So therefore, where have I been in this poem, in this book? as a record of a journey. The idea of a mihi, a formal welcoming, that each of these in as much as they deal with loss is also accepting that a new way of life is coming, unknown. working this into the body so it's known that it's not an error. 

I feel fucking terrible about starting to write today. But I am taking myself through my emergency writing steps anyway. I have headphones and music, and two hours on the selfcontrol app started. the source of the terrible - having the feeling of Starting Work tomorrow and the pressure on the time, like everything is banked up behind the wall, and the pressure to attend to all that, a sense of anger from the other about what I haven't already done. A "WHY HAVEN'T YOU DONE THE DISHES" feeling. Which is not trivial because it was threatening and constant and overrode my needs and preferences all the time. Or maybe not all the time but there was no negotiating? And what I needed was undefined, and no kind of priority at all.

Anyway, I am taking myself through these steps. have music, headphones, time will stretch. There are dreams.

Last night I dreamed I was in the water - the sea, a large bay, with Mum and Cathy. There's a really strong current sweeping us fast in a direction which may be beyond where we want to go. I think I've dreamed about this water & coastline before. There are multiple bays, islands, it's quite pleasant but there are the dangers of being in the water to negotiate. Swimming out of the current to the land. This was the plan, and I'm not sure if I have the strength, if this is too big an ask.

There's another section to the dream. Getting out of the water onto a pier, this place is Japanese, we are in a museum? A row of artefacts in the centre of a room. A very weathered beam - or is this the pier?

To be in the cultivation of a dream life, which is more important than the poetry. This feels like a really core piece of the puzzle. I want Martha to understand its importance. And in that, finishing this book is not the same significance. It is not INsignificant. It is just not the 'end' of all. And my accountability is not in having it published, but in developing this life.

a dream in which a man and a woman are crouched, face-down in shallow water. I/the woman stands up, and immediately begins labour.

the water was in a stone room, ancient and quite dark. the labour is very active, powerful, almost angry. 

other than that I feel stuck, 'blocked' tonight; maybe a symptom of having just done marking which was finished today. part of it is actually a little different to what the word block suggests - it's like charge through me every time I see another art work or *something* that i approve  of - a movie title, a photo a line, something. 

very hungry to do some kind of collage, and for the patterns in asemic writing.

and thinking I would like to submit the ms to Vagabond Press, seems like the right place. 

There was another dream, about curtains. I was in an apartment in a new city (visiting or staying) with my partner, who was black, and our young child. The apartment was large and borrowed or rented from people we knew. It was positioned over a large complex of public swimming pools. Our kid wanted to go swimming and I had promised that he could - but as I was looking out the window it seemed like there were few people down there - I wondered whether the pool was closing at 3pm, and it was nearly 3 now. Still I felt we would take the boy swimming somewhere. Meanwhile we were going through the rooms, talking about how we'd replace the curtains, and the expense to get the place looking presentable. The end room was messy but I said if we tidied it up and made the bed it would look fine, with its existing yellow curtains. Not our style but I didn't need to use that room (it was allocated to me), because I already had a study elsewhere in the apartment. We made the bed and it looked good - see? I had a phone call with the apartment owner, a kind of shallow, perky woman, explaining what we would do.

There was a sadness about this dream, the guy I was with, who somehow felt broken. I loved him but he was weary with everything he had been through just from being a black man.

*

This is mysterious and I'm not sure where to start with it. The new life coming. Reserves - that we have limited resources to play with immediately, but that we have (and I have) things in reserve. 

I dreamed that we were at Douglas Rd, and Mum was saying "untastic!" or "unfantastic!" to me. What? "Untastic!"
I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Turned out she had been asking me to fetch her books to read (I hadn't heard her/been listening), and she didn't want fantasy novels. I was going through all my books on the dining table, and looking for things I wanted to share with her. I put together a set of non-fiction things that I really liked about masculinity, the history of masculinity in NZ and related things. There was one book I liked so much that I had two copies of it, one 'good' and one for giving away. I wanted to give her the unblemished one, as a gift. But it seemed that one was already well-thumbed and I had already turned up all the bottom corners of the other one, marking all the passages that were about men and landscape, as a my own research interest.

