untitled

The world will not hold its shape
Under indirect gaze, the streets
I am suddenly in Montreal again
The corners know me, the greenery
Waves, in surprising bunches
From all around the concrete
The statue of a poet seems to be
Waiting around the next block
For conversation

It is a strange and marvellous thing
The vision in corners of eyes
Less what is there than what is desired
Disappearing at the periphery
Folding in on a nonexistent self as I pass
Inciting traces of Nietzschian panic

The translation has drowned
The fine young mind of the artist
Bloated and leaking

the human fantasy

και εγώ, το όνειρο


oh.

the tendrils
with a tight tight embrace.
small things stare (forget their blood)
with wonder at the smiling unreal-
outstretched, unrejectable-
and thank them for being
and save the receipt
and count your blessings with your change.

Come here, my child, and touch this weathered face
that watches you and knows your every thought
since first you breathed. And when you leave this place -
depart the alien things your kind have wrought -
you’ll find without them what you truly sought.
And you will weep. With knees in dampened earth,
with water in your eyes, with heartstrings caught
and torn; I spill your artificial blood,
and from your death, draw life. Your salty flood,
so welcomed by the parched and barren ground,
renews the earth. You churn it into mud,
a chance for other things. I turn around
to realize the sun has set on me -
the night, alive with death, my legacy.

The Human rose. It stared into the night
Past the hardness
And it dreamt as though it remembered me
Back when we were one
When I caught it by surprised and sometimes hurt it
(But – always – loved it.
Mine.)

I am the snake who squeezes you too
hard. Who loves you like disease do.
Until his love drinks in your breath
and tips the waiter with your death.

From me to you and back again
(the distance never changes)
From here to the woods
and back to the dream
Projected on a billion billion minds
We are the stars of the silver-sky fantasy
That so few can see;
The meaning is lost on me.

You may search very hard for me;
push and pull and tear up the grass,
as though your roots are there, too,
sleeping away amidst the june bugs,
waiting to wake with the seasons
and eat them raw
as my heart is raw
and eats away at me
like the days devour the seasons.
I wish to die amongst the grass
become one with the bugs;
they would welcome me to.
And they would welcome you, too,
since your heart is just as raw
and just as open to the bugs
as it is to me.
So join me in the grass,
and we will waste away the seasons
the repetitive seasons.
Let me know if you want to,
and you may join me in my bed of grass
where we can kiss our mouths raw
and I can hold you to me
with our audience of bugs
and we will sleep away the seasons
just you and me
and the others too.
The weather will rub our skin raw
and so will the churlish grass
the secretive grass.
You may eat my insides raw
and act like it has nothing to
do with me
and hide what’s left of me in the grass.
I will preach to the bugs.
I will skin the seasons raw.

It is the war of the elements, now
And creation is losing against my creation.

pardon my french

J’aime surtout les mûres
comme ils tombent dans
mes mains, écrasées
entre mes doigts

leur tache sur mes doigts
comme du sang écarlate.
Ce n’est pas là, mon cœur

transcrit entre les graines
du fruit, entre les trous
de ma chair, mais plus
miniscule que ça: la vérité

de les mûres—
sang vermeille sur mes doigts.

untitled

I am three bottles.
I am the way you want things.
I am six wrappers and the floor.
I am more than not a poem;
I am defiantly unpoetic.
I am not so old anymore.
I am that special sick feeling of bone-cracking.
I am storebought.
I am peeled.
I am leaving your lover.

Elegy

I.
when summer lay smoldering in beds of grass
and the earth burned our naked feet

days swallowed each other
the spur of action saved always for
later

(this was the lie in the yard
sweating green into the heavy air

deepfry tan sun
glinting red off your retinas

pressure-cooked skin on
muskoka wood)


II.
the snails we collected by the dusty curb
the flies that hit our burnt faces
the cat that laced its way through fences

eyes iced shut
lying with the rest of the past

what little grace remains
in the languid movement
of limp leaves and hot birds
now tempered by loss

Toothpick Woman

I and you go quietly around our crossing paths,
never touching, Toothpick Woman. I could pick
my teeth with your shoulder. Sometimes I long
to dig my teeth in your shoulder. Midnight, and I’m
awake, eating my words, swallowing my words,
to fortify myself against your empty limbs,
Matchstick Woman. You are the stuff of my insomnia.
You are the stuff of mayonnaise dreams. You are
my malaise, I cannot haunt you effectively.

The Baby

Judging by the light in his eyes he is
between the lines, a veritable lampshade. Why?
he asks, his baby teeth bright.

I do not know. I do not tell him so.
How am I to answer glowing eyes, a baby
mind? I am afraid to be revealed. He

frightens me. I jiggle myself for batteries,
for backup power. I want a torch in hand in
case of sturdy self-defense. I’ve never seen

a baby like this man, kept infantile for centuries,
millennia, by megawatts of desperation
that shine from every corner of the earth, adding

one to another until together their blindness is
blinding. I cannot hear through the light. All I feel
is his baby body pressed against me.

Cushat Dreams

Beneath her horny toes,
...............the branch
is a memory of window ledge.
Her bird mind is only a thin breeze
in its seed brain,
.........but it is enough.
When she bites through berries they are
French fries on her beak, smeared with grease
of animal fat fingers.
........Cushat dreams of iron trees.
When the wind pierces miles of forest
to ruffle her, she thinks
....................she smells
the distant smell of flying,
vast tracts of stone and glass, the
ruffle of wind through
..........millions of feathers, of pigeons.
Dupe at heart,
.......the thin breeze brings her
grinding sparks between the pebbles,
taste of sulphur on the leaves,
.........endless seas of human feet.

Planting

you and me, we’re organic things
between us we make organic things

between us is something that is
not a seed, but exactly like one,

something with long-buried roots,
something not moving,

but growing. slower than sight,
growing and spreading,

white skins in the underside
of dirt, offshoots, intrigues

of underground living.
my eyes touch the ground

and rise back up to meet your own.
there is nothing for it, the quiet hum

of bees, the painful silence
burgeoning between us.

Close Countenance

This hair falls,
falls heavy through the air,
lands nowhere, only
trailing off to meet its many ends.
I tell my child stories
that end & end,
and yet continue.

These fingers split in indecision,
end in nails, divide,
renew. My baby
cuts her baby skin
open, but it grows again,
thicker than before. In her,
my life is endless.

Will this face stay smooth?
Will these breasts remain
in place? They fall,
heavily they fall, no mouth
to feed; my child
lives on foreign food, no longer needs
these old breasts, this face.

Shoulders

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and Earth’s foundations stay.
- A.E. Housman

We said,
let’s hold our shoulders side by side,
and build a wall that goes forever.
This latticework of arms and hands
is stronger than the bending bones,
the straining flesh, the living leather.
More than blood is coursing through
the veins we sprout. A different kind
of sinew lashes minds together.
We stared down fear and fear ended;
Our shoulders held the sky suspended.

Expedition

We stare at each other across the table for ten long minutes,
eyes swerving up and down each other’s faces,
picking at rows of forehead creases,
digging up signs of
smiles around the mouth,
frowns around the eyes,
and I wonder what I’m looking for
and whether I’d notice if I found it.

Coffee arrives and words follow,
no better than the silent scrutiny of those long minutes,
still wrapping themselves around foreign tongues
and prying up the corners of think-out-loud talk.
I do my best that day,
I dig through you for hours,
but when it comes to flags, I am still colour-blind,
can’t tell red from white.
Later that night,

I go down without a fight.

Apologies to Elizabeth Bishop

My mother’s voice: “bring a watch, lose the keys;
love isn't a door, but something too hard to master.”
I have lied next to rivers, filled with the lovely art of disaster.

the way down

look.
I am weighed down
by a tangle of directions that just
show me back to my place
like a movie usher with a chip
on his shoulder and a flashlight I
will use to brain him.

