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.

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.

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

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

Terrorizing emotions


I sit here and think
Jumping to conclusions
Under the guise of feelings
Sent via worded phrases
Tormenting thoughts
Cancelling friendships once standing
Accruing indifferent reactions
Never once looking beyond the heart
Tempting angered responses
Severing all ties
Talking out of both sides of the mouth
Applying pressure to open wounds
Needless damage done
Dancing on fresh graves
Tethering hopes with razor wire
Harnessing putrid darkness
Escalating hidden fears
Haphazardly slinging arrows
Avoiding the real truth
Terrorizing emotions
Endlessly

Honestly I feel as though this entire time I've been pacing back and forth, accruing images of two ice caps slowly breaking themselves apart into tiny fragments of burning pitch that hurls itself onwards into the night, leaving bleeding trails of light as reminders, notes with coffee stains on the edges, written late at night without much light except for what scraps pour out from under the door from the reading light. You want to breathe normally but the bag won't inflate and it's so hard to calm down when everyone else is shaking and crying and prostrating themselves as though they'll consecrate the middle aisle with their cheap pleas for salvation, for their young childrens' lives, and for all the time they wasted ******* quietly in the dark after the reading light went off and even though they had a headache. They sing a song of mutual slump, of tacit awareness of the grandiose ******* of 75 years spent in too quiet comfort concerned with small victories and unconcerned with massive regrets. Then daylight breaks and you have to look your coffee stains straight in the eye and pretend they're just blemishes when they're sores and wounds and abscesses. And before long the paper disintegrates into brown pulp and you hate that you hate yourself because surely someone is more ****** than you. But that's just one moment out of the day, and you live them endlessly, you love them endlessly, overthinking, underthinking, drinking till you can't feel your extremities and then toying with a knife because you know you couldn't otherwise. Then you nick your pinky and realize how ******* stupid you must look, trapped in your own kitchen hearing your wife down the hall resent you more and more, her distaste, stained the color of sea foam off the coast of Cyprus, her frown fixed forever forward toward your back, and her face makes you sigh, and it's the same sound as before, sure, but now you know what is happening when these tiny admissions of regret escape from anyone else's lips. Then the plane picks up out of its nosedive and people cry and hold each other and you feel more dead than if your body had just ended up tangled in the wreckage of a turbine engine, your intestines laced between the blades like the back of a corset that gets tighter and tighter until you can't feel it anymore because you're numb.

You’re a smack down
Kick-around, clueless clown
That tells unfunny jokes
And runs with the blokes
That put up with your antics
And your busted semantics
Because they think someday
Things might swing your way
And they can profit by association
With a human abomination
That enjoys investing atrocities
With scarifying velocity
On the halt and the lame;
Running opportunistic games
On those who cannot defend;
World without end, amen.

But heaven forfend
That you might have a friend
Who seems a holy prophet
But does not seek for profit
And acolytes to their cause;
A bogus Santa Claus
Who leeches from the people
In his church without a steeple,
Just microwave towers
Sprouting like ugly flowers
To spread out the message
So we can read every passage
That boil down to a sermon
To send money to this vermin
Your bund proclaims a messiah
When he is really a pariah
Nobody has yet recognized
He’s so well disguised.

But, be aware, polecat
Some know what your at
And what you are doing
I nothing more than accruing
That which you can bank.
You have nobody to thank
For the outcome you inherit
From the outcome you assume
When your calumnies bloom
Into the realities that appear
When the truth draws near
And tars and feathers you
And when your victims do
What they should have done along
Was reject your ways gone wrong
And found a rail lying around
To ride your **** out of town.

The connecting notion is "blindly, without foreseeing."

From <https://www.etymonline.com/word/temerity>

Sad, you, city child, silly old man says.
Sad, you, city child, saying so hateful a thing,
saying you would hate being a bird,

saying you cannot imagine having nothing to do,
but fly around heaven all day, scrounging
for scraps, ah
child,
see those crows, hear their song,
are they laughing/
yes, at you.
I believe all black birds laugh, coo,
if you care, is common to doves, coo
to caw,
as a bird, these are common sense,
saying, I am here, now, if you care,
let me know,
otherwise,
this is my rest of the moment, time to feast.
I come to
eat the bugs that eat the dead,
caws, never any famine
until fire, or

catastrophic reordering of earthly things.
As when men lost sight of time signs,
trains of thought, fought all natural
signs of times too long for one
generation to know alone,
but watch,
hide, and watch.

Isotropic radiation field
pressure moulding matter
from raw mater, really
immaterial substances accruing
oomph
to act as a force in field, from
out to in
becoming one in time and nothing
more.

Or drifting into sleep as sound
silence imposed enwraptured wait/


A mighty rushing wind…

Eight billion voices
counting cadence, 30 per,
once intuned as day to night,
global steps through ever empty
time continuance field-set-frames
expanding as we imagine unbelieving
unimaginable,
in a structure so big,
us, no mortal takes so many breaths.
We listen, loosening tight why-knots in
wish reports so oft negated in time today,
I am in this wind passing as gas
of eight billion breathers, but
between the exspelled hex
human 'spiration, so soon
seeming freebird familiar
with the bass line,
my toe taps a happy dittydahdit dah didah.
- haps as happened,
- may haps per se
- FTA
sent into the wind every minute or so.

keep looking, soon we see, you, there
suddenly blue shifting seeing me seem
no longer red and running away,
but we both are like fairy floss,
pale blue dot convergent
gentle minds, fitted with tamed tongues,

hearing laughter welcome the transformation.

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 proagated 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 2021, 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

A peacock arrives with no feathers on the dawn of broken human density, held only by the gravity of the mind,
In flux with all things,
Your possibility is your demise,
And yet a pathological transformation is accruing without the thought of that which is neither action nor reaction but a passion of interactions with the universe that is grasping to put you into her infinite embrace of wisdom and light,
To planes far greater than petty beings can imagine on a merely three-dimensional abstain.
Contemplate to step outside your brain.

I guess you could say, that life is a play
That fans and critics are watching
Complete with the cheers that gives us the tears
With boos and jeers we're dodging

They don't really care if the tale is of glory
All that matters is loving your story
In fact they love it more when fates are tragic
They just want a seat for unfolding magic

Read the script's back page, predicitng the encore
Listen from thhe back stage and hear that they want more
You'd do anything to help out the cause
Accruing acclaim and accepting applause

The audience knows they can make or break you
They'll drag you to the top and call it a breakthrough
You better impress for they only take few
Until you mess up. Cut, start over. Take Two.

We get up
We work
We in darknesses
Lurk
We of earth
We forget
We were stars
Before birth
We revert to
Desert
One another
In peril
We civilized people
Prefer to be feral
And where all the wild things go
We reload
And we bode
Of extinction
Instinctively
Sown
We are harvesters
Harbingers
Of the undoing
Pollutants,
Intoxicants,
Blood debts accruing
Our own bitter end
Our untimely demise
We are all
That the known universe
Can surmise
And perhaps we are fallen,
Condemned,
Walking dead
But in fight for our life
We are thee
Watershed

Picture me this: not the arched brow
  but the body when night, curves like a moon
  accruing more weight.

Develop me this: not the body when curved like a moon
    but the white stucco of it,
    assuming its form.

Fold me like this: not the white stucco of it,
   but the space it takes for need,
   the occupancy it wastes for want.
     In this manner is how you will

And lay me flat against the river:
   not your memory of walls with fleur-de-lis,
   but with lilies. If this day were leaf when turned
   from the night when I took this collapse,
        let your hands be pedicle. My inflorescence you have
   mistaken as displacement yet not drown – meet this canopy

  at the end of this river that is your river – your static grace that
  is the music of your passing.

When met, disintegrate: not the lilies – they are anchors you have forgotten,
     not this day if it were a leaf, but the day dried from a washline
   of clouds. Let my inflorescence be a blunder of your recall.
         When you meet this canopy, pack all of its mileage,
               exact it in this distance. Take photographs of. Do not keep.

What do we make of our lives??
Are they simply a concatenation
of different distances with different
endings? Do not most of us hope
to love and be loved, to be successful
in meeting our goals be they accruing
wealth or helping create peace around
the world? And don't so many of us
spend our lives fighting our demons
be they alcoholism or the like?
So many of our lives are filled with
heartbreak and sorrow, torment and
tragedy. Humanity runs a race that
has no finish line. The most important
question each runner must ask is  
"Did I realize my real self?"

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Body movements swaying
Voices in your eyes
Then the silence broke,
Into a mass of
Convulsing laughter
Fingers tickling my mind
With your scent

I brushed my hand
Through your hair
I sensed
Qualities of
Rare innocence
A sensual flight
On a panther’s gaze
Make up an indolent picture
Mesmerizing me
Into a deep ,uncomplicated slumber,

I hear  magic,
I hear music
My heart perceives
My touch declaims
The very essence
Of your name

There is something
More about you
Than just the way
You wear your clothes
Something more than just
A carve of a smile
Or a tilt of the head

When you walk by
Zephyrs whisper
Mighty low
Attesting to the birth
Of blossoms
And the prayer of trees
Accruing to the slow
Dance of sunlight
And the faint swell
Of the dewdrops
When the morning braves
The lush of the
Green grasses
As the world begins to wake…….

