The Old Man

My mama didn’t raise no fool
I know damn well these new road rules just school our society into a cesspool
That can view an old man getting run over as a glitch in a schedule
Don’t tell me it was his time to go
You’re not Michel Angelo
And this is no abstract art show
It’s time to grow, and
Forego forbearance on forces our fingers can’t hold.

Because how sick is that
How sick is that
That we’d rather watch and wait
Wait
Wait
Wait for fate
Rather than re-coordinate priorities
And pretend not to be phased that we just gave
A human being an expiry date.

That logic of baited waiting
Intoxicated escapism
Sedated consciousness
Soul itching only for the next fading

We are faded
Jaded
Vapid
All wasted
Stumbling through life drunk
Drinking more in one day than a kid in Otara eats in a month

Disgusted by those poor motherfuckers with their hands out
Taking handouts till the rich man says his hand is out
But you know

You are that poor motherfucker

Difference is you’re delighted in your Zombielike third Reich strike
Dim lights and polite applied conversation
But that existence is but a semblance
Difference is you’re not lucky enough to know
You’ve been loved up into shutting up.

It’s called miserable happiness, love
Consumed by selfishness
Unless you, yourself, experience a collision with death
Only then is a passionate drawwwwn-out breath
Inspired within your lacklustre invisible insistence… HA

And normally I couldn’t care less
Preferring a lack of involvement in your self-indulging script
Go ahead, suck your own dick
But I can’t help but give a shit
About the innocent the tail of your car is gonna hit
The family with four kids that won’t be fed
The baby with third world diseases that’s as good as dead
It’s that innocent that I’m gonna miss

Love Me But Don’t

‘I love brown women, you’re all so sexy’

That’s what he said to me, that man at the bar

He got a cold smile and a back turn, but that didn’t suffice

Excuse me miss, he says

Now he’ll probably wish he could take that back

Being two drinks down my track, I say

Honey, love me all you want but I’m not sweet with you

Sexualising the substance of my subsistence and

Reducing my entire existence

To exist within the paradigm of your term of reference

“Sexy”

And brown woman, I am,

But I’m not down with being first brown, and then woman

So excuse the lack of appreciation for the depreciation of my entirety

To an exotically beautiful anomaly

 

Love me, but do not try seduce me

Deny me the pleasure of pornographic pragramatics and sexually-driven semiotics

While we watch the sun set,

Setting on the set-in-stone concepts of equality

Holding hands and holding off the equilibrium of societal responsibility

Because in your world

I’m only responsible for assimilating my physical dimensions to lying down horizontally

In a warm bed of Oriental seduction

 

Love me but do not commodify me

Let’s be honest here -

You’re sharing the love only ‘cause brown girl shares have gone up

Had it been the 60s, it would have been a different story

Akin to socialism, loving brown girls wasn’t in then

And since he’s now calling me feisty

Stopping me midsentence

Like he’s never met a brown woman with an opinion

I’ma share a little something with him

Yes I’m strong, yes I’m independent

But no that doesn’t mean I’ma lesbian

Even though he’d have me thinking I been one

 

Love me but do not limit my infinity

To finite tiptoe-ing and towing the line

With “honesty gets you nowhere, girl”

“Don’t scare him off, girl”

“A woman asserting herself and ascertaining some level of self-confidence is scary, girl”

In a world where woman and rational are still antithetical

Freedom, but only conditionally

In so far as woman don’t express and just suppress lived experience

 

Love me but do not flirt with defining me

So far you’ve tallied up brown, woman, sexy and feisty

But I’ll make it easy for you,

I’m not your brown back-of-the-car, warm-your-bed, kiss-your-soul and make you feel better about your existence type of chick

I’m a product of revolutions, baby

Mind and soul

My people built the pyramids, a world wonder

And you’re wondering why your one liners are wandering alone at night?

Ha I’ll leave you to ponder that.

