Pumpkin or Dating a Shallow Guy in Korea

This night is our first date my

up-to-ears-beard and reindeer jersey are

very handsome and in your winter boots

you look more like a distant rocky mountain than

a monk who threw on my long coat  - but nonetheless

it is very cute.

It's winter so I say; take a chance with a

silty bathhouse on the edge of the brine.  

We are washing in separate baths but

sleeping in the same room by night.

Our heads on wooden pillows and

on the ground we sleep just with our

body's bones, our flesh is soft and young.

Drunken men and women come

inside from under the hard black sky to sleep

one old woman pulls the sleeping block 
out from under your head

makes it sound like a ripe and seed-filled

pumpkin hitting the floor.

I tell you, pumpkin is an ugly woman in South Korea,

and you’ve even heard of an ugly woman

but I do not understand your call to

register the shock.

It's not a matter of feminism.

Baby fat if they're just right, I might say

flower-piglet, but an ugly woman, if she's just growing in

long orange lines under the sun.

Yeah. You found me down on the farm.

Even she’ll admit to this. This is what you

fail to grab, even she will admit to this.

But it is not you, don’t worry, and I don’t have a small face,

so until now it is a can-of-pumpkin-soup-girl who

looked at me in the nightclubs. I do not like a big face.

I want to be a model, but in Korea it’s not attractive,

this face-of-the-big.

To cut down on the bones of your face is

a possibility and if I save money, I might manage 
to move arms to surgery.

So, sleeping here with you on the planks and

your head bouncing against the wood

I am grateful to hear the brevity of its thump. 

English --- 한글 한글 --- English

English into 한글

We eat small fish with button eyes from plastic mass graves but to bite them is so satisfying especially hearing the tiny bones pop between your gorgeous white teeth. The way you use chopsticks to harpoon candied potatoes, your symmetric lips deftly consuming pickled walnut. I envy the way your heart munches deeply.

In the evening we kiss and your mouth has bloomed into a sour flower but I don't mind. You call me Flower-Piglet and when you do I call you Tiger and see us both flying over the city like two little super-animals on Tiger Pig adventures.

You are always full of rice because you eat rice and you love rice and your skin feels like rice when we hug, our bodies mould together and we are a bread yin and a rice yang and although traditionally Korean people don't eat bread you are more than hungry to have me.

Sleeping, you dream of a field of red cabbages. I am in the long dry lines between the rows wearing wooden sandals and talking with your mother who speaks to me in circles and squares, which I use to cut and gather spicy leaves into urns.

But when you wake I have brown eyes and you still call your own eyes black even though that is impossible and when I cook rice it just doesn’t seem to hold. And, you speak quietly in Korean when you call your mother. And, you say shhh, when your father calls.

한글 into English

We enjoy the ocean’s yield in the same container, small fish with a slim eye beaded through their skull, seeing themselves in salty bunches. You enviously try to lasso wild rice from the bowl and watch my brave teeth doing natural things.

We kiss and your lips are fluent with sugar, it is nice but salt is an important part of any meal. I call you Flower-Piglet because I do not call you all the time, even when you call me Tiger.  You say we are two super small animals like pigs flying over the city to see our way into the evening and I say which city, piglet? Where? 

We should always be filled with rice; cooking it and eating meals together, and rice is important before we die, too. We hug and your skin is learning to love rice, or, at least starting to star the healthy map of rice. Traditionally, Korean people don’t eat bread, but there are now many patisseries in larger cities, and I am not sure about this.

In sleep, I dream of the red cabbage fields, discarded urns, and you cutting my mother’s spicy talk and hanging it obviously on a long drying line between the rows of vegetables. You bend down to supplant the cabbages with small strawberry plants. 

In the morning I still have black eyes, but when you wake up it seems impossible to you. And when my family call, you curl into the bed sheets like a Flower-Piglet resting in the hay and sleep. My 꽃 돼지.

