Wild in Vungers
He was drunk, staggering all over the dance floor,
bumping into other couples, and throwing his arms
about. Then he jumped on a table, unaware of the
ceiling fan spinning above him. He narrowly avoided
being scalped.
A bar girl dragged him down and, for a moment, he
behaved himself, sitting at his table in the Grand Hotel,
Vung Tau.
The Americans were everywhere. It was hot, leading
up to the monsoon. Soon the nightly curfew would
fall—bringing the White Mice into the streets. Every
soldier knew those bastards would shoot at anything
that moved, no questions asked. But none of this
registered.
He ordered another round—Johnnie Walker Black
Label, with the mandatory Saigon tea—and then he
spotted a fellow Kiwi, a girl on each arm, and waved
them over.
The band had started up again. The Vietnamese
musicians were skilled and played all the latest hits—
Elvis, Aretha Franklin, Procol Harum. He kept drinking,
trying to forget, although he didn’t think of it like that.
He just drank.
At some point, he blacked out.
He woke up in a storm drain outside the hotel. It was
well past curfew, but miraculously he hadn’t been
seen. He crawled into the bushes. It would be a long
wait until dawn. His wallet was gone, vomit was
dried down the front of his shirt, and the mossies were horrendous.
Grief
When you see a child grieve, you grieve.
When you see a son kiss his father on
the lips, through his seeping shroud, you
grieve. The boy cannot leave his father’s
side.
When the pallbearers lift his father’s
body high, he follows like a faithful pup,
staying close, through the shattered
streets of Gaza. Will the cortege make
it to the gravesite? A drone circles, watching
from above.
How Can You Feel?
How can you feel when you know the
truth: all is lies, endless lies and spin,
the precinct of traitors.
Hopefully, your innards won’t
be spread across the bathroom wall.
All is good, all is well, nothing to see
here.
Gaza.
And that’s the pity of it. We are being
eaten alive, one bullshit headline
after another, every syllable loaded
with malice.
To suppose that each is an island, is
to ignore the bathroom in the real,
albeit the suffering continues—as a
widening stain in the fabric.
How can you feel?
In short—you can’t.
Is that blood upon your breakfast cup?
Palestine
Is it right to be shredded in a
cardboard hovel while caring for
your kids?
A mother who wanted none of this,
caught in the maelstrom.
She is dead, along with three of
her children. Her husband who
has been missing for months, is
presumed dead.
Medics attend to the sole survivor.
The child’s wounds do not require
surgery, but his grief is overwhelming.
Shaking uncontrollably, he
shows no interest in the sweets or
toys on offer. He cannot be distracted.
Fromelles
Here lie the glorious dead—
a colony of skulls and old boots,
the detritus of war.
Many of the skulls are broken.
Life rises from the mud.
Foliage invades the wire.
The rats have now departed.
Some skulls seem lost in thought,
others appear vacant.
It’s two years since the slaughter,
no cross has been erected—
just a .303, upright on its bayonet.
The bones will be collected and
buried—not where they fell, but
in myriad rows, named, or nameless.
Blanched
His friends seemed made of wood,
with smiling wooden faces. They’d
not experienced the sharp end and
gotten frozen over, unlike his father,
blanched above Burma, or his
grandfather, choked down at Ypres.
During his own military service, he
realised that war was knowable. It
did not exceed his upbringing. It was
predictable: you fuck up, you pay, or
your mates pay, irrespective of luck.
Not so his childhood.
He was teak on deployment. Frozen
over. He survived—a wooden kid in
a plastic war, now morphed into
Bakelite.
Although he barely understood why,
he couldn’t feel. He was numb,
double-dipped: the early demise of his
mother, and the suffering alongside his
brother.
Marrow
How do you get to the marrow?
With a jackhammer?
Can it be sucked or siphoned, databased?
It is cleverly hidden but the miners of the
soul have learned how to extract it.
They frack for marrow.
They drill for it.
They salivate when it gushes forth.
To harbour the marrow is dangerous.
When soldiers die, they call for their mothers.
Vigil
Hold tight, your blood-red poppy
as you quicken to the drum—
the sound of columns marching
for the lives undone.
The kids who never made it,
their souls unjustly priced—so,
was it worth the glory, this
hallowed sacrifice?
