Extract from Kex/e
On waking, the other self, Babe,
withdraws into the black immensity.
Self or god, day by day [it] waits.
They take from where they walk
a scoop of that Nothingness,
sand without grain, our dust,
and pour it into a scoop in the cave floor,
closing it over with rock.
Each evening after walking they do the same.
Whether from fear their love is monstrous,
or merely from curiosity,
one morning, waking to their parting,
they disclose the hole and it is all light.
They are looking at the negative,
blinding beauty owning
its perfect contrary: oneself.
A cry escapes, the negative cry.
It follows as they run,
they would be running yet—
but that Babe’s motor,
touched by their sincerity,
terminated the age of Information.
Note by the Writer of Kex/e
After the deaths of my early interpreters, mouthpieces of a strong and good sense, crazy with inadmissible euphoria, men and women in touch with reason, with light that gave them vision not blindness, I became convinced they had died because of an oppression of which only imbecility is capable, a superior darkness. I returned to books and collective music and art we had made, set apart from what I perceived as an unkind place of accusation and intolerance, ruled by the kind of mental disease that is never diagnosed because it inhabits the structures of diagnosis.
I explored and rejected thereby wisdoms of the monkey peoples of the East, of the flesh eaters of Scythia, of the loric heart gougers of ziggurats, and of my own people whose culture of dishonour and advantage seemed now to be alien to me, its own bad advertisement. I rejected the monomyths that perpetuate inequality. I wanted to learn and transmit not by law, structure and heritage but by the momentary trip of song, art and poem, not to transmit from elder to junior, but instantly, to transmit and receive a charge among the internally ecstatic who had not ended their lives in despair, but who had ripped themselves from a dangerous disempowering.
I looked for it, and look for it, in works that will never be bought up and celebrated with capital interest, adopted by countries and cities and organisations who will use them for their own purposes, the kind who cavil about the negative while embodying the same negative, speaking about value and liberty while censoring as they exile, within their own societies, the makers. The makers hold the keys. They transmit not arcane knowledge, but today’s knowledge, by text and the seen, on canvas and concrete, by note and beat, and yes even, by the screen. Some of them might not be aware of their knowledge, their power to do this. Some under-estimate or overestimate that power, but they do it.
I wanted to find music and visual art and words that could never be seconded by currency and exploitation, transplanted by replacements, surrogates, rewards, comforts and commodities, the like of which had already taken hold and was spreading even among the children of the punk era. I wanted to find it, recorded on paper and poster, in lofi recordings, and in the ephemeral, never recorded, which exists only for the tiny seconds of its expressing, in living room practices, in conversations, in individuals’ inspired diatribes, on the walls of flats, on the streets of suburbs and big cities.
Bill Direen
Bill Direen recently completed a short tour of New Zealand performing music with his group Bilders. The tour promoted their new album Neverlasting (Grapefruit/Carbon). On tour he also read from Apropos, 2025 prose poems with photographs by/of musician friends. In 2025 he became an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Te Tumu Toi laureate, for his contribution to New Zealand writing and music.
NZ Poetry Shelf 