Bitter Heart - New Version

Bitter Heart

That night, time had a bitter little heart

You against the cool river bank me in the grass 

rustling round you


You caught a koura in your hands it warmed and crinkled 

a fresh lantern lighting up the valleys of water

I called you a kind of rural magician an aquatic metaphysician pulling 

crunchy life from soft matter and although you laughed you said

the night is giving me a hard time with its slow arm its 

fast arm

and so I caught your crying legs and cradled you vastly

*

We walked back to the house and your bed was dense with tiny
sad ghosts

last winters mice ricketed in soft crooks of skin and

spring lamb bleated wetly at our finger tips

a swarm of lost bees burned darkly between us

*

Outside the red-eared moon curled again and

nipped at its own thin tail,

dreamed of becoming fat on small edible things like us.

*

Later the river carried the koura downstream to perform amongst

the slick pool of eels while 

we worked hard to resuscitate the day but

Time has a bitter little heart. 

Bitter Heart

Bitter Heart

That night, time had a bitter little heart

You against the cool river bank me in the grass 
rustling round you


You caught a koura in your hands it warmed and crinkled 
a fresh lantern lighting up the valleys of water

I caught your crying legs and cradled you vastly

the night was giving you a hard time with its big arm its 
little arm

*

We walked back to the house and your room was dense with field ghosts

last winters mice ricketed in soft crooks of skin and

spring lamb suckled nervously at finger tips

a swarm of bees burned darkly beneath the blanket

*

Outside the red-eared moon curled again and bit its own

thin tail, dreamed of small edible things like us.

*

Later the river carried the koura downstream to glow amongst 
the slick pool of eels while 


we worked hard to resuscitate the day but

Time has a bitter little heart. 

Carnival Love

You found my heart

in your hand

moved it about like a
tiny plastic pinball machine

easily guiding the silver
bead down the thin
lime-green tunnels until 

all the red and yellow lights
smashed about.

You win! It said.

I said, you win. 

You looked, the prize 

now thrust shy

upon the counter

suddenly here and
pinned all over with
bright felt hearts -
shameless in its softness

and with your 

faux rifle you 

changed the game and 

shot it clean off the perch. 

Care Bear ™

The god of childhood lives in the
rimu alcove at the foot of your bunk,

lives in the half light of a night
sparked bright by fat stars.

The god of childhood glows pink in the black,
the rainbow strapped across its belly a
cesarian of magic, a painful stitching of
the colour it costs to hold all your hope.

When you sleep in your bunk,
the struts made of manuka,
the step ladder your father's rendition of a
kauri's bones,

the god of childhood sheds its trade mark,
refuses to smile or open its arms wide,
refuses to tilt its head upward for a sweet hug.

It has business to be doing.

The god of childhood is putting on
psychic gumboots and kicking Barbie
off the ledge,

is opening the french windows and
observing the rats - the stenching pelts that
circumnavigate the edge just beyond where
your house casts a dim light out into the bush.

The rats are various.
The rats multiply easily and look toward your mothers bed.
The rats smell of cheap cask wine and
live in your fathers eyes past a certain hour.
The rats whisper about the changing geography of your body.
The rats are much better at math and
the girl rats are very pretty for rats.

The rats chew slowly, their eyes upon the house,
each purposeful nibble tearing another splinter from
the roots of big trees.

And the god of childhood is out on the
corrugated iron now, weaving the
passion fruit vines into a long rope and
whirling down to the mollusk shelled ground.

And the god of childhood is shaping pipi halves into
sharp edged ninja stars, and thripping the
white blades out into the low lying bush
where they meet with muted wet thuds.

The god of childhood is sitting, lotus position
on the driveway. Eyes closed,  saying
Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ
Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ
Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ

And the god of childhood is beating its way
out into the damp foliage, getting down on
its knees and reddening its soft cotton face.

Boats

Your boats sail away from the port,

the water is murky and slick with
rainbows of oil.

Creaking, they travel to the edge of the flat world,

wending beneath the paper-plate rounds of moon and sun.

The boats self-origami -
an implosion of structural beauty as
mast folds to bill and
sail into wing.

