#institutional
A cockroach knows a cockroach—
not by insignia,
not by the parchment framed behind mahogany,
but by the odor of survival,
that cold administrative hunger
that outlasts every anthem, every oath.
They know each other by residue.
By the practiced contempt
folded beneath public language.
By the elegant speech of sacrifice
delivered while the people’s bread
still clings to their teeth.
Neither sovereign nor savior—
only leeches lacquered in ceremony,
feeding through the arteries of the republic,
calling extraction governance,
calling decay order.
They do not arrive as tyrants do.
No drums.
No boots striking the square.
Only robes, citations, televised restraint—
the slow confidence of men
who believe institutions belong to them
by natural right.
And so the rot advances quietly.
Through adjournments.
Through sealed rooms.
Through the grammar of procedure.
Like termites in cathedral wood,
they hollow the structure from within
while praising its strength in public.
Their loyalty is primitive and exact:
hunger recognizing hunger,
filth answering filth,
one infestation sustaining another
inside the same exhausted machinery.
Cockroaches gather where public trust once stood upright.
In courts.
In studios.
In ministerial corridors perfumed
with constitutional language
and the odor of managed truth.
They feed upon justice ceremonially—
turning law into spectacle,
verdict into theatre,
delay into doctrine.
Priests of process,
parasites of the nation—
they inherit the shrine by stripping it bare,
then preach sanctity over the emptied altar.
And when the streets finally remember themselves,
when students, workers, lawyers, families
begin speaking in one rising voice,
when the screen itself burns white with outrage—
the script changes.
Suddenly corruption has a smaller face.
A safer body.
A more disposable name.
Now the disease is “fake degrees.”
Now the infestation is narrowed
to the minor and replaceable—
as though the great engines of theft
were built by clerks alone.
Strange how power launders its language.
How an insult hurled at millions
returns as precision.
How the same mouth that stripped dignity
from a generation
now retreats into footnotes,
clarifications,
televised innocence.
Even this naming feels too clean—
as if language stood outside what it serves.
But memory is stubborn.
People remember the laughter.
The contempt.
The rehearsed humiliation
disguised as public wisdom.
And slowly they begin to understand:
the law is not sacred because men recite it.
A robe does not cleanse decay.
A bench is still wood—
still elevation—
still vulnerable to the weight seated upon it.
That is the terror beneath every failing order—
not protest,
not outrage,
not even exposure—
but recognition.
The instant the public looks at power
without reverence,
without hypnosis,
without fear—
and dares to name the cockroach
while it sits upon the bench.
May 17
May 17, 2026 at 1:10 PM UTC
Forgive them for their sins,
For they know not what they do
They hold the shotguns under their chins
But haven't got a clue
Apr 26
Apr 26, 2026 at 3:39 PM UTC
I tell myself, can't see ahead,
But my path is already drawn?
A narrow line in antiseptic light
that runs from dusk to dawn.
Each morning bleeds from yesterday
through walls too white to stain,
and prophecy is nothing more
than habit dressed as chain.
I wake inside a measured room,
where padded corners bloom,
and silence hums fluorescent hymns
against a vacant tune.
Who decides what sane is?
Who writes the rules for me?
If healing feels like suffocating,
is that recovery?
You call this safety, call it care
I call it slowly dying.
Tie my hands, dim the lights,
but you can’t stop me trying.
A canvas binds my restless arms,
fabric biting skin;
they say it’s for protection
I say it cages what’s within.
Once I held a voice so clear
like winter in the air,
now it shatters into swallowed glass
and settles into prayer.
Save me, smiling martyr,
step down from polished wood;
your halo shines in sterile light
it does me little good.
Who decides what sane is?
Who names me unwell?
If I don’t fit your diagnosis,
am I broken — or rebel?
You crown yourselves as cures
while I am tied in shame.
Don’t tell me I am better
just because you need the claim.
Your Eyes blink in corners
of every fragile day,
watching lest I fracture
or quietly slip away.
Rats of thought inside the walls
scratch along the seams;
they gnaw at former purposes
until they feel like dreams.
They ask me, will you take the pills?
Will you say you’re ill?
Will you trade your jagged truth
for something easier to fill?
Who decides what sane is?
What if the system’s wrong?
What if the thing that claims to heal
is what’s been choking all along?
You can catalogue and keep me,
file me, lock me still
but something in me will not die,
and something never will.
Feb 9
Feb 9, 2026 at 9:00 PM UTC
draking death features and tones
no lust lost
in oceans we toss
man only of our presence to be
included rudely
at the suggestion of the wet nurse
thirsty in linen
uniform beds her words
nourish
long as ever is
in the business of breath
methods of incubation
amorated swells in the pattern
batten the flourish of our human ilk
for the journey would calm
our raving losses
and punctuations of breeding
Oct 23, 2022
Oct 23, 2022 at 10:10 PM UTC
A true
Banana Republican
he claims
fraudulent results
due to
American intervention
Nov 10, 2020
Nov 10, 2020 at 9:51 AM UTC
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 white power.
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.
Jul 27, 2016
Jul 27, 2016 at 6:03 AM UTC
As I sit on this assigned desk
ears drooling with institution gel
I swirl on the seat, the wind pause
Musing in evangelised dilemmas
Lobotomised to jerking veracities
Sagacity amateurs boost egos
Stooping and stooging in asylums
Barricading others progression
Regressed losing solid grounds
Jurisdictional custodial supervisions
An infused scent of propagandism
Scenes of robotic observational modelling
Unprincipled to insist on another destiny
Calculating targeted risked predictions
Regulated to invigilate and unroll a matrix grid
Who am I? To forge his,her or their trench
Mar 9, 2016
Mar 9, 2016 at 7:56 AM UTC