My Father Says to Talk Only About the Weather Until I Break Off My Polyamorous Relationship

1. Hazy fog with high 6 & low -1
2. Rainfall with high 8 & low 1
3. Rainfall with high 8 & low -3
4. Hazy fog with high 6 & low -4
5. Hazy fog with high 8 & low -6
6. Rainfall with high 7 & low -4
7. Rainfall with high 6 & low 3
8. Rainfall with high 12 & low 4
9. Rainfall with high 10 & low 3
10. Rainfall with high 14 & low 9
11. Rainfall with high 14 & low 7
12. Rainfall with high 12 & low 7
13. cloudy with high 13 & low 8
14. Hazy fog with high 9 & low 3
15. cloudy with high 6 & low 3
16. Hazy fog with high 4 & low 1
17. Hazy fog with high 5 & low 0
18. Hazy fog with high 9 & low -2
19. Hazy fog with high 8 & low -2
20. Hazy fog with high 9 & low 1
21. Partly cloudy with high 8 & low -3
22. mostly cloudy with high 7 & low -1
23. Hazy fog with high 10 & low -2
24. sunny with high 8 & low -2
25. sunny with high 8 & low -4
26. sunny with high 7 & low -5
27. Rainfall with high 5 & low -2
28. Rainfall with high 7 & low 3
29. Rainfall with high 12 & low 4
30. Rainfall with high 9 & low 6
31. Rainfall with high 9 & low 4
32. mostly cloudy with high 10 & low -2
33. Hazy fog with high 7 & low -3
34. Rainfall with high 6 & low -4
35. mostly cloudy with high 3 & low -6
36. sunny with high -2 & low -6
37. snow with high -5 & low -7
38. snow with high -3 & low -7
39. snow with high -1 & low -4
40. mostly cloudy with high 1 & low -4
41. Rainfall with high 8 & low -4
42. Rainfall with high 9 & low 4
43. Rainfall with high 14 & low 6
44. Rainfall with high 13 & low 4
45. Rainfall with high 13 & low 6
46. Rainfall with high 13 & low 6
47. Rainfall with high 11 & low 4
48. Rainfall with high 12 & low 6
49. Rainfall with high 13 & low 3
50. Rainfall with high 8 & low 3
51. Rainfall with high 9 & low 5
52. Hazy fog with high 11 & low 1
53. mostly cloudy with high 8 & low -3
54. mostly cloudy with high 11 & low -1
55. Rainfall with high 7 & low 5
56. Partly cloudy with high 11 & low 2
57. Partly cloudy with high 11 & low 0
58. Rainfall with high 7 & low 1
59. Hazy fog with high 15 & low 4
60. Rainfall with high 7 & low 1
61. Rainfall with high 12 & low 1
62. Rainfall with high 16 & low 4
63. Rainfall with high 16 & low 7
64. Rainfall with high 15 & low 8
65. Rainfall with high 13 & low 7
66. mostly cloudy with high 16 & low 6
67. Rainfall with high 10 & low 3
68. Rainfall with high 14 & low 11
69. Rainfall with high 12 & low 3
70. Hazy fog with high 14 & low 0
71. sunny with high 18 & low -1
72. Rainfall with high 16 & low -1
73. Rainfall with high 17 & low 5
74. Partly cloudy with high 17 & low 3
75. Rainfall with high 16 & low 6
76. Rainfall with high 11 & low 4
77. mostly cloudy with high 12 & low 4
78. Rainfall with high 14 & low 1
79. Partly cloudy with high 10 & low -1
80. sunny with high 13 & low -2
81. sunny with high 17 & low -3
82. sunny with high 16 & low -1
83. sunny with high 20 & low 1
84. Rainfall with high 14 & low 8
85. Rainfall with high 11 & low 7
86. Rainfall with high 14 & low 7
87. Rainfall with high 12 & low 8
88. Rainfall with high 13 & low 8
89. Rainfall with high 13 & low 4
90. Rainfall with high 16 & low 1
91. Rainfall with high 11 & low 7
92. mostly cloudy with high 15 & low 4
93. Rainfall with high 14 & low 7
94. Rainfall with high 14 & low 8
95. Rainfall with high 13 & low 8
96. mostly cloudy with high 18 & low 8
97. Hazy fog with high 23 & low 6
98. Rainfall with high 21 & low 8
99. Rainfall with high 17 & low 7
100. sunny with high 19 & low 6
101. Partly cloudy with high 20 & low 4
102. Partly cloudy with high 18 & low 9
103. sunny with high 22 & low 2
104. Partly cloudy with high 23 & low 3
105. mostly cloudy with high 16 & low 7
106. Rainfall with high 14 & low 9
107. Rainfall with high 13 & low 10
108. sunny with high 15 & low 2
109. Rainfall with high 14 & low 4
110. Partly cloudy with high 18 & low 5
111. Rainfall with high 18 & low 9
112. Rainfall with high 12 & low 6
113. Rainfall with high 12 & low 8
114. Rainfall with high 15 & low 9
115. mostly cloudy with high 13 & low 5
116. Rainfall with high 13 & low 4
117. Rainfall with high 13 & low 6
118. Partly cloudy with high 17 & low 2
119. Partly cloudy with high 25 & low 7
120. sunny with high 28 & low 8
121. sunny with high 31 & low 8
122. Rainfall with high 24 & low 9
123. Rainfall with high 16 & low 11
124. Rainfall with high 15 & low 11
125. Rainfall with high 17 & low 11
126. mostly cloudy with high 18 & low 7
127. sunny with high 19 & low 4
128. Rainfall with high 15 & low 11
129. Thunderstorms with high 14 & low 9
130. Rainfall with high 17 & low 8
131. Partly cloudy with high 19 & low 5
132. sunny with high 26 & low 6
133. sunny with high 29 & low 9
134. sunny with high 33 & low 10
135. sunny with high 28 & low 12
136. Partly cloudy with high 21 & low 11
137. Rainfall with high 21 & low 12
138. Rainfall with high 16 & low 12
139. mostly cloudy with high 21 & low 12
140. Partly cloudy with high 23 & low 9
141. Partly cloudy with high 23 & low 10
142. sunny with high 18 & low 11
143. Rainfall with high 21 & low 14
144. mostly cloudy with high 21 & low 13
145. Rainfall with high 21 & low 9
146. Rainfall with high 21 & low 12
147. mostly cloudy with high 20 & low 10
148. Thunderstorms with high 18 & low 9
149. mostly cloudy with high 18 & low 11
150. Partly cloudy with high 24 & low 10
151. Partly cloudy with high 24 & low 9
152. Partly cloudy with high 23 & low 8
153. Partly cloudy with high 15 & low 12
154. mostly cloudy with high 21 & low 8
155. Partly cloudy with high 23 & low 9
156. Partly cloudy with high 24 & low 8
157. sunny with high 26 & low 10
158. Partly cloudy with high 25 & low 12
159. Partly cloudy with high 26 & low 14
160. Partly cloudy with high 23 & low 13
161. Partly cloudy with high 23 & low 8
162. Partly cloudy with high 26 & low 11
163. Rainfall with high 18 & low 13
164. Rainfall with high 18 & low 12
165. Cloudy with high 19 & low 12
166. Rainfall with high 17 & low 12
167. Thunderstorms with high 16 & low 9
168. Rainfall with high 15 & low 11
169. Partly cloudy with high 22 & low 9
170. Rainfall with high 27 & low 10
171. Rainfall with high 22 & low 12
172. sunny with high 24 & low 9
173. sunny with high 27 & low 10
174. Rainfall with high 27 & low 13
175. mostly cloudy with high 25 & low 14
176. mostly cloudy with high 25 & low 14
177. Rainfall with high 19 & low 16
178. Rainfall with high 22 & low 15
179. Cloudy with high 22 & low 15
180. Rainfall with high 22 & low 14
181. Partly cloudy with high 29 & low 10

