Poem 465

Kind of bumptious but they can’t all be miserable and depressed … the last line is a joke of course on the Hone Tuwhare poem …

( I like the image of sparrows flying as sketching Chinese character acrobatics … the characterisations of organs … the wet white shorts are from a school swimming day … dried apple moon is one more in a long list of moon metaphors I’ve come up with (send in six and win a prize) … )

Rush Of Blood

Down the street like a white warhead
I go pogoing all the telephone poles
under a plate tectonic sky bells shouting
stories through machine noise of my hydro dam heart
sparrows crack the trees for nests sketching
Chinese character acrobatics bones for brushes
on stretched paper ground fed to the roller horizon
flowers squawk like electrocuted parrots
                                                                                    jam
the waves I keep on
running my round head into the wrong-fit day
fat man liver I say
                                     long grey-green wisdom intestines
floodlit race courses of open heart
bitter torn ticket appendix
I stuff you all in this skin
and run for it sun sinking 
                          like wet white shorts in the pool 
the day skinning away
to win I burst through
                            plastic herniated light
                            where crowds pit the terrace like ancient acid
                            brown tang of battery gone liquid in the torch barrel
                            dried apple moon comet of phlegm rolling
                            down the blackboard sky
                            hear my mother through a megaphone
                            say

                                   this is no ordinary son