The Lifers

By Michael Steven

From Sean Macgregor's lounge occupied by stoned youths to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven's second collection presents his clear, clean vision of 'the lifers' who inhabit these islands and beyond. A generation's subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten. Steven's writing neither patronises nor romanticises in its intricate depictions of small worlds of violence, despair, love, and struggle. Always it refers back to the redemption of human connection as its magnetic pole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Otago University Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781988592480

Book preview

Acknowledgements

BACK IN THE DAY

The soupy fug of Sean Macgregor’s lounge ripples across

the memory matrix: five boys are couch-locked at midday

after smoking too many bucket bongs while his parents

holiday at the annual Rotary Convention, just out of Taupo.

It is the summer of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.,

the first heavy Dutch indica strains. It is the summer

of acid tabs imprinted with green and red dragons,

Sonic the Hedgehog, Bart Simpson’s larrikin yellow face.

Pixels on a television screen reassemble into Merv Hughes

standing there in the outfield at Eden Park, twirling

his panhandle moustache like a hit man on Lygon Street.

His next catch puts the lights out on the last test of the season.

It is the summer of Dancing Beer, of overflowing ashtrays,

of grease-sodden pizza boxes. A face from the future,

glaring back through the calico wallpaper, calls for someone—

anyone—to hurry up and turn the goddamn tape over.

THE 8:50 FREIGHTER FROM PICTON

Tower: 1996

A fine rain glazes the dark buildings

on Federal and Wellesley Streets.

It’s 6:15am, a Thursday morning.

Six storeys underground in

the newly opened casino carpark,

the building site broom hand

sits in his black Falcon XR6 ute,

bagging up grams with the tip

of an ivory-handled hunting knife

from a sandwich bag of white crystal.

Six storeys beneath the wet

intersecting concrete footpaths,

the silent glass storefronts and

doorways, beneath the first high-

heeled and brogued footsteps

of office workers and commuters

sleepily stepping off the buses

arriving from the outer suburbs,

beneath the street sweeper’s spinning

brushes polishing kerbs and gutters,

the site broom hand and speed dealer

sits in his black Falcon XR6 ute,

racking up finger-thick lines

on a CD cover, to kick-start the day.

He has memorised every name

on his tick list. He hoovers the lines,

his pupils dilate. Ventricles

thump in the bone house of his chest.

All over his ulcerated gums

he rubs the remnant powder—

drains a warm can of DB Bitter

to rinse away the drug’s caustic drip.

Six storeys beneath the neon halls

of gaming tables, roulette wheels

and Keno screens, epileptic corridors

of beeping and flashing poker machines,

vanloads of tradesmen arrive:

carpenters, concreters, carpet layers,

painters, plumbers and electricians.

Those who work to stay high

and stay high to keep working queue

beside the black Falcon XR6 ute,

passing their handfuls of crumpled money

through the open tinted window,

passed back packets of white crystal,

before hauling aprons, extension ladders,

lengths of pipe, drums of cable,

compressors and steel toolboxes

into the service lift that will carry them

to the altitude of their day’s labour,

to the communication and observation

decks of the incomplete tower,

the tower they are being hurried to finish

by barons and boardroom gangsters:

the tower plunging now through soft

rain and cloud, high