The way ahead is endless,
to drums that never stop—the
young, the old, the dying, each will
bear the cost.
Reveille
Only the experience counts. It’s impossible
to know how bad the trenches really were.
Words baulk—the gagging wind, the
decaying corpses rippling with maggots,
the metallic taste on the roof of your mouth.
How to conceive of such inhumanity, and
its architects? Those who insist that others
do the fighting.
Our eternal ignorance.
For trench veterans, the past is indelible.
There is no goodbye. It leers into dreams,
unleashed by thunder or the slam of a door.
The guns may be silent, but the war goes on.
And the refusers, incarcerated, executed,
buried as traitors—will they be remembered?
Reunion
We survived—all else is secondary.
Words from another planet—on the
main drag of Auckland, in pouring rain,
traffic rushing by. Just two of us in a
bus shelter. The weather—monsoonal,
sticky, like Nui Dat, our last shared
outpost.
It was a shock to see him. Here was I,
half-tanked, stuck between a rock and
a hard place, and he, dressed in a
business suit, neat as a pin.
I unloaded. He stayed silent. Then, he
reached forward and plucked my shirt
at the shoulder, asking, ‘Can this be
taken from you—the shirt on your back?’
It seemed to make sense. His bus arrived.
Then it roared off down the road.
That was years ago. I haven’t seen him since.
Resurrection.
Please, please, come in from the rain. I have
an old book to show you, with a loose
illustration of Pont Neuf, after they built the
Eiffel Tower.
Here, here is the book. What do you think? I
trust the coffee’s good. Can I get you
another? I can’t believe it. I thought you’d left
for New York a month ago.
You are wet. Let me take your coat; I insist.
How stupid of me to think you’d show an
interest while feeling damp; the Paris winter
is cruel.
Yes, yes, the drawing is compelling. So, you
like Derain? It’s got to be him. Fancy finding
it hidden inside this book—it’s a bargain, just
ten francs. How lucky can you be?
The mist is rising around Notre Dame. What
an incredible job the army of craftsmen did in
its restoration. Yet, who could forget the grieving
onlookers singing hymns as the stone gave
way—the spire tumbling from the roof? Ave Maria.
The Waiting Room
He was at it. Pacing around the kitchen at 3 am.
She was due home hours ago. Where the hell
was she? A phone call to the police provided no
answers.
He paused in the hallway, looking at the photos
on the wall—the two of them at the beach, hair
tousled by the wind, and a small black-and-white
image of him in uniform, post-Vietnam, his arms
raised in mock surrender.
3.40
Was that a woman’s voice? He went outside,
but the street was empty—wet tar glistening in the
moonlight. He lit a cigarette, drawing deeply.
It was her first night on the job. The caterers had
provided her transport.
His brain locked. If she wasn’t trapped in a wreck,
then where was she? He couldn’t sit still, and kept
pacing around the kitchen.
Nearing 4 am.
A car door shut, breaking the silence. He hurried
to the front just as the vehicle pulled away. She
walked slowly up the path, brushing by, unamused
that he was there.
He followed. Her ankles were caked in mud.
Surprised, he asked where she’d been, but
there was no answer. The back of her jacket was~
flecked with grass. On the floor lay a crumpled flower.
Inviolate Spaces
Red robins flit among the paperbarks.
Wagtails dart about, foraging on the run.
Through the trees, we get a first glimpse
of our destination.
We cross the low tussock, habitat of
spiders, lizards, and grass snakes,
black as obsidian.
Finally, we stand before the ocean,
realising the dreams of our ancestors.
There is no jubilation—just realisation.
Thus, we accept the offering: sweet
ruby saltbush, freshly dug tubers, and
crustaceans baked over embers late into
the night—each of us transcendent beside
the dark-lit sea.
Le Petit Pont
I know a place. Let me take you there,
buy you a drink, and admire the graceful
lines in your face.
This city of dreams is contagious. A
scene where coffee and croissants
replenish the cavalry, while flâneurs,
poets, and painters watch on, savouring
the ambience.
We lived in Montmartre—you,
raven-haired, strangely wild. How I
remember the late nights, our arms
linked, walking as one, over the grey
cobblestones.