I can’t seem to explain
this map with my fingers.
they get lost around the
curves of roads and parts
that are grey water—
no, grey land—
no, that’s water, I
think. I’ll have to
explore
it with my feet;
toes know the way
to the water.

I will plant my feet
in the ground,
root around,
look for a buried road sign or
disoriented tourist,

drink twelve beers and
drive myself home.

Re: Klein

the kind of girl who lies in fields
in the brown and brown of early spring
with a tingle on her tongue

well I mean we are meant to be
alone or whatever, or apart or whatever

the kind of girl who lives like she’s dying,
every moment precisely savoured

alone or whatever, but I never understood
that twenty year silence. what a waste

the kind of girl who lies

of talent. I’d say time but
that’s a waste anyway

incisive and minute,
in fields in the brown

no matter how you slice it,
I mean everyone knows that

and brown of early
spring alive and
dying by the moment

Obituary

Podesco, Anan
At birth. First child of two desperate
people, beloved brother of no one;
no sibling will ever come along to be
wondered at and imagined by. Left
this world too soon to have a home.
Soon to be followed by a mother who
was destroyed by the pain of being
torn open and finding nothing inside.
Mourners are asked to reserve their
condolences until the second funeral.

The body at the bottom

I took the stairs two at a time to the body at the bottom.

Her hair was alive under my hands as I brushed it away and looked into her eyes. Something of their light seemed to linger around the edges, hinting at the heartbreak that had burned there. I remembered damp lashes clinging together in fear, begging desperate questions of me. How I had known, then, that my heart had hardened against reply. It gave way now, ran with a red trickle around her temple towards the arc of her ear, escaping my absent ministrations.

Three steps up lay an empty shoe. It burned my fingers as I read the ripples in its sole, scanning stops and pebbles from its frequent journeys. Tracing the heeled curve, letting its pitted edges teach my fingers, I read the message it had left me. The twin had cut deeply into the soft underbelly of the floor, three steps down, five seconds ahead. It held no sign of remorse for its insane departure, violating the deepest bonds of right and left. No stockinged foot had abandoned it; the separation was justified.

Under my nails I noticed some of the living hair that had crept along with me, unnoticed, flashing its coy smiles in my direction. Unable to resist such promise, I rejoined its sisters in the carpet and we spoke to each other in lover’s whispers. One laughed of a tickling brush against her cheek, another of a windblown sting to her eye. Several spoke of how they had intertwined with impassioned fingers and felt the exquisite pain of their pull. For days we whispered back and forth, until I swam with their secrets.

Alive then with this golden glow, I stepped carefully over shapely leg, past immodestly hiked skirts. Delicate fingers beckoned to me to return, but I knew them well, knew how they had lain curled around neck and shoulders, grasping flesh as if possessed. Having finally gained that sweetest of silences, feeling the lick of it coil expectantly through me, I raised myself up, up, and flung shut the door.

Words' worth

And though the poet weeps his lullaby
on the bank of the Thames,
the waters rush to their own song-
broadcast through static to the human ear;

If I could hear like birds
my books would hit the river.

Micro

I read things in your eyes like writing on money
too tiny to see
too important to miss

Gutterhome

The shortage will be divided among the peasants. –Proverb

I am the glory that drips from bitter mouths,
smokes butts from the street,
kills strays.
Rain pounds my flat and painted surface,
engenders sporadic stubble,
drifts grime.
Insolent hymns resonate through my waste lands,
ciphered with screeching hosannahs,
silent cursing.

Emblazoned with a dead man’s name,
I am steaming black sympathy,
cold change.

Behind a lifetime crust of processed cheese,
between stains in faded floral print,
humming seafoam,
worn fur seeps years of sordid stench,
exposes overflowing flesh,
sprouts scarcity.

This runner is cut down foot and knee,
bleeds white and octagon red,
absorbs lead,
and lies motionless in a rotten orange glow,
exhaling centuries of gutterhome
into the endless night.