Auckland Poetry.com

Nicholas Alexander’s artistic projects include some extremely successful productions of New Zealand artists at the Assembly Rooms in the Edinburgh festival, twice. These days he has returned to his well-established IT career producing many websites, including this one.

Nicholas has performed as a local poet in Auckland beginning his apprenticeship during those legendary nights “at the Shakespeare” in the early nineties. Nicholas was a founding member of the successful performance group, The Poetry Brats and has recited in the UK, readings in London and Cambridge and at the Scottish Poetry Society in Edinburgh. He has performed in a reading with Witi Ihimaera and with the artist Mika Haka.

His contribution to Auckland Poetry has been as a co-editor of one of the much earlier Poetry Live journals, called “Auckland Live”, and later establishing www.AucklandPoetry.com NewZealandPoetry.org, as well as other websites recording the arts in this city, Auckland.

Extending into video has opened up AucklandMusic.com to publish videos of bands, etc.

Chaos Matters is his poetry web-blog. His “signature” work Chaos and Matter follows.

The shoes fit like gloves onto
tender hands that caress midnight
fears away like the wandering feathers
of a untied goose
blissfully
through the ancient artifact-ed sites of
quarries or a curdle forming in cream
or a crystal growing tenderly

the capsule arrives
and takes you to
the golden forest
the passing lights of time
thread a pattern though
wandering moments
through all mutual experience

togetherness and isolation
the isolation of ideas into categories
the isolation of individuals
into types
named and defined
identified and pinned down
your sacred soul a wisp of light

song and dance tiger
we know your movements
and are set on the hunt with dogs
casting shadows on the plane forest wall
the sawdust residues of music
its dust blowing glassy threads
singing in pale light
the orchestra of chimes

the body following behind the wall
its black and brittle eye
watches you while you sit and think
pulling levers trying to close the gap
between chaos and matter

Copyright © 1993 by Nicholas Alexander

Recent photographs