Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
once upon a timean emergent timean Ecclesiastes timea rising sun time that shines warm on the cheeksa fresh time blossoming from the emptiness and greening into historyan epochal timea seasonal timea calendrical timea time of minutiae ticking left wrist shackled timea global market shekel timea metred timea banging bongo timea pulsing time of poems and…
1) mmmm you tell me to say the wordall your friends, theirs say the worddrumming fingers on your hipswaiting, waiting, waiting on my lips you want to play the lear with medemand that i profess it, dearlear? get real, early oni thought we’d gotten past the word sing to me the way you used to…
why do extrovert and beautifulget three syllablesbut poor plain gets just oneif plain was polysyllabicit would get more opportunitiesvacations in majorcatanning topless in a thongwhile beefcake verbs look ona mojito by the poolthen another and anothertil plain (no longer plain) shoutslook at me i’m populartrisyllabic like all the restlatinate pronunciationno more the blunt teutoni use…
I reread pieces long after the fact. At the time of their writing, they seemed persuasive; they could have moved people to see the world as I do. But now they seem clunky. I want to cut the facets of a diamond with my prose, but my only tool is a sledgehammer.
I wanted to write a protest songthen realized how, all alongI’d been beating time with my pulse. My cardboard sign was turned to mushin the rain, and the slogan, gone in the rushof feet pounding it into the mud.\ My chant was the choked hello I gaveto the Mumbai caller who said I’d savea lot…
There’s a thread runs through everythingand a seamstress with a camel the sizeof a needle’s eye, though it’s not the eyethat worries me, but the other end,a steel point that runs me throughlike the pin the entomologists useto fix their bugs to the mounting board.The Fates don’t clip the thread, you know.Whoever said that was…
This is a poetic response to some passages I read in The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness, a memoir by Karen Armstrong.
Have you heard the news? Publishers Weekly reports that a Japanese insurance company purchased Toronto-based ebook seller, Kobo, for $315 million dollars.
Half-choked Blooms I give my best to the morningand the balance to the afternoonin the half-choked blooms of the rosesand the thorny brambles of a dying quince. Profile of a Poet i used to worship in a churchbut the air was stale and deadi slunked away an outsidernot meek not powerfulan inheritor of nothingthen to…
what a fucked up thingto nail Jesus Is Coming to a treebeside a highway in north ontarioa via dolorosa which is latinfor road through the middle of nowhereand prompts an eternal question:if a soul declares its christin a forest and there is no GODto hear it…a tree-spiking evangelist isno concern of mine no soulsharmed in…
there’s a path in The Forks where we stumbled on a humble little man dressed in a loincloth and armed with a walking stick a strange sight in Winnipeg though less strange if we had stumbled on him in wintertime we would have figured the cold froze him solid instead of the rabid pack of…
as we drive into Laniganpopulation next to nothinga pull out and a signand on the sign a mapand above the map in bold-faced caps the word LEGENDI’m not thinking cartographyand imagine a bright marqueeflashing The Legend of Laniganlike The Legend of Zeldaevery place has its legendhere we see its traceshere the dusty gravel roadshere the…
I hate to drive through the prairies.It’s boring. It all looks the same.I love to shop at Wal*Mart.All across this great country,Wal*Mart is the place for me. (if performed, this verse should be repeated at least 300 times, once for each Wal*Mart in the country) Download the complete collection of poems and accompanying photographs as…
Imagine our world is dying. Imagine survival depends on journeys to distant suns settling strange planets colonists voyaging for generations whirling in cigar-shaped tubes tribes of ten thousand adrift between the stars. Now imagine these crafts of our salvation are designed by the Ghermezian brothers: worlds of endless shopping salted by breaks in water parks,…
What was the wildest thing you saw in all of wild Canada? Was it the roaring waters of Rearguard Falls? Or the black bear swimming across Mud Lake? Or the pine beetle chewing its way down the North Thompson River Valley? Or the protesters haranguing politicians on the steps of the Victoria Legislature? Or the…