I need to come back to Huma. It's not that I blame her, but that I could not feel 

One day when I was nine or ten I went for a walk with my granddad on Patea Beach, and as we came around the head he saw the face of the cliff fall away from the cliff to stand, upright, beside it. I didn't see it but he was shaking, weird to me, and there was the broken cliff.

This morning I missed my bus and walked alone for the first time in ages, relieved by April wind on my eyes which I strained reading comments in the dark as my son went off to sleep. Someone was explaining that as we do not know our great great grandparents, nor our great great grandchildren, there's no real reason to care what happens in a hundred years' time. And there's a certain lightness to imagining that - the freedom of the unloved, dumbness going on like a bell already rung. 

Greenglass as a surname

While visiting a marketplace on a basketball court near some quiet apartment buildings, I couldn't escape being poked, and the fingers were genitally aimed, though fortunately I was clothed. I punched the pokers in their faces. But the American man was strong, and I could not land my punches with any force, and he grinned and went on to poke again. I must write about this, I thought, and only later - why? Did it have something to do with the way Netta's insistent pause, on Question Me, had amplified the sportscaster's attack, so that he was now a Breakfast resident? And that I did not want to share her tears, whose magnifying properties I fear, suspended as they are in a medial element that can not touch and dissolve "the blinding dust of earth"? After Great Expectations (Chapter 19) I read an interview with Christina Stead saying no, no, as though carving piered vaults in a cliff wall. Yes, I think, exhilarated, I too can think no. So "their hatred of men among all things" - well I've never met a feminist who - Nic calls to say he's accidentally addicted the toddler to the video of Rick James's Superfreak - the lycra, the bounding cleavage - and now he's stuck, gormless, to the couch. "He's all right.” Yeah, all right with me. "We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on.”

when you walk across the soft dirt you are in the wheel tracks. a shipping container exerts no force on your path. the stairs at this point are still wooden, scaffolded in iron to the blue above. ten storeys of stairs in crate-wood against the iron palings and it’s time to empty the plastic bag. nine am before the temperature comes above freezing. eyes hurt without sunnies. vents stacked shine in the earth. can you look at them and not think about the circumference of a body? and what the dead want of us. and what the dying make of their new surroundings. you will stop to pull me back once your own dream is over. the sky’s not empty it’s tensile. the sky’s not empty it’s a pie-crust. the sky’s not empty it’s the skin of all its snakes.   

a little bell is ringing softly under the air conditioning vent. I hope that you are sleeping easily. a little bell is ringing softly. the union poster curls. I hope to return your book to you having read it. a little bell is ringing softly and the clock ticks, muffled. I hope that something holds you through the moment it comes, so that you don't fall. a night does come. we sleep very lightly while you feed, and then return as adults to the wordless world. the doors hiss softly as they open and then close. I cannot hear any footsteps through the glass. I hope that you are sleeping easily each night, and that you wake slowly without fear. 

I'm getting tired of these wee prose poems in a sub-hejinian sub-scalapino mode. I haven't got shit on either of them. it's a series of gestures - atmospheric setting detail blurred into the bodily, non-sequiturs, irregular pronoun use, confessional lines not pursued, faintly surprising rhythms. its crap. 

I've seen leaves in webs before but I've never seen such an elegant necklace. you could be riddled with it before they ever found out. droplets fall from each of your spokes. your awning the wind. I could be wishing you free of pain while you need to take care of a hollow for mildew. I wouldn't do that. behind us sunlight reflects off the green glass and back through the leaves that become a glimmering plane. this needs defence, which is why no one will defend it. though I think she wrote it so I could copy it. and now I am walking past a spaceship renovation receiving a call that he's a misogynist. that's all I've ever done. nearly home. it's coming out your ears. 