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

from This Poem Book 2

Mounted with lexical rivets, pivots
parties of oscillate paucits

this poem is quickening its pace
adjusting its race

writing bare-back and saddle strapped

and says
fare-thee-well ebullient ellusors
sluiced in floosy cues crimped
crumpers frumpy lumpen in a ramped-up
rumba boombox

of pushed property, apéritifs, parodies, parties of
froto folio philio-hillbillies

and it is groping in the
proxy fraudulence of
edgy arpeggios, fingering itself
like a discordant accordion in a squatting quadrant

all volatile and frustrated
like a fun-size yodeler roadie
in a rubber suit

all deviant and distorted and crammed with punkspew
spam panoramically rammed with hardcore caveats
like a reluctant carnival

crawling with prodigality




and it is garnishing its aegis,
collaging its pages, waging

in rended ends, upended
lends, inset with

petite pot-shot plotted naughty spotifiers
in whisky thicket and agon
of egged-on add-ons

oh this poem is
dressed for a poppy bonbon
a hey dolly heyday

but for all its spectroscopic gaiety
it’s just a heteoflexible
savoir-faire thee-well of abbatoir avatars
caveat have-nots

ghostly hostesses, hospice auspices
of fermishte foster fluster muster
plutards

and is just so on a roll

with its frictional flickers
flecks of screaming memes

montaging its ontology
ménaging its philology

of lexical proxemics
like a nymphy simplex-soaked candlyland

all asterisktaking

in the cataleptic spasm of techno-flexed flourishes
dissolute and nihilist, asemic, dyssemic and abstemious

exploding like visceral nostalgia

fraught with discarded favors
flavored percepts, surfaces, services
refigured in a
shifting ground of rewound
bounds

and is so unfollowing you

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Blue to Red

As you sleep, I am watching you drawn into the unsteady
Blur of a Shaker rocker, ear pressed against a teal welt

Gessoed onto your naked shoulder. In your drifting-off
Horse rider’s hands, so without borders they could be

A cartographer’s, the bow of a homemade violin aches
To map out scale. If they were awake, your fingers would

Unstring the staves of night, your left eye a bruised pianissimo
My right forearm a warm crescendo. Your lips, parting, tip

Up in profile, fear dividing my face in two: first a fighter
Next a bull charging a ranch gate the wind grates open.

Your hinges unhinge me while, outside, a magpie whistles
Into cottonwoods cobalt with breeze and, inside, mirrored

In me, you exist in dream, your face turning full. Mars
A readymade riding into the corral of my ribs. There

Is no other weather, no greater lightning strike to
Cleanse us as singly, our unsaddled horses fording

Vast floodlit night-spaces etched, we have come to feel
By the sharp stream of quietude we each have had to

Wade through to drink from. Once the eclipse starts gnawing
The moon outside inward, I sit across from you, thirsty

Inspired, and cold, slipping on your faded, dawn-bloodied shirt.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Through a Glass Lightly: Cento for Beginners

The nasturtium is to itself already
a memory. It opens its leaves
its fire
ribbed impression in the grass
that forms like shadow.
I see it plain
as a living fretwork
in the distortion of sound,
press a leaf to a winter dream
of your hand
translated, given.
Our love calls and we lie
in the future of cells dividing,
a water drop
clean in its own shape.
A nasturtium between itself
and us, showing the light.
Time to be born.


‘Through a Glass Lightly: Cento for Beginners’ from the collection First Light by Kate Fagan, published
by Giramondo Publishing Company (Sydney). Used with the permission of the publisher.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

