Pinewoods Park

Pinewoods Park has one big pine tree to justify its name.
The tree’s strung with Christmas lights well into February
because it’s always festive at Pinewoods.
The Park used to be fairly relaxed
but now there’s an electronic gate and barbwire fences.
With a name like Pinewoods Park you might think of rest homes, mushy carrots and incontinence.
Really, it’s a pristine place,
popular with families fronted by proud dads who thrust their arms out the windows of their 4WDs to swipe their gate opening cards.
From the top of Jacob’s Ladder you can watch the waves incessantly rolling into Orewa beach,
much like the unstoppable mobs that would surely flood the Park if it weren’t for those big gates.
Mounted on the roof of a bach near Jacob’s Ladder is a wooden bird with a grimacing face.
The wind blows the bird’s legs round in a circle so when it’s gusty he looks like Wile E. Coyote madly chasing Roadrunner.
Or, like he wants to run right off the cliff into those rowdy waves.
Who can blame him?

Why reality shows aren't gospel

On reality TV shows compassion is
building a mansion for a family of disabled people.
The desired reaction is
all the family members crying and saying that they’re now set for life.
In my experience, compassion
soon becomes something you drag out at 9 and stuff away at 5,
or even earlier.
Finally you’ve had it.
You tell people you’ve supported for months that you’ve resigned.
The real reaction is
them saying ‘yep’ and skateboarding off,
or swallowing the last of their latte and walking out on you into the Helensville afternoon sun.
Then you realise that compassion is
accepting that gratitude can be stuffed away too.
It’s knowing that
you have very little idea of what it’s like to be left
and to only have empty skate ramps and the main street of Helensville to fill this afternoon
and many more to come.

Not on a holy night

As some car nutter’s Ford flag whips about and rain drums on the Novalite roof of the bach porch,
I’m lucky enough to discover that the truth of life is to not hold back from any good thing.
While I drink sparkling wine and the pittosporums drink the warm rain,
on the radio Paul Simon sings about the mother and child reunion and then a man on an ad raves about premature ejaculation.
Prematurely, on time but hopefully not too late I want everyone to reach my conclusion.
Glad tidings of great joy for us all, I think,
as the rain thrums on and my mother and I hope there's still wine left in the fridge

Privacy

Two women,
one middle aged and one older,
maybe the mother,
pause their walk through Browns Bay New World car park
to look at a dead bird
which has crashed into the headlight of a parked car and smashed the light.
The bird is tangled up.
One white feather flaps in the weak breeze.
The older woman squats on her bony haunches and says
‘poor thing.’
I walk off quickly.
The footpath glares up into my eyes.
Across the road the people at Starbucks shimmer in the heat,
an oasis of coffee drinking teenagers
and tiny dogs tied to wrought iron chairs.
That poor bird.
There’s no dignity in such exposure,
especially not in the Browns Bay New World car park
where heaps more clueless bitches won’t get that it just wants some privacy,
for fucks sake.

In the event of a disaster

Cockroaches kept appearing in the bach I was renting.
I trapped one under a glass, phoned my friend whose husband runs a pest control business, organised an extermination, and then got the hell out for three nights.
When I came back I swept up a few dead cockroaches.
Their legs were curled up and in death they looked tiny.
One wasn’t quite dead and its antennae weakly twitched.
I chucked it out the window to die in the bark and weeds.
Suddenly I remembered the cockroach I’d trapped the other night.
Under the glass it was very still but when I banged the floor with my fist it moved a little.
Looking at it I felt bad.
I should’ve let it go and die quickly from the poison but I was too scared not to leave it there.
On TV that guy who used to be on Shortland Street was promoting Civil Defence:
“In the event of a disaster the first thing we’d try to do is reach our loved ones.”
I looked at that trapped cockroach.
It was a lonely, starving creature and all its loved ones were dead and dying.
I felt really, really bad.
But I still left it there.