-

Love me but love me right

Not for being brown

But for not settling for less than a woman’s full worth

Because you know you know a woman’s full worth

Knowing full well I will love you for loving to love a woman to her full worth

Love me that kinda love, the good kinda love, the love of an equal

Love me for me

Loyal to Love

“Love is an enquiry of the world from the point of view of the Two, and not an enquiry of each term of the Two about the other. There is a real of the disjunction, which is, exactly, that no subject is able to occupy at the same time and under the same relations of the positions. This impossibility lies in the place of love itself.” – Alain Badiou

“Love produces the truth of the situation just as the disjunction is a law of the situation. This truth composes, it compounds itself to infinity.” – Alain Badiou

Selective vision, and I knew. I knew that in this process of refinement, filtering others from my field of vision that my heart had decided. My body spoke of my blind-sightedness, an inability to reciprocate.

I feel only repulsion to their longing.

I wish to tell them I long for another, to hold their hearts and sink them into the quiet of a deep and hallow silence. I wish to tell them I am blind now, and like a blind woman, I see through them, seeing only my version of reality, and that I bat my eyelashes only in polite acknowledgement, and that they would not be running home runs tonight. I wish all this in one breath. For in my love is the abolition of an alternative.

Rationalising and self-regulating, the poking and prodding by open-ended questions – that is the death of love. Confusion – that is the death of love. The very question is the death of love. So I stopped. I took courage by the hand and carried on down this path, a path that will surely lead to my undoing.

I am drowning in a fidelity to truth.

Love is truth.

It does not doubt; a commitment to open space and daisy-blanketed luscious fields. Niche and wild, simultaneously; it is a complexity reflecting the intricate mosaic of the human psyche. It is an all-encompassing, all-empowering narrative that helps to define existence in saying, “I am not, but I am, and you are.” In a completely astonishing kind of way, it has defied the confines of ‘reality’ by reclaiming it as its own, disrupting what was, unpredictably.

I now dwell in the plausibility of possibility, paving the way to a future of my making with him embedded in my consciousness. With or without him by my side, there is no negation, no refund option. For what I feel now; it is eternal.

I am eternal.

21 to Life.

Yes, I am 21 tomorrow. I had the celebratory shindig complete with drunken declarations of love and lifelong friendship, and stirring speeches that spoke of sentiment and embarrassment in equal terms of endearment and appreciation. I did not down 21 shots, but I did have a chocolate cake washed down with a few.

Yes, I am 21 tomorrow. I have a place in this world. I am thankful for every bit of blessing I have been endowed with, and for a family and friends who love me, unconditionally, and believe in me.

But please do not confuse my thankfulness for content. I am not content; this is not the end of the line for me. I refuse to have a lacklustre existence of a 9-5 where my principles rust alongside my ageing body, mind having been lost to the tides of conformity and labour exploitation. I am ready to fight for a little more from this world.

I want every last atom of everything, and more. I want all of it. I want all of it for everyone. I want poverty and suffering to be history. I want everyone to make history by making it history.  I want to be the change.

And I will be.

So while my family and friends do the looking back to my past, I look forward into the sunset, to a morning where champagne socialists tip their glasses out and toast the now-empty glasses to the real struggle; a revolution that starts in our minds and hearts.

Happy birthday to me, but more importantly: happy future-changing, readers, and happy living.

Painting Butterflies

Baby, one brush of your hands
Traces the very contents of my soul
Painting me with butterflies
And a figurative eloquence that gave me the freedom
The security
To explore the far reaches of an eternity with you…

Your touch whispered passion
And your eyes spoke it too
Arousing a weakness that I could not fight
For I have no strength without you
And thus no strength to resist you.

So I let you take down my white-picket fenced boundaries
That had been built by years of solitude and deceit
Allowing your gaze to shine through
To the very core of my existence
Taking me by my hands
And leading me into your abyss of blissful happiness.

But yeah baby, the cold hard reality is
You’re leaving inevitably
You decided this long before you met me
I don’t blame you, nor could I ever hate you
But I’m drowning in the possibility
Where I took the wrong turn at hopeful and hopelessly
Lost in a belief that you and I could defy
This – the constraint of reality.

