sitting in a bus stop...

previously published in Jazz Waiata (Auckland University Press, 1990)

sitting in a bus stop outside Otara

eucalyptus trees planted in the street
I visited Whaiora Marae but couldn't find the face

of a friend

so I'm sitting out here

with the smell of felt pens

and the whole Polynesian race

as long from Onehunga as can be

Te Whaiora
my journalistic mother where I spent

one week

with the media in 1984

listening to kaumatua Eva Rickard and Sir James Henare

who told us about the future in the past

his grandmother

tasted human flesh

she doubted our possibility of success

I remember dawn smoking on the marae porch

and the love letter I sent

probably still in its envelope

somewhere on the Coromandel

the bus turns up

he clips me a ticket

gives me my change

and I watch their doors roll

as our doors touch

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Message from Mangere

A young pohutukawa blocks my view of our mountain now. In

the darkness

below its slopes the ripples are eclectic: some from shoes thrown

by a lover who sang she was 'two steps on the water', others

from the pull

of a full moon. The street lights flicker, electric flares

reflecting celestial gigawatts: from the mountain top you feel

like God

looking on the glaxay that is Mangere. My civilization spreads

six billion miles, where Pioneer-X signals its existence. I accept

the

emptiness,

the huge distances between the lines of the message: it may as well

broadcast here. And what about Mangere? The 'lazy' volcano, quarried

for it scoria,

renowned for significant suburban wildlife: punks, streetkids, rastas,

heavy metal, Ronald Macdonald is headmaster of the local primary

it's true).

Three kids piss in the doorway of their state house, each betting

on the speed of his stream as they drunk stumble from a concrete ramp -

prelude to lives

Spent at Ellerslie? These infants of the very poor are far from

'unkillable', as Ezra Thump and the filthy rich would have us believe.

Kenny and

Dolly

sang it: Islands in the stream, that is what we are. Gee whiz,

my most urgent personal question is cash or cheque? In Mangere

the PM's the MP:

everyone and everything's in an inverse universe: you get karanga'd

on the shopping malls, the tangata whenua live in genuine chipboard

whares

overlooking the beautiful hei-tiki shaped sewerage system,

the streetkids pop smack, listen to Grandmaster Flash, rap Michael

Jackson's

BAD LP:

I'm Bad, shimon you know it, and of couse they sleep in the public

dunnies with the hole in the cubicle to prick your dick through.

Yeah Columbus

discovered Mangere, but meaty chicken breasts in sesame seed burger

ads are really insensitive: it's just the way, aha aha, you like it?

No wonder

they spraybombed KILL A WHITE on the local Kentucky fried.

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