The three big names

I met David outside Countdown and he didn’t look like David.
He was wearing leather shoes, a black jacket, black dress pants, both a bit baggy on his thin frame, but he was so proud in his interview getup.
Some of the usual David was there.
The hoop earring through one tender lobe and the surprisingly soulful eyes that looked like chocolate buttons.
“You look great, very professional.”
“Thanks.”
David rubbed his big hands together and exhaled with a loud “whew.”
“Nervous?”
“Yeah, but it’ll be OK.”
It was.
After the interview, I shouted Countdown’s newest part time grocery assistant a coffee.
“Congratulations David. It’s such a good start for you.”
“Yeah.”
He beamed, and all I could see were pointy teeth and happy, melted chocolate eyes.
“I’ll be working and Paris Hilton’ll come in to ask me out and I’ll be like, nah, sorry Paris, I can't, I'm working.”
It had been a long time since David had talked joyful, pointless shit.
What these illnesses do to people, making grown men thrilled to accept jobs that teenagers only grudgingly take.
“I’ve always thought of being like whatshisname Hilton and Donald Trump. Hilton, Trump and Gillespie, the three big names.”
‘I don’t know David. Those guys seem pretty ruthless, but you’re a nice guy!”
He laughed and I did too and we finished our coffees.
I doubt if Hilton and Trump have ever been as proud as Gillespie was that day.
The biggest of the three big names.

An example of Courage (a Big Topic)

Love,
The War On Terror,
Death,
Writer’s Block,
and other Big Topics may be sources of inspiration.
You can feel obligated to be inspired by Big Topics.
But I find it:
On the motorway to Silverdale at 8pmish on a summer evening,
while pukeko families are wandering near the road, past lumps of dried feathers and guts that show the risks of such a home.
As I pass the BP station and see the remnants of sunlight emphasising the sternness of the road signs
and making the toi toi glow.
When I notice that on the hill brown calves are jumping and testing out life
and two horses are staring at everything,
maybe being warmed by the last of the honey sun
and by being part of this living poem,
which I guess is really so small
but in daring to be a small poem
is maybe very big.

Before the comet

Waiting for the comet that everyone is talking about.
The one six light years away with a 15,000 kilometre long tail.
The one that won’t be seen for another million years.
Filling in dead twilight time waiting.
Having eaten mussels for dinner, each of them with brown rubbery protrusions that looked like tiny snake heads.
Thinking of poem topics:
My Best Date Ever.
The Man Who Sits On A Mobility Scooter Waving At People.
When Friendship Ends.
Etc.
All what you'd find in the creative writing section of school English exams.
Trying to choose between a glass of wine, laundry or a walk on Red Beach.
Dull, dead twilight time and twilight choices that would smell like a musty room and taste of floury apples.
Failing to make decisions.
Killing time that has already passed away.
All of this before the comet, which will make this time and these deliberations seem even smaller.

Reflections on driving in the North Shore and Rodney districts

Good keen men with baseball caps and sneers clench their steering wheels,
desperate for passing lanes,
which are never long enough.
Young women tie their bleached hair into ponytails and hide their cold eyes behind sunglasses as they speed down the motorway.
Older women wearing sleeveless polar fleece vests and chook haircuts tailgate in their 4WDs,
smugly surveying the masses from their vehicular castles.
People wage war on their way to get their Brazilian waxes
and order their espressos
and visit graves.
The rage bubbles in the people as their pubic hair is torn out
and their drinks are drunk
and their flowers rest on stone.
Resentment is written on their personalised plates and rammed home by their bullbars.
They can’t escape their own fury,
no matter how far or fast they drive.

Try it, you might like it

Maybe I have found an uneasy paradise,
alone with R.E.M on the transistor radio
and strong coffee in an elephant shaped mug.
In no way is it an ideal heaven,
being alone and scared of this sometimes as summer people pass by outside
and all I can do is look at the framed print of peach coloured flowers on the wall.
But it is something good,
to dare to live alone, with no telephone
but with other luxuries, including blueberries and sweet apricots in the fridge, Mr. Bo Jangles now on the radio,
and the sea on either side of my little life.