from Forced Drift, Section: Dawn

Variable irradiance; variable background. A body in sun beyond the shadow of a doubt. Buoyant reflectance; bouillon carbon. Good soil lights up lit-up hands and carbon of so much work. Light, neither-here nor-there, wondering glow nestles liquid scree. Somewhere is a perfect heat; perfectly real and concrete; perfect soluble forms perfect no more. Shore heat; shored-up by eternities of faith, and crumble puffs of ice-dust come fair and sharing-off light and shade. Come here, fair bodies. Fair says the world to come, says displaced color starts here, one with another – first melt – then leak – first painting: “Say, look at that quivering landscape.” Of a body, the remarkableness of it all, displayed against all other bodies. Firm heat; infirm sun. Clarity comes after: “Say, see the moon in morning.” Dawn is the drawing of a line – one made with a finger across water, hands across the back of an animal, several fingers through a lover’s hair – see the anxious landscape; see light advance – error of pen marks from rib to ear. Who has faith in the arbitrary? But in our sun and what it covers. This loneliness. Remains. This country. I want the sun to cover everything. Nape itself; limbs hard-site; what wraps together as skin? My rock to your hard place. Then bit by bit, a touching of everything. Everything is interesting. A man against a tree, an obstacle in front of a lizard. An octopus draped atop a whale. A mountain and a glacier. Our simple heads, last drenched – last glow animal praxis; glow our path into solemn etcetra. It becomes bright. There is nothing more to do. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Ambrosian animal snout; sun receptacle passing species; simply living yet so taken by food; so taken with sweetness. All bees, you are, simply taken by food, and given subtle bodies, given subtle matter, who would not wonder at a chameleon in our midst? We have need of light that will bring fulfillment. Light our being, our matter, and mercy in shadow’s cold movements downwards, as in the case of water, as in what is visible, congealing as foam or phlegm – all sick – to learn, that is, to know, the gem hidden in the phenomena of color. Pink-purple green-yellow red-purple inches of tan-yellow pink-purple, with ½ inch pinkish-purple, dark purple partially red-purple, a red-purple arm, dark-purple patchy-red pink-purple dark-purple red-purple red-dark purple inch. What falls out when we shake a tree? Shake the tincture of scent? Nostrils, amniotic sacs – what bursts? It goes without saying that the ear is ever open; that little loops in front of mouth are attention encased bubbles; contained in breath like a purpose. Circles without circumferences; cartwheel galaxies. Full blown sun. Gently, we think in such substances, a breath from face to face; sun from peasant to field to bowl to body. Oral curves bear fruit. “Say, don’t speak with your mouth full.” Costume sun; drench and dry. I’ve given it up to you. Some hearts tell something good. Some hearts are together against seasons; some hearts are low hung fruit. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. A way to speak precise, quiet and with climate. A way to lounge in sun; flexible radiance, heat that’s nothing new to me. It is very bright in the sun. The birds wake us and I am gone from your belly to slowly rise. To set upon some truth in the day as not open, as not a yawning gap, but a mass; the massiveness of our bodies spooning together. Monstrous cuddled forms. Under light, we look silly. My tiny expenditure to your few grams. Under one body, cadence of another body. What a surprise. What unmanageable forms. Say, “the sun hunts us;” all this brightness, getting brighter. This almost very bright in which I’m all that I ever will be. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To wake up over and over again in this small movement universe. To sun myself. My voice of an angel. Before breakfast and the fall away from warmth.

The sun does not break into pieces.
The sun is constant weight.

My darling hard-site; my darling under hooks. We per the direction, per the other duties. I was faking it. I was a hidden treasure. I desired to be known in sweetness and in cavity; of hollow and of blood taken at fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The month we are in accumulates in the mouth. Shit breath. Shit for brains. We reach sweetness, my darling. Heart from a distance and the heart from up close. This is my body – this is my love – incurring tiny grams; lone presence in weighted jumpsuits. The clean heart within me. Water into me; a second flowing towards my body, a third towards my legs. Light bowels. Distance arteries. We move without any interlude, as it were, as it is now, from the womb into the house of language, or the hall of sounds into each bowel’s acoustic gesture. This is our glow together. Our blood and treasure. Renouncing innards.

Free of thrombi.

The lamp by the lips as before

a sunrise we are under

vision of someone talking.

My face again in the last rays. My face again looking directly into the sun.

Oh, that old routine

rung around

our bodies.

Dodecahedron humid forms sweating buckets; dodecahedron duodenums shitting bricks.

It’s bright

“it’s me, sugar”

It becomes brighter even still.

Over the sternum we gaze red and willing amniotic sacs; the color of red works the face – dark but shaved close – shadows without constructors and us with our colors’ mosaic branches.

A. body thin.

B. body cold.

C. skin moderately pigmented.

D. dark brown beard and moustache.

E. irides brown

F. cornea clear

G. scalp dark

H. shaved close

I. lips without

J. teeth good

K. chest is

L. fingernails short

M. torso note.

I’m putting myself to work. There’s so much more to do. Both things, flesh and fields, on horizons and waiting irradiation; plunked irrigation, the water mishappens.

Braille pasture, my rolled form.

We resuscitate haze soul. The heaven within that gives me life.

The body is the temperature of no more lambs.

Gulp form horizon.

I melt into paradise.

Swallowed bits, tiny grams.

Curvilinear desire, a boat in a ravine or a mountain in a valley.

The body is the temperature of a working hand.

Roundness lurks touch; everything is roundness. Solar valleys, waves kicked up by wind and our skin together in brightness; it becomes bright, it becomes bright more quickly still. And each phase of wave and of our skin, as if mercy were a skin of water. Say, in the hands of a man with his gloves off who works all day in pasture and who walks slowly between rows and dwindles until he vanishes; and then returns, or his shadow, attaining its maximum length and then decreasing; or the idea of him as interfering waves, and his skin, empty now of water, because he drank it all or used it for the avocados; and the skin is empty now; it’s a normal skin, or skin that is still under fabric, an empty skin; because after all, a skin swollen with water does not arouse fear, does not awaken it, much less isolate it; but the empty skin does, and this is what I saw in the angle of the hour: a-free-for-all and shadow lengths standing for the sun.

The temperature is that of the refrigeration unit.

It becomes bright. It is very bright.

Red-purple knees blue-purple. Black red-purple black; blue-purple crust; red knees; blue-purple 3 ¼ inches; intramuscular purple; head counting pre-purple dawn.

Pinpoint clouding; pinprick dippage.

Deep calf patterns on the lawn.

Just think of the things I’m becoming.

Clothing on a body

hanging like a bear, stretching like a bird.

Your jungle out there to my greener pastures

capture landscape; the whims we are

on cleft

palates cliffs.

The body is the temperature of clouds at dusk.

Of mild clouding; injury solstice.

