Albany Village (8.30 am)

[photograph: Jack Ross (2006)]

O Canada !

Birds crack like a whip
as Kathleen sings
Myself I shall adore
abhor?

On the truck
sheep graze
a carpet green

O Canada!
those snowy peaks
the maple leaf
that hand tapping its ash
out in the road

[First published in Bravado 2 (2004): 22].

Roadworks

[photograph: Jack Ross (2006)]

Roadworks
Auckland Geography

(for Anna Rugis)


The city is a map of the city
– Ciaran Carson, Belfast Confetti

This is my current work-in-progress -- a set of interlinked poems about my own personal map of where I live. They run in geographical order from north to south ...

Here are the poems:

1. O Canada! (30-31/7/03)
2. Cruisy morning, eh? (8-19/8/03)
3. Tentacles of Destruction (14 & 20-27/5/04)
4. The Asbestos Hands of Dr. J. (7/10/04-26/1/06)
5. We were Soldiers (20-21/4/02)
6. Castor Bay (17-24/2/06)
7. DEATH & BEYOND (2-5/6/03)
8. Refrigerium (20-22/1/06)
9. Birkenhead (21-22/11/03)
10. A Sunday Walk (13-31/7/03)
11. Such Manners (21-23/12/05)
12. First Night (20-21/4/02)
13. Cycle Couriers in Freyberg Square (17-25/2/06)
14. This DVD contains everything there is to know about Stargate - & more! (13-15/9/05)
15. The Kid Stays in the Picture (27-28/5/03)
16. Every girl’s a babe (6-10/9/05)
17. Newmarket (30/6-22/7/03)
18. Unsuccessful Applicant for Neighbourhood Watch (29/9/05)
19. Coromandel (26-28/7/03)
20. Blinds (28/2-11/3/06)

It also functions as a game, the Auckland Game.

The rules are here.

Basically they're very simple.

Start off on the place gameboard, then move onto time.

Here's a list of the poems by place, and here they are again by time.

Restart button

I've been meditating for some time posting some work online, and had a website all planned -- pictures, internal links, the whole nine yards. I even went to a community education course at the local high school to find out how to do it (it always seemed to be raining on those nights ... I'd walk up through the football fields and see the other poor sods all processing around the visitors' parking area trying vainly to find a space ... even finding the right classroom was a bit of a chore. I went to that school when I was a kid, but it's grown monstrously since then ... the numbers tailed off gradually till there were only really two or three of us stalwarts left, determined to get our 49 dollars' worth).

The idea of paying further for the privilege of having my own domain name and having piles of crap hosted by some faceless provider didn't really appeal to me all that much, though, so I'm now hoping to accomplish much the same thing with this blog.

So it'll be a bit erratic, and intensely inter-connected. There'll be single entries, longer pieces, and ongoing raves. I don't know if anyone (except me) is going to like it, but hey, that's not my problem ("Hey," indeed -- why does one go all Californian the moment one logs onto a website?) ...