Sitting. Thinking. Doing.
Nothing.
Trying. Failing. Faking.
Something.
Smiling. Consuming. Swallowing.
Everything.
Absorbing. Accruing. Attacking.
Anything.
But soon that
All will
Be
Nothing.

Coming to the death
in ascetic millennia
of dismantled fluids
accruing illusory gestures

Maybe in the meanwhile
where life gets its flow
relentless pass
a spare reality

wonderful would be to
mirror innocently
the dreadful slaughter
of the reason.

"back to a wall at the broken glass ball where ones fed up with it all not just feeling small

a twitching of cheeks it's been this way for weeks and is this what he seeks? the cellar door creaks

bed fully-clothed you and your betrothed and the people you loathed a stones-throw from homegrown despair alone

i take no time to finish this rhyme exorcising the grime accruing in the back of my mind pure stream-of-consciousness line-by-line at 12:29

need a passport to get to the kitchen sink need the friends i don't have for a chat and a drink need to turn off my brain in order to think need a rope and a stool pull me back from the brink

i'm collecting read receipts today. thanks for your help."

*Seen Mon 14:42

Across bodies
carrying dormant elegance,
forgetting givens held,
instead jabbing,
kicking, longing masks never on.
Pretend quasi reality situated
today, upon varying ways
X's yield zero.

Account, now, for assumptions and accruing
beleagurment barring budding
caring..
Demonstrations defining discussion
early on, easing ever
further from facades falsely
guiding. Gentle gestures,
heartbeats with hands held
intertwined in-between
in-jokes,
inklings,
inlets, long-lasting days left laying
making master plans maybe
noone notices,
others openly oblivious of our
presence, preferring perhaps
quiet quizzical
regard. Respite raises rushed
sentences sentencing solace
to two twenty-somethings turning to
unification, under covers used as
veils vexing visages, visions
well-wishing, with wills of wildlings and we,
extracting expositionist excuses, exiting
yesterday yet yearning for youth's
zeal. Our zenith, Zion.

It wanders restlessly released
In tombs of recently deceased
And surreptitiously it seeks
Just to be mortal once again
Sarcophagus of sinful skin

To hide the scarab-swarming flesh
An all-consuming nothingness
Falling to the floor and crawling
From a skulking skeleton
A rotting corpse of blending in

With those who see no form of pharoah
Decomposing in its marrow
Just disgust accruing dust
As time embalms its bones within
These pyramids they've never seen

Storm clouds hanging heavy on the horizon
moving slowly this way, that way, got
my eyes on them,
crawling ever on
like a ****** with a gun
that's aimed at me.

Secretly they fascinate,
the way they lacerate the sky.

Umbrella man
with head held high
can understand
though cannot see
the reason why
the sky flows
overhead.

I see trouble brewing
words of
bitterness
accruing,
some goings on
that need
some
seeing too.

A large Kingdom suffered a great catastrophe
when a fierce blaze engulfed the royal palace,
killing the King and Queen.
Leaving behind their two princes,
the eldest, a brash and self-absorbed boy,
was crowned King.
The young Prince, shy and reserved,
devastated by the loss of his loved ones,
became inward and reclusive.

Many years passed, the king,
enjoyed a life of leisure and debauchery,
accruing many debts from his lavish lifestyle,
consequently; larger taxes were imposed upon the citizens.
The people fed up with high taxes
and their leader's behaviour,
revolted and stormed the palace, overpowering the royal guards.
The angry mob found the King in his room,
shocked at the sight of their monarch,
now grossly obese and sick from excess.
The people decided exile and poverty,
not death would be a greater punishment
for their selfish King.
The people came to the prince's room,
compared with his sibling; his life
was simple and selfless.
Shocked by the contrasting way
the brothers lived,
the people decided the Prince
would be a worthy ruler
and proclaimed him their new leader.

The Kings first decree,
was to make his subjects equals.
The King abolished taxation,
Nobility and land owners
were ordered to divide their vast lands
and wealth equally among the peasantry.
The people rejoiced
from their new-found fortune at first,
but soon became disillusioned with life.
With no commitments to honour,
the people became aimless
and counter productive.
The Kingdom, with no class structure,
fell further into decline and ceased to exist.

Not another word
About my misbegotten
Purpose
All compendiums
Addendums
End
In every bit as worthless
As these verses
Reimburse me
For the squandered
Fortunes fated
To be spent
In purgatories
Just a man
Incarcerated
In a prison
Of what vision’s
City ruins
Have created
I have crumbled
Inundated
Like a cookie dipped in milk,
By the weight of over-shaded  
Like a flower left to wilt
There were no pills
Or panaceas
To alleviate undoing
Only bills to pay
Atop already
Mountain debts
Accruing
All before we even come to her
To once upon a time
We were
Like fairy tales
Enamored bliss
Impaled upon
Unhappiness