The Seine divides. Our Lady acquires,
casting a shadow where lovers drown.
Many are gone, unknown, who once
sought fame, yet others have risen from
the past to tell us more—loneliness is
the key to this city. I know of a little café…
Arbeit Macht Frei
Auschwitz is cold. Clouds gather in the west. We walk to
Crematorium 1. Formerly a morgue, the SS poked holes
in the roof to deliver the Zyklon B. The heavy wooden door
was reinforced and sealed with strips of felt. During the
killings, the guards revved a truck engine next to the
chamber to drown out the screaming.
It begins to rain. We confront the ovens. The emaciated
corpses were paired with new arrivals—endless supplies
that balanced the fuel load. The Sonderkommando worked
around the clock. At the Black Wall, wreaths glisten in the
wet.
The rain increases. We make our way to the shuttle bus.
It’s a short ride to Birkenau.
The camp is vast. No locomotives or rattling boxcars. No
piercing whistles, barking dogs, or frenzied commands.
No pitiful howls of anguish—just silence. Every spring, the
frozen earth turns to mush. Back then, if a blade of grass
could be found it would be eaten.
Watchtowers glower over us, spectral in the mist. Here
lie the shattered remains of industrial slaughter. Hoping to
destroy the evidence, the SS razed the crematoria, the gas
chambers, and fled.
A few barracks still exist. Rows of brick chimneys rise above
their weathered foundations.
The clouds lift. The rain has stopped. At Little Wood, a muster
of storks takes to the air, migrating south. It feels symbolic, like
something has survived, despite the desecration. We head to
the shuttle bus, damp, barely conversing, chastened by the truth.
Easter Monday
Soon to be a crucifixion, a day or two late,
but judging from your general appearance,
not salt or serpent, not hydra, not scorn or
thorn, but an adornment of heads, swollen
with goodness, ready to explode like good
pilgrims along the way, testaments to love,
and to the day itself freed of time’s shackles,
travelling like a river over the ripening plains.
The Bush
And then, if you pass the test, having put your
heaving brain to rest, there will come the first
miraculous sign: a fantail—arabesque, will-o’-the
wisp—is gone. Did you see it?
Wait, there’s more. Its mate, piquing your interest,
shows the complexity and flexibility. And there,
unseen, a kangaroo appears. It hops twice and
sits, listening—a sentinel. Then it departs—
hop, hop, hop—agile across the broken ground, away
and away, merging into the stringybarks.
A feast awaits those who are patient, but little awaits
those who rush, whose craving usurps their revelation.
Dark Fate
Defunct silos cast shadows in the setting
sun—to the edge of the Earth and beyond—
their duty done, awaiting demolition.
Here is the fabulous dream of man: a
crumbling nuclear power plant. It exists
despite Chernobyl spreading havoc across
the food bowl of Europe—atom by atom. It
exists despite the agony of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, where people were reduced to
marks on the pavement.
The plant will soon be gone, but the waste
will linger longer than recorded history—tens
of thousands of years.
Decommissioned subs clank hulls in
backwater graveyards, reactors removed to
temporary locations—in open pits, guarded
until a better solution comes along.
Our nuclear legacy is perpetual, a stain on all
that lives. As it lingers, power corrupts, and with
this comes the fall of man.
The Scourge
Not Satyricon, not a pastiche, but a full-blown massacre.
A felling of nature’s bones by the wicked children of the
apocalypse. Fellini’s wildest dream would not incorporate
such destruction: living wood reduced to ash. Are Van
Gogh’s olive groves being mocked as weeds, while the
Louvre sinks below the Seine?
No city in the world would tolerate this: the howling
chainsaws, the curled lips of the climate heretics, the cars
jammed in rows waiting for Armageddon, the subservience
to foreign entities, the sheer ignorance of these Philistines,
a biblical epic played before a dumbed populace—the
dreadful has already happened; nature tormented as birds
circle the carnage unable to find a branch to rest in the fabulous grove of dreams.
What has Adelaide done to reap the whirlwind? What are its
crimes? Show me its crimes—show me its crimes! Once a
fair city, now strangled, its writers’ tongues glued to the roof
of their mouths, inarticulate under the shadow of dead wings.