The Fairytale of Individuality: Free Market Edition

Equipped with new and improved versions of kingdoms and palaces, the 21^st century narrative is founded in the belief that the individual is the writer and publisher of their own fairytale.

The pages of the tale detail all the usual exploits – university, graduating, travel, finding yourself and a job, falling in love, getting hitched, settling down, investing in a house to raise the kids in – shaped by the ultimate happily ever after of individuality.

The modern-day kingdom of suburbia, a locality made up of identical property lots, is where most fairytales begin. These localities are idyllic, far removed from the lacklustre of city life where life in slummin’ apartments is polluted by traffic, immigrants and spiralling crime rates. From this we can see the creation of two distinct blocks (to simplify it a bit): a perceived ‘utopia’ in the suburbs that is antagonistic to the ‘dystopia’ that the city could be seen to represent.

In the suburban block, apartment buildings were transformed into two-levelled safe havens with backyards and white picket fences, our equivalents of palaces. Physically isolated from the ugly and ills of the city, these individuals exist within the bubbles of their suburban fairytales. They down cocktails of privilege that incite victim-blaming and ignorant drunkenness. In this drunken state, they start to internalise the belief that those who are not living a fairytale are simply uneducated or not hard working enough, oblivious to the complexity of conditions that determine a person’s social status.

A more sinister transformation also took place. Homes were transformed into houses. The hand of the market painted a picture of aesthetically and structurally identical ‘perfection,’ and what had once been the heart of familiarity, the home, became devoid of culture and character. Value here lay not in the memories it birthed within its walls, rather it was dictated by the ebb and flow of the property market, which similarly went on to shape the individual within its walls.

There, individuals were made to perceive control through petty decision-making as to the colour of the counter top, type of garage to be built and choice of tiling in their houses, which further empowers this festering façade of individuality.  In this way the suburban house almost acts as an extension of the loss of true individual expression and bourgeoning sheep-like conformism. In fact, the meaningless control individuals are afforded over design features of their houses is somewhat reminiscent of their symbolic political power, which is only truly real on Election Day once every three years.

In this fairytale, success is measured by the individual’s material wealth. The house is home to the individual’s journey towards ‘success’, struggling to juggle a career, long hours at work and maintaining appearances within a ‘successful’ circle of friends. In this house, the individual needs the latest gadgets (that everyone has), ‘custom-made’ leather lounge suites (that are sold nationally) and annual renovations (can’t be outdone by the neighbours).  The culture of competition fabricated by this lifestyle dissuades individuals from political engagement in wider social issues, as they are distracted by superficial material expectations.

Sure the names and faces may differ in each suburban fairytale, but the theme remains the same. Each of these individuals is just one of many that participated in backward migration from the city centres to suburbia, all of whom purchased those lounge suites and fancy gadgets, and most of whom now enjoy a privileged position in the unequal power structure that we ironically call our democracy.

So hey, welcome to suburbia: creator of false consciousness and invisible tool for suppressing socio-political engagement. The consequence of which has been disastrous; a society drunk on the belief that if you aren’t living a fairytale – it’s your own fault.

This logic overlooks a number of factors that we have essentially no control over. Let’s start with the fact that no one consciously chooses the path of poverty. No one would write their tale to include being born into a single-parent home or to be brought up in state housing with alcoholic, so-called ‘welfare-leeching’ parents. It all comes down to the luck of the draw. Moreover, the overarching negative attitudes towards beneficiaries and the working class render it near impossible to build the self esteem needed to fuel social mobility. And yeah, perhaps there are examples of people who have ‘made it from the bottom up.’ However there are millions upon millions who have not and this is where the problem lies.

The mass depoliticisation fabricated by capitalism, arguably through processes like that of suburbanisation, not only embodies the loss of the true essence of individuality to the claws of the market, but also the loss of empathy at the societal level. Flagrant attacks on beneficiaries and the working class demonstrate the way in which the prevailing façade of individuality absolves individuals from collective responsibility, blinding them of the real manufactures of illness, poverty and unemployment.

