New Zealand culture,
a fragility,
tainted by violence.
Colonisation.

Writers have examined,
the loss of Maori land.
Less common however,
is writing concerned with
the benefits,
accruing to white people
as a result of the acquisition
of this land.

Colonisation has provided,
Economic and social advantages,
to white people,
in contemporary New Zealand.

A hierarchy,
white Western culture,
sitting uncontested,
at its pinnacle.

The cultural capital that whiteness provides.
Unearned advantages at our disposal.
Live our lives with greater ease:
Homeownership.
Health.
Education.
The ‘Justice’ System.
Institutional privilege.
A political separation.

The white New Zealand system,
designed for whites.
To get through school,
have good health,
get jobs,
get a little justice.
If the system was designed,
for Maori people
it would not be the way it is now.

Overrepresentation of Maori,
in every
negative
New Zealand
social statistic.

The persistence of *******.
Society provides greater opportunities,
to white people,
by disadvantaging those who are not.
Unacknowledged,
debilitating, racism.

Being oblivious,
sustains a belief,
in white superiority.

While factors:
socioeconomic status, gender,
sexuality, disability,
may impact the degree to which,
individual white people,
can access privilege.
On some level,
every white person,
in New Zealand
benefits from their skin.

The same song looping over and over…
The same suicidal thoughts torturing my sanity…
Repeats accruing on infinite piles of ruble,
Vigorously fighting these thoughts,
These demons of mentality,
A constant cartwheel of emotion…
Always racing…
Not ceasing for a mere second…
Forcing the pill in my mouth,
And then another,
And another…
The only mental painkiller is death…
I feel numb,
Darkness seeps into my vision…
Blurring reality…
The Pain is going away…
I feel alive as I feel myself die…
Emergency Medical Squads break the door down…
I sit there,
Watching them cycle electricity into my body as I blindly stare,
Eyes not moving,
Weak,
You never came.



I want to tell you I love you until it becomes white noise…
Always knowing I love you,
Never doubting yourself again…
I want to make love until we are one…
My body and yours…
Sharing the night, and day…
Filling senses with pleasure and love…
I want to hold you until you are weightless…
A feather in my arms…
Carry you up to a safe place on a dark night…
I want to love you forever…
I want to love you till stone itself evaporates into the air as it boils underneath the red giant sun…
I want to love you when the Universe rebirths or collapses…
I want to love you when the bell tolls,
The bell does not mark the end,
It will never end,
I will love you always,
Forever,
Not stopping even for a supernova…



No matter how lovely, how vivid, how colorful the painting…
Toxic fumes are given off,
The closer you look the more cracks and flaws you’ll find…
No matter how soft the wood, how elaborate the carving,
You can’t even begin to feel all the splinters…
All the cuts,
The closer you get the deeper the grooves…
This rusty drain has grown clogged of emotion and dust…
Wonderful you say…
But that is just for now,
Today.
My past is dark, dead, rotten,
Who knows if the future will be any different.
Today I have a moment of peace,
You,
A bright blue gem shining in the darkness,
So pure it becomes it’s own light-source,
Echoing beauty throughout the blackness,
Illuminating me,
True Commitment,
Warm and sweet Love,
Unquestionable Trust,
Seraphic Beauty,
Everything I need…
I sit here questioning these words…
Thinking of the purest way to put them,
But emotion is not pure,
It’s *****, rough, and raged,
But when I talk to you that emotion turns into something different,
It turns into satisfying warmth that runs through my body…
The past evaporates into the air,
Dispersing and losing its importance,
You are my future,
Not the past.

What are we to make of one lifetime? Any given lifetime? Is there a goal for everyone? If there is, clearly each goal is not necessarily the same as all the others, though it might be the same, or at least similar to, one or more than one. If there is no goal to any of them, then what is the reason we live? That would be nihilism. Why, in fact, has the human race propagated for untold millennia? In some respects, human life has evolved progressively positively, but in many other respects, it has devolved disastrously. The way each one of us has lived our lives is a function, I believe, of whether we were loved enough, if at all. If we live a loveless life from conception onward, we wind up unconsciously compensating for the emotional dearth we have suffered by accruing wealth, achieving fame, aggrandizing power. If we look at the 3,400 years of recorded history, there have been exponential advances in warfare, but humanistically relatively few by comparison. As of 2023, there are 10,000 diseases that can and do afflict us, but only 500 cures for the ones to which we fall victim. We have been fighting countless wars against our fellow man and killing millions and millions and millions of them, but discovering an exiguous number of cures for illnesses that often **** us. Why this gross, this grotesque, disparity? And we now find ourselves on the cusp of extinction from catastrophic climate change and the existential threat of nuclear holocaust. So, are we here on Earth simply and inexorably to destroy it and all its living creations? Or are we going to have soon enough a worldwide epiphany:  to begin and never stop realizing that first we all need to be loved to love others;  that there is but one land, one sea, one sky, one people;  that the boundaries that now divides us are not on maps, but in out minds and hearts;  that while we live on a small planet, it is big enough for all of us if only we are first loved so we can then love all others.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Father Mckenzie  

Turk’s Head teased my shadow
free last evening along the arroyo

our separation minute yet
edging toward the clement lip

accruing like the thunder eggs
I keep in a jar by the door

God long since departed, drifted
away on the high desert wind

that drew us here long ago
rifled pages of the Book Of Common Prayer.