Cut surfaces show the usual deep red; branch embolus. Pink-purple arteries in-situ froth clots in a mild nutmeg pattern as deep landmarks glisten green-yellow in mucosal lining. The thymus; the hymns blunt force. Lip cut sections; cut the red-purple cheek covering an area of 1 ½ inches and to the left of this is 3 ½ inches of tan-yellow parchment which appears as a stain on the chest, pink-purple, with ½ inch separation between the two nipples. This extends, curvilinear, to the left, along the costal margin across the left flank and mid left back. Brush burn patterns implode and make a color, pinkish-purple, under a growing light of dark purple averaging ½ in the greatest dimension which now covers an area of 2 ½ X ¾ on the right upper arms, partially red-purple, a red-purple arm, on the right lateral side, an elongated dark-purple arm, covering the back and front and patchy-red arms scattered over inner pink-purple upper arms to the elbow and dark-purple arms at the greatest dimension of oblique and elongated red-purple arms upwards and along the back of red-dark purple arms – linear and outstretched.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Finishing Salt

This is the end of season in the food forest. Bitter apple. Fairytale fungus.
Spores so dry they fly and impregnate everything nearby but us.

These are pivotal places. Leaves drop loud. Everything burns.
Autumn sugars in on itself. Concentrated sun. Jam on trees. A deep Gulf Island cum.

Spring is scented for courtship. Summers want wet. Winters lie in wait, yearning.
We make deep criminal love from far away. Inside. The Cabin. The Heart. Soft.
Because we know this will be our last.

Flame gone out as if we were not Lovers. Recovered as fire to smoke into air.
Breath into body absorbed into blood. Energy of muscles pushed to exhaustion
As if we had not just begun inside Nature.

These are the cutting times. Fear of amputation. Fall, the slow wood fire.
It never goes out. Even ash holds evidence in wind. Our Aegean meeting.
Fresh tomato, olive oil, broken bread and Turkish tea beneath the sycamore.

These are small cremations now. Slow. With intent. A forced ending.
You approach from the east and I, the west. We walk the path raw.
Our very own Silk Road toward separation.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

stuttering in domestica

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

from ‘Perfect Blue Distant Objects’

That a subject can be observed, under its own

volition saying, ‘I

am with persons unfamiliar with difference. I

differ more

from things than from those places that effect
distance.’ At one remove from the latter we have

to back

them, their interests biting into former gains,

being back

in a home stripped of nature and thus full

of the art of the ill.

Very seldom are reports raised, or any

imaginings of present

disappointments, great estimates by individuals

high

on malice, constantly juiced on malice. We are

what

ignorance makes of a defective reality out

beyond

actual monsters and all their quaint little bugs.

It bears

out that hearsay is a thing, too, like matter,

that hearing

people as irritable conjecture or abstractions is
a particular quality of action to some. Acts

against ourselves

are not where we dislike the concrete. Existence
as arbitrary names, arbitrary nicks in the nominal,

innumerable

sides to the qualified good, other indifferences

of the damned.

Our features fill up the portrait. We are caricatures

who

know enough to hate scarcity, anyone

can, and has previously.

To whom should the observed up and complain. An acute
wish to spite the moment, to let it see him,

his particular

enmity, to sit down disarmed and go some way

toward disarming

circumstance. If he can view it, quartered in its unforeseen
neutrality, like any other supposed adversary, respect

for like men

might turn as the ugly eye turns, not balked at

but put out.

He is an abstracted object, not in the way

of expected

disagreements; he and his distance are an implacable

disgust,

hatred in a long room where the same person is
a face with no nose and a general to man. He found
you alone with your diversions, with your sympathies, alone
he seems contemptuous, he has nothing, and says

stupidity

conceived him over a laugh. You heard something laughing

as he laughed.

Unranked subjects talked and talked, knowing

you’d torn

into the party hoping to find some virulent

strain, find a writer

tamed by some animal’s cough. The sort who bites himself.
That’s him, in shorts, making nothing of opposites, even in
company he is balanced in a vice. Another expert

may be one

lime cordial away from dull hatred but you try

him for that also,

for that and other offenses you merely wished

were somewhere given.

Before learning to earn you acquainted yourself

with the nearest

fool. It is as well he’s forgiven your other hand,

as your other hand

is profligate with secrets milled from the public, characters
shaken out of the given heart and spoken to kindly,

handed

parts of their mothers and fathers as sport, as an aged

politics

hauling its personable carbuncle of fellowship. You are

a person

who has been told. You are sallow from all the ocular proof

of a face

on the ghost. Ghost mending this blue in the blunt matter.
Your dignity held up against ridicule is one edge
of the edited lie. He has invented _______ from scotch tape

and

a fondness for the anonymous just. Where you were not
just, so am I not the author of a moment. The moment can be known

critically,

or learned well, even as it comes out of the _______

unsatisfied.

Is it only the mask man dreads and do we only

hate disguise

if a human in shorts dredges the something for notions

concerning himself?

Distance entertains us only partially, and people

entertain

compounded simplicities then work out their guesses
in answer to nothing derived from reality. We drive

those ideas

into experience, mixing the only true general

up with models

abstracted from naked ones and zeros, the perfect

favoured over deformity.

Our being ill together, the mingled good

of our lives on the web

is not fault but whipped virtue. Our pride

not ours if not

encouraged by them. If I despair of vice,

my ‘if’ is courage,

a finely tuned one-­‐-by-­‐-one into the truly

long weakness, it bisects

pride, party of the proudly weak, named,

mean, learning all having is classified.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Johnson Lake, Late August

You paddle tenderly
through the chatter

of paper-thin lake ice
while I cast and troll

a line in the wake.

This is what
it’s like to forgive
and yet remember.

Set a boat in the water,
push it off from shore.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Clairefontaine

A bright orange notebook denominated “Clairefontaine”,
96 pages of papier velouté ruled in lilac and pink,
is the last vestige of two years at the Lycée Français
where each subject had its own special cahier,
its glossiness and heft implying the relative weight
and importance of the knowledge transcribed
within its covers.

My own students had flimsy yellow cahiers
indicating the low status of English at that institution
whose mandate was to bring culture to us
in our colonial exile. Recognizing this, they refused to pay
for their textbooks and handed their homework in late
or not at all. Meanwhile, around the corner,
a foreign language school was being demolished
having collapsed on a class overpaying for the privilege
of wrestling with “there”, “their” and “they’re”:
further proof that the study of English was suspect.

