POEMS
2019 From Behind the Machine was published in 2017, Memoirs for Fishy in 2018. I tried a third novel and failed at it. Not wanting to give up writing entirely, I turned to poetry.
From the start of 2019, the first thing I did each morning was write a poem on a typewriter. The number at the top of each one is the day. I gave up halfway through the year and threw the later ones out. Others I lost. These are the survivors, photographed and uploaded.
In 2020 I went home to New Zealand and spent most of my time hiking the Tararua Ranges. In 2021 I was unemployed at my brother's house in Gisborne, where I spent six months teaching myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Python. Between 2022 and 2025 I wrote four novels. Only the latest has been published: The Magic Café.
If you've read it, you'll know about these poems. Here they are for real.
-t-4- On arriving into Hualien I was met by a town - which I would
-t-3- Mariam was what you might call photogenic. At twenty years
-t-1- I feel sad to see another year pass
-1- Some have inquired how it is that I meditate
-2- What would life be like without the birds?
-3- So deep now into the summer
-4- In life, there seems but one decision,
-5- Ibegan the first evening of this week watching the rains
-6- Alcohol is no friend to madness
-7- Often when I converse with those younger
-8- A poet by morning
-10- Being set up for failure
-11- Taoism sees a middle way between order
-12- I am now convinced
-13- As I believe it
-14- It shouldn't hurt if whenever our mind ran blank
-15- Like the wind
-16- From where my apartment sits
-17- The old saying
-18- Then at a certain mature age
-19- A lover of his body
-20- The first thing I remember
-21- "What is it that you really want?"
-22- There comes a time
-23- "What shall you write with your new found
-24- I shall go out today
-25- We could have kept believing that there was nothing beyond
-26- What shall I do for Australia Day?
-27- The sun rising on a Sunday morning
-28- If someone asks me
-29- Take nothing for granted
-30- The taste of olive, capsicum, parsley
-31- There's a young boy in my heart
-32- After a brief moment of heat wave,
-33- Even the greatest stock investors of all time
-34- One day someone may ask me
-35- One nights bad sleep out of thirty five
-36- The difference between being asleep and awake
-37- As I walked out to the ocean facing edge
-38- Just a classy, dignified
-39- The pure silence of the early morning
-40- The old saying
-41- I could walk along the sands
-42- While seated upon the watery porcelain throne
-43- It is the wise
-44- Wealth is a feeling
-45- We don't know what it's like to lose anything
-47- I must say that it does turn out
-48- What could possibly bring more pleasure
-49- When I peer out my bedroom window
-50- How does it feel to earn your first stripe at something?
-51- How should I know what it's like to be so attractive?
-52- Just think of it like this
-53- I must confess to you Ms Typewriter
-54- I like to think of the situation like this
-55- Like all versatile forms in nature
-56- Between the water and the earth
-57- There are certain characters among us
-58- A simple waiter in a much loved cafe
-59- Like cotton to be washed and hung out in the sun
-60- To awaken every morning to this typewriter
-61- What to say for true love
-62- The early hours of a Sunday morning
-63- Supposing that luck has anything to
-64- What if we were given the number of days
-65- How could I forget?
-66- Just to bring it all back
-67- There's too much memory within one
-68- Like an industrialist
-70- Moving now into autumn
-71- What is in our lives to lose
-72- For the first time now
-73- and now the rain returns
-74- After three months they said
-75- Watch how in just over a decade
-76- I love the sound of it
-77- Keep your head up
-78- Even some mornings
-80- Like a new sheet of paper
-81- What can I tell myself but to learn
-82- If there's something out there
-83- There's a bird in the park
-84- The practioners of spiritualism
-85- So here you go then my dear boy
-86- Life as experience
-87- if only to write something today
-88- Here's to change
-89- And just like that
-90- I feel the calm to be
-91- A lit fingernail
-92- There are some games
-93- What we persist with in life
-94- I sometimes - now
-95- It's been about six months now
-96- It is on moments like this morning
-97- I had some thought this morning
-98- "The history of interest rates"
-99- I could fall back to sleep
-100- For the first time that I can recall
-101- I know I told myself to write every morning
-102- Even though it all seems 'up in the air'
-103- "Well hey" he smiled, "you've got to
-104- There are people in this world
-105- There's a good friend of mine
-106- It's here now
-108- It just occurred to me
-109- there could never be
-110- it is social identity
-111- If I knew Schumpeter
-117- it's like this in the morning
-118- Under what sign was I born?