Always a reason

He told me
“I like to wear all my clothes, yes, all at once and there’s nothing wrong with that, OK.”
He laughed at me because he thought I was too polite.
When I asked him about the art exhibition for people with mental illnesses he said
“it was OK but mine was the best by far, OK.”
He ended each sentence with “OK” and consequently always sounded confrontational.
When I offered to buy him a sunhat so he wouldn’t get burnt delivering his pamphlets he was worried:
“Don’t buy me an embarrassing hat, OK?”
Once, when one of my colleagues rang him he told her he couldn’t talk because his chicken was getting cold and he hung up on her.
He smoked.
A lot.
When he was a boy then an adolescent his mother was having sex with her father.
He knew it.
Face it, you’d be fucked up too.

Decency on Albert Street

I was sitting at the bus stop at 2am reading a book about Kurt Cobain and I was sad, not because he’d died but because no matter how much we’d like to we can’t force our life to overlap with someone else’s.
My feet hurt from an eight hour shift at the bar.
Out of the impersonal city night a woman appeared.
She was what people meant when they said raving lunatic.
Her hair was crazy and her eyes looked in two different directions.
She was in my face.
She gibbered about being beaten and how she needed to get to Grey Lynn.
I thought:
Schizophrenic?
Battered woman?
P addict?
All three?
She snarled and her teeth were a mess but I was drained not scared.
Because I’m stupid sometimes I opened my wallet and flagged down a passing taxi.
I offered the driver all my under the table pay to take the madwoman to Grey Lynn but he said no and drove off.
Fuck I was tired.
A yawn swelled in my throat.
Where was the decency?
In me?
In the people who weren’t at a scummy bus stop with a woman who smelled of vomit?
In Grey Lynn?
Or nowhere?
The city was so big and the taxi was speeding away and there was nothing I could do to help that woman.
She babbled at me and shouted “fuck you” and rushed off rounded a corner.
Then I was alone.
On the bus home to the Shore I reopened my book but was interrupted by a guy who kept looking at me and finally shifted from sitting with his friends to sitting next to me.
He asked was he making me nervous and I said no, which was true.
He told me his name was Manny and that we’d been in the same class when I was Form One and he was Form Two.
I remembered him and we small talked for a bit and then he moved back to his friends.
Kurt’s suicide note read “peace, love, and empathy.”
That night I managed edgy tolerance and ambivalence at best.
I quit that job soon after.
The hours were exhausting and I ended up with a bad kidney infection.
It just wasn’t worth it.

Stop telling the same damn stories

When some people’s names are mentioned only one story ever comes up.
My father told me about a man who would periodically walk through town naked and preach about Judgement Day,
near where DEKA used to be.
That man might've liked oranges and kept a diary.
Perhaps nude preaching wasn’t the highlight of his day.
He could've thought I’ll get this done and then go home and feed the cat.
But no one wants to talk about eating oranges and keeping diaries and feeding cats.
Which is funny,
because why is being able and willing to do things like those every day considered less bizarre than public nakedness?
I suggest you think about it.
Because when Judgement Day comes, God will.

Like Patrick Bateman I thought

After a visit to Browns Bay beach, during which I saw two sets of identical twin babies and an old man eating chips, I drove home along Rosedale Road.
From the top of the hill near a field of pine trees you can see the sign for BARBARELLAS SEXYLAND.
In addition to owning SUVs and expensive dogs us North Shore-ites want to buy better sex lives.
A man tailgated me along the flat.
Maybe he was in a hurry to get from this wasteland to SEXYLAND.
Like Patrick Bateman I thought this is not an exit.
You can drive and drive and drive but all you’re doing is making inroads into hell.
Further on I noticed that the personalised plate on the car in front was the same name as a famous American serial killer, just spelt differently.
The driver might’ve been a suave rapist, or perhaps the car was.
Everything has its own way of violating.
Are personalised plates name badges for cars or drivers?
It was such a long road and a thick, windless day.
My plate idea:
NOEXIT.