One young man died shielding a classmate
with his body; his actions heroic
in any language.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

“The tiled koi pond is filled with lobsters.”

Heather Jessup, YHZ-(YYC)-YVR
December 4, 2012

Heather, there is nothing on the Internet that suggests
that this koi pond filled with lobsters actually exists.
Knowing you are not a liar, I can only assume
you are a romantic that misread holding tank as
koi pond.
The lobsters not ornament, but there
for souvenir: the remembrance boiled alive and served
to friends. I was here. Memory dripping with sweet butter.
Here. I empty the tank of lobsters. What now,
wishing well? Signs that say you really oughtn’t throw coins?
Clear the coins, pull the plug.
Wherever, intones the PA. The empty space
a place to lie down before security comes
with its hook, with its hustle.
Race to the gate where the poem takes us
into there’s air with your rusty laugh,
your old cellphone with its cricketing clitter.
Wherever, wherever, wherever.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

from “Janey Settler-Invader”

Now and then the wolves cry like souls
in purgatory. I think they are reincarnations
of dead Indigns come to reproach the palefeces.
Every time c□ck hits in, energy shoots
from the base of my spine. Perhaps
Louis Riel, the ill-starred half-brood, is
among them. He simply turned his face
toward the sky and made some remark
about the weather. I should like to be that
bird or elk that lost her mate under the ripe
snooky moon. Once I picked bright blooms
from his grave near a great bear-like cross
bearing a prisoned figure of the Nazarene, pierced
hands and thorn-stung brow. He that resisteth
the power resisteth the ordinance of the plague
bot infesting animal intestines. I’m beyond
coming when only the lovemaking of the grass
hoppers can be heard among the clover. The shit
with distinctions between crazy and Kiel’s body
lies, but mayhap the Hebrew King’s soul
and his dusky Israeli braves hit the fan
and everything turns chaotic and wild again.




Here is a warrior whose legs are bare
except for a coating of terra-cotta paint.
He has the loans of a cave-dweller. A bright
red head sticks out of this apricot pit because
at age thirty the Prime Minstrel gircumsized himself.
Now, if you shut up and stay nonexistent, I wouldn’t
be surprised if even an Indign may have a desire
to display his muscular development. This man’s
tongue began to make noise in the settlement like an
unchained hurricane. Up, up into these trees! Lord Selkirk’s
heart sank, ‘I fear me.’ Leguminous odours from decaying
clover and rank, matted masses of wild pease, the feverish
exhalations of the tiger-lily, and of the rich-blooded buffalo
lilac. Abortions make it dangerous to f#ck, herbage crushed
into the mire, so I can finally get love, turkey buzzards
circling, I don’t want to touch it more than that, sodden eyes
gleaming with expectancy, a quick kiss, wet and slimy. Scotland
is a kingdom of the mind, an ambition overleaping Mayan ruins.
You know that Indign is a cunning diplomat. Is the story
of the Colony going to be an epic or a drama?




Noo Grodof ntck the(\the oivJ4this discord
of the bands, in opposition to the bagpipes and
tom-toms, excoriates one’s ears, but the squ■ws
and papooses in the wagons seem to enjoy the
injunction. Father, I want to apologize for how
I’ve been acting. A great passion-rose bloomed
in each cheek. The Devil is an image. ‘Du darfst!’
it says – ‘You may!’ Oroon^o-stood a.ftrt3pl05hl(^9
on the verge of JY*There are good-looking maidens
in the procession. (Corrects herself). One of them
had too much poetry in her sweet head,twxVI want
you to lead me without hesitation into the land of the
shadow and the monster of a dizzy steep overlooking
a gulf. I want you to plunge into my wounded body the
name of axtonlv ttvuo ottrLove. It’s a pity these soft-eyed
little bundles of femininity must grow into large, dull
Oftifcof ri .,. ^ IIC squOndtruawsXlVf. Here is one slim
and supple tn ntcklOct as a stalk of Oroond m>y soim corn.
Oroond US Beautiful, too, in that one requisite of a beautiful
face is light plop plop 3 i£,Mpir\n no air to splAsh LOith
thinq C Coloured light destroys all hatred. Love’s a lance
cutting my brain in two. While coughing up blood, she keeps
working on this rug.




One man has three sc@1ps hanging
from his belt. He meekly marches along
to the tune the paleface sets him. Tut!
He is only a tomcat eating the family
canary, skin ripped off and (The. so(fiy red
muscle exposed. I roll my hands in his fat and
bite my own little hunted v£ni^htchan^E.pet!
The appearance of other birds and beasts under
similar circumstances are likewise tokens. Do you
consider the flowers I gave you worth preserving?
Eastern people, and folk from overseas, shudder
at sculpts on a belt. Their methods are different;
but I know! I know! The peelface stalks
his victim just as relentlessly, and takes
the scf*rf just as surely; but he hangs
it on his wife’s neck in gems of naked
flame; or he may hang it on his
wall in a Greuze
or a Millet.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Sarcophagus (1986)

The spring Vancouver sang “Something’s Happening
Here,” something happened over there.

It’s still happening.

The prince and princess opened
65 pavilions, a highway
of stalled vehicles, an alabaster statue
behind glass. The city had arrived.



. . .


Gorbachenko suffered a radiation burn on his back where Sashenok’s hand was
located when he helped carry him out.

Vomiting and losing
consciousness. Pins and needles,
a taste of metal.


. . .


41 international + 7 provincial + 2 territorial + 3 state + 9 corporate + 2 theme + 1
special (treasures from the life of a pharaoh).


. . .


Just before it happened and before
it opened, Gram died
and there were sandwiches.
A new haircut she wouldn’t see.


. . .


Scavengers strip all metals.
Visitors ditch protective garments
at set intervals.
More horses than ever.

On Google Earth, a place of rivers.


. . .


She’d have remembered when they found
another pharaoh’s tomb. (The curse
of the mosquito, wonderful things.)

