Matthew Harris

The Resurrected Author (Poetry NZ - Issue 34)

There you are

looking at the page

and here Iam/was, earlier

typing

And I, then,

imagine/d you now,

with your critical eye,

hoping that I, then,

will have had something

good to say.

And rightly so - you’ve

given me your time and

I shouldn’t waste it.

So let’s geton with it:

there you are,

and here I was.

Am I speaking?

No,you’re speaking to

yourself.

Listen.

It’s not my voice you hear in

your head, but yours.

What am I doing then?

Am I thinking through you?

What am I telling you?

I am telling you that you’re beautiful.

And you are reading.

Reading this:

You’re more beautiful than a billion stars.

Wondering: How so?

Then, shrugging,

thumbing over the page,

you leave the print of a

galaxy in the

corner

Second Person (Blackmail Press Poetry Journal - Issue 18)

You say you need to find yourself,

as if yourself is some kind of cliche,

wandering around out there somewhere,

which it is.

I suggest you stay at home

for a day or two,

because you occasionally

show up there to

use the mirror or

take a Tramadol.

No point in

going out again tonight:

even if you are out there, you won’t

be able to recognise yourself

any more than you can

watch yourself blink,

any more than you can

taste your own tongue.

And even if you can

find yourself, what will you do?

Look at yourself for a moment,

then pass by, whispering to

yourself in the second person?

As you can probably tell, I have

my doubts about your

chances. But, please, if

you do round a corner somewhere

and see yourself standing there,

tap yourself and point in my direction.

Premise One: an Apologia for Love (Toe Tree Journal - Issue 3)

Yes, we've had some disgraceful

moments,

felonious arguments,

but I'm just as ashamed

of our innocence.

Just think, the ridiculous

premise we started with:

p.1: I am alone, you are alone.

This is an oversimplification I’m

sure, but humour me for a moment and

remember our first night together when

we said things we didn’t believe ourselves

and agreed wholeheartedly

with each other's inconsistencies -

What sort of a raison d’être was that?

Did we have anything

in the way of a sound rationale?

Were you a red herring?

Was I a straw man?

Let’s hope that when the conclusion does arrive

that it contradicts the first premise

in other words, what I’m trying to say is

you get a better argument as you go along...

Shedding fictions in Albert Park (Side Stream - Issue 17)

Old oaks tear out their hair

old oaks tear

out their hair

at the thought of

another winter.

I decided then: we were walking

through Albert park

just like lovers, my hand in

the back pocket

of your jeans.

Foot-scuffed leaves.

Your ankle turning

on an acorn.

The old oaks.

Nothing to say, so I told you

I once tore out my

hair - all of it.

Neither of us believed me,

or even pretended to.

The truth is, there were

no leaves in Albert park

as we walked.

We were already in winter.

It was time to say goodbye.

We had told many lies.

The line about the oaks

came from a haiku I wrote

last year.

The whole thing

was a fabrication,

a page in a fiction,

a leaf that had to be shed sooner or later.

The 274 (Poetry NZ - Issue 34)

Sleep against the city,

against reflections: sedans passing

through trucks,

pedestrians through buildings.

Ignore the fear that you

might not get home – that

you might wake up inside a

circuit of barbed wire fences,

a land of large wheels.

Ignore it - don’t worry.

Someone else will reach up

and light Stopping.

Let your temple quake against the glass,

count the power-lines in your mind’s eye,

imagine you are kidnapped, blindfolded,

memorising the turns. Wait

for the shock of stillness.

Loose Ends (Trout - Issue 12)

The laundered rags outside the

mechanics workshop,

strung up like Tibetan prayer-flags.

Would anyone think so?

There are certain strands of likeness,

common threads, running between the

monks robes and the overalls, between

the monk and the mechanic:

both are always

head down,

humming to themselves,

working on the nuts and

bolts of transience.

Are there sufficient connections

to get us from here to the next place?

An old guy smoking outside

the Philosophy Department once said:

"We're like clotheslines, and every

experience we have in life is pegged to the line…"

I didn't understand, but

nodded like a toe toe in the wind.

"…the more years behind you

the more you have on the line,

the harder it all gets to understand."

Again, I nodded.

Later, these fragments connected:

Friday afternoon of Labour weekend,

I see a ute going down the road with a long

plank surrendering one piece of white cloth.

The need to string together words,

to tie these loose ends.

Pathoscape (Massey University, Creative Writing Anthology, 139.123: School of English & Media)

[pron: pey-thos-skeyp] noun [Origin: 2006; 2007 for def.]

Etymology: pathos "quality that arouses the emotions," 1668, from Gk. pathos "feeling, emotion”

When revisiting a place significant to your childhood,

or, as the case may be, a place you used to frequent with an old lover, such as

+ scape "place, or scene," 1773, abstracted from landscape;

as a new combined element, first attested use 1796, in ‘prisonscape’

The Eden Garden

24 Omana Avenue

1. the connection between a place or setting and an emotion

2. a feeling of being confined to an earlier time and place

You can’t distinguish between your present-self and the

self detained in the past. You’re neither. You need a new definition.

The inorganic collection

i

Here it is:

the street is a large intestine.

ii

One might mistake it

for a ticker-tape parade:

the strips of packing paper,

the un-spooled cassettes.

iii

People arrive naked and

depart in boxes;

appliances arrive in boxes and

depart naked.

iv

The plastic bag whirls

in the winter winds.

A stock sequence

in the pantomime.

[Cut]

v

I don’t know which to prefer,

hailstones in the gutter

or polystyrene beans.

vi

O, thin men of Grey Lynn:

what were these things doing

in your houses in the first place?

vii

A suspicious van will be trawling past,

often an Econovan.

viii

Next to the jar of bolts

and the bag of sea-shells

an old bucket collects the sky.

ix

It seems as if they’re never going

to leave. And then, when you least

expect it

x

Translucent yellow grass.