At the clean edge of blue where
the ocean falls like
long long wet hair,

they take flight,

leaving me at the docks of my self,
looking at the empty linear horizon
cutting away the sky's skin -

my imagination falling to pieces around my feet,
through the dark wood cracks
to the matt ocean beneath.

Twenty Little Poetry Projects

1. The TV is a cantankerous old man, yelling
the same bored ideas over and over, I tell him I don't kare what Nik did to Kursty, but don' shuddup ol' man!

2. Inside of us we all know that the dead float in a comical mask amidst someone else's lost jandals and togs

3. my eyes are tacky paua, kauri clocks from the kauri kingdom in Ahipara, the last little town before the cape. We could stop and get a limp pie and the worlds biggest orange choc-chip ice cream

4. I taste the icing covered houses, licking their scalloped rococo-pink - a marzipan of nausea right before a too hot bath

5. Johnny Depp! How dare you break up with your Frenchy. How dare you marry a fox-eyed skeleton in the first place. Don't you know it's cool to love fat girls? Haven't you heard of the Vogue Health Initiative?

6. I start to have sex with the elderly, gently setting aside his walking frame, laying him down and making up for lost time

6. But the dead are also riding fat horses and smiling like they're auditioning for a Colgate ad. How I used to think Are your maclean's showing was are you a clean sho-lene. Clean westies? On horses? They do like death metal, though

7. but horses always look healthy, even if the rider has been dead for years, stuck by spur to the stirrup

8. Giz a hoon! Giz a hoon on your missus I wanna do some damage ride her hard like a ford escort up customs street see how she squeals when the rubber burns. Giz a hoon bra!

9. because we sometimes feel powerful we think about dolphins in the supermarket and because we sometimes don't, we don't.

10. He called me bulreoteulttae Piggy, in a breath of flowers in my heart chakra pieonatda

11. the archaic elephant of love steps heavily upon all mundane things, crushes most of them to dust

12. and we were as sexy as the seatoun presbyterian congregation on a hot sunday.

13. so at the whiteboard I draw complex algebraic equations with the end of my janitors mop, while a boardroom of corporate psychopaths 'get told' how it is via skype. A mouthpiece for all the dumb baby seals - a vicarious blue collar hero I am.

14. Maggie Magpie has a fat ass when she runs, her purple and green polka dot tights new from Italy won't hide that, even though she's only 9.

15. And ... when all the dolphins are dead they will make a tasty pie, and the tasty pie shall be shared amongst all the children, and long kept marine mammalian secrets shall be revealed. Such as we always knew what you were saying and we rape, just like you. Childhood obesity will be the secrets ruse.

16. and sweetheart-coloured jellyfish will decorate the disco hall with lights, and you can preload your Missisipi moonshine in the linoleum stalls before the dance, before the girls wait on one side and the boys on the other.

17. In order to be free I must drink protein shakes and meditate on my g-spot chakra 

18.  그가 내게 꽃 돼지라고 불럿을때, 내 가슴 속 차크라 안에 숨쉬는 꽃이 피어났다 (but the chakra in my heart grew when he called me flower-pig)

19. The flowers (I) haven't had sex with a bee (a guy) in ages (8 months), probably because they're plastic, and so they hang their heads forlornly.

20. And the elephant thunders on, dragging the world's bric-a-brac behind it in long pretty lines.

3. Oscar Wilde said 'With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?', so .... what's he saying? He callin' the home-shopping network is a liar?

It's pretty hard, after a life of getting away with putting an average level of work into things and getting relatively good grades/results, to realise that the only way to get where you want to be (even if you don't actually feel like you ever get 'there') is through hard work. There is just no doubt at all that hard work yields amazing results, and that you have to be willing to bang your head a million times against that strongly resistant wall, until that one million and one-th bang which sees all the bricks come tumbling down and you have your creative eureka moment, glimpsing and momentarily catching whatever it is that lies on the other side. I sit at my computer staring through a numbed collection of cells at the day, the cars on their purposeful wheeled missions, the tree slicer machine and the men out in the cold Wellington air feeding that poor shrimpy pine through its mashing teeth and I've just no idea how to start! And hence my blog. When I blog I feel little pressure to say anything of value because I don't believe that people really read my blog! Which is kinda great because it becomes an on-line sort of diary where I get to throw it out into the cosmos beyond the written page and feel as if someone, somewhere is listening to me whinge. OH what a world we live in. Anyway, now that I've vented that, I am going off to head bash that wall until it falls into the dirt and I get to glimpse the weird purple monster that at the moment I can only hear, but not see. Oh how it taunts me.

