Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three November-December 2024
Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition
To my haters, poems by Michael Steven.
To My Haters
after Villon
I have found your place of worship.
I know the very pew where
your knees bend in supplication
bothering that bogus god.
My patience is long and merciless.
I will wait for the perfect afternoon,
the right hour to exact my hit.
I know where you hide your train sets.
The last thing you will ever hear:
the sound of twin hammers popping.
I will empty clips of ‘platonic
models’ into your hollow chests.
Muzzle flashes. Powder burns.
Forensics will mention shell casings
hitting the ground like syllables.
I won’t even wear a mask and hoodie.
Earthwork
for T
Do not ask me where I went: you know.
Hell is anywhere. It is any place
where you are not.
Often I wake in the wrong hours because
my mind is a district of overloading
circuits, darkening alleys
and doorways.
I cannot handle returning
to an intolerable,
interminable dream where I am muted,
where my hands are busted
and bloodied
from digging through all this rubble
backfilled by loss. I am scarred-
up and shaken.
I am living here again to love you.
I am here to read your body
by heart, by heat.
There is dirt and gravel and scoria
in my mouth. Listen, baby:
I am singing to you.
Dropped Pin: Cashmere, Christchurch
for Chris Holdaway
No gods or scrub fires on the hills today.
Only black cloud, formidable threats of rain.
The cold endures in a blood continuum,
in this helix of hard, damaged genomes.
Winter is perpetual in ancestor city
where only the broken help the broken.
My dead grandfather slides through wards
of white plaster, polished kauri floors—
still bathing; still dressing, feeding, drugging
shell-shocked returned servicemen.
His face mirrors the spooked, the shook.
An inheritance he passes down to his children.
There are spaces in the drug safe of time.
Missing bottles of amphetamine, barbiturates.
There are question marks on case folders
locked away in a cop shop filing cabinet
where our faces are supposed to be.
Genomes in a helix, in a blood continuum.
© Michael Steven
Michael Steven is a poet from Tāmaki Makaurau.