Let me launch a fresh poem
from a sturdy pad.
Let me lash my fleas
to the back of a Pigeon
and coax tiny words
to leap from the Page.

I live in trepidation
of the surreptitious buyout
that turns small presses
into kiss-ass sycophants
of big-media empires
where lawyers hide in ice lockers
and jump out on demand
to expel their hoary breaths
over the ground at my feet.
It’s chill or be chilled.

Let me sit like a watermelon
in the desert. I’ll grow my skin
thick to keep the juices
from drying up too quickly.
Let’s hope the buzzards
pass me by. Who ever heard
of buzzards sucking the pulp
out of a watermelon?
They don’t have to, of course.
Even if all the buzzards
fall dead and the melon
thrives, the seeds will never take.

I’ll launch my poem instead
from onion skin or go splits
with a long-dead monk:
a palimpsest, more illuminated
than illuminating, scored
on animal hide, like a brand.
That way I know they won’t
take their imprint with its logo
and sear it into the flesh of my ass.

July 09, 2010

Related posts:

1. Poem: There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea
2. Poem: O Captain! My Captain
3. Poem – My Mother’s Bones

O Captain! My Captain!

If you get one,
why can’t I have a captain too?
Was O captain! My captain!
the posturing of an idealist?
Is that all it was?
Good press?  Words for hire?
Is a cry for a captain
just a finger shoved up
against whatever gland
secretes nostalgia?
It’s as if Eden sprang
from the fields of Gettysburg
or today in the hills
north of Kandahar.
Is it not my right?  Look,
I have a coupon –
redeemable at Wal-Mart –
buy one captain,
get one free,
or, at the very least,
take a rain check.

If we feel contempt,
for things gone by
and cynicism at things
we’ve been promised,
what’s left to us
but a narrow cleft of time
where we find purchase
to scrabble for our lives?

Give us our TiVo
time-shifted programming,
reality TV with ripped abs
and breast implants.
Give us this day
our daily Dose,
gossip and Sudoku,
news feeds on screens
split five ways past Sunday.
Give us our RSS,
our tweets and our skype,
friends delivered
on the wings of a
deprecated XHTML,
multitasking, ADHD,
Ritalin swallowing,
blood engorged
corpus callosum
in a hypertrophic head.

What was I on about?
I can’t remember.
So much happening.
Let’s go shopping instead.

June 23, 2010

Related posts:

1. Poem: Watermelon
2. Poem: There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea
3. Poem – My Mother’s Bones

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

– Arthur C. Clarke

I don’t know how things work.
Take lava lamps for example:
the rise and fall of globules
like red corpuscles squeezed
in a mysterious rhythm.
I’m amazed the lava doesn’t melt
through the glass.  The blobs
are real lava, aren’t they?

Take the financial markets:
the rise and fall of shares,
the lifeblood of the global
economy, a systole of cash
and diastole of debt.
I’m amazed the melt-downs never
sink us to the bottoms
of our deep pockets.

The wizards pull their levers,
the magicians cast their spells
and assure us they understand
what we don’t:  the rise and fall
is as natural as breathing
and will go on forever
like a heart with a pacemaker.

June 18, 2010

Related posts:

1. Poem: Watermelon
2. Poem: There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea
3. Poem – My Mother’s Bones

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1. Poetry and Politics
2. Easter
3. Poem: Watermelon

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1. Mixing Religion and Politics
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I wanted a single room apart,
but you demanded all my heart.
What you asked I gave for free,
withholding nothing, me to thee.

On flat stomach and virgin mons
ran delving fingers and oily palms;
with slavering lips you took what’s yours
and left me grunting on all fours.

You say I chose, got trinkets for
(which makes me free, though just a whore).
It can’t be rape, your lawyers state:
my marriage vows will exculpate.

But we possess in equal skeins
the time before us, when the pains
we’ve buried will rise up, blast forth,
and send a chill gust from the north.

April 22, 2010

(I had considered calling this “NAFTA” but changed my mind.)

