If the Wi-Fi on your hi-fi on your hi-def on your Wii
is connected to the iPod that controls your PS3
and the Dosbox on your Xbox booted Linux just before
but the Bluetooth on your Blu-Ray doesn't like your MP4

and the HDCP settings on your HDMI port
tell your SDHD SD-card to suddenly abort
and the CIA are calling 'cos your SDMI mix
just got copied to the KGB instead of MI6

and your Flickr's started Twittering your pics to Wikipedia
but your router won't re-multicast your Vista multimedia
and Google Search is peeking through the Windows in your brain
and your Blackberry is bleeping 'cos it thinks it crashed a plane

patch your PHP's Apache with a picture of a badger
then go paste it up on Facebook and sign someone else's name.

Vacuum isn't
Kilometres
At all
It's skin

Space is an egg
Sunny side, scrambled
Boiling over the city
Any way you want it

And you could pour
Light from a jug
Onto grids of crisp
Houses

The trick
Is to wake up
Sideways

Evenin', sir. Been out on the town tonight, have we?

Just a routine checkpoint, sir. If you'd kindly whistle into this bag.

We need to establish your blood happiness levels, sir.

Yes, just a whistle is perfectly sufficient.

Or a yodel, yes.

A rousing chorus of 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' would indeed do the trick, sir. If you truly feel it.

No sir, this is not an evidentiary happiness test. That is to say, it has no actual what you would call legal standing in court. But a failure would indicate sufficient cause for us to request you to accompany us to the local store for the full Seasonal Fitness examination and certificate.

His orders, sir. Our mutual friend. Him with the beard.

No, I'm sure neither of us wants that, sir. If you'd just whistle? Or hum if you prefer. It's the mirth that is the significant factor.

Involves candy canes and intubation, I believe. I've not witnessed the procedure myself. It's only my first night on the shift. Your lips go here. It may help to pucker.

There's no call for that sort of language, sir. This is for your own safety and protection during this extremely tolerant season. Once again I have to request that you perform the procedure and display visible jollity.

Sir, I'm afraid that is a fail result and I'm going to have to ask you to accompany me to the store. You are not at this point under obligation to exchange gifts, but a card will be required, and possibly one phone call. Should a gift become mandatory, you have the right of access to a gift-wrap of your choice; if you do not have gift-wrap, a tasteful bag with store branding will be provided...

Absents

I looked everywhere
to find you a present

The only thing they didn't have in stock
was me

So I bought it for you
but then I remembered

The only thing I don't have
is you

Collision

Christmas is a collision
white knuckle deadlines
multiple party damage
the smoke of burning bridges

one final accounting
of the year's sins and omissions
told, carried, spindled, posted
racked with the cards and wine

white crosses
on the new year's grave
resolutions
to live forever

Forgetting How To Fly

Christmas and the smell of
haybales on the plains

and looking up at a sky
black and full of dust

through a tin-shed window
and bright in that star river

the Cross, a kite
for hanging dreams on.

It's been some years, now,
under white fluorescents

and I'm missing something
I've forgotten how to name

that space inside, to fly:
I need a holiday from me.

I weep, I rage against eternal night. I beat my fists on dead lunar stone. Why does God keep smiling?

starholes

this is us in '69:

blue marble
snapshotted
halfway to nowhere

(-- what we did on our
lunar holiday:
scuffed shoes, tossed rocks --)

that's all there is:
one pale blue dot

(-- except, ah, the fire
which burns through
starholes
from the other side --)

it's not like I'm asking
for much, God

just the earth

I replaced it with the more ambiguous 'Off The Grid'. Perhaps I should have kept it. But the installation already had dark themes and this felt just too despairing. Gethsemane is not about the end of all things, it is just a place we walk through.

extinction

my lips break
when I try to pray
for the world

it spins so fast
the times blow a gale
pain overwhelms me

industrial genocide
garden to necropolis
in my generation

what is there to say
that is not agony?
that is not despair?

we have slept
the night was long
and even our awakening

kills things

barometer

trees cramped with pain
a bruised ash sky
moaning of a hot dark wind

storm's coming

sun stains like wine
a bone dust moon
vacuum rips my breath away

storm's coming

I watch alone
under the cyclone's eye
strips me to the truth

storm's coming

no more choices
but to stand
face up

storm's here

This poem is about a personal response to climate change in a New Zealand context. Christchurch is an exposed, swamp-built city. We inhabit an urban environment without immediate danger from weather, but there is always the shadow in the back of the mind, in the cold wet winter days, that the Canterbury river plains are a fundamentally inhospitable place to be should the water rise. On Rapaki Track just up the hills from my childhood home there is a monument to children who died of exposure when the weather turned bad. Some part of me has never quite forgotten the fear as a small child of being lost, displaced, a city kid thrown back to the elements. I wrote this as a challenge to that shadow.

Stormwalker

when the hot nor'wester
scorches tussock up Sugarloaf
I will remember you
on Olivet

when the freezing easterly
drenches Brighton Pier anglers
I will remember you
by Kinnaret

when the winter night
shades westward over Halswell
I will remember you
in Gethsemane

the storm rises
the wind whirls
the wave breaks

it will not touch me
it will not touch me
it will not touch me