Though she didn’t know she’d be gone
before Expo opened, she hadn’t planned to go.
Too many steps to get there
though just three kilometres
if one could fly.


. . .


The man with the hand on his back.
The glass roof, fallen in instalments.
Her kitchen print of Jesus.
The shut-up air that held the meddled relics.
The land plaza, the air plaza.
Near her ear, that purple spot.
Kaput.


. . .


But: the geodesic dome.
A child’s hair in a drain.
The book beside the bed.
Some benches, now perched near beaches.
A classroom floor through which a tree.
What the looters left.
The bookmark in the book beside the bed.
Cards for future birthdays.


. . .


The place on East 4th lives there still,
made new. (Almost but not quite a street
you can go down onscreen. The time
of the cherry blossoms.) Of the cybercafé
on the corner, she would recognize the brick.


. . .


Her death, the last turn
of the turnstiles, not disasters.

In Kiev, they held the May parade
but no children of the government
went out that day.

Five years later, the princess
visited Chernobyl’s children, listened,
stroked their cancers. Click here to see her
lean her head into her hands. Even thinner
than at Expo. Listen
to the shutters.


. . .


Twenties set aside inside
a granddaughter card in one of many drawers,
enough for an ankh, Egyptian symbol
of eternal life. Sixteen, trying on irony
or was it hope.


. . .


As for the #4 reactor . . . , we estimate it will be 20,000 years before the real estate
will be fully safe.

Real estate?
Only the old were allowed back.


. . .


Her house brought in thousands less than Asking.
The adjoining lot, with dandelions,
next to nothing.

It all started after Expo
they say. Then the skyline
filled with cranes.


. . .


Her last steps up the steps.
Back from dinner for her 87th

No, she was not in bed,
she had gotten up,
the bathroom was a small room, hardly
large enough to fall,
though she must have.

The heart of course.


. . .


What happened over there clicks up through the trunks, the blades of grass.
Swallows with cataracts nest in the sarcophagus.


. . .


Where it happened, a whole
new city. They had to clean
the soil first, before they built
the glass towers.


. . .


Someone on Facebook has her name.


. . .


The lone and level sands.








Italicized material from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Grieving

In darkening days
when pulse slows,
a great shaggy bear
fattened on berries, and cranky,
lumbers to sniff out a cave in the rocks,
the warmth of forgetfulness, deep sleep.

Who would urge it to spring
back into sharp light and wind,
to lick only snowflakes swirling the snout,
to skid along ice
even great claws cannot grip
before time’s twist in the belly
hungers for a rebirth?

Some too wrap around ourselves
a thickening memory,
lie down, inhale minutes passing
fed up with foraging, fighting, or fleeing
and fill a hollow with rest
mindless, simply to be.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

The World Is Never Enough with Us

I should apologize for another
Poem about death and political economy
But the daily walk is the graveyard
Emily, treading, treading
Like the Fang people of Africa with the
Bundled sticks of their dead dried
Folded and packed around on their backs
Thin children that never wake or complain

*

I open a file called “no file”
A messianic cloud of media
Rising above rioting squares
The colony called “don’t stop”
Does not stop—flails against futurity

It could yet be about corruption
It could yet be about better worlds
It stops just outside of town, rumbling
The largest truck you’ve ever seen
It’s bucket filled with half the earth. Literally.

*

The other night I read a novel
In the file called “no file” I lodge
Records of evacuations, abandonments,
Foreclosures and dispossessions

According to the avant-garde
This isn’t new
And “new” means “maybe we can
sell you another one of these.”

I am upbeat despite the end-times
Faux comforts and police horizons

*

My daughters are shopping at the mall
It’s a green space we call “eternity”
All their lives are an imaginary
Of the yet-to-come

Even the mall is still only a dry unceded field
Mice wander and developers eye
With hungry imaginations crooning

You’re so fucking spatial
I wish I was spatial

*

Note to self:
Perimeters are difficult to discern
And species are in constant motion
Curling towards their disappearance
Engines culling “data” we will not read

I find it difficult
To imagine the lives of many others
Though their abandoned velour couches
Can be found in the forest
Soggy Blue Star Dust, Dr. Pepper

*

Mostly we keep blowing
Each other up
Like bombs are our way of saying

S’up, I’m here too
Is this crazy human meat times or what?
Now let’s keep making money, death mill daddy-O

*

My daughters cannot decide:
Zombie movie or cell phones?
I could still be dreaming
Of France and revolutions
Or walking between the etched stones

*

I tell the girls what matters
Is the soft light just back
Of the collective’s desiring eye
The beach we build beneath
The mall’s unmade paving stones
(though I do not mention
the continuous rule of dead
labour over living
or their future riveting
to a single fraction of time)

We choose the Zombie movie
Because life is like that

*

Emily, shall we hide our brave face
On this daily walk
Or take us simultaneous
As complicit beings wondering
How to stop, but carry on differently—
All we’re freighted with—
Unearned privilege, debt, colonies,
Muttering doges, sputtering lanterns,
The metallic insides of the earth,
The proximity of death squads—
And still slink silently
Towards better worlds?

*

Of course complicity just means
You have to change yourself entire
When changing the tired world

Its Molotov banquets,
Its endless lines of tanks idling nearby
Its schools for unlearning indigeneity

*

As if all we had to do was
Make the world strange again, hmm?
What is the nearness
Of economies and lobotomies?
Note how money is
The cryogenic liquid
Of this period evaporating
What lasts
And filling the tanks of
Sulphurous lies—

Just don’t look up at the eyedroppers
Poised above our frozen faces
As we gaze at the empyrean
Of stained acoustic ceiling tiles

*

Meanwhile beneath the glassy surfaces
Of our smartphones—deep in pocket—
Young girls and boys
My daughters’ ages and younger
Pull handfuls of dusky coltan
From a muddy trench in the Congo
And somewhere some kid—god love him—
Says it’s all good
Just before his brains become
Some zombie’s next meal

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

A song in the context of its album

soon to be simply discs or tracks
not dropped like stitches nor
ushered by storks, not
pre-approved for mortgages
nor credit limits pushed
just within reach of some
golden sunset over what-
ever lush green hill waits

soon to be simply vinyl or tape
not appearing like magic,
nor jutting like so many
mountains through crust
over millennia, not rising
as temperatures, nor
advancing as armies, nor
swarming with all these
dead bees, nor falling
like reddish-orange leaves
after summer rolls on

soon to be simply laserdisc or mp3
not reigning down through
history like a monarch’s line,
nor splitting the heavens like
thunderous applause, not
angling for advantage over
the other anglers, nor
simply advertising success
in tidy couplets meant to
encourage a belief in an
orderly universe within
which rebelliousness
sells cheeseburgers

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Absence

Ledgers make light of the news.

