Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
After Juvenal
She’s leaving.
Getting away from it all. Leaving
the dry echo of her laughter
like leaves, scuttling down
bare autumn streets.
(Don’t blame her, really,
unemployment and isolation are
minor evils. She’s leaving this rat race
city, perched on a faultline, Transit
bulldozers breathing up our arse and the Xmas
advertising machine, already kicking into gear –
in August!)
She’s leaving, she says.
A batch up the coast, a place
in the sun
turning over
new leaves.
*
Ātārangi has been chucking her gears into the boot, but she takes a break and we go for a wander, stop on the bridge that joins the two halves of the Bolton St cemetery.
I can tell something’s on her mind. I wait. When she’s ready, she’ll spill.
Once the Kumutoto stream flowed here,
as women worked on the banks, harvesting
thick blades of harakeke.
Now there is only the glint of glass, and the roar as traffic
swarms into the city.
I lean against the side of the bridge,
concrete sun-warm against my back,
and wait.
*
“This ain’t no place
for a people of mana.
They don’t show respect
for our tikanga.
I’m stone broke
and they can’t get enough –
fines for this, fees for that…
I’m out of here,
before I trade in my mountain bike for a mobility scooter
I’m heading back
where Takitimu touched the shore
and Rongomaiwahine changed
history with beauty.
So hāere ra Wellington. The suits
can have this place, all their
wheeling and dealing,
smooth talking tax-evaders.
Once these guys were the runts
of the playground. Now
they run their own puppet show
pulling the strings of the beehive Pinocchios,
these are the knights
of the Business round table.
And what can I do
in the global marketplace?
I never learnt how
to lie. If a dollar for me
means a child’s life enslaved,
I cannot accept it. The earth
will not feel new pain
by my hands.
I refuse
to become an accomplice
in the orgy of capitalism.
If a man is rich in today’s world
you can be sure there’s blood
on his hands. Not all the golden sand
washed seaward from Oriental Bay
is worth the price you pay, racked
by insomnia, as your tipuna weep
tears
of paua.
And for what?
To see it all
crash
with the next swing
of the stockmarket?”
(She pauses, for a moment, as a large truck rumbles under the bridge,
with its load of high sugar intoxication, the sides plastered with Coca-cola indoctrination)
“And don’t get me started
on the Cocacolanization of Aotearoa.
I can’t stand
the rise of the billboard,
the mediaplex, the harbour
clogged up with burger wrapers.
The country is measured out
by miles to the nearest McDonald’s.
Our tipuna should see
what this land has become,
land of the long, white, complicity…
The strippers on Courtney Place
with their mermaid pools and their
stars and stripes bikinis.
What would Kupe think
if he saw the young guys
with their Nike sneakers and their
mud-streaked rugby shirts?
Guys from Samoa, Fiji and Tonga,
aiming now for a mansion like Jonah’s.
Quick with the hands, unlimited verve, gift of the grab
a professional contract, courtesy of Adidas…
he’s a jack of all trades,
autobiographer, all-rounder celebrity
visits kids in the cancer ward…
Tell him to score and he sidesteps his opponents,
dashes a hundred metres in ten seconds,
charges through another six players
and soars over the line.
“When men like this parade
down the LOTR red carpet,
with purple-shirted directors
and Hollywood starlets,
while we are pushed to the back
of the crowds - we,
who first drew breath on the spines
of these slumbering taniwha
We who were norished on ripe
karaka berries.
Tiwhatiwha te pō, tiwhatiwha te ao.*
“‘Out of those front row seats,’ we’re told.
‘Your incomes are far too small.”
And so, my bro
is once again the object of pity and disgust
with his grubby blanket around his shoulders,
the thick skin on his feet. ‘Out of the streets,”’ he is told.
‘It’s an important day, and we must look our best.
The law’s the law, and you’re under arrest.
Make way for some Hollywood bods
with ragged clothes and hairy pods.’
Such were the fruits of that pokokōhua
Kerry’s Public Places Bylaw.
And there’s applause as a herd of hobbits
swarm up the bucket fountain
pissed as skunks
and urinate right from the top,
a really spectacular display splashing
from the upturned red buckets .
“And while we’re on the subject of pokokōhuas,
let’s talk about university management,
like that grey-haired bedell
and all his vices.
He graduated with first class devices
in cellphone management
and sleeping with sheep.
Now they’re running rings with their
red tape
red stickers
a tenth circle added
to the bureaucratic inferno.
Here an academic, free-born,
must spend his lunch break in the dark recesses
of the library, making markings on the
stickered spines of un-cost-effective books
making room, making way, saving money…
Why not sell the books
the building and the view
declare an end-of-day profit and
never have costs again?
