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.