But then the overall feeling in giving these to her was that she wasn't that interested anyway - they weren't what she was interested in reading.

*

I feel like this is in the space of the last dreams. But with the distant/disinterested mother again. The excitement about books is still located in me. And the mother's disinterest is isolating me, taking away the value and energy in what I want to communicate. 

Dreamed that I was in the Patea house, my grandma's house, staying there during a literary festival. With other writers there - Tony Green, John Scott. There was a young woman on the tv who had been featured that day at the festival - dynamic and very different and interesting. I'd already bought her book, it was on the table, and I was a bit proud of this because it somehow reversed my slackness and disengagement. I said 'oh I have her book here if anyone wants to have a read'. But the others said no - that they didn't like to read while they were writing their own work, for the purposes of focus. I was surprised again to find myself on the other side of this signal of 'goodness' and application, and to find it wasn't necessary, but still, I wanted to read the woman's book. I began dipping into a chapter, and it was incredibly rich and engaging -

it was in the first person, so it became the dream, where the writer and I were simultaneous. A recount of her memories of her nanny, who had four large, full breasts. She could remember being breastfed, this extraordinary unlimited experience of plenty. There was a question of whether the nanny was black, a figure of exploitation. There was a question of whether the writer could really remember this far back, but possibly (because of her class status and the period of her upbringing) she had been nursed by the nanny from infancy well into her childhood - 7, 8, 9 years of age. I buried down into the nanny's shirt and found a breast in all that fullness. I had not yet found a nipple to latch on to but the satisfaction was huge.

*

following the dream I was able to write yesterday and got quite a bit done, with a feeling of casualness, entitlement, laziness, freedom. This dream and the classroom dream have the same odd feeling to them, of reversing the rules and requirements of my creative work in a way that doesn’t feel credible but is really gratifying in the dream. And in this one (actually in both of them) my resistance is outsourced to some authority and legitimised, leaving me free to engage and be fed and satisfied but in ways that feel suspiciously privileged. 

I wonder - why four breasts? why did the breast I  suckled have no nipple? and what about the movement into the book?

at 11 weeks when things were tenuous I thought I felt the baby feeling me, aware of me, and sometimes when I surged with awareness of it, it surged back on those currents.

now I feel like he's tucked in a needed unconsciousness. I know he's alive because we've needed so many scans, but I don't feel his awareness, or I feel like it is wrapped around his own growing, where it needs to be.

saying 'he' still feels like a slight aggression at this stage. it is fun for us and it lays out some sort of hazy movie for a future but he's still an it, unburdened by personhood or gender, not needing any appearance. except the appearances which tell us he is alive and growing. is that an intrusion?

into my own willingness to be open to the fortune of death, to sail with it again.

precipitous is that day of digesting and wishing for the sleep that turned into diggers

you're stretching me out

or I'm bleeding around you wee baby I can't tell

just bloating

bodiness

I'm going nuts. Eating is a HUGE DEAL, it exhausts me. Bleeding again overnight the last couple of nights. so tired and tearful. I read a bunch of stuff on SCH and it helped sort of then I think it overwhelmed and upset me, that this could go on and on, that it could cause later problems. 

moss eats canvas, fire ants crabs land crabs blue crabs to

crawl up a rope because I love you

a nature poem,  boring for an island which might die crossing a hot  road

and vulnerable christmas children (they bite their shells)

sometimes you do find being in groups is difficult 

against the fence in the sun 

and not much shelter or school crawling up a rope

well we love us so I changed then you changed then I changed 

but it's not a chase anymore it's more like oh, you're here, we are

there's something about - how do I get from the abandonment to the chase? they're not the same
or the plenitude of the weed species while keeping the loss