Poems about stabbing white people: a confession

And a poem

Talofa friends

I feel like I’m in a creepy version of Groundhog Day. I thought I would post this poem and realised that I posted it last year in response to ACT’s bully-boy tactics then. Then I read the post before that one and realised I posted that yesterday (or was it the day before?). It’s all making me feel a bit deja vu in a seasick kind of way.

I said yesterday I was trying to avoid ACT posts, but someone sent me one which I’ve tried hard to scrub out of my head. Sadly I remember some of it - it went something like: “blah blah blah” and then something about me “sitting down each day to write poems about stabbing white people…”.

Because that’s what I do. It’s all I do. Everyday I sit down to write poems about stabbing white people. So far, I have 25 years multiplied by 352 days equals 9,215 poems about stabbing white people. Nine thousand two hundred and fifteen poems about stabbing white people.

I have cinquains about stabbing white people and ballads about stabbing white people. I have odes and sestinas and elegies about stabbing white people. Hell, there was an entire decade of stabbing white people via haiku only! I have limericks and sonnets, villanelles and ghazal about stabbing white people. I’ve written in blank verse and rhyme; used blackouts, acrostics, clerihews and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but, some time in the 2010s I wrote an insane amount of limericks about stabbing white people.

It’s gotten so out of hand I haven’t had time to bring up my daughter properly. I haven’t washed my hair enough or cooked proper meals. I’ve let romances fail and several pets have died of starvation in my care; all this because I’ve written poems about stabbing white people EVERY DAY.

So, in a spirit of the deja vu I mentioned earlier, here is one of the very unusual poems that is not about stabbing white people, but is from a post last year. I promise you a new poem tomorrow - after, that is - I write a poem about stabbing white people.

Edict from the Self-appointed Arbiter of All Art Permitted in New Zealand

From now, till the end of days, all poems will be about landscape

not native landscape,

no ‘ti kouka’ with their race-baiting leaves

or if this tree must be mentioned, it will be – from this day and forever more –

referred to as cabbage tree

not ‘kapeti’, but cabbage. CABBAGE.

From now - till the blonde Christ returns from the blue skies -

all paintings will hark back to English pastoral scenes

such paintings will be set in New Zealand

I repeat, NEW ZEALAND

Not ‘Aotearoa’.

That word is next on the list of words for permanent extinction.

Art will be set in New Zealand but only in approved and appropriate landscapes

naked as the shorn indigenous sheep.

The sheep is now, and forever more, to be known as the indigenous animal of New Zealand

not the kiwi

(note to self: rename the kiwi).

Music will be from the following categories:

1. Songs of praise to the 3 approved political parties

(ACT, ACT and ACT)

2.               Music that can prove a genealogy back to the motherland

(note to self: remove the word ‘whakapapa’)

3.               Music the deputy prime minister can play at his rallies

(note to self: change that to Deputy Prime Minister of the Second half Regime of the People’s Republic of New Zealand).

No other form of art will be permitted.

All art must undergo stringent tests to determine whether they are acceptable to the Arbiter of All Art

otherwise known as the Deputy Prime Minister of the Second half Regime of the Greater New Zealand Reich.

Such tests will include, but not be limited to:

hog-tying of artists’ hands and feet

tossing of hog-tied artists into a lake or pond

artists who sink and drown will be pronounced approved artists.

Approved artist’s work will be shown in regime galleries

played on regime radio stations and websites

published, both online and in hard-copy, by regime-approved publishers.

End of edict.