June Poetry Dump (2026)
Wednesday is about books and writing. (And reading). Once a month or so I share the latest poems I’ve written. Here’s the poetry reflections from June of 2026.
I guess it was in 2024 that I started this thing, so we’re into the second full rotation now. At the beginning of a new month I share the previous month’s batch of poems. I’m writing them when and where I can, sharing most of them on this site, I then gather them all in a ‘dump’ here at the start of each month for those that prefer to read them in a group, as part of one of the official newsletters that appear during the week. To give you an idea, and in case you missed it, here’s last month’s — the May Poetry Dump for 2026:
May Poetry Dump (2026)
I guess it was in 2024 that I started this thing, so we’re into the second full rotation now. At the beginning of a new month I share the previous month’s batch of poems. I’m writing them when and where I can, sharing most of them on this site, I then gather them all in a ‘dump’ here at the start of each month for those that prefer to read them in a gro…
June was a busy time. I played some records at a cool bar just down the road from where I live. I promised to reboot my podcast, and even made a video saying so. I wrote some poems, amid all the usual writing. I hosted SAY THE THING, as always. And I turned up to read at the Flash Fiction Day event too…
But yeah, the poems. Here goes…
PLACING:
You work, you give eight hours
of yourself each day and most
of the week. You sleep, when not
at work. It could be worse.
You used to drink. To keep on working
and give up drinking is better than the reverse.
But it’s a long track and there’s so far
still to pedal — and you gave up all
the gold with no guarantee
of being given the silver medal.
JAZZ:
It’s not about what gets us
to the dance —
rather how well we manage
the situation
once the music is on
and everyone can hear.
BUTTERING UP:
I bought a knife to a bun fight.
I said ‘spread ‘em’, then followed
my own instruction.
JUNE, 2026:
Like the guy in a singlet, sandals, and shorts
pressing the pedestrian buzzer eight times
to see what changes, I feel a bit out of sorts —
the winter of my disco tension is soundtracked
by Donna Summer. I feel love for so many
great things I almost cried listening to
Steely Dan’s Kid Charlemagne on the way
to catch the bus. It was too heavy, slipped
right through my fingers; the song not the bus.
MCCARTNEY TOO! :
got baked and talked
about McCartney II
for days which mirrors
the daze that he was in
to make that charming mess.
Me and lan had bonded hard
on this before, but with the smoke
in the air we were making new
Beatles biographies, confirming
our shared grasp of the mythologies
and like a proper male friendship
we barely ever talk of anything
else — but there’s no doubt
we are in each other’s lives
and ready to pounce
on anything more trivial
than shared musical lore —
since life’s other distractions
of health, happiness, finances —
can sometimes sorta get in the way.
NEW ORDER:
Eating sandwiches a day late,
drinking coffee a dollar short
(so literally can’t be milking it!)
I thought I’d be more sorted
than this. But, something-something
…the spice of life!
The drums in Way of Life, that
low-slung bass across Bizarre
Love Triangle, and As It is When It Was.
This is the fresh bread, the extra buck,
the way forward. All Day Long,
this music in my ears, and filling
my heart and sometimes my soul.
At least I know I have that still.
So this is Paradise.
ALL WE ARE SAYING IS…
Give Pete a chance.
Everybody’s talking about
Harry, Kevin, Stephen, Lucy,
Rowan and Martha, especially
Martha. But all we are saying
is give Pete a chance.
TECHNICALLY, ECSTASY:
You found the Black Sabbath singlet
I never ever wear, and didn’t know I lost
but that’s enough hope for the new day
to be decent, to be better, to be interesting
at least. I’ll wear it underneath something
else, and it will seem like I Am Iron Man.
SCHRÖDINGER’S POEM:
The dead cat which is still alive
can only thrive in the box.
If lifting the lid is the best thing
you did, it is also quite likely the worst.
This poem is full of rhymes, they tend
to hide — but also they don’t.
Erwin Schrödinger was a complicated
man — but then again he wasn’t.
But one thing that’s never reported
about his experiment was how
it was actually about empathy.
That’s why he built a pet cemetery;
knowing that sometimes they come
back. And if they don’t we won’t worry.
LET ME ROLL IT:
Heart like a wheel:
made of cheese
and spinning within
the circle of itself;
If I told you a horse walks
on middle fingers
would you hold it
against me?
Your heart, that is.
Or would you require
the full story? My heart
certainly hopes so.
BE GOOD:
There is no way through it but to do it.