So if not everyone’s ‘Once upon a time’ ends with a happily ever after, and if it isn’t their fault; who is to blame? Well keep an eye on the ‘Occupy Movement’ and stay tuned…

Hopeless Happiness

This is dedicated to someone who became very special to me in a short space of time. I wish you all the best and hope you learn to let yourself drown in hopeless, aimless happiness. 

We are at a precarious time in our lives, where the decisions we make get a little knee-deep in serious, colouring the horizons of potentiality and plausibility in our futures.

Torturous questions like ‘If I leave, will I lose her?’ or ‘If I take the job, am I selling out?’ bounce around in our minds, doing rolly-pollies and jumping jacks, poking their tongues out at our fear, our fear of fear.

We extend the fear that we might perhaps soil and stain the floor with dirtied feet beyond that, to being fearful of getting our feet dirty at all.

In this way, we blind ourselves to the radiant beauty of these moments. We see not the luscious green fields that we danced in, nor the succulent fruit that stained our faces and mouths with their juice, nor the smiles and the laughter, the holding hands and getting lost in each other’s arms. We see only the dirtied feet and the pain of leaving these pastures.

We fear the fear, we fear feeling in excess, and we fear the sting of what it is to live a fruitful and passionate experience, and then have it disappear. Because what is the point, eh?

I mean, there is an expectation to run alongside our peers in the rat race and that nagging worry that this opportunity mightn’t arise again, or perhaps that we are leaving these pastures inevitably anyway, so why allow ourselves to explore feelings with such an expiry date at hand.

And so we fear life and distance, protecting our souls from pain choosing to exist lifelessly. We do so while convincing ourselves that we are happy, when really, we are confusing happiness with trained content. And so we seek comfort over passion, superficial over meaningful, and easy over challenging.

There is a whole lot of ugly in that approach to life. Let me tell you if there’s one thing I have learnt, it is that the pain, which may hurt, which may be agonising, is well worth it.

The beautiful that these moments are submerged in, the process towards getting the floor soiled, the days immersed in bliss, are worth every second.

It is in these moments that we are most alive.

The happiness of these moments might feel heart-wrenchingly hopeless, but we must learn to drown in their beauty, or cease to exist at all. Because when we bleed, we know we are alive, we know we are living, we know we are.

So bleed, get your feet dirty, allow yourself to get lost in the sunshine and kisses of true happiness.

And learn to live a life beyond mere existence.

Society that talks, but doesn’t listen.

Today I woke up to birds chirping and bombs dropping in the background
Today I woke up to sunshine stained with blood, tears and burning effigies
Today I woke up and experienced reality in its entirety
Conscious of the fact that others continue to sleep walk through their todays
Today I realised that the biggest problem with human society was that
Is that in order to relate to, then retaliate against
And reverberate beyond the borders, by which we are defined,
We feel that must have some sort of connection
That consociates us to those that are in the confines of oppression.

Today I realised that we, as a society, have learnt how to talk
Talking over and around
Down to and above
We talk, we talk and we talk
Drowning out the voices of the voiceless
Who cannot verify or validate the deafening pain of their todays
In which they must learn to survive
In a language that we can comprehend –
Survival, which by the way, Darwin knew not of
And wrote nothing about.

Today, Gaza is abandoned by the living,
For life is not equal to or below their futile existence
Amidst the rubble of what once was their beautiful city of symmetry,
That symbolised synergy between all creeds
Amidst the lost souls and dreams
Of grandfathers, grandmothers, sisters and aunties
In a yesterday with a peaceful, loving society.

A society not fraught with a divided ideology that
Extends some abstract Jewish superiority
Denouncing common denominators of humanity, and
Leaving Gaza wallowing in the stinging solitude
Of being referred to in the past tense in the present.
For what was, has gone, and what is coming, will never be.

Today, despite all the UN resolutions and the Oslo Accord,
Reality is still drowning in the abundance of
Heart wrenching sound-bites and word-limits of
Massacres, human rights abuses and genocide,
We continue to skip their flailing heartbeats like broken record players
Because their stories know not how to reach us,
When as a society we have learnt how to talk
But not how to listen.

