THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT the hackneyed
images of blood red berries overflowing
spoons of lust, or nibbling fistfuls of figs
while drowsing in honey-bee summers
on cane coloured beaches bleached by heat
of too many pomegranates, hidden like apples
of knowledge, high in the snake-filled trees.
THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT juxtaposing
insanities of life to force a pattern
into schizoid jigsaws that bend the corners
of anyone's sanity to fit the spaces of colour
left on a table where passing-fate,
munching on marmite toast, can sweep
one's life onto the kitchen floor.
THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT a long-night's
journey into days on Ganges rivers and
Westcoast spirituality, scratching for
powers in pounamu embedded in tapu
and litigation for those without the blood
of brothers who cite mythology and treaties
while sisters scale the fish and cook the kai.
THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT those tenuous
friends who, in the gulps of opening wine
at masticated launchings, predict next closings
according to an economic index based on
table-d'hote small talk that culls the literary
goats from the chosen rooms of France when
the liqht is too fragile and the work, too faint.
THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT fasting into
seraphic revelations of millennial proportions
on the way to Damascus, or Outram, along
unsealed roads at dusk by lonely paddocks,
watching for aberrations in the heavens and
passing cars, while kicking at stones and chances
to make a difference and a sound
THIS POEM IS NOT ABOUT all or some
of the above. THIS POEM IS ABOUT
obsession, and accessibility of tools
that rouse the masses to introspection,
turning themselves into pillars of verse
to equal the plagues that drove
the Egyptians to murder, the Jews to flight
and God to issuing commandments