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First, a lonesome rider comes gently
murmuring in the dark,
riding a white stallion into a bang.
Second, the sweet chaos of quarks…
play fighting like children                                              
on a trampoline.
Third, the life and the love
of unthinking minds, and of molecules meandering
  along our DNA, adapting.

Then the sensing things
      find their place; crafting geology,
   time and taste, into a land of empty waste.
All impressions teeming, ideas wild, dressed
   in sterile suits, this is the reaping
upon the fearing eyes.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall,                          
Mirror, mirror, on the wall…
I ask you, one who knows them all
   who walks like Jesus, bathed and masked
into the cave where upon we ask
Who is the fairest of them all?

And in these moments of ferocity,
bright like burning Pohutakawa trees,
     I cower beneath the fury of the sky.
In the timeless and fragile imagination,
I ponder teething things, creeping                                  
   and making their way to Matilda’s
earthly paradise. Take me now;
oh raise me, spirited Fig,
to enlightenment.

Though in my awakenings, whilst light
               finds entry to the eyes
        through a liquid sand,
    I wish all the treasures of the lands
  ka whawhai tonu ma¬tu,
ake ake, ake!
   I wish to find a nightingale                                                  
    with its blood drenched upon a rose,
    staining my withering suit,
  as I pass from fascination
into gentle death.
Shimmer tucked behind a yearning—
faces of strangers on familiar footpaths,
benches.

Some frown, burrow into pockets,
handbags, buses, and
age concern, kids kicking the tills.
A hand in lost goods, a river crossing,
a bike in the stones.

They take and they take and they take and they take—
they take.

Till death on the stairwell of a house party.

So ka whawhai tonu mātou—
ake, ake, ake...
ake, ake, ake.

Go as far as you can drive on a tank of gas,
taking the gravel road so it kicks up and spits
in the sideways rain, the everywhere rain, the anywhere sky.
Close your eyes at the brink of eclipse.

To see a red jaguar in a garage,
doors barricaded,
a note that says:

"I have no intention whatsoever
to harm myself."

Yet the crunch of autumn begins again,
and oh—
the joy of finding white rose petals
at the bus stop.

— The End —