Beneficiary Bashing and the NZ National Party

“Resetting expectations” back to Beneficiary-Bashing: A Basic Guide to National Party Welfare Reform

When it comes to National Party policy, don’t let John Key’s smarmy smile or Paula Bennett’s ‘scientific evidence’ fool you. A flick through their cryptically proposed welfare reforms and it is quite clear what they are implying without explicitly saying it. Tricky! Although this mightn’t come as much of a surprise considering our PM has never been one for transparency or honesty – refer to the Tea party tape and the backdoor meetings with Petrobas, despite the very recent and very poorly-managed RENA disaster. Bennett claims the Welfare reforms are “resetting expectations,” so let’s take a look at what that really means.

Firstly who are these elusive beneficiaries that National love to hate? Recent figures suggest there are currently 328,000 beneficiaries, which is approximately 12% of the working-age population. Of that group, 26% are on the invalids benefit, 18% are on the sickness benefit and 2% are carers for the sick and infirm, 33% are parents supporting children and 17% are on the unemployment benefit. However National party rhetoric consistently dumps all beneficiaries into one homogenous group of lazy, unmotivated and undeserving, which is misleading at the very least, and absolutely disgusting at its most reasonable. It creates a culture of disdain for all beneficiaries, while carefully ignoring any distinctions or reasons as to their inability to work. Little to no attempts are made to correct these popular misconceptions, and understandably so, because they carve the way for their proposed welfare reforms.

“The expectation is for the majority of beneficiaries to be available and looking for work”, exhorts Bennett.

Hold on Bennett, this ‘majority of beneficiaries’ you speak of are on the invalid and sick benefits, sitting at around 46% of the total beneficiary population. So what you are really saying here is that you expect the sick and the invalid, which includes individuals with mental health problems, disabilities and impairments, to enter or re-enter the workforce (i.e. for their labour to be exploited and the like). Ask yourself if this is the type of society you wish to be a part of, one starved of empathy that has no respect for the sick.

There are a number of draconian proposals to ensure that those who are weaselling out of work are made to get off their asses. One recommendation will see to it that medical certificates go ‘transformers’ on us, and become ‘fit notes.’ Instead of describing the length of time an individual is unable to work, the health professional will describe what the individual is capable of doing in paid work. The last say then goes to “work professionals” who will gauge the validity of said ‘fit note’. This means that your job descripition and work expected of you will be tweaked to allow you to be as productive as possible during this time. (Apparently, health professionals cannot be trusted to put the economy before their patients. Go figure.)

National party policy then goes on to state: “There are clear links between welfare, poverty and poor health. Evidence shows children are better off when their parents are in work, not on welfare.”  This simply is not true; one trip down to the Auckland City Mission will make anyone a believer. Under John Key’s watch, we now have a new class of people – the working class poor. These are individuals with fulltime jobs, who aren’t leeching or being lazy, who are now unable to support their families and feed their children. Why is this? Well again under National’s watch, wages have gone down, which apparently is meant to lead to long-term economic growth, which in a nutshell and without sounding too much like an activist on a megaphone, means ‘the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer’. The trickledown theory has yet to ever trickle down genuinely, I’m afraid. So where’s the incentive to work? Well, in my opinion, there are none. Alongside the inability to support yourself and your family, working conditions are, to put it bluntly, shit (refer to, for example, the 90-day work trial bill and plans to introduce an un-liveable youth minimum wage). So perhaps instead of pointing the finger at individuals for not working, the government could seek to better working conditions and treatment of workers (that’s assuming of course there are jobs to begin with…)

The punishment for those seen to be ‘leeching’ off the system? Benefit-cutting. For example if offered a night shift, the individual must accept irrespective of their ability to find childcare (childcare, which by the way, is on its way to not being subsidised if National has its way! Woo!) This treatment is also known as leaving people out in the cold. For what, you may ask? Well, for daring to be sick and invalid, for daring to be marginalised, for daring to become parents (if poor people can’t afford children, why are they continuing to breed?!) and most importantly, for having the audacity to not have a job despite there being none to speak of (job creation hasn’t been one of National’s strong points, you see).

