Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
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…
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 place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto.
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…
Of all the useless appendages,your earlobe is the loveliest.I’ve never nibbled on your tonsilsand know nothing of appendices.I whisper and it stirsthe white down that grows there.Like the soft sand of Normandy,it’s the beachhead of my advance.I order my words, and offthey go, over the top,to take the cochlea,the stirrup and anvil! With precisionand discipline,…
better to not play catch on the roofbetter to not get your fingers caught in a snow blowerbetter to not get struck by lightening on a golf coursebetter to not fall onto subway tracks during rush hourbetter to not eat sliced ham from the leftoversbetter to not use condoms that have sat too long in…