“Politics is just the same.
If Te Rangi Hiroa were to have a say
before the select committee today…
If Apirana Ngata were to take a stand
on his ancestral land, the foreshore
he’d command
little respect. The questions would fly
‘How many Harleys does he ride?
How many Armani suits, how
many mansions?’
Each man’s word is as good
as his greasy hair or his
share portfolio.
What poor man ever gets given a Harley
or his own political party?
Nobody finds it easy to get to the top
unless God’s on his side.
Inflation swells
the rent of your scummy flat,
your benefit seems to shrink
with every passing week. And yet,
if you were to wake up out in the wops,
you’d be happy enough, and no one would care
if you wore your ug-boots and hoody
down to the shops. Even the kaumatuas
need no better gears than a baggy tracksuit.
But here in Wellywood, we must toe the line
of fashion, living beyond our means
on student loans or the DPB.
“What small town hicks ever bargains on his
house being demolished about his ears?
Such things are unheard of in sunny Tolaga Bay,
or Nuhaka, nestled amongst the humps of
ancient whales. How can we sleep
secure when our homes are poised like
houses of cards, destined
to collapse before the bypass bulldozers.
“If you can face the prospect
of no more film festivals and flat whites,
find your own place in the country.
What it will cost you is no more
than you pay each year for some shabby
moldy flat. A veggie garden out the back,
and a short walk to the beach, enough
kai moana to feed the whole whanau
and then some.
“Stress causes more heart attacks amongst
city dwellers than any other factor
(the most common complaints
are high blood pressure and stomach ulcers,
brought on by over-working.)
How much sleep, I ask you, can one get
in an apartment with paper thin walls, the traffic
thundering past, the pounding beats from
the nightclub downstairs.
“If a rugby game summons the PM, she
speeds there by police escort.
There’s plenty of room inside the limo,
she can read, or go over her speech notes
or snooze
as she races along. Meanwhile,
we’re crammed in a bus
or queuing at the gates.
Some lout swings
a beer bottle, another tries
to score with me,
steps on my toes.
Do you see all those catering staff,
bustling to and fro, keeping the bigwigs
fed and watered, their hangers on
getting their free booze in the corporate boxes.
“Outside the stadium, on park benches and under
motorway bridges, street kids sleep, and a homeless man
sways along, fallen off the wagon again. If a carload
of drunken rugby fans swerved off the road, what
would be left of his body? Who could identify bits
of ownerless flesh and bone? The poor man’s flattened corpse
would vanish along with his soul. And meanwhile, all unwitting,
the folk at home are busily chucking the pizza boxes into the bin
and grumbling about the biased ref, and the bloody Aussies.
The homeless man stumbles into death,
no spirits guide him to rarohenga,
no one wears the pōtae tauā , or calls
a last karanga, as he makes the lonely journey
to leap past the red fuzz
of pohutukawa.
“There are other perils in Wellington, of various sorts,
what with earthquakes and gales,
windows blowing out all over the town,
So pray and hope that nothing worse
than pigeon poop
falls on your head – not
a window pane or a piece of a roof.
“After the game
some wanker in a flash suit
surrounded by admirers
walks straight into the choicest club
but the bouncer blocks my way
“Stop” he says.
I have no option but to obey –
what else can you do
confronted by a thug
twice your size? Walking home
under the watery glow of streetlights,
a wanna-be punk, reeking of hash
pulls a knife on me. “What are you looking at?”
he sneers in my face.
And what’s the point of calling the pigs
They’ll probably say
I brought it on to myself, f’ing nigger.
New prisons rising up all over, bulging
at the seams with my bro’s and sisters.
Even the cop’s early forebears
made sure the only prison stood
on marae land,
keeping us in line.
I could go on till the cows…
but it’s getting late,
and it’s a long way to Mahia (a long way to go)
don’t wanna get stuck in the rush hour jams
So
ka kite ano,
e hoa. Don’t lose touch.
Whenever you cruise home to Turangi
invite me over to share your lake and mountains,
watch your cuzzies ace the kapa haka champs.
I’ll put on my warmest woolies and make the trip
to those chilly heights – and listen to your rants
if you think I’m worthy…”
No hugs, no painful fairwells, “No tears bro.”
She just turns to face the road
north.
The blue
smudge of her car
fades
until it can be hidden
behind
my hand
still raised in farewell
and then
behind a finger
and then
she’s gone.
Leaving me
with her rants
her words
butterflies
fluttering
down an empty street.
And so
I pin them down
sketch their bright markings
in a heavy book.
*
I leave them
pressed
between the leaves.