Maui Catches the Big Kahuna
You came out of the primordial depths beguiling and bannered, a smothering plumed serpent, designed with stars arranging your temple, to pillage with whispers the appealing innocent. Dexterous and charming with light-silvered fingers, you danced with searing emotions, held sway, played them like a thousand veils and hid your face within their folds. You kept your darlings in numbing thrall, took their ransom in velvet letters, piled in debts for shaken pleadings, you deceived with Janus' mirrored face. Maui knew the Monster's history; the sea he madly plundered was plumbed long before by Maui's skill; the Trickster God set the bait, calmly waited to take his haul. X marks the spot on pirates' maps; shy virgin, such a blameless sign, betrayed the fool who dared to curse the Goddess in her watery train. Proudly, I bore his fish hook on peaked waves; Ah, Master Navigator, I was the lure; I held the line which disarmed the Snake and Maui leapt up victorious. What of the bodies which lie submerged? What of the souls washed out to sea? Maui, will you unshake your net, command the sun to set them free? For some it is a wretched penance; for me, such words forge a simple joy; I cast the God's line out on the tide, the lustrous moon brought it back to me. Her avenging teeth filled my mouth, biting hard with truth's lambent nails; I spat the Colossus from my throat; coiled about my choking voice, you floundered in Maui's driven reel; my scrawl flies free in his mighty wake.
The Roman Forum
He walks abroad, red and bold as the Adversary, trumpeting and parading his virtue with the brash costumed glitter of the Roman Forum. In procession, I am damned in a virtual scene, bowed to the self-proclaimed victor, hung in effigy. Grown fat on a vision built with words, he, the victor struts shamelessly on some imagined stage, uttering declamations to bruise the ears of his audience and write a decree for the seats of assembly. Monstrous graven images spawned by loathing hold me hostage and advance their agenda to an expectant crowd; as one, heads nod to the drum of their calumny and the Idol rises, gladiatorial, erect with suave speech, monosyllabic tirades for my defeat. I wrestle free – ideologies cannot constrain a defiant spirit. I have my part to play; iconoclastic and rude, I boldly expose the tyrant's vain scheme to unravel new histories on the spindle of truth.
Alone at Dusk
The shape of bliss, steam rising on evening air, carried, tender wraiths into darkening sky. Night enticed, a peculiar loneliness of ancient ferns and pungent bush envelop me, half-floating, submerged in the womb-like warmth of a secluded hot pool. Damp sounds play subtle songs, the plop of rain from overhanging fronds, an occasional bird call, gentle drizzle across still water. Venus rides fast-moving cloud upon an ashen sky heavy with memory; ghosts scud the skyline, ever-changing and restless, caressing silhouetted motionless trees. Night deepens, ashen hues die, flimsy forgotten memories, the colour of age and creeping death insinuated in the sigh of growing darkness. I linger in a heady afterglow, a fire from within the earth as much as the dying sky holding me to ransom, my immortality written on starlit water. Contentment; the echoed evening star holds vigil in a candle flame and casts soft light on an open page where a poem first breathes the shape of bliss, recording that hour when I was alone at dusk, away from all the world, afloat in a hidden hot pool.
Flight of the dragonfly 