Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
cash grabs and glad rags feed bags and grab bags old nags and plastic blow flies and jujubes If Freud had been Japanese,would free association have ledto 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…
They’ve widened highway 69up through Parry Sound.Now perched high on outcropsand staring from their rocky ledgesare the Inukshuks,granite rubble stacked,legs, torso, arms and head.“We are here” (we think they say),a testament to thosewho set them there,a good host with arms wide,or maybe a guide to point the way. I am the bones of my mother,Laurentia,…
how great the fallcrashing down around my headhow great the dread i feelwhen winter breathes her first chillacross the landthe great hoar undresses gnarled limbsthen laughs her limpid taunts how i hate her voicethe icy screech of it grates on my brainit bodes a pernicious nothingthe mind asleeptoo tired even to dreamthe swirl of flakes…
When I was a teenit was inconceivablethat I might find radicaltucked in the foldsof an old man’s face.Now in my forties(though with a boy’s libido)I see in the mirrorhow the first lines crackmy youthful veneer.From mid-day the dawn lightlooks the same as the dusk.Which explains why old fogiesspend so much time counting changeat the check…
My therapist asked me:What are you thinking?I said: Nothing.My therapist said to me:No one thinks nothing;there’s always a new thoughtmoiling to the surface.So I made something upand she pretended to be pleased. My therapist asked me:What does it mean?I said: Nothing.My therapist said to me:Doesn’t matter what you tell me–even your grocery list–it all has…
“There’s a hint of -”“Pepper,” you say.“Exactly,” and the steward bobslike those dipsomaniac birdswhile I swirl, sniff, sip.I tilt as if for shots.Yay or nay, or checkbox,or I approve, then a jetof purplish juiceinto the canister. I pride myself on the subtletiesI hear in orchestration:violas from within the strings,they rise and then they sing,they sing…
Do you think that I, like Jeremiah,had come to give your soul an enema?I don’t even know the proper orifice.I only wanted to box your ears,smack you upside the head,vent my rage at all you did and said.But those Jews with their predilectionfor over-interpretation, theycalled it something else, something noble.They hoisted me on their shouldersand…
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.
A suberbug is coming,an evolved pathogenwith tougher DNA,a variant, a strain.We delude ourselves (they say)to believe we grasp the highestlink of the food chain. I am resistantto the idea that microbesborne on the currentsfrom a spluttered sneezecould abbreviate my teemingPetri dish thoughts. Is penan antigen? Or more the disease? The subject line: SARS andSwine flu…
I cut through the parkand there, tucked in the grasswas a banana, freshfrom the local grocery store,unripe, green tending to yellow,with a label stuckto its thick skin. I felt for a minutethat the sky had crackedand through the crack the wholeweight of recorded timebore down upon me thereand stomped me to the ground:a bug smushed…
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.
I have been thinking about the personality of numbers. Until this moment, it never occurred to me that most people think of numbers only as tools for cataloguing quantity. But numbers have a distinctive life outside the numerically bland universe of human beings.
Excuse me, excuse me,may I have your attention please.I have an announcement to make,a declaration really.Oh my! I do declare!No mere extra! extra!blaring from the street corner,taped to a utility pole,stapled to a fence slat,but a full-bodied shout-it-from-the-mountaintopWittenberg-door-splitting theses nailingsteeple peeling moon howlingjudge pleading fever breakingshout for your attention.Could Gabriel have been more insistent?Him with…
Ostensibly, this poem is a response to the news that marine biologist, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, committed suicide on March 16th, 2009.
There was a third man, and wiser still, who built on water instead of sand or hill; the rains, the flood: unmoored, he rose and fell and shuddered to the rhythm of a deeper swell. Three thousand years enslaved by our tropes, the old salt spews bile on our hopes. Still, we insist that, while…