"Whatever makes you feel free, that's what you should do. It's really simple."

in the span of ten minutes you can mount and dismount an elephant many times over. you can sew up the mouth of a full sleeping bag or run two four minute miles and have a heart attack. but if you have two contractions you're still not in labour. and you cannot make and drink a cup of tea.

pejorocracy/kakistocracy

Al and his girlfriend Nikky come back to Mum's house to visit with me and to see this place they haven't seen. They're sort of teenage tourists in a span of life. Poppa is dying his luminous death in Mum and Jim's bed. Al and Nikky stack up horizontally in the bed beside him, their heads forming a short column of two, like they are conjoined at the neck. Their watching him quietly is a kind of service to my family and it becomes the quality of the night. At the same time I know they are going to keep the luminosity. I am working in the kitchen but on my behalf Mum then watches Al to help him sleep well until morning. This is the reciprocation of love.  

the library books are somewhere even if you don't remember whether the ring was left on the side table or the wallet that they came over your front lawn in uniform to tell you about this is the height of the uniform coming over the front lawn over the tiny wall we are here to tell you about what has been found a bus goes round whether you have the money it is just down the road where he comes to the door and it's dark stacks of newspapers stacks of bottles you'll have to not mind see I'm blind and the milk the wallet months later the wallet many months later the library card that never got cancelled  his face turning in such a way that you don't see his eyes so it's still in circulation that anyone would move that way down a hall that they have always known the wallet on the bare table the cards still in circulation and he turns at the very moment you hold out your hand

this could be something you refuse as a matter of principle. repetitions which leave you knowing the words. leaves on sun. falling over repeatedly out towards them. he is in the corner against the glass shelf covering his face. we walk in circles through his howling. this is a zebra. this is a giraffe. against the world which makes noises that are suitable for their names. you refuse that for it is too sweet. and when you are more tired you crawl. and when you are more tired you will sit. the ball falls away little atom come to fetch. here skirting on a very fine rim. they are dressed in dark grey and their brooms help to steady them. 

it falls over the edge and we go to chase it falls over the edge we go to chase I have paste for that kind of rift I have six friends who would like to host the water falling over the edge in their garden that is a trampoline quivering out. it is a beginning each one wants the ball but after his molars are pushing up through we find another child hands us the ball and it is a lamp leading to another lamp back and forth all the way to the edges of the garden where the soreness tips over and falls away. she will ask you what it is the the four of them in motion. she will ask you if is your hair so long you can't afford scissors. the water in their faces falling away with the ball you throw in each  direction not yet catch. sore in a little circle around a credit card account. I will find a way to chase it. giving me a tiny edge fine hairs on the fine edge of his mother comes only for a day. she comes only for a day. we'll touch it. to their warm garden made of green water with its flowers and take that swelling there. let's go and take some words with us. he has learned to clap. see the water shakes over the edge. 

sunlight reflecting back off the green glass through the gum leaves moving like an element

   One day when I was nine or ten I went for a walk with my granddad on Patea Beach, and as we came around the head he saw a huge piece of cliff fall away from the cliff to stand, upright, beside it. I didn't see it but didn't doubt him; he was pale, shaken-- I had no reference point-- and there was the broken cliff.
   This morning I missed my bus and walked alone for the first time in ages, enjoying April wind on my eyes which I strained last night reading comments in the dark as my son went off to sleep. Someone explained there that we do not know our great great grandparents, nor our great great grandchildren. So there's no real reason, she said, to care what will happen in a hundred years' time. But you can look if you want to: it's your foot there on the pivot point, your limbs lost in molten air. 

dreamed last night that I was somewhere - some kind of bland resort-chalet type place, not at a beach - with school friends, but fundamentally alone. my mother called to tell me that she had decided to kill herself. what? but she wasn't asking for help, she'd already decided, and she'd just called with a certain kind of hardness, almost spite, to let me know - as in 'I thought you'd want to know'. I started to argue, shout, plead, cry - 'if you die I will never, ever be okay again' - and I'm thinking of T as I say this, that he will not be okay either. I cry and scream and protest for a long time, and then she laughs, and hangs up. 

the tar-pit wasn't of much interest to me. the falling, of course, was real.
mother's milk wasn't of much interest to me. the seething kid was real.
the herd wasn't of much interest to me. the enclosures, of course, were real.
the haunt of jackals. the thirsty ground. the churning cream. the bottle of tears.
his age wasn't of much interest to me. his transparency was real.

