Poem 27

This was printed in The Listener, accepted by Marion McLeod while the regular poetry editor was on holiday … she got told off because you weren’t supposed to publish things about suicide … 

… I can understand that editorial point of view more now … the poem is pretty bleak for a massive circulation national weekly … it stems (I guess) from the more ‘punk’ sensibility I wanted to bring to poetry and also from my experiences as a psychology researcher reading the details of every NZ suicide in the year 1980 … 

( I like the bully-boy heart and the way blue uniforms summons an image of large men crowded into a small space … )

A Little Twist Of The Lips

Let me tell you said the corpse
to the police
if I'd been hungry
I would have gone looking for something
to eat
if I had been tired
I'd be asleep now
but I wasn't
anything
           so I yawned
           and cut my wrists

perhaps I just didn't like the way this bully-boy heart
pushed my blood around
maybe I wanted to know what it was like
to be a scarecrow
or to see how many blue uniforms
could fit in my bathroom