The Selective Memory of the Acolytes of Ganesh

The Selective Memory of the Acolytes of Ganesh (a work in progress)

Baby Ganesh had so many arms that
instead of suckling he milked his mother
like a cow

Ganesh had so many arms that he
couldn’t stop picking his trunk
which grew red and raw

He had so many arms that he played
under the Bramble bushes for
painful months at a time

so many that he hung like a needy spider
in the corner of Pravati’s room

he had so many arms that they
kept him awake for hours at night
with the shadow-lurch of puppet play

but when he cried, overwhelmed
by this crawling multitude,
they became maternal;
a soft cradle of snakes
hissing in the rushes

Ganesh had so many arms that he played
the Chicago Bulls at Boston Garden
and won

he had so many arms he fought a band of ninja
without spilling his sake

so many that they had to play rock, paper, scissors
to see who got to jerk him off

Ganesh had so many arms that he couldn’t
stop challenging himself to multiplayer Warcraft

so many that he was the king of second base (ping!)

so many arms that he plucked 100 whales from the ocean
to practice kissing on 

and so many arms that they downtrou-ed him
when his huge mammalian head threatened
to explode

Ganesh had so many arms that his
fingers grew as fast as bamboo

so many that he carried panthers,
vultures, snakes and sharks as currency

so many that after dinner he picked his teeth
with the bones of all the elephants ever

Ganesh had so many arms that giant squid
lusted from the sea to stalk him

so many arms that carnival rides
burned with neon jealousy

Ganesh had so many arms that he wrote
the language of love with a thousand pencils
on his fifteen-minute smoko

so many that he flew like a pterodactyl
through the air plucking the elderly from
small villages

and so many many arms that he held
every lonely thing in his micro-cosmic palms

Masters of Creative Writing - Update

Well, I am about three weeks into my MA program and so far so good. It's been pretty intense. It's not so much been to do with external pressure from supervisors and so forth, but more the kind of pressure that my fellow students and I are putting on ourselves in the creative sense.

The aim of the year is to write a book of a 'publishable standard', which you know, well, that's pretty alarming. At the moment I am sleeping very restlessly, the way you can do when you start a new job. I head into fitful rest with lines of poetry, my own and others, running through my head and I wake to the same kind of thing, thinking 'oh, maybe I can change that line like THIS'. If it happens at night I have to get up and write it down, or it'll be gone come dawn.

I'm realising more and more what a difficult thing it is to produce quality art. Art that seems good to you very rarely seems good to others, or at least not in the way that you would hope it to impact the person reading or viewing it. You can have a magnificent, life altering vision in your head of how you want it to look and sound on paper but the execution of that is so very very difficult!

And how to portray all the nuances of life?! How to show the complexity of the thing that you want to express without making it seem like a contrived load of shit? And how to CHOOSE what to write about? And then HOW to actually write about that thing? !!?!?!?sdksljeih olasindfl nln 03-48690wu@#%$@#%$ !!!

Over the last few days I have been cursing myself for not having a better vocabulary and an extra 20 points on my IQ and have come to understand that I am at the very bottom of a huge creative mountain and that only years and years of hard work are going to get me to a place in which I feel I am reaching my potential. And that's O.K.

There are two possibilities at the moment for what I'd like my thesis / book to be about. 1) some kind of question about death and memory written by turning my dead relatives into symbiotic robot / human people who come back from a special futuristic governmental unit and are changed in good and not so good ways. haha. I'm serious though. And 2) I more straightforward collection of my poetry about observations of life / beauty / sadness, you know the drill.