I begin at night. I paint my skin and the hairs of my body and of my head. Now the sun is rising and bright hairs fall, flakes of skin fall all around me as a glittering dome. Now I have their eyes they come in and they are an audience. The sun is rising. It is midday and the head throbs. So they are pressing on the fence. They are spilling into an air zone. Now I name the secretions of my rivals. This one bleeds. This one's nose dribbles as he cries. They will be devoured. The sun is rising. Flakes of skin fall from the rising body. The clamour is an open breath and it casts a shadow. The body shines. 

as a kid I could imagine the end of the world as watching stars go out. not trying to decide what to serve for the first birthday party while watching fictional radiation sickness on tv while clicking away from the map of the oozing red globe on the herald front page. what have I learned? that ending is a fantasy but irrevocable loss is real. that I can write about it think about it feel sick and then forget. 

my mum gave us this picture book by a swedish behavioural scientist which is supposed to put the baby to sleep, and I gave it back. the rabbit is drawn in coloured pencil and he looks unwell, like someone who's been smoking a dozen cones a day since 2004 but hasn't slept since deciding to quit on tuesday after breaking a rib coughing. the book warns you off reading the book to someone who's driving, then the rabbit's mum takes him on a long journey to see uncle yawn. well, I'm sorry about uncles, but in the sense of general regret, not personal responsibility. my memory of being hypnotised in 1988 by bert potter the communist free-love therapist who turned out to be a paedophile is surprisingly clear. there were a hundred people in the room and nothing happened except sun coming in through the trees and the big bay windows onto the cushions and the groups of quiet cuddled up people, and bert talking slowly about a beach and the water line and a stone and a box. I feed my son to sleep, and sometimes when he doesn't sleep we just go out into the back yard and talk to cockatoos or look for the moon. I don't know if that's the right thing to do or not but it works okay. 

why, when I catch the bus, do I share it with old women and not with old men? are the old men still asleep or are they already at the shops? did they walk? did they drive? one of my grandfathers would only walk into town, walk from balmoral to the city and back again in three hours. when he died of a heart attack fishing on the rocks, the doctor refused to go down to the beach, and the men who found him had to carry him up to the road. once I dreamed I carried him on my back through a desert. because he was dead he could no longer walk. I am not sure, in a heart attack, if the heart attacks or is attacked, and if it attack-fishes or is its own end in war but still quietly with the tide, and perhaps the bus's old men are already dead. or perhaps they are driving regardless, like my other grandfather, who nearly died when, functionally blind with glaucoma, he drove into a sheep, and who nearly died when his ride-on mower rolled over on top of him at the bottom of a slope where very long grass kept on growing. 

it's a cool day. gum trees turn liquid in the air above the roof. leaves dangle as though they are in water. leaves blink on and off. branches hold their place. this cloud bank holds its place, a form reaching back, stillness being the one you want to return to. his hands, his kiss. this cloud expanding upon you, and holding its form. we still call this summer. you put your backpack on. you check the sky and leave the house. from the bus stop the mountains are blinking on and off. we will call each other today, holding the phones up to our ears. and breathe, ready to speak, looking up.

they say her husband is marvellous, he's done a terrific job of looking after her through it all, though he does like to tease: that the directions she gave us to the lunch might as well have gone through launceston, that it was curious she didn't bring out all the biscuits. that the tale of a lost chain-watch really began when she leaned over a bridge above a river and fiddled with the chain - unfortunately for the young man who dove in to retrieve it, and saved it after all, the little watch soaked but still ticking. the memory makes them laugh quite together, bright joy in liquefaction. 

First among the poems I won't write today is the one about the girl who was pitied for being ugly but who turned out to be clever. The poet of this poem has a special insight about acne scars, but I am not that poet. Next is the poem for the depressed friend I haven't seen enough of lately. It says I'm sorry for being awkward about your depression, I was just feeling at that moment and not feeling into words. But why pick up the phone when you can send a text. Then there's the one about the way that terror disappears along with extreme heat, and twenty degree days open the pores like a light and easy moisturiser named something like January Breeze. It doesn't help, it doesn't help.  Nor the news-sheet poems made of torn up, clogged up language for tasks, rolls and rolls of them, covering walls and windows, but always peeling away as though sortable, insisting on being sorted, black and white, impasto, clammy, opaque.

Everybody's at the river, swimming in run-off and dogshit. Six swollen cigarettes
dry in a hat. There are a handful of paths. I should have worn some different shoes.