Claims by John Key that there will be an emphasis on child wellbeing are empty, as they are the unquestionable victims of these reforms. [Note: we have 200,000 children living in poverty, right here in Aotearoa.] National party recommendations include parents being coerced into ‘work-preparation schemes’ if their child is under 3, working part-time when their youngest child is 3 and must work full time once their child is 5. If they have more children while on the benefit, the recommendations state that they should return to work when their baby is 14 weeks. While some of these recommendations are not yet concrete (they have to be elected first!), there is a clear message being sent to NZers. Being a parent is not considered valuable, nor worthy of an individual’s time. The repercussions for children in welfare homes are bleak, whose parents face benefit cuts should they decline work, regardless of the circumstances. The current benefit sits at $322p/w, so any further cuts could see families turned out onto the streets, or lead to neglect when parents have to work and cannot arrange/afford adequate childcare.

Not to mention that these reforms stink of hypocrisy, especially considering Bennett herself reaped the benefits of a positive welfare system having been a solo mother at 17 and a recipient of the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) and the Training Incentive Allowance (TIA), which allowed her to obtain her degree from Massey University.

With all these considerations, you can bet your bottom dollar that National’s forecasts for reducing those on welfare by 100,000 won’t be making Aotearoa a healthier, richer place to live in (perhaps only for the 1%). Increased rejection of claims and coercion into work where it is inappropriate to do so mean poverty rates will go up. Repeat after me: Poverty rates will go up. Poverty rates will go up. Poverty rates will go up. This negates any rationale behind having a welfare system at all, as it is meant to support and empower individuals during their times of need. National’s reforms do the opposite. They worsen socioeconomic conditions, hinder attempts to enter workforce in a positive manner, which will inevitably widen the gap between the rich and the poor and strengthen intergenerational welfare dependency.  Say goodbye to social mobility, folks!

The discourse needs to be shifted away from victim-blaming towards more effective, problem-solving. This would involve contextualising welfare dependency, by disaggregating data, correcting popular misconceptions, and understanding the reasons behind high levels of dependency to begin with. For example, instead of punishing and driving individuals further into poverty through benefit cutting, how about focusing on creating jobs for the 17% currently on the unemployment benefit, who have no chance of finding a job when there a no jobs to speak of! This I’m sorry to say John Key (actually, no I’m not) is the responsibility of the government (yes, he had the audacity to say it wasn’t). So do your job and do it properly.

If you do anything this election, Vote out National.

Lovers in a Moment.

Y: What do you want from me?!

X: Look, I just need to tell you something. It’ll only take a moment of your time, and considering the length of eternity, and our forever that has come and gone, surely you can give me just that.

Y: Well that’s just grand. You want a moment now? Well have it, have my moment, you’ve stolen and wasted a whole lot more of my moments anyway, right?!

X: That’s just it. I’ve still got them, the moments. Let me explain. It doesn’t usually rain here. The torrential rain and gale force winds rained on my parade, and well, it may have taken me a little by surprise. The storm, our whirlwind romance, it brought to light the shallowness of my existence. It exposed a reality I had never known. And that was scary, y’know? It was like looking into the mirror and seeing someone completely different. I didn’t recognise myself any more.

Y: Are insinuating that I changed you? The nerve… You really have some nerve coming here and giving me that crap!

X: No, listen! Excuse this mess of a speech, I mean, this isn’t a speech. I’m just thinking aloud, with you, here, on this beautiful starlit night. And I guess I’m asking you to excuse the mess I made, the mess I made of us. I was by no means implying you had changed me.

Y: Then what? What exactly did you mean to imply? Because I’m getting sick of the tossing and turning, the tidal waves and hurricane mood-swings. I’m done with this game of hang-man. No more guessing and fancily worded introductions, just say what you came to say.

X: Baby, what I’m trying to say is… You didn’t change me, you found me.

Y: You mean…

X: I love you. I realise that now. There is no me without you.

Y: And you felt 3am to be the most appropriate time to express this?

X: Baby, I couldn’t lose another one of your moments.