1.

These short-back-and-sides sonnets built
Of strict octosyllabic lines,
Of beats just one less than the cat’s
Reddened tails, are gaol cells I’d like
To break free from but can’t. Bereft
Of a honeycomb’s riches, I
Still hope readers will turn each key,
Visiting all to serve the time
Needed to get the hang of them,
And having digested the lot,
The blocks they’ve been arranged into,
The whole grey penitentiary
The isle was once, and this book is,
Be released to freedom at last.

2.

Till thirteen years of age reared on
The constantly wet overcast
Hell’s Gates’ cannibalised West Coast
Among convict-descended folk
Government propaganda called
‘Residuals’, though we comprised
Sixty-two percent, I escaped
As blotting paper sodden with
Memories, but only to return
At life’s end to the East, where sun,
Instead of lightening, strengthens black
Squeezed out for poems, with manholes in
Ceilings thought of as trapdoors for
My ancestors to hurtle through.

3.

(After Milton’s Paradise Lost)

My matriarchal wowser-gran
Shouting ‘you devil!’ dragged me from
Our sputtering one-valve wireless for
‘Sooling on’ with ‘skitch ‘em’, West Coast
Old Crawler-created gaol slang,
My obsessively loved blood-red,
Bruise-blue ‘Demons’ against ‘The Saints’
Through static making them ‘The Hounds
Of Hell’, that got me sent to bed
Without tea for kicking her in
The shins, for knowing as a child
That when ‘Goodies’ and ‘Baddies’ fought
My heart was with the underdog,
With Lucifer thrown out by God.

4.

‘Bit of a devil, your old man’,
Hell’s Gates’-formed blokes said with respect,
Though in his case mine was withheld
Since I judged him through mother’s un-
Clouded stain-free New Zealand eyes,
Seeing him, of convict descent,
As Justice of the Peace unfit
To fine others when he too sped,
Gambled and drank illegally,
A style inherited from his
Great-grandfather James Sparks sent out
For forgery, rising to be
A constable whose weakness for
Low life continued as before.