There is no guarantee that any of it
is going anywhere. Just do the thing.
Say the thing. Make the thing. Be the thing
— or be the person that does and makes
and says the thing.
That’s all you can be.
I mean be a decent human too.
But this will help you.
David Seymour never made anything beyond misery.
Chris Bishop only ever made a mess.
Chris Luxon makes people laugh — unintentionally.
Winston Peters makes a mockery.
Nicola Willis makes people cringe.
Don’t do any of that.
Don’t be any of that.
Be yourself. Be beautiful. Be imperfect.
Be ready to cry, and willing and able.
Be happy to experiment, be hopeful.
Be pure. Or do your best to be sure.
There is no way through it but to do it.
There is no guarantee. No one here
gets out alive. Do your best right now
to thrive. And enable that valve in others.
Be good.
HOLD THE SALT ON THOSE:
They watered down salsa
and made the bossa-nova,
it hit the pop charts and
cardigan lounge music
was next. A thousand
record covers all circling
tweed and fondue, the
sharp corners cut.
Musical lobotomy
never bested the bossa
but I gotta wonder
if we received the right
deal. I mean yes, we
deserved it, but that’s
not my point.
WE BELIEVE THAT WE CAN’T BE WRONG:
We walk like soldiers through Internet fortresses
We share stories and tell ourselves
that we’re telling others that it’s the truth
We build bunkers to bury the dead —
block, unfriend, snooze, pile on in attack,
We have trained ourselves to lack empathy;
We hit those keyboard clacks like each one
gives a royalty — and of course we believe
in loyalty, though only within our tribe.
We believe in joining the charge, once
there are others singing along.
We believe that we can’t be wrong.
TO KILL TIME WITHOUT INJURING ETERNITY:
Tell Annie tomorrow has started arriving early.
We are already where we don’t want to be,
where we said we’d never stoop — caught
in our own disintegration loop, ambient hum
comes on way too strong, like the brand new
staff member already planning a team-building
party. And then we pray for yesterday
once more. Start building beyond the
architecture of your dreams.
We must be the carpenters of a whole new
set of screams; a reset of the screen.
One where we find we’ve only just begun.
THE DIFFICULT DIVORCE ALBUM:
Guys in the 80s, that made their name
in the 60s, making records to pay
for the divorce. They have the best
bands of course, the producer of the day,
was it Was, or Lanois, or Froom?
There was suddenly space in the room
there was depth in the songs too,
but only if you waited. It was not there
the first time around. Looking for
a new sound and a new love too.
Figuring just enough cynicism
would probably pull them through.
Spending money to hide money,
and to make money, and of course
just to take money, betting
on a new and hopefully safe house
and hoping to rake it all in. Better call
Emmylou, maybe Linda Ronstadt too?
STANDING BY A BROKEN JUKEBOX WITH MONEY IN MY HAND:
Perfection is not the key to music
but music is the key to perfection.
When someone doesn’t have
any favourite music I feel
similar confusion to when a person
admits to collecting jazz fusion.
When rough edges get sanded,
it’s so something can become furniture.
My absolute favourite music won’t let me
sit down; doesn’t let me get comfortable.
BECAUSE:
It always cracks me up when you
mention a band or writer or someone
of note, and the other person seems
truly baffled they haven’t heard of them.
“How”, they ask, “has this happened?”
And the answer is always the same:
You haven’t listened weirdly enough;
haven’t read widely enough.
You haven’t clocked the internet.
Because no one has. And no one will.
And that is what’s beautiful
about all of this.
THE UNIVERSE YAWNS:
It’s all unprecedented from a certain lens,
but turn your seat, switch your cup, adjust
your view — look back to beyond such pale
It’s all precedented actually. The boredom
of the universe, its stoicism, its imperviousness
is the proof; the actual truth. What’s tough
for you has been tougher before.
America was founded on far worse
than Trump. Chris Luxon is not quite
New Zealand’s lowest slump. We deserve
the indifference that blows through
like a series of quick storms;
that resets every calendar month
as the new norm.
SAY IT IN LESS THAN 30:
That first Ramones album
and the last Nick Drake one
are saying the same things
in different ways, but they both
wanted to get it off their chest,
and quickly. I like to listen to them
back to back — and try to imagine
if their careers were reversed.
Imagine how revered the Ramones
would be with only three albums…
(Arguably that is the case anyway,
three that matter…)
No one would deal with 25 years
of Pink Moon in concert.
Though it’s fair if cruel to say
Drake knew that ahead of anyone.