Anywhooo, we shall see.

Girl Walking

She had a heart
of glass
inside it burned
the smallest
flame and

around that
flame orbited
a caravan of
dark things;

dogs without
eyes and

newborn babies
with teeth or

girls just walking
walking.

She walked along the
promenades and
lips
of beautiful places
as though
she
didn't guide
herself -

eyes always on
another
dark horizon.

And her eyes were
the colour of
milk.

Three

I don't know why
but
I imagined us,

three

dancing in
soft triangles
on the lawn.

Girls with
the chanting
rain

coming down like
jewellery
from the Honeymoon
sky.

We laughed
silent in the roaring
sheaves

long haired

wet skinned

bright phantoms of the
mind.

Conversation

It's all been locked by some incantation you and I made years ago. And now we can't remember. The lawn the hall our table our common places they're all sewn up. We feel fooled by our dark selves. We fling words at the backs of moving walls. Even talking doesn't seem to help. It seems to make things worse. In the hallway our words meet and spark and disappear but they haven't gone. In the air hang silent tumblers of language, new worlds with stronger locks. We'll never make the keys because lets face it, we just haven't got that kind of time. So we play scrabble by the fire each word feigning innocence while we flip our heads and laugh. We just imagined it! Life's so ..... ? so .... quaint?! But we didn't but it's not. We've lost the way and neither of us left red ribbons on the branches of gossipy trees. We sit at the table where the vast crucified web of conversations stretch and bounce between us, flinging your great-grandmothers teapot about. It's ringing like a telephone - and we don't answer.

After The Rain

The lavender sends
soft satellites out into
the botanical hum,
they orbit the
garden bobbing
on invisible
currents of heat
three feet off the
ground,
testing the days fabric
and
all around the bees
and cicada
charge summers
engine;
in their small chests
fibrous
cogs and wheels
ruffle furiously ....
at work consuming
and
regenerating the
hot cells of summers
dream.

You've Gotta Pick Your Battles

Who would've thought that mowing the lawn could yield so many life lessons.

Life lesson #1 : you can't mow every single little nook and cranny of the garden, if you try you'll go mad attempting to fit a huge propeller protected by a massive round steel guard into tiny right angles and 10cm circular spaces of long wavy show-offy grass. I kept envisioning a tiny little mower on a stick with a changeable head, like those sanders you see on informercials. OCD dream come true. Now that night has fallen and I am sitting here at the kitchen table having eaten my dinner, I still feel spiteful toward those grasses.

Life lesson #2 : doing work on and around the land is severely satisfying. It was so sunny today and all the birds were out. I saw a Kereru fly over head to the neighbour's Puriri tree. I saw a two Californian Quail cruising along in front of the bank, like little bowling pins. Once I'd finished mowing I looked out over my dominion, a little only child she-lord, and felt so satisfied by the neat rows of mown grass.

Life lesson #3 : if the mower weighs X and you way Y and and X's value happens to be a lot more than Y's, and Y tries to hang X over a hill to cut a bunch of long annoyingly wavy grass, the chances are Y will end up flying over X's handle bars, down into a dark bush and getting up to find a huge spider web wrapped around face. And then Y runs around screaming etc and X is lying with blades cutting furiously into thin air and Y's father Y comes out and says why are you down the bank with the mower ...... so yeah.

Life lesson #4 : getting hot is awesome because then you get to get cold again. Mowing in the sun, sweating, rolling down a hill, screaming, more mowing, followed by a swim and two ice cold beers. It's the yin yang effect baby; dynamic systems. The Korean's and Japanese have it so right with their bath houses, steam rooms, saunas and hot pools along side icy cold dipping pools.

Life lesson #5 : you get to smell the true essential smells of many of the plants in your garden when you mow because you accidentally (some times on purpose) mow over parts (or whole) of the plants and the heat of the mower and the hot summer air seems to diffuse these scents. piney, camphory, sweet, sagey etc.

Tomorrow I plan to help dad cut and move a fallen Lucitanica Pine for firewood ...... what deep / transcendental experiences await me?