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If Freud had been Japanese,
would free association have led
to the penis? Why not to the tongue?
Or to a flip of the middle finger?
Both potent in their own ways,
and mightily accessible.

keen tools and old fools
big screens and no means
small backs and sharp tacks
please take a seat

When school was let out,
Melvin’s mind was in the gutter.
Not in a lurid way, of course.
He saw a catch basin
and wondered what lay below:
the curious fruits
of an understimulated brain.
The ministry of education
prints glossy brochures:
our children will soar.
Of what use is soaring
to a naked mole rat?
Or to Melvin, who cracked his skull
when he jumped off the roof?

gun racks and coal sacks
mactac and cheap tricks
card sharps and tooth picks
skinflints and back packs

If Freud had been a cannibal
from a Melanesian tribe,
would a cigar have been just a cigar
or precursor to a solid meal:
a cut of flank seared to taste
on the burning coals,
a liver paté spread on wafers
and downed with a sweet elixir
of coconut milk and blood?

monster trucks and blue pills
boob jobs and bad luck
motocross and oil spills
dead birds and traffic cops

March 22, 2010

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I am the bones of my mother,
Laurentia, the womb of a continent
lain in place a billion years,
magma cooled to granite,
feldspar, quartz and mica,
groaning beneath the weight
of ice a mile thick or more,
crying away the pain with rivers,
north through the Arctic watershed,
south through the Great Lakes waterways.

They came with their blasting caps,
their boring drills and dynamite,
graders and big-wheeled trucks,
roaring from first light until
the sun went down, then it began again:
a billion years blown to bits
in the blinking of an eye.  For what?
For that frenetic two-day flurry
round-trip scurry from the city?
Bury the land in asphalt
to appreciate its beauty?

Though I’m nothing but the pickings
of a corpse, I will endure.
Long after your greatest monuments,
and you with them, are ground to dust,
my hard bones will still be here,
dead arms stretched wide, a host,
but not for you,
pointing the way, a guide
to the river, running deep
with my mother’s tears.

March 01, 2010

Related posts:

1. Poem: Watermelon
2. Poem: Magic
3. Poem: There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea

I pride myself on the subtleties
I hear in orchestration:
violas from within the strings,
they rise and then they sing,
they sing to me; and deeper
lines within a poem, drawn taut
and plucked, they ring,
they ring for me. But wines?
Why do they reduce
to juice?

You hold your glass. I
push mine back, watching
the clarity, swirling
the intimations of
all I’ll never know.
I swallow and wait
for the smooth finish.
I drink you in but
much goes wasted
on my palette.

Dec. 02, 2009

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Nov. 01, 2009

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Lunching on the Forth and Clyde.
Chicken Arriata.
What is Chicken Arriata?
Sauvignon Blanc.
How civilized of an afternoon.

Arriata is a pasta, gluten–rich,
my lunch, a collision course
with dermatitis herpetiformis
and its tomato paste of rosy rashes.
What to do? What to do?
The waitress is sweet, the wine, dry.
Another sip or two will bring on a plan.
Rare sunlight refracts through the glass
and plays colours across the page
splayed beside my poisoned plate,
poetry by a man who knows better.
I don’t wish to give offense
so I swirl pasta into a ball
and slurp it down my gullet.

I cannot digest arriata.
A knife clatters from the plate.
A spontaneous selection.
A fantasy of who I might be:
a man, at café, at intersection
of motorway and canal.

This vision of me, of a man
magnanimous, comes unravelled
like noodles from a fork.
“Is everything to your liking?”
“Very much so,” I lie and smile,
and, beneath her attentive eye,
slurp down another knot of goo.

This ever–becoming a man!
Chicken Arriata.
Now I must ask for the loo.

I will be polite, and suffer
for it later, waking in the night,
scratching, scratching, scratching.

Notes:

The situation that forms the narrative for this poem struck me as funny and inherently Canadian. I thought I’d be spontaneous and order something I’d never had before. But when the waitress delivered the dish, I realized I couldn’t eat it. The problem is dermatitis herpetiformis, a gluten allergy that leads to mindbending itchiness. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to offend the waitress and so ate some of the pasta she had delivered. However, the poem is not really about celiac disease, which is a rather boring topic. It’s more about the tendency many of us have to place the desire to please others above the imperative of self–care. This is more than a theoretical reflection about soft concerns; selflessness is a dangerous business that can unintentionally inflict psychic harm on the self and on others. I’ve tried to hint at the danger by framing the narrative with a reference to the painter, Tom Thomson, who died a possibly violent death in Algonquin Park more than 90 years ago.

Oct. 01, 2009

Related posts:

1. Poetry Reading – The Reed Leans Into The Wind

I am resistant
to the idea that microbes
borne on the currents
from a spluttered sneeze
could abbreviate my teeming
Petri dish thoughts. Is pen
an antigen? Or more the disease?

The subject line: SARS and
Swine flu have interbred.
If I open the attachment
it will infect my hard drive
with a virus. Is there a shot?
Or is it only in danger
that we thrive?