A sodden breeze from home last night
a tang of salt, a churchyard hush

low plaint of cello’s lurking around
these adobe walls for a way inside

my callow words returned to claim
their hollow sound and mouth

all that was left unsaid
an old man darning socks

in the night when nobody’s there
crossing the room to leave

the door ajar to old sermons
bible black sky pierced with diamonds.

Only LOVE can save Earth and all living creations upon it.

But to LOVE, one must first be loved. That is why it is imperative that the embryo must be loved. Then the infant, then the toddler, then the child, then the teenager, and so on.

If you have never been loved, or not enough, you will have problems, serious problems. But it is never too late to be loved.

I was not loved by my mom and dad. They had a terribly miserable marriage for 36 years. Neither was emotionally capable of loving me.

But our maid, Maggie Woods, bless her heart, loved me. Did I care that her skin was black? If you have a garden that is drying up, do you care if it rains?

Maggie loved me. She fixed me two poached eggs, grits (she grew up in southern Texas), and two slices of toasted wholewheat bread buttered every morning for years. She washed my clothes. If I needed a spanking, she spanked me. If I needed a hug, she hugged me. I could feel Maggie's LOVE.

My biological mother never entered my bedroom when I was in it. Maggie did.

I remember one incident in particular. I was a kid. I was sick in bed. I distinctly remember Maggie coming into my room with something to eat and a Squirt to drink. I had never drunk a Squirt before, but apparently Maggie loved it. (Maggie and Floyd, her husband, lived in our house in an apartment on the third floor.)  The Squirt unconsciously symbolized her LOVE for me.

In my early 30s, I entered psychotherapy with Dr. Patricia Norris at the famous Menninger Foundation. We used what I was to refer to as "unguided" imagery. (Most refer to this modality as guided imaginary,) I worked with Pat, as I came to call her, a long time.

In short, the way it worked was that as we sat in our chairs, we both closed our eyes and waited for something to come into my mind, which I then would share with Pat. The long story was that Pat became my surrogate mother. We experienced many loving moments in our "unguided" imagery. The LOVE I felt from Pat, though through imagery, was real. I was finally and fully loved, and that made me who I am today.

Hate is not the opposite of love. It is the absence of love. Those who suffer from the paucity of LOVE unconsciously try to compensate for its dearth through becoming wealthy, then mega wealthy;  by garnering fame;  or by accruing power. None works.

But LOVE works. The more of it you share, the more you have to share.

Earth suffers so greatly from the lack of LOVE that it is dying. But even if one human being feels love, that love can spread like wildfire.

Let's hope the wildfire of LOVE spreads over Earth entirely and soon.

It is utterly plausible that it can happen.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

BEAUTIFUL

He: not in the looks; inner or outwards,
neither words said or held out,
Seldom the blemishes or dimples,
make-up coverings; shades of red, purple, often blue,
The actions you take in response to adversary,
the seconds lost in the eyes of time—no.

You're beautiful for being you...
and the above are just accruing.

It's never mattered what others thought of me.
As I now look back on my life, this was true
when I was growing up--in grade school, for
example. I had some friends;  I even had my
first girlfriend, Virginia Bright, whom I met
in the fourth grade. I had a dream about her
and the next day I chose her to read after I
had. She invited me to her church on Sunday
evenings to learn how to square dance. As I
continued to grow up, I got elected co-captains
and presidents, but I didn't seek them out--
they just seemed to come to me. I remember
I used to say hello to--befriend--classmates
who were not popular, most likely because
they were of a different race than most of us;
I didn't even think about our superficial
differences--I just liked them. That's the way
it's been my whole life. Perhaps over the
decades I grew to understand that bigots,
racists, were the way they were because
as they were growing up, they never were
loved enough, if at all, and as a result, suffered
great emotional pain, pain so great they un-
consciously tried to repress it, but could not,
so they unconsciously compensated for their
lack of being loved by accruing megawealth,
achieving power, not to empower others,
but to oppress them, and/or by gaining
fleeting fame. I feel sorry for these people.
Everyone needs to be loved.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS