
that clamours to be fed.

here, look-
you're tripping over
your feet and lost love
to show me,

so hastily taped and mended,
by your eagerness and earnest words,
the fragile parts of me
it took so long to build for you.

it was all for you,
the tiny castles
I spun from glass and love,
monuments to small braveries,
a tribute to your residence in my bones

tripping over my feet
to show you
I was strong
and that I loved you

D day sounded like
me putting on  shoes
and turning my back on your disgrace
and the way I had organised our furniture.

I just wish I hadn't lost my headphones
because I have nothing to stonewall
the abandonment
screaming at me from every corner of this life.

tumultuously drunk,
in no particular order
on love
on wine
on loneliness,


but I remember too late,
it makes me sick
when I mix my drinks.

One night when I was eighteen
I was drunk on beers and East end accents
in a Basildon garden lighting fireworks.

I seared my thumb
on the base of a sparked *******
which careened into the fence and dried grass,
igniting in deep welted pain
and a smallish fence fire.

Inside my skin sits once again the same ache
ignited by a spark you nurtured,
which burned us both down,
as beautiful and unruly as the rogue firework and the flames.

You disappeared like the last winter frost,
  and I despaired like Spring.

Throw your line down
and sit with me below,
beside the cray pots and the fish.

remember the gifts the sea gave up
the rocks and stories that made their way into my pockets
for your indifferent hands to overlook on the windowsill.

Throw your line down
beside the ***** and tangled weeds,
and remember a single line
is not enough to tame an undertow
that sings arias to the moon.

So many lines and laments
scribed in ink and feeling,
for the girl who is the ocean

but she is a swell and surge
too dauntless and wild,
for a lover whose bones crave the shore.

She craves the squalls and gusts,
and cast iron skies,
a worldly drift to sate the salt in her skin,
the deep pull of currents in her blood.

She is chaotic but not reckless,
she is fickle, but not feckless.
Love her boldly or not at all
her bones belong to the sea
but she will always return to the shore.

At dawn on my twenty fifth birthday
416 pilot whales beached themselves,
in the shallow tides at Farewell Spit.

I woke to rain on the wooden roof
of my new flat
and confused myself in unfamiliar blankets and
the words of your message,
written heartfelt and wobbly
in the early hours before morning,

caught in the marine ebb and flow,  
that stranded us too.

Andesitic magma
was leaching from a tectonic collision deep below
and burned itself out
on the side of a newly formed rend in the landscape
A languid lava flow both ruthless and viscous  

pyroclastic madness settled in a cooling atmosphere
forming ash and raining tephra which fell
quietly to earth  
to suffocate the burning
and everything else.

under ash clouds
under grey powder and stillness
no movement can be made.
Each breathe is sulphuric but the burning goes on

Don't worry yourself
think of the exploring you'll do alone
no one to drag you down

alone
alone
the word rings around my head
the most depressing decibel I ever heard.

No one to drag you down because
you have SUCH an imagination
how could this POSSIBLY be a bad thing
look in the dictionary under independant; you're the definition.

definition however
finds no hold in a mind made only of galaxies
the expanse is endless
thought can stretch so thin
I lose the beginning of an idea into space
and end up floating in the quiet vacuum of my head

I needed you
to be
the corners of my mind
a framework
to attach my grandiose ideas and give them meaning
to know
that I am more than just synapses
firing at random  into the dark
that I am a physical being.

I needed you to hinge me to reality,
because otherwise
I am just stardust and matter
trapped in a skull.

It's 3 am when you wake me
with cold hands in the shape of chords,
breathing stories and whiskey
spilled on the p.a by a guy
asking for songs.

In between saturday and sunday
you tell me about the  bikes
in town for the rally,
lining the streets in rows of inert thunder
while their people drank
and moved to the music you made.

It's 4 am
before morning finds the bluff
to light up the world's earliest hours
good morning you say
before we fall asleep,
laughing at your own joke.

Sunday is church day
said childhood, Mum and Mr. Jesus

I agree
said university days, a late night and a hangover
Sunday is a day of rest,
and there are many ways to keep the faith,  

like staying in bed.

Please say something, you implore
wearing a halo of uranium based fallout
lift the silence wrapped around your ghosts
hurt me
hate me
hit me with it.

Silence never volunteered itself as a barricade
it slipped its way into gaps left
by broken plates
broken bones
broken homes.

You are not the first to implore me
nor the first to disappoint me
but mutually assured destruction is a two way street
and I can't reverse the nuclear winter in my bones
just to appease the guilt you feel
for bombing everything we had.

I guess                     up
I could trip
the stairs  of
my mind
in time
to find
the line

I shouldn't have crossed.