Anything can be outdone

Tim McVeigh might’ve been pissed to know that he missed 9/11 by just three months.
Or maybe he wouldn’t have liked to be overshadowed like that.
After all, nowadays, when someone says terrorism, do you think of New York or Oklahoma?

Not such a good couple of days

After a night of almost no sleep,
After quitting my job yesterday,
After enduring a kid kicking the back of my seat for the whole flight and saying things like "if we crash into the sea we'll drown,"
After leaking taps and weak water pressure in the shower,
After washing away sweat and feeling it creep back out,
After having to bear early morning backpackers with their cargo pants and corn for breakfast and bone carvings,
After dry muesli with bitter yogurt and watery tinned fruit which cost $6.50,
After no milk with my tea,
After blowing into the tea cup in the hope that the steam will moisten my dry eyes,
I remember I'm here for a job interview.
Good morning Wellington.

My hometown

On www.oldfriends.co.nz I keep reading that many of the girls I went to school with in Whangarei are “enjoying being a Mum.”
Whenever I’m up north I’m tempted to run down the street,
past the old library,
past where DEKA used to be,
screaming “a part of me will always be connected with this place.”
Since I’ve left Whangarei a lot of development has happened at the town basin.
A couple of months ago I walked along the waterfront with Grandad.
He kept asking me if he could pay for me to have a ride on one of the tourist boats.
I kept laughing, patting his old brown arm and saying no.
He’s got Alzheimer's so it’s not his fault.
He asked me “so, when are you going to do something amazing, like get engaged or have a kid?”
After that we had a coffee in the sun and watched the boats.
A perfect childhood summary
in one grown up afternoon.

ANZAC day in Whangarei, 2006

The predawn sky was thick with clouds and, unsurprisingly, it started raining heavily.
Neil and I searched for Grandad and my cousin and uncle in the crowd congregated outside the Whangarei public library.
Hundreds of people had turned out for the ANZAC dawn service.
The old soldiers, heavy with medals and age, slowly formed lines.
The old soldiers were very dignified in the rain.
Neil and I found Grandad and my cousin and my uncle.
Soon, the old soldiers started marching, in time at first, then more and more out of step.
My cousin and I looped our arms through Grandad’s old, sun spotted arms.
Neil and my uncle walked behind us.
The streetlights bounced off raindrops caught in everyone’s hair.
The old soldiers looked like shuffling angels.
Grandad and I got separated from the others at the cenotaph, so we stood together as people gave speeches and laid wreathes.
Some of the speakers messed up their words and the trumpeter who played the last post squeaked a few times.
It was embarrassing and I was annoyed: war is hard but speeches and a trumpet solo shouldn’t be.
A few times Grandad seemed unsteady and I asked him if he wanted to sit down but he said no.
He was very strong in the rain with his medals and memories.
An old man in the row behind us collapsed partway through the service but he got helped up and said he was OK.
The strength we have and lose, it’s beyond our control.
Afterwards we all went to my uncle’s place for coffee.
We only stayed for a bit, because everyone needed a rest, especially Grandad.
Neil and I drove back to his house.
The day was flat and the whole of Whangarei was grey.
We didn’t have a war to fight and would never have our own one to remember.

Broken

“I like seagulls but the thing is, their eyes don’t move” I told my friend at the beach.
“They also look stern all the time.”
My friend reckoned they were doing it for effect.
Seagulls puffing themselves up just like people do.
We walked along the foreshore in the soft rain.
I saw a seagull with a broken leg.
What happens to seagulls with broken legs?
There was a mural painted near the skate ramp.
Written at the bottom was “artists: Becky T., Liam H and Connor P. aged 7”
I will never be seven ever again, I thought.
Soon the rain eased and we walked back to the car and drove away.