Lament

I’m not writing
but feeling the weight

a pen in my hand

listening.

listening.

listening -

dull ache in the left side of my brain.

Gravity Bites the Big

Apple, Adam, Eve
sparrows from a bell-
tower

Lucifer too
tumbled – a wished
upon star.

Fruit from every tree
litters gardens every
where, sunken tombstones

across from a farm
dead tracks that once sang
parallel songs to yellow fields.

My abs, your hair, rusted cars
little black flies swirl in the red
of my Cabernet

Last night I swear I saw
Humpty sat on a wall, today
shells in the eggs.

Even the doves have flown -
leaving peace as a bite-mark
on the branches of olives.

The Truth Behind Chicken Little

In the end

The sky was not falling -
Chicken Little
was only growing

up.

Something like the Blues

thunder rolls out its familiar timpani
wind turns grass into flutes -
a train in the distance wails for rain

Junk Mail

Papers everywhere
little bits, torn or whole;
newsprint, blank cheques,
lined paper, ruled paper, graph
paper with those little squares.
Moleskins, fake moleskins,
faxes, emails printed, unprinted
receipts, money, cookbooks
journals, telephone messages
labels, assembly instructions
Christmas flyers, catalogues
paper bags, paper towels
napkins, tampons, toilet
paper, kleenex......

all my books
all my unwritten books

Reclamation

She knew when the refrigerator light went out
that so much more would fall apart.

Words no longer transmitted between
heart and hand, no feeling in the fingertips.

The sun began to erode into winter,
bright but without the substance of warmth

or happiness, what about happiness?
No longer a funny kitten with a limp

or a dog with one eye. It’s the small things
that slowly leave us. Like dusk to sundown

queer indigo space where nothing matters
just a fraction of what used to be before it disappears.

With everythig in shreds, she revels
in the null of quiet white spaces.

Midnight

I am the stranger you should have kissed
over there in the corner, against the wall –
me, in a little orange dress, silver stockings,
real lips, real time. Instead, you settled for
the same old thing, a lack of everything
but the same old new year.

I watched her little black dress swing
as you walked out of the place.

But I saw you look back -
I swear, I saw you look back.

White Out

I guess there is always something new to look at or learn, something like living through the first snowfall upon settling in Manitoba when all the trees were ripe with leaf, rivers full of survival. Until the mosquitoes in May - Until the yellow orange leaves in September - It’s still a place you can see for miles; here, they still hang a sheet on the line when someone dies. Until everything prairie howls white .

The Great Thaw

And suddenly, words

melted, ran, flowed down-

stream, mesmerizing as they

ran clear, brighter than any sun

day and the forests flexed with the

muscle of loggers, lakes crested

heavy with shippers, next to fields

full of poppies, lavender, spring

anenomes that only nod their white heads

for over a week - yet all these brightened

as the words tumbled by, in love with

themselves, clothed in a magical purple -

their own bruised truths. When darkness

fell you could hear them all singing, as if

they had just become something

closer to magnificence.