Many Mansions (2015 poem)

Yin and Yang is Cain and Abel , sheep & fruit. I’m able 
and I’m keen, a good keen can catch-all can do here
on the fractured plates of  Aotearoa,
gift of active volcanoes, for in the shimm’ring distance 
hills are cloaked by their own clarity, 
clad in a state of mind above both thought 
& feeling. Almost could I be an animist among 
such objects. It is chryptochromin-activating dusk 
o’clock & all my thoughts have changed because
we have not even gotten used to fire
& light bulbs! What is more, there is a backdoor in 
the mind, but most go for dead coals that it has long departed,
rippling from the epicenter of a victory:
being in becoming’s sphere of axis, right suspension of the givens.

Hump Century (2011 quatrains)

(written in 2011, "the gods" changed to "Our Lord" in 2016)

...beamed down from satellites to TVs

plus nanonetworked smart dust plus deep packets oh I can't
perceive it all at once! Bound on a treadmill of CVs
& paying for our training's slant,

as well as its inherent use
to humankind, we must be more than splintered specialists
amongst the Google Earths & views,
we must be more than numbers on chill neatly indexed lists!

There must be a rebirth among the great apes armed with war
who scout the land & then report
on its munitions dumps, civilian population, spore
dispersion mediums, who kill for sport

from helicopters with high-powered rifles, yes there must
be renaissance among the apes
who wield the neutron bomb as they disturb the Terran crust.
Our Lord should take them by their napes.

Anomalistics (2014 poem)

As clouds lower, so do upper-atmospheric lightnings,
which accounts for some reported sightings. 

So we see them here as if they were alive:

on infrared or radar in the humming air they thrive.

Anomalies! Anomalies are beautiful, I feel. 

For just this sentiment see Devereux, Vallée, & Keel.

Ghost soldiers clomp stampeding stamp down shuttered shaking streets. 

Some are called elves, some are called sprites. They light this strange old sky 

of nights. And they bestir me with the holy question “WHY?!”

Ideological (2007 poem in sprung rhythm)

Spark Motes of dust float in the beam

Through canopy of bed and wood

Good

Of opened drawer and canopy

Of forest down on pioneer men

Inn

Rangers Beggars Merchants Speeches

In this floating world suspended

Hid

Like masters under canopy

And cover of a palanquin

Men

Straining lift with slavery or

Drunkenness of moon mating

Rutting

Simply, masters, servants, but no

Enoch's Enoch's Enoch's walk, no

Clue

Into the words that bury them

Drum

Mass graves' hundred millions where once

Tens of millions lived too, longing,

Stringing

Beads on rosaries and stringing

Up unnecessary man-shapes

Grapes

Exploding as high pressure lights

Imploding as they reel from heights

Wits

Lanternfish of riots, winters,

Shouts and dreams, exploding Tzar killed

Lulled

By propaganda teeming from

The crowd programmed by snore of sky

High

Daguerrotype (2015 blank verse)

Dickinson, who called Itself "Least Figure
on the Road", burnt out Its codependent
ape mind and continued on Its mission.
Those desiring further information
should see Schopenhauer's lifelong work on
the renunciation of the will.

An orb's eye view of fun (blank verse from 2012)

I never go to parties anymore.

They're not the ancient ways I sought in them.

They do not tear the veil back; do not lift

participants above their hamster wheels;

have not! do not! will not! communicate

in dashing tongues of fire; are not the ways

out of the Age of Iron, Age of the Wolf,

Age of the Tower come around again 

to haunt the halls of drafty history.

With Writhing Willows (2015 poem)

I.

Wind flagellates the RSA.
Aograoroan sheets of shining stratus cloud
loom over dormant, busy mailboxes and eyes.
The pinch-faced, angry man
next door is always throwing out
his younger flatmate. I keep well away,
don't even know their names. Perhaps it's his
own son or other relative,
which would explain the other's patience and longsuffering.


II.

I found out later that it was his son.

Balance of power (2013 sonnet)

A dragon and an eagle whirl around
at dusk like Sambo with his shining skin,
a whirlwind furiously void of sound
and thick as Goodness. Round and round they spin,

frustratedly unable to draw blood
for sheer futility. Why fight along
the bell curve’s crest, why kick up fuss? Ned Ludd
would only separate us. Just be strong,

parade toys, troops and hawks, spit out glad bile,
and whirl around as though this feedback loop
between us means to last forever while
the debts and hungry mouths begin to group

around our citadel of magic hope.
We who were so enlightened now must grope.

Contraction & Magnanimity (poem: sonnet)

Grim sky looms gray, a sickly, writhing void
inside of one. Nightmarish bright gray days
& that low-pressure with which they're alloyed
replace habitual disciplines with haze
as harsh self-criticisms smirk & feud.
No progress & no product is enough
on such a day, with static gray imbued;
one's very soul departs one in a huff.

Our grander days of gliding, godlike clouds
proclaiming an exact munificence --
recalled to mind -- oppose these banshee shrouds
of a particular deluge... Intense,
far, warming, this light yoke of hours starts.
A whole begins to coalesce from parts.

The Mirror Men (2009 heroic couplets)

*You hold a mirror to your times and group,
obliged to hoist the colors of your troupe.