You were taken from me before we were born
and so I floated and grew alone in a room for two dreaming of moons and sunlight

What are you if you are a twin,
but never had the chance to be one?

I'm half of a whole made up of two people
but now I am  all of what is left,
with a ghost
hidden in my peripherals  

Sometimes I feel I am the moon,
the moon and lunar tides
which means you must've been the sun and shores
to tie me to the earth

Because when I am alone, you are the phantom beside me reminding me of warmth,
and you are the unexplained loss I feel
standing in the sun

Once when we were kids
Mum had fun throwing a dinner party.

I could tell because
there were stains on the tablecloth
but no one was crying,
and the food upgraded from sausage rolls to Sushi and Olives.

I want one-
-You can't, Mum  said they're for adults-
I want a Olives-
     said the back of my 4 year old sister as she went to try the
New Thing.

The Olive was carefully chosen and examined with 4 years of culinary expertise,
swirled around a gummy mouth and
promptly returned to its post.

It was yuck -
she informed me and her breathless twin from the safety of the veranda
after weaving her way through the adult legs strewn around the Good Lounge without even so much as a
'woe betide you child if you're in here again.'

So we sat and thought about parties and Good Lounges and woe betides
drinking juice,  
and watched our Uncle fill his plate with sushi and olives,
singing tonelessly to ABBA
before spilling his beer on the floor .

How can I blame you for your broken parts?
for a flaw that was hammered into your bones by another
until you thought it shaped the way you sit inside your skin

How did you get to be this way, you ask
how do you hide your pain to help me lessen mine?
how do you love me, both craven and curious ?

Because, I find no joy in the pain I could inflict
which for only a second would ease the dull ache in my belly.
Because I have welded myself  together from the scrapmetal anger creates, countless times
Tasting only iron and rage
and my bones are stiff from the reconstruction of yet another life.

I forgive you because you are as human as I am,
just as tired of the forgery which has weakened the frame that builds you.
Because you now control the hammer
let it build you,
or let it break you

Unzip,
new skin quick
neutralised Freudian slips
A spy game
so slick
well placed mortars sinking battleships

new suit
cover skin ill-suited to do business with life

find a life that suits your business
before you cover your life with a business suit.

The minute shift it brought about
helped along by three pints and sneaky tequilas,
was enough
to generate
a fanfare.

For too long I have stooped,
trapped in the exoskeleton of an older world,
unable to move and unable to breathe,
for fear I will shatter the outer plates that hold me together.

But a little while ago,
I felt a crack rend the outliers, and a burst of colour I'd never seen before,
rainbowed happily through the split

So here I am,
cracking plates with rainbows,
with the Old World and an Exoskeleton I outgrew,
gathering new dust on the floor beside me.

And atop a hill moulded from wishful thinking and despair,
stronger arms build armour from a grin,
gnashing teeth and belly laughs.

So try me now,
because I am ready.

You and I went for a drive today
squeezing ourselves into your car
jostling for space amongst five years worth of love and loss
lapping an aimless mosaic
through  the streets we grew up in.

I say I want to clear the air
looking at the  scars your hands collected since I last saw them
and you say it's funny we are both so stubborn
or we would've spoken sooner
watching the road
with the wry grin that has always stayed with me

Of all the things we talk about,
the hollowness you say you feel is what echos in your face
and the steely timbre in your voice
is so different from the happiness of when we first fell in love,
and I can see it  grip your steering wheel
hidden in your broken knuckles
every time that you accelerate.

Please don't speak to me
about the universal movement of time,
I feel as much as the next human,

days marked by solar rotations
restless nights under changing lunar faces
and the chameleon nature of life as history etches a path in skin.

And while time will while away
pulled along by the ebb and flow of currents,
and history is lost on ancient tides,

pull away my new skin
and underneath as always
you remain the center of my gravity

an infinite pull I can't help but follow.

Why do you still occupy
the nooks and crannies of my head?
Drifting up through the cracks in the plaster
bent nails and poor construction
hammered hastily into place

How do you fill
my vacant minutes with shadows of you?
Your outline walks beside me on the street, wound up in my headphones
the echo of your daydream touch
a humming static on my skin

How still do you fall asleep beside me
when I am wrapped in the disquiet of a restless night?
How do you ease yourself into my brain like its nothing
and hide among synapses that try so hard to lose you

And how still to lose you?
When the thought of you occupies the wasted time
that escapes order and control
and slips under the floorboards

And in that quiet and that dark
is where you and I occupy,
held together by the wandering nature of thoughts,
that find their way into the nooks and crannies of my head

The thought of you is indifferent to my hasty plaster work,
and
the thought of you is intoxicating.