Capitalism is Saving the Planet
The brittle morning/ is here in person/ my dream is served cold/ a dream of finding a wallet/ as fat as a hamburger/ money as fibrous as bacon/ that I cannot spend/ because it is unprepared/ uncooked/ raw/ and smells insane
The maggotty white
potato chip that the small
Goth survived on
Karangahape
Anything that has a heart will leave a ghost
And anything that had a heart has left one
Only squint your eyes at the Good Morning Dairy to see the after-image of Hunters and Collectors
Sheets of bright yellow heat cook th content of K's oven
Morning spreads out like a newspaper
There are twists in K like minor plot devices
Its ribbon stretches out just long enough to be an event
Its path is sometimes an arm, sometimes a neck
We travel in its jetsream - this is the favoured way of travelling K
Saying "hi" to our other selves, our dwarves, our clustered schoolkids, trannies wandering op-shops in search of today, and later, whores stationed like pegs on their own invisible X-marks-the-spot, "hello" tired orange-faced drinkers sitting in the Navel and Family, "hello"
Conversations are birds flying out of our mouths
Some are monuments between friends, others slightly moist drivel evapourating in the sun
The weather changes at a moment's notice
Strokes of reckless diagonal rain are set free, angles alternating like a court of law
There are those that walk out of its effect just as there are those who walk into it
K people are our flatmates, sometimes vital, sometimes wallpapered
Perhaps K itself is just one wafting dialogue
K itself is a spoken word risen out of chatty and squeaky polystyrene exchange
It contrasts coldly with the implacable beachhead of Grafton Cemetary where the ghosts are not recent and the conversation is dead
St Kevins is the castle built on the precipice of Myers Park opening out like a green book
Its bowels are pine-bristled and we can pass up or down them (up to the Steps of Challenge, down to the playground)
After the rain, everything changes like a charade
There are shrieking Polynesian voices breaking mirror people
The sounds of old men learning new alcoholic talk
Margaret the Sentinel giving away every third cigerette like her astrology had rolled over and reconfigured
People still cut through the streets
She is thinking: "Don't rain on me. I wouldn't rain on you."
He is thinking of slicing his boyfriend's ear off and chewing it
K is a cringing zoo in a silver coating
Its smells become highlights
If a stale sitcom can be said to hum, there it is as thick as laughter between walls
Beer, glue, gum, foundation, wrappers, sunken dream with the texture of kebab
The eyes of some flatties are granite now and even the buddhists know the fingerprint of crazy
K isn't a man or a woman because it's a thing in a gender-serating dress
Or do you just believe that because a poem told you on authority?
K is like the Abyss, or leftover 80's mirrorglass
K is what you make of K
And as you travel in its jetstream
As you know
You are K
The Television Documentary
A television documentary reminded him/ upset his notions of a calm flat past/ there is that farm filled with alsatians' voices/ he was five/ there were some distressed hippies going on about artshit/ they had it in for rugby/ some large Samoan woman giving him a nominal tarot reading/ she seemed to say it all though he cannot recall the content/ someone called him a metamorph/ the brown and green hills tag his mind/ Colin McCahon makes him think/ he hates to consider the gaps/ what happened inbetween?/ what's the fucking point of the past if it has holes in it two miles wide?/ the documentary showed a lot of New Zealand countryside and he watched it without gratitude/ some of the apparitions of formation invited soundbeds/ Bach/ reggae/ Patti Smith/ all incomplete/ all riddled with the leprosy of forgetfulness/ he hates the hills that mark his childhood when they swell like giants in his present/ he lives in the city now/ fills a diary/ that he cross-examines at length
Young Godfrey's Death
Without reference to history, what can the suicide of one more twenty-three year old boy tell people?
History. What do people want to know? The history of his rooms in flats, the history of his girlfriends?
There's the last movie he saw, there's the last time he looked in the bathroom mirror
There's even the last shower he ever had
His cashflow was always buggered up the arse by one addiction or another and he usually felt like money was pure evil
Does this tell friends to call a doctor? Is there anything unusual, anything original here, any signal broadcast at all?
When you end your life, every event leading up to that point becomes a gospel and an enigma, the details nails, the rumours formed like a sick cotton wool of overhead cloud
Do you put the suicide note on the witness stand, cross-examining its handwriting, does your desparate vice-like reason squeeze for secrets and cryptic agendas until they finally ejaculate the answers that could have made The Difference?
Sorry. Godfrey didn't leave a note
Godfrey's service was an aquired taste
Mourners felt guilt branded by sorrow
The minister of the church spoke about a Godfrey no-one had ever heard of or met
You get that
Funerals are stupid and choppy and opaque or grey
They are unreal and nonrepresentational
Funerals are fucked and you stage them because it's better than not staging them
Funerals even have the word "fun" in the spelling of the word but it needs the word "question" or "why"
For there are answers
No-one wants to say what they are
No-one wants to think them or own them
No-one wants to be the next Godfry
People can ask the images of Godfry still fresh in their minds (their living minds) "Fuck, man, why did you do it? Can't you see what your shit has done to us, you selfish dead prick? What in the hell are you doing in that hole? You make me hate you, I'm just so angry and sore. I love you, I'm hurt, I can't think, I love you, you left me, I hate you!"
But don't believe Godfrey can't answer back
"I did it because life was just fucking shit. I did it because you couldn't take my pain away. That's why I'm dead: The pain and you, you ignorant cunt! I had to do what I did. And I'm better off down here in this...opening..."
Twenty three years of history, but don't worry, there's nothing you could have done.
One Opening, the Same as Any Other
The wine is working/ I double back for another serving/ The woman is reluctant/ You'd think she was paying for it/ That's the owner over there/ Her husband is in New Mexico/ She is talking to the painter/ His work is jagged and so obviously cruel/ Red spots indicate its fashion/ Most of these have sold/ They make me think of religions/ The trees in them are made of cold green music/ The works as big as doors have the gravity of flat gods/ My ride is making faces/ She wants to leave/ It's near the agreed time/ Someone I fancied once asks me outside for a cigerette
The Creaking Door Music
Some feel they can judge the twenty four hour a day tedium by the signs and notices
SEVERAL CLINICS ARE IN PROGRESS AT THE SAME TIME THEREFORE YOU MAY NOT BE SEEN IN THE SAME ORDER AS YOU ARRIVED
The one dollar coffee machine rattles before stubbornly scalding drinkers
No-one has turned the overhead TV into action
One ten-year-old girl tries to read all the star-shaped nametags
There are two staff called Anna
The blue-grey speckled carpet doesn't look worn
Unlike the off-white walls peeling like dandruff
Patients are funny-looking:
Some shaped like boulders and planets
Some pitted like moons
The woman driving up to reception looks like a squirrel in a wheelchair
Some dramatised painting of coastal weather conditions attracts no-one's attention
(Perhaps it is painted by some doctor who needs the money)
The creaking door music is constant
Some legs on the stairs turn into people as they enter
Others do not
Protected neon tubes try to saturate the otherwise daylit room in a subtle yellow fog
Night must be harsh!
The fifty-something scarecrow needs to make a phonecall and someone nosy is able to point to the wall by the pamphlets
It's a handyphone by name
It takes coins
Not everyone is in vague distress but some people too jolly seem like heretics
Someone with a walk like Peter Sellers sits down and brazenly reviews the notes from his pocket
There are not enough magazines to skim
There is no newspaper
