From Late love: sometimes doctors need saving as much as their patients - 2016 

I have always been in love with the poem. That might be an unusual thing for a boy from South Auckland to say. It would be more accurate to say I have always had my head in the clouds and poems have been small rockets through the silver. I was born that way and then was lucky enough to grow up in a city that was full of distinctive voices. In South Auckland there have always been other ways. The only extra push towards the sky I needed was being a Seventh-Day Adventist and the church gave me a giant shove. I am a God boy. It was perfect training for having ones head in the clouds.

When I was twenty-one I remember walking out of a lecture in twentieth century poetry at Auckland University. The crush of two hundred people emptying through the doorways at the top of the stairs was taking place as usual, seats were banging back into place and the sweet rubbery smell of linoleum and apple core in the corridors was waiting. But for me it was as though everything was taking place in slow motion. People loped beside me like dinosaurs through a forest. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. I watched waves of thought sweep over their faces that seemed disconnected with what they were saying. It was as if there was an animal inside them that was separate from the animal inside them.