Facing your fear
makes you go all cold inside.
Intestines shrinking and suddenly
the floor looks pretty.

Facing an impossible act
makes you get butterflies.
The mouth blubbers meaningless phrases
Tries to gather courage and bravery.

"New Plymouth"  

I
I, as a young woman, stand still
Like a ghost column in a Mausoleum  
Adjacent to the New Plymouth spit.  

I breathe in the invisible sugars of salt
And the stubborn incoherences
Of the sea washing green over layette white.  

The rocks are blunt teeth,
Fat and round like an old Frisco seal,
A Cerberus jaw barring me off

From fatal self-destruction.
What a laugh!
These flippants, these peacekeepers  

Have no idea, nor do
The gargantuan ships,
Walking on water like Jesus' feet.  

The sky is so pure and clean  
it's sectile, no clouds  
nor disturbances to be inhaled.  

II  
  

I hang like a death wish on the hotel's lintel;  
Outside copse's foliage joggle
And I think cold.  
  

The air is sullen and austere,
It knows what it's doing to me.
The air that kills, kills, kills.  
  

The radio stubbornly blubbers
More sheepish than a baby,
Confabulating the local rugby.  
  

I collapse like a sack of black potatoes.
I feel weirder than Pluto.  

I am an alien, an alien to the bulbous women
  
And silver lined suited men.  
The grand annunciation
"I hope you enjoy your stay"  
  
Makes my organs twist and puffer.  
It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!
This place cries for my demise.  
  
III
It's a rural community.  
Mothers in ghastly flannel and baby spew
swallow gossip like Communion tablets.  

The precious circulate the carousel,
Scoffing hot dogs like prepubescent piglets,
Sausages sliding like fat worms

And burning like hearts in an oven.  
The sizzling steam disintegrates
Like clouds of Statismospores

Spreading positively into ether.  
The sun beats like a muscle
Burning, burning, burning

My laundry-washed white.
I’m vulnerable.  
I was once pure and sweet like an Aryan,  

Now I am dying, dying, dying
From fat smiles curled like a snail
With grey fatty hooks under my eyes.  




IV  


Tiny bluestocking girls like me  
All congregate in the Library .
At last I am by myself.  

I still don’t feel at peace.  
My thoughts are frightening
When I am at my writing.  

They are even worse,
In fact deathly,
If I do not write.  

This climate of strange spacemen,  
This culture of monstrous noses
Has driven many women mad,  

Not excluding a woman like me.  
I’m bored to death, literally.
Now, now, I say,  

Carrying my golden bags of poetry,
“I love what will destroy me,
And hate what will heal me”.  


October 5th 2013

all of my Islands have honeycombs and harsh bark
where shrubbery blubbers in too much sun
and halfwit Karma blunders in a cup
of unquenchable designs.

Wharf ******
on the plank of the following prank.
heavy like Moses.
Ordained by self-harm
and actual Pirates.

breathing Majong Cactus
Where I Temporary
Go.

THIS IS HOW WE SHOW OUR LOVE.

The baby's in the cradle; far is mum.
He wakes up frightened and he starts to scream.
He blubbers to his mum to carry him.
This is the way in which he shows his love.

She comes and lifts him up and hugs on chest.
He feels so calm, and she feels glad and blessed.
He coos, he babbles, and he prattles best.
This is what he does when he shows his love.

There is no need to cry; his mum is nigh.
The world for him is safe; why should he sigh?
So glad, he lifts his hand and scratches her an eye.
No wonder, this is what he does to show his love.

My Lord, we feel so frightened and we plead.
We carol and sing hymns and offer a good deed.
We may at times imply a spiteful word,
but still we are that child who shows his love.
BY JOSEPH ZENIEH
____________