Policy equates practice, designates who is who.

You book it, reveal the space where light might leak.

All thorough, a pencil erases tremulous views.

Numbers can dictate geography, as well as balances.

(all the ways I inhabit you, take you in)

Rain evaporates eventually and it gets too hot to sleep.

Volumes of Stein riffling in the wind left open.

You can’t survive without guts, gutters.

A return clunks if a typewriter, or if a driveway full of parked cars.

Ivy covers. Love persists.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Lesson 12

2.1 Front Facelock Variants 2.1.1 Swinging fisherman suplex 2.1.2 Rolling release suplex 2.1.3 Slingshot suplex 2.1.4 Suplex slam 2.1.4.1 Sitout suplex slam 2.1.5 Inverted suplex slam 2.1.5.1 Sitout inverted suplex slam 2.1.5.2 Delayed vertical suplex 2.1.5.3 Rotating vertical suplex 2.1.5.4 Drop suplex 2.1.6 Underhook suplex 2.2 Belly-to-Back Variants 2.2.1 Belly-to-back suplex 2.2.1.1 High angle belly-to-back suplex 2.2.2 Leg hook belly-to-back suplex 2.2.2.1 Bridging leg hook belly-to-back suplex 2.2.2.2 Swinging leg hook belly-to-back suplex 2.2.3 Cobra clutch suplex 2.2.4 Crossface chickenwing suplex 2.2.5 Electric chair suplex 2.2.6 Full nelson suplex 2.2.6.1 Karelin Lift 2.2.6.2 X-Plex 2.2.7 Tiger suplex 2.2.8 Half nelson suplex 2.2.9 Pumphandle suplex 2.2.10 Sleeper suplex 2.2.11 Three-quarter nelson suplex 2.3 Belly-to-Belly Variants 2.3.1 Super belly-to-belly suplex 2.3.2 Capture suplex 2.3.3 Double underhook suplex 2.3.4 Head-and-arm suplex 2.3.5 Table top suplex 2.3.6 Trapping suplex 2.4 Side Variants 2.4.1 Saito suplex 2.4.1.1 Leg hook saito suplex 2.4.2 Side suplex 2.4.3 Northern lights Suplex 2.5 Inverted Facelock Variants 2.5.1 Inverted inverted suplex

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Pig Heart

“Our bodies are mysterious because they are alive.”
-Dr. Doris Taylor, Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota


A “ghost heart,” she calls it.
Lifeless, suspended in a glass dome
between worlds.

The lab is full of them.
Time pings off the glass like a swarm of insects
at night—yet inside there is no night.
No rhythm. No sleep. No end.

*

She rinses the dead heart,
injects its rubbery walls with stem cells,
flips the old organs like houses.

*

In the lab they speak of hearts
as “dead” or “alive.” Meaning what? Is there such
thing as the life
of a heart, a heart-like life? If so, it’s possible that a dead one
wouldn’t even be a heart anymore. It wouldn’t be any kind of thing.
A “ghost” then, as she calls it,
if we can speak of the body and not just the spirit
as ghost.

*

When she filled the first heart
with living cells, it didn’t start beating
immediately. A tiny pacemaker was attached.
Days passed,
then Harald and Thomas called her from the lab.

*

A rosy flush
like dawn creeps into the flesh …

*

A stem cell
can divide indefinitely, and in this it resembles God.
It is necessary and sufficient for skin and bones and eyes and lungs,
teeth and hands and hair
and heart.
But it is none of those things.
It’s might, maybe, perhaps, the incarnate what-if
of every organ, an idea in the flesh.

*

The lab fills with plums, ripening
organs suspended
in glass bells, the spell of death
slept off like a fairytale.

Half-orphan, half-parent,
they hang like sleeping birds, like orchids,
like smoked meats,
cocoons, candied apples, like oysters yet to be plucked
from their shells.

They swell in imitation of a world
they don’t fully recall, waken to a future
we can barely imagine,

tiny beating hearts,

first fruit in the kingdom
of first fruit.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Opening: From the Balcony

Without intent. The island. The lake in the foreground. The forest in the background. The sky.

The sky goes chest-first into the lake. The forest goes in backwards. Out there: call it overdose. Call it overwhelming. Goes in backwards. The light on Dublin, on New York, on Toronto, on St. John’s, on the rocks just under the surface of the lake. The place is of the geometrical. Infected frames. The real world and the human world.

Out there and in here.

The lines drawn are undrawing themselves. You lift your phone, take the shot, and the landscape is pulled inside your palm where you can hold it like a pear. Now: inside your hand is the water. The light in the water. You send it away.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Curtains

I pull back the curtains. A parking lot. In the distance, a camel wanders. The sky is
nearly white with clouds. Oil stains.

I pull back the curtains. The trees are so close together they appear to be hugging.
Caterpillars dangle between them. The colours smudge and blur, like watercolours.

I pull back the curtains. A perfectly groomed lawn with a folding chair in the centre.
A child with Peter Ustinov’s head sits completely still. A lawnmower passes from one
side of the lawn to the other.

I pull back the curtains. Another lawn. Green, but speckled with yellow dandelions. A
rippling breeze.

I pull back the curtains. A conveyor belt carries dolls’ heads from right to left.
When the heads reach the end, they fall off the belt, into a pile on the floor.

I pull back the curtains. They pull themselves closed again.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

To My Suicidal Husband

Please do not look for poetry
in your death. Your drowning or
hanging or tsunami of pills & booze
will not be poetic.

