A Poem: Poetic response to New York (First time)

A Poem

Love letters to my love
Fast forward to Berlin—
No, to New York. I present my series of nose bleeds, crushed up used condoms with
eaten eggshells and underwear stuck to ATM machines in Berlin with a note and pen to leave a note, to whom I don't know, to a tired and bemused group of students and tutors, claiming it to be part of my expression of the sacred in daily life for the average female body in relation to money—attempting to bypass or transgress/transmute the clichéd relationship between—no big deal—how do they relate? Transaction, sharing, exchange, protection, just let the body bleed. Why stop the flow?
RE-late.
These ships are late. These relations are strained. I hear their brains straining.
It’s a body brain drain.
As they place money on my meditating naked body as an invite 'to open your hearts,
open your wallets and...' flock around me. 'Make a wish', I say to someone and then grab her hand like a beggar.
Rewind
to a gravel road. In New Zealand. Surreal expansive dusty rocky -scape. He put his hand over my mouth and screamed my name. He put dust in my hair and called me his baby, said I was wild, he was crazy for me, would I marry him?
Everyone likes a good story.
What's the true story?
The first time I made love I got carpet burns. You can use your imagination there—be
as heteronormative or not about it.
The big reveal is out. There are no secrets left to shout.

Listen to the big silence, the wise crone told me.

‘There's a woman trying to talk to you’, he said. ‘Should I listen to her?’ I asked. He shrugged.
Rewind.
Then I got a bloody nose from being smashed in the face by a rugby ball, and my brother deliberately ground me into the dirt to make me bleed. It was one time I really got really hurt—I liked playing sport with my family.
Fast forward.
‘Perhaps it’s too personal’, said one tutor. ‘Have you thought of taking yourself out of the picture and working with other people's bodies?’
Good point, Mr. Mister.
Mist.
Missed
the point.
Fast forward.
I miss my baby, when they ripped her from my arms. Don't say it’s useless, don't say
forget it, don't send me roses on your behalf. Love is mean, love hurts. I will love you til the end of time, I would wait a million years.
Not my words.
Rewind.
I was the only one who wouldn't sleep with someone else's boyfriend, so I didn't have
sex for a good five years. Present > gift.
Oh, this is WAY too personal.
Give me more pornography. The world needs more fake sex, more fake boobs, more

lies, more cancer, more plastic bags, more non-committal dismissive encounters. When the goat finally rode into the foyer it was like an epiphany for all. Rewind/made up.
I asked a Maori carving in a marae what I was and the answer was 'delivered'. Fast forward.
A visa appointment set, health insurance, a date with the KSK woman. A whole new world, a dance—is/it charades? I'm OK as long as it’s smooth...not Kafkaesque. Not KGB. Like before.
I hold out my hands for inspection.
I hold out.
Dreamt of both my deceased grandmothers in one dream and had a dream within a
dream, recalling the dream to a stranger. One said, 'French is important.' But then Paris was her favourite city.
Then he writes to me, ‘Je t'embrasse.’
Several performances in the past weeks, some of which I found tiresome but some very interesting moments—some brilliant moments, actually—squeezed through a keyhole. Yes, I am in the right place, a morphing of performance memories fading or collapsing together now into snow dust, fast, which will only evaporate before my eyes, fast. Oh, and these tiny little snowflakes on my clothing. I have never really noticed them before, but they are so perfect. A new friend, very sensitive, pointed them out. Allowing the moment to pass, we capture nothing. When we have the illusion of it, bliss. Always excellence from the street, too much, I have to close my eyes. I am inspired—life touches me, I am so grateful for my life. Even the ugliness inspires me. Fertile decay. Berlin is paradise, compared.
I hold out my hand.
I am an ambassador, I got told last week, for my country. Hahahahahaha.

Then there's your flood. What the hell? I want to know all about it!!! New York is really getting it too; I recall a whale washed up on the shore when I arrived after the hurricane... nature spewing up onto the dystopic metropolis. On the climate change front in New Zealand a famous filmmaker was swimming off the shore of a wild but popular west coast Auckland beach last week and got bitten by a shark, then when trying to alert someone, completely eaten by five in front of everyone. No one ever gets attacked by sharks in New Zealand, ever. I have in the past five or so years intuitively felt sharks very close in the water and got out, saw one jump in a very safe beach... and saw aerial shots to confirm my suspicion. They are coming closer!
Inside my hungry brain, there is so much space for new learning and experience, growing pains, growing hurts. Something will deliver—I feel like I am a mad woman, nattering to myself, birthing my own letters—see how insular? I am from New Zealand.
I say to him: Life is performative and poetic, in generalisation and detail... things are in motion. Life is life—lived. Shared. Known, unknown. Lost, found, dropped, held, cared for. Remembered, connected, fragmented. Allowed. Created. Believed. Questioned. Felt, heard. loved. Vulnerable. Alive. Precious.
Truth is only for us to know. It slips from sight, it’s OK. We breathe. We move. We touch.
liebe .x ale.x.a.wxyz. liebe zurück
He was swimming in the Mediterranean and suddenly saw these dark spots rising from beneath and yelled to his friends to SWIM. Deadly jellyfish were coming to the surface; only one of his friends was stung and had to go to hospital.
Rewind.
What are these scars on your wrists? I asked her. My boyfriend cut my hands off, with swords. She was the woman who saved her friend by protecting her with her arms and managed somehow to put her hands back onto the bones of her wrists before the

ambulance arrived. That is amazing. THAT is amazing.
Present/Past/Future/In the line of the sun, which looks like the path to GOD on the
water, one day I saw a question. This depression-soaked culture, repressed English hangover, could not crush the mystery I felt so deeply in my bones.
I was told by a healer once that I am an untameable horse with untrammeled creativity, indomitable; as much as people will, do and have tried to stop me.