I would pay well for the cure
to a bad idea: the kind
that bores into a mind
and chews up an education,
the ripening years
of experience, the meat
of personal affection.

I want inoculation
but can think of no one
(not shaman nor doctor)
who can set my mind at ease
with chants or cold vaccines
to protect me against the strains
of the world’s general disease.

Aug. 03, 2009

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I felt for a minute
that the sky had cracked
and through the crack the whole
weight of recorded time
bore down upon me there
and stomped me to the ground:
a bug smushed in the dirt.

I saw transactions fired
on Sumerian tablets,
Monsanto share prices
dancing on monitors,
growers to market in
wooden–wheeled carts
and refrigerated Boeings.

A mother buys the once–
exotic flesh for her son’s
Star Wars lunch box special,
and he, bored of the same old,
has the freedom to toss it onto
the grass in the park where
it will rot to a brown mush.

Aug. 01, 2009

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1. Unmoved
2. Superbug

Remember
how Dad spent hours over the scope?
The right frame? The clean splice?
Spooling the film onto reels, packed
into metal canisters then stacked
on shelves in the basement?
We never watch Dad’s movies.

The casing on the super 8 is cracked,
the projector bulb burnt out.
You can’t get replacements anymore,
not even on e-Bay
- and I don’t call,
you with your business, me with my cares.
Wouldn’t it be fun, one last time,
to run hand in hand to the water’s edge?
To hear the sea groan as the world wings
the moon around on a string?

I went back to the beach alone, barefoot
through the spray, with wind and roar.
Styrofoam bobbed on the waves,
spent condoms, like stranded squid,
gulls fought for hot dog remains,
scraps of foil exploded from their beaks.
I thought of mortgages and of car payments,
garbage strikes and composting,
Bluetooth and roaming charges,
gas mileage and life insurance,
and I wanted to take your hand,
to remember to you Mom’s words:
“Boys, beware the undertow!”

Notes:

In the June newsletter from Michael Moore I read: “It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one — has now made itself obsolete.” But obsolescence isn’t just an economic ploy to promote consumption, nor is it just a cause among many causes for environmental despoliation. Obsolescence is an attitude. The prevalence of this attitude is evidence of the contempt we bear for our own memories.

Yes, we tend to look on our childhoods with nostalgia. The artifacts from those times (in my case, the sixties) bring up all kinds of associations and, depending on my mood, these associations can affect me quite powerfully. There are lots of times, too, when I look on my past with an ironic humour: “Could I once have looked like that? Did I really wear such clothes? Did we really use such klunky appliances?” I tend to look upon my past with an air of superiority. And yet … And yet … If it weren’t for the endless succession of consumables and the conviction, almost religious, that our material circumstances mark our progress, would we really take such a view of our childhoods?

As you might have suspected, I address this to my brother – or at least a fictionalized version of him, since I have no specific memory of holding his hand and running together with him on a beach. But the details don’t matter.

John was the cute one. I was the older, serious one, and, as you’d expect of an older sibling, I felt protective of him. John hardly needs my protection now, but that feeling hasn’t gone away, nor do I expect it ever will. It just gets expressed differently. To the extent that a poem is ever for anything, I guess that’s what this poem is for.

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0 is female. Though nothing in her own right, she is pregnant with the possibility of other numbers.

1 is obviously male. He is uninteresting and blunt.

2 is female. This is especially obvious when she’s rendered in a seraph font, with slender curving neck. Demure. Sometimes coy.

3 is androgynous: two curves meeting in an angle. Neither one nor the other. Neither soft nor hard. Neither male nor female.

4 is hermaphrodite. An angle that receives a phallus across its own thigh. Though secure in itself, it is threatening to 1. That is why 14 and 41 are such uneasy figures.

5 is female, bright and cheerful. She is open and non-judgmental and gets on well with all the other numbers.

6 is female. She has a darker disposition than 5. She is precise and officious, not the easiest to relax with.

7 is male. He is the joker, the one who lightens the mood at a party. He is fast friends with 5 but it is 6 who brings out the best in him, and it is 7 who moderates 6’s intensity.

8 is androgynous, an indeterminate mix of curves and angles. But 8 is older and sterner than the other androgyne and so sometimes exudes a masculine aura.

9 is male, the oldest of the numbers, the leader. 9 has a paternal fondness for 2 and jealously protects her from 7’s advances.

Before you mix numbers (for example, by multiplying 18 and 23), check with them to be sure they’re in the mood to be mixed in that way. On an off day, 414 can be disastrous.

No related posts.