There is no residue of poetry
in a bloated cheek snagged by a fish hook,
in a cracked leather belt swaying
from a light fixture or in a sludge of vomit
protruding from your throat like a second tongue.

And certainly no poetry will fall
upon your devastated wife folding
the last pairs of your dirty underwear &
ignoring the phone on a Saturday night,
piles of pizza crusts on the coffee table,
one of your horror films running aimlessly
on the screen, wondering why you
never imagined her twitching hands,
the packing up of your extensive library,
or the signed book of your own poems,
To Priscila, my love, because nothing exists
without you
, under her lumpy pillow, now
warm as soggy shoes left to dry in the sun, and
her sobbing the last of her suspect memories
of your tender eyes, your brisk, hunched
gait, the slow circling of your hands
across her belly, into the awful emptiness of
hangers, towels and toothbrush holders,
microwavable meals and refrigerator
reminders, because your imagination
failed to reconcile the oxymorons
of her & your death.

This is not poetry.
Trust me.
While I am still your wife, and not a warning.

There is nothing less poetic than your death.
And nothing more plain.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Programme

Recline upon bird down, tightening loopholes, feeling a touch of the artist
in the middle of the night—palaver &

slaver to mark the occasion of our first impudent glare, everything flared
tricked out like seasonal cues & slashes in fabric stuffed under coat
rushing through alarm with a genteel corner of your dripping image

Read: the double helix hologram on rear license plate stalks is the only real thing
in this freaking place

Reach across arm rest when the tympanum is being retuned & tenderly clutch the
ineffable junk of the significant—okay, now who does not have a partner
for this exercise—your musical bust should be turning and grinning

Run, run into frozen sea of grey square with flopping image in arms &
draw continual comparisons to that fishy petroglyph before you can
dredge up the food that is life and so on

Wait for one thousand and three eternities. Wait, I said not to interrupt

Read: the double helix hologram on rear license plate stalks is the only real thing
in this freaking place

Remove your things & find the bird down in the dark & indulge in the shock
gathering static at the first cold snap—slapping flesh & smacking that idiocy
forming in the puddle of a gormless face, then stiffening into muddle

Tread beyond regime & routine toward that frigid grey sea & perfectly striking
wait in the cold until you freeze into sensuous folds of marble—wait, wait, you
leave a smouldering hole of light in the clouds

Bite the fourth character in line & then behind that tricked out longhouse
offer compensation that is two hundred blankets inside a canoe then
tweak the hidden rebellion beneath your thawing folds of marble

Read: the double helix hologram on rear license plate stalks is the only real thing
in this freaking place

Break any heart that lacks the subsistence of root vegetables &
bury it at sea, or in the choppy grey square during a squall then
tell me this is not happening upon the squawking bird down

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged

Quikrete Self-Levelling Cement Compound: Consumer Feedback

From the window I can see it has already happened,
in the time it takes a tub of time to tip.
Lawn and pink impatiens pulled
inch by quick-inch under the lip.

It tumbles down the stairs in practically
no seconds: me. My saddest shoes are flat as tickets
to an exhibit that’s just appeared.

The lookalike lake is opaque as a spill in MS Paint,
as the yard before anyone saw it.
It takes my reflection under its wing.

It is cake batter, panless, tempting each direction.
Invites the eensy clovers to change behind its towel.
Which is grey, drenched, immense, curiously
gritless, silken, impossible to lift.

Maybe Google Earth has something, just here, to hide.
A vein in the brain blooped like a metallic-inked pen.
Or Celeste, Universal Dentist,
could be taking an impression of everything.

I have always loved the little sharp-edged tools.
A natural assistant, I select a spackle
blade, row out, face almost in the starless,
rudder of a nose set to “hover.”
My idea is just smooth things over.

(I’m not really talking to my husband,
who is, by the evidence, to blame—
plus, he’s busy trying to jerry-rig a barricade
with the cement’s own packaging.
Surviving fragments of the text suggest
we have less than twenty minutes.)

That’s when I notice the ant
stepping into the slow surf, matte
Jell-O on a windless expanse—
Whoa there. Hey. Hey!
She tries to turn but can’t.

Then, without a backward glance, her friend joins her.

It’s girls’ night out at Aquafit, with weights, Yes, someone has
in the deep end, and I am powerless tipped the carton
to stop them from registering. labelled “evening.”

It’s easier once you’re in, isn’t it?
says the second ant, in pheromone code, to the first,
who sweats a clumpy leg-lift.
The shadows flex and lengthen.

Whisked egg whites, soft ice cream,
blue smoothie, maple filling, wild
honey, ranch dressing, pudding with carrageenan,
barbecue drippings: a montage of pools
these gals have lapped before.

I can’t handle it anymore.
I grab a dead leaf from fall’s waterfall Disclaimer:
and scoop them out. They are two tiny elephants pouring may
towing their haunches to the statuary. affect the
Time is speeding up as the cement slows down. Season.
If I wash them clean, they’ll drown.

I should really stop looking, but, New Scene:
an earthworm spikes the surface, seamstress
pursuing her childhood dream of becoming megafauna,
a lake monster, and enjoying some early success.
She’s gained a costume’s worth of extra skin
like a hooded cobra’s crinoline
just by being in her element.
Who am I to play the skeptic?

My gaze only solidifies her fame. A dozen more ants
wade in to photograph her body with their jaws.
The trap is more complicated than any of us know.

“Should we be wearing masks?” This is the first thing
I say aloud. My husband, a man who cannot resist a homonym,
recalls a time he daubed grapefruit-scented clay
all around his eye holes. Though synthetic,
it parched like an afternoon of real sun,
the kind of singular experience statistics suggest
will add scenes to your life, stretching it.

Lines like that make me want to clock him.
I have just the trowel, twitching its shadow The end
like a minute-hand over our moonscape, dripping. is coming!

“Do you find it hard to breathe?” he asks. “The particulate…”
Yes, god yes. With all my heart.
We twang twin yellow bands around our heads
and secure our personal bubbles,
as the intercoms on aircraft instruct, “before helping others.”
Gravity, a rule I don’t especially understand,
is still visibly doing its thing.

Posted in 65: CANADA | Tagged