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN 17:
Too nervous to try that,
too arrogant for this.
Drive to the edge of the sea.
Dive in to swim to the other side.
Survive by fluke, which is privilege
unacknowledged. Then, when
I don’t — someone will say
it’s by design.
CAMEO:
Hitchcock slips into frame, orders a drink, is gone before the first sip. Or walks down the street like a gust of his own wind. His fixed stare doesn’t dare acknowledge the camera; his cameo is a sprig of parsley, that final twist of salt. The grist of it all held tightly between forefinger and thumb. Crushed with a flick of the wrist, and placed just so, then almost a scurry as his little legs took him back to camera; he had just infiltrated his own dream. His silhouette on the screen.
MOST HOT TAKES ARE LUKEWARM AT BEST AND WOULD BE BETTER SERVED COLD!
Everyone out there saying their thing
that they hope will cut through,
but knowing it cannot stand for long without
the prop of suggesting it’s bigger than it seems.
Dudes on podcasts, reviewers with reckons,
everyone a schoolboy at the end of the day,
and invested only as far as their lunch money
takes them. Notice it is pointedly about gender —
the need to feel tough or have edge as strong
as my need to suggest it’s not all that.
The spear in the eye of a woolly mammoth
as it ran towards trampling, now that
was a hot take. Disagreeing with your mate
in front of a condenser mic that you bought
second-hand after the last guy hung it up
because not enough people were watching
and no one at all was ever listening…
Not a hot take. Not a lot at all. Not
anything worth putting up over the fire
or hanging with pride on the wall.
THIS ONE GOES OUT TO THE GUY EATING A KIWIFRUIT IN THE UNIVERSITY TOILET:
Good on you!
I heard the slurp as I walked in,
thought it was the pneumatic door’s action for a second,
but nah. It was you. Whoever you are. Bent forward
over the basin and hitting this fruit hard with your tongue.
And you stopped, only briefly, to clock me.
And I stopped only briefly too.
Once I knew where the sound was coming from,
I could start to piss.
Once I started to do that
I felt like you increased your work rate —
as if all that was between me and your precious toilet-food
was my stream of piss, and once that golden run was done
I was going to come looking for a Kiwifruit?
I didn’t. I washed my hands. But didn’t quite
wash them of all of this. I thought about writing
a poem, but other stuff got in the way across the rest
of the day, so this is how it ended up.
Different from what it might have been.
But speaking of that, I’m sure you didn’t set out
to eat your Kiwifruit in the loo. So your day was
probably different too. And if it wasn’t your Kiwifruit
before I saw you with it, then someone else’s day
had been altered for them.
So that’s the chain of events. Or at least some of it.
And now I think about it, I don’t think you spilled a drop.
Which suggests you’ve done that before.
Even with my brief interruption — and it was weird,
feeling like an intruder, when I was the one doing
the right task in the right place — your form was assured.
You seemed unflappable.
I watched a kid walk into a school toilet
with unwrapped sandwiches when I was very young.
I remember a teacher saying to another teacher,
”he’ll probably get very sick”.
That teacher walked off, laughing. Puffing
on his cigarette.
And later, in the classroom, still smoking,
but a different cigarette, he dropped his ash
on my maths examples, smeared it against
my pencil workings, to illustrate — apparently
— that my handwriting was messy.
But you probably didn’t need to know that.
You probably just threw the leftover skin
in the bin.
WHAT WE ROCK ABOUT WHEN WE ROLL ABOUT ROCKS:
Whenever I see someone pick up a rock
in a movie, I think of the Raymond Carver
story that ends with how it started with a rock…
That’s some economy. Right there.
Rock through a windscreen, rock to the back
of the head; rock me baby just like you roll
the wagon wheel — like the B.B. King tape
I played until it stretched, and not like
the Wagon Wheel song; fault of The Old Crow
Medicine Show. A rock held in one hand
suggests the ultimate imbalance of the scales
of justice. The rock being hurled. The rock being
felt. The rock being caught, but only if someone
is lucky. Which means someone is also unlucky.
Which means Carver had it right to say that’s
where it started. And where it ended as well.
So, busy month. There are 24 new poems there. Which is three more than last month. And so many in fact that I should probably take a break for a bit…but we’ll see…
At the SAY THE THING event I read an essay:
And my piece of Flash Fiction for the National Flash Fiction Day event could almost have been a poem:
So, see anything you like here? Anything you absolutely hate? Anything you’d like me to write about in a poem in future? I do (sometimes) take requests….