Picnic at Orakau Memorial


Rain is sniping down a grassy knoll like a slow divorce,
spreading phosphates into a mandala shape
of mud and night crawlers.
A mandala like a broken mouth
sucking the fortifications
in a fractured peach stone
to quench gums plump with bloat  …
the worms remember.

A worm dredges up a black and white picture 
of moist, salty hog-flesh from grainy diodes,
flesh mixing with sand and sparrow in his gizzard,
rumbling past his five hearts
out what passes as a sphincter
until it mingles with
bayoneted blood, wound slime
and spear splinters.

The deep mud is stoic.
The topsoil might be more helpful,
so much mixing, floating and loss
during every fertile storm-fall.
If pressed, she might sketch the solid weight of bodies,
wriggling like they had dancing fever
as musket growls uncork cheap red wine
with every patient volley.

 

Burns Building (Second Degree)


A gravestone-grey, unshaven rock,
pocked with a munching complexion; 
a straight-jacket of sullen, epiphyte evergreens,
whipped brown by beer swears, vomit, corrosion.

I ghost past into another dumb numb week
through the safety-glass chicken-coop doors,
where a cardigan with a food-stained sneer
chomps vainly from the photo-board.
Pink skinned others stumble within
by the light of corpse candle halogens, 
unwrap ham-sam mausoleums
while they contemplate original sin.
These dirty straw-people
stagnantly mumble
about Curnow’s blue period
and the price of gurnard.

The trees marinate in brown mud…
they hollow down with toenails,
but cannot feel the dirt
through the drainwater.
 

© Chris House.  All Rights Reserved.