Dedicated to the Steelers who do their hard work so well.

The Pier five superstructure
Looms above the turgid waves,
Gothic cranes do hover close
To service needs of orange knaves
Who swarm to manufacture,
Who work to make complete
This massive bridging edifice,
This mighty engineering feat.

Cathedral like in grey austerity
Freezing zephyrs howl and blow,
Through the maintenance shaft tunnels,
Through the bridge's bowels go.
The catacombs are echoing,
Stark light's reflection deep
In corridors of baleful concrete
Through which angled cause ways sweep.

A forest of reinforcing rods
Stand starkly high and straight,
Atop adjacent pylons
Which arise from deep mud's gate.
Hazard lights are flashing
Amber, green and blue
As north east gales bring pelting rain
To obliterate the view

The tattooed hands of black skinned steeler
Twitch the wire to make the loom,
Lattice works of reinforcing
Blackened mesh of iron entombed.
Hard to fathom steeler's chatter
Bending low to twitch by feel,
Working fast in noisy unison
Twitching reinforcing steel.
Pliers flash in rapid movement
Wrist's convulse in rapid slap
Unintelligible chatter flows
But the job is finished, just like that.

Skill saw screams in echoed silence
Booming blows of hammers pound,
Pipe work's resonance percussion
Tempered by a sad song's sound.
Great concussions pound the air
As towering cranes do drive,
Enormous pylons into mud
And bedrock's solid hide

The mighty form travellers moving
High above cold estuary waves,
Reaching forth for unbuilt mana
It's red extension arm enclaves
Providing for the next poured section,
Providing for the next steel work,
Reaching out for firm embrace
Where Pier four's form travellers lurk.

The pungency of solvents spread
Across the steel plate, made to last;
Barrier to adherence of
The sticky concrete's surface cast.
The form work archway's wooden shell
Adopts a high cathedral stance,
This bride in waiting nervous for
The concrete pumps lithe serpent dance.

An unyielding environment
A hard surfaced place to be
Where materials of venom
Are handled casually.
Where massive superstructures
Unforgiving in their stance
Lead the busy, ant like steelers
In their lofty, hard days prance.

To look across Pier Five's expanse
And view the surface cant,
And visualize the future motorway
With it's headlong traffic rant;
And look again at what is spread
Across it's surface now,
At the jumbled reinforcing steel,
The cables, tools and how,
Organizationally chaotic
The whole affair appears ???
Whilst in actuality, my friends,
This clockwork sequence has no peers.

With the roar of passing traffic
As the headlights flash on by,
And the Pier's massive cantilever
Looms impossibly to sky.
One must praise the skilled designers
And those engineers of skill
Who summount vast odds of nature
To scale this monumental hill.
As this mostrous concrete edifice
Claws inexorably from tide,
To loom in towering sillouhette
Where estuary mists abide.

Marshalg
onsite@Pier5
Manukau Harbour Crossing
29 June 2009

Silhouettes in moonlit mazes
your tears are complex superstructures.
Superclusters wrinkle I, negative energy,
tunneling through chasms forbidden;
you and I float.

Comes  a sound, depth charged sleeper cell,
a bloop, a mystery, an unsweep,
a whistle, a Julia, a train, a slow down.
Heard by 350,000 zombies.
You and I sleep.

A child derails a train, safe to say,
that the world has its trapdoors.
Its a mystery, they say, but what do they know?
About us and our death.
You and I disorient.

Your two ******* hide a heart,
A mother board center of circulation.
Your body’s iterative delusion
Graces mine. And dissolves me.
You and I disintegrate.

We need to hack the heart,
With absurdity and farce and slipstream:
Into subspecies, we, simians,
We are grateful, gratified.
You and I evaporate

The bodies are buried
in boiler rooms below
precipitous buildings.

Tipped with gargoyles,
scabbed with windows,
the superstructures rise
on cords of carbon steel.

Inside miraculous husks,
the elevators lift and fall,

interminably.

Antiquated carriages
click like scarabs
on ropes and pulleys.

With interiors lit
by faint buttons,
the listless coffins

circulate our remains
behind gypsum walls.

When the elevator doors glide open,
an emerald chime sings your name.

mama warned me
about becoming attached to ghosts,
about chasing the lights that flicker behind closed eyelids,
   trailing their
     ruminant symbiology
      down labyrinthine tunnels
till you're left, stranded
   in a nowhere from where you started
and they fade
away
to nothing.

...

I keep loosing sight  in the lag
    that hesitant flickering pivoting between footsteps,
those   pauses  of breath  between paragraphs
of the mold in the ceilings dictated speeches,
the decade old dust encrusted spider-webs on the coffers abandoned superstructures, intricate semantic patterns, still present, present, but encapsulating nothing.

                                     (Educations warped my mind
                                       into prescriptive paradigms
                                      drugged up on science fiction
                                      alternate attritions of future presents)


–//

One day,
      the ocean promised to swallow the world,
but failed to set a date; just a vague sense of inevitability.
and everyone gets uncomfortable about the liminality,
and there's
                     a moment of rupturing
                      unveiling the blanketing
in the process of our mass comatose suicide,
                            That    no     ones sure what to do with.
And we collapse into the indecision
of what to make of this wavering present
  loosing sight
between barricades of candy bars and cheeseburger pies
while the radio static sighs
'boys only want love if it's torture'

                                                  (i find it a bit optimistic)

//–


I keep becoming waylaid in the lag
   the hesitant faltering between long warn down footprints
   travelling down some path set out by the last
   in no way definitive; but, at least, defined
   by the haphazard indentations left behind
  while sometimes there’s treasure in the depths that we climb
   it's never the kind
                                 that explains itself.

            (But still time turns and churns and burns
                while we frantically mine all the scattered urns.)


   –\

            The philosophers and neuroscientists keep working to find the foundations underlying why
               we think what we think, why we feel what we feel,
     they peel up the carpet and peer into what's beneath, but
                                     they just keep finding

                                         ripped up carpet  and musk.

                 \–


I keep searching for home in the lag,
    the tumbling bind of footfalls enshrined.
      but even if there's no way out of here,
      there's occasionally a whisper of camaraderie in the air


       (you never escape,
              no no,
            but sometimes
                the enclosure unfolds )

...

mama warned me
about becoming attached to ghosts,
about chasing the lights that flicker behind closed eyelids.
    but here in the dark,
  i'm not sure what else to follow.

A fire, pierced the dark
We do not know its flame
Only that within a bang
The elements, they came

And then, the fire raged
Expansion, from the core
And then condensed in to the things
The Hubble searches for

We glance with star struck eyes
At orbs of transcendent light
They look like winking beads, I thought
In their epic flight

Like life, they’re superstructures
I offer them my awe
As I row upon the Milky Way
As I step out the door

Beneath the cosmic canopy
That mystical frontier
Beneath which we can’t comprehend
Its truths so strange and queer

Infinity – is made of atoms
‘Tis like an endless tapestry –
Stretching in all directions
In longitudes for Eternity

From solitary molecules
To entire superstructures
The building blocks of the cosmic scene
Articulating Natures

Without seam – or stitch
Or rip upon the textile
The matter of the multiverse multiplies
Making Eternity fertile