No comprehension is implied by your
allegiances. You walk along the shore,

exactly mirroring its curling waves
as in a graveyard you reflect its graves.

You’re powerless by nature to do Good
or Evil, only to reflect the wood

if walking through it, dark or otherwise.
What connoisseurs! You only believe Big Lies.

* I regard determinism as something which applies only to a substantial subset of the human population.

A quatrain of caution (poem: squib)

Traumatized by generations of fucked-up behavior,

people look outside of self-improvement for a savior,

yearn to be the massah closer than you think

because it’s normal. I’d advise you not to blink.

Peering through a window pane at a transmitting bee (poem: blank verse)

It was as though that bee had tried to speak
with those gesticulations of her legs
& thorax, one leg sometimes rubbing past
her head. She finally whirred off in a huff,
not having gotten through to me at all.

November 2nd, 2012 (poem: squib)

Supervisors overlooked propped-open doors.
Wind tumbled down the street,
blew dust off of the ruins.
Construction workers shucked their flannels,
roadworks fucked the roads.
Men spoke to one another as to men.
I stood at ease.

The Hell Upon a Hill (poem about religious cults & inquisitions written in 2014)

In fissiparous burnt-over
districts, Pilgrim Fathers drift like
sharks at peace with their own lurking.
The Inquisitors were devils
at their levels, theirs were revels
of a kind performing Hell for
future generations. Trauma
from that Hell still haunts burnt-over
districts like a bottomless pit,
and neatly on neat benches in
their neat gear do they neatly sit
like animals kept in a pen
of a kind performing Hell for
future generations. Trauma
from that Hell still haunts burnt-over
districts like a bottomless pit,
where watchful for the faintest spark
out in the silence of the dark
they roam the Land of Eyes and Lips
in case a breathing human being trips.

Multipolar (poem written in 2011)

Hydrating as a paragraph or verse
you grow inside a time of quantitative
easing / currency devaluation /
open borders / Babelisme, haunting  me,
encircling me like antimissile shields,
propelling me like an electrolytic
cell, resolving all my oppositions
into unities, completing me like glowworms
all around one of a humming heated
night! It's 28 Nivôse. Two hundred and nineteen.

The Sun Itself (poem: cinquains written in 2012)

Raw magnanimity, unleashed at men,
is no respecter of existing forms.
Quite frequently it clashes with the norms
which govern this wild sphere whereon we win
or lose our minute wars, brave manmade storms.

True power, no mere irritating voice,
does not make one resentful, like the Sun
itself does not deprive all men of choice.
Not of commands is power’s lattice spun
but of humane behavior set to ‘stun’.

It's now early morning in Neu Sealand (poem: sextets written in 2013)

Dawn had not yet tie-dyed our arc of sky.
The wallabies of Waterdeath* had not
yet stirred. We had not groaned yet by & by
emerged from wombs of warmth to face the day,
ingesting caffeine at our usual spot
and breathing life into our lifeless clay.

Chill blue light shone down from the gibbous moon
onto the hamster cages that we call
our homes. Dawn had not passed our farthest dune
upon its way to greater, grander things,
like winking out the nightlight in the hall.
Gray statues shaped like birds had not spread wings.

*Waimate

Horse (heroic sonnet / example of sonnet portraiture written in 2013)

I didn’t even know that he was there
until he nearly crushed my fingers in
between two boxes of the pallet where
I had been stacking them. He beamed & then

cried “Watch your fingers, Bro!” And in that grin
I saw his topsy turvy, rotten teeth.
I think of him as Horse because -- well, when
I look at him I see a horse... Beneath

that bodily encumbrance beats a heart
of old. Some other workers say he "stinks".
He’s like a duckbilled platypus, apart
from other species. My heart sometimes sinks

as I peruse his file, look in, away
from him right there beside me as he zips
& come to no conclusion, not all day.
It’s better when the good ones crack his whips,

of course. I can’t forget him. He looks hurried
later on where formerly he scurried.

Centuries of Lights (rolling stresses poem written in 2008)

(an explanation of kshatriya behaviour
in the context of becoming)

All of us are kamikaze pilots.
It's a matter of which aircraft carrier to ram
before deactivation,
with fewer mangled bodies & torn, twisted bulkheads
in most cases.

 Maybe tyrant Kings are better than their absence,
better than the Tweedledumdee crypto-oligarchic State.

For Progress is:
the Reign of Terror or a Bonapartist Plebiscite,
gunshots in the woods behind a planned community.

The Long Weekends (poem written in 2013)

Centuries braid sine curves in the distance.
Centuries tilt, tumbling in the distance, galaxies of fixed points.
Fixed points on the axes are so distant,
warming as warm distant stars,
wide as wide open roads of two Long Weekends in a row!
A row of questions pumps my temporary heart,
and in the distant present I give thanks.

Two Squibs for Almond Castle (poem-in-two-squibs about a 'hippy mansion' in Waitati)

(written in late 2013 / early 2014)

1.

Fog unravels and untangles
at Waitati in the bright mist,
tops of pine trees disappearing
of a long soaked cloud December.

2.

Though the pace be apace, it’s a sweet, swirling place
where division of labour occurs with mad grace.