Unreachable

Cry into the sea

Breathe out sky

Take stock of time

de-canting through

a liquid hourglass.

Remember the sound

of sea as it rushes

the feel of skin

as it prickles to wind

or the way turquoise water

turns clear in the cup

of your hands as you stand

alone and unreachable -

horizon paper thin.

-Debbie Calverley

Untitled (for now)

Cry into the sea
Breathe out sky
Take stock of time
de-canting through

Remember the sound
of a sea as it rushes
the feel of skin
as it prickles to wind

or the way turquoise water
turns clear in the cup
of your hands as you stand
alone and unreachable -
horizon paper thin.
Debbie Calverley

Airports

In the silence of my hotel room
sudden noise of building fans
planes take off and land
on the highway all the traffic
hurries somewhere.

I'm tired with nowhere to go
Tomorrow is another day.

Debbie Calverley

A great link to show solidarity

You can watch this update live from around the world, it is a great thing to do!
btw this was not an attack on music it is not that specific it's an attack on all of us and everything we stand for, it is not limited to something singular.  Everything is about people.

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/paris_solidarity/?bGhzOjb&v=68045

Prayer - Lia Purpura

Prayer

Its occasion
could be
a spot of sun,
bar sign, label
on jeans,
carnation, red
light where you
wait and
gratitude hits.
Or a name
the length
of a subway car
that only makes sense
when you say it aloud
in your head
as it passes. 

LIA PURPURA

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful 

Dig - for November 1st, 2015

As storm skies blow in

calmer seas begin to churn

to toss and turn, whirl

in spiral pools, drill

to excavate some ancient site

buried in its sandy bed.

And so we search

to find mystery lost

only revealed when wild skies

flash strobes of lightning

clap out thunder at midnight

wake us from our small lives.

Set the every day on fire!

Quiet endless tick of wall clocks.
Dig - blow the ghosts away.

- Debbie Calverley

Fall

Poplar leaves shiver
Silver dollars in sunlight
Spruce stands ever green

- Debbie Calverley

As Evening Comes

His scribbled thoughts

dissolve into clouds

pink with evening sun-fire.

Until day descends

into dusk his eyes reflect

that unsinkable blue –

A ship on the horizon

sails ghost white.

Somewhere in a grotto

of yellow rock and olive trees

her shape in shadows.

As day heat generates

into the small of her back

she instinctively reaches –

A small star begins to gleam
A full moon expands

- Debbie Calverley

CK Williams

Writers Writing Dying
CK Williams

Many I could name but won’t who’d have been furious to die while they were sleeping but did—
outrageous, they’d have lamented, and never forgiven the death they’d construed for themselves 
being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like rubber gloves 
stickily stripped from the innermostness they’d contrived to hoard for themselves—all of it gone, 
squandered, wasted, on what? Death, crashingly boring as long as you’re able to think and to write it.

Think, write, write, think: just keep galloping over the hurdles and you won’t notice you’re dead.
The hard thing’s when you’re not thinking or writing and as far as you know you are dead 
or might as well be, with no word for yourself, just that suction-shush like a heart pump or straw 
in a milkshake and death which once wanted only to be sung back to sleep with its tired old fangs
has me in its mouth!— and where the hell are you that chunk of dying we used to call Muse?

Well, dead or not, at least there was that dream, of some scribbler, some think- and write- person, 
maybe it was even yourself, soaring in the sidereal void, and not only that, you were holding a banjo 
and gleefully strumming, and singing, jaw swung a bit under and off to the side the way crazily 
happily people will do it—singing songs or not even songs, just lolly-molly syllable sounds, 
and you’d escaped even from language, from having to gab, from having to write down the idiot gab.

But in the meantime isn’t this what it is being dead, with that Emily-fly buzzing on your snout 
that you’re singing as she did, so what matter if you died in your sleep, or rushed toward dying 
like the Sylvia-Hart part of the tribe who ceased too quickly to be and left out some stanzas?
So what? You’re still aloft with your banjoless banjo, and if you’re dead or asleep who really cares?
Such fun to wake up though! Such fun too if you don’t! Keep dying! Keep writing it down!

Last Lovely October Day!

Oh dear I resemble the Ortega painting!

Ortega '64 - Love this!!

Happy Thanksgiving - a gorgeous autumn!

Blue

And the sky is so blue
And the leaves so yellow
And she thinks of his eyes

Somewhere a sea recedes
Too soon taken

- Debbie Calverley

It's Too Quiet In Here

It's Too Quiet in Here

A sparrow mistook
a light for the light
of day. A contractor
penciled Transitional
Space on the plans.
A woman parked
next to the airport
and stood on top
of her truck.
In an empty office,
a fax inched out
of the printer.
The wind knocked
over a metal bucket.
Spirals at the end
of a vending
machine turned
to let down the chips.
Everyone in the sub-
way pitched right.
A blue crayon melted
on the welcome mat.
The timer for the timed
test went off. A pilot
light went out. Every-
one on the bus pitched
left. A shade slapped
open, untouched, and dust
flew up into the sun. 

CAROLN GUINZIO

Turning

So goes the revolution. To turn the wheel,
to rotate, revolve, turning
the turn, the turn of a hair—and it's the loss
of all composure. A hairpin turn, to turnabout, to look ...
Now it's your turn
to turn down, to spin, swivel, swerve,
to take the curve that turns
the stomach, to veer and arc,
with the turn of a screw
the turnbuckle of the body is fixed.
Turning the tables.
You're never turning back.
Turn the key as all heads turn,
when nobody is looking,
the body turned loose no longer impounded.
Turn up the music.
Turn off the lights.
Turn on. Turn over. We take turns
twirling before turning-in for the night,
to return to sleep,
to turn out with the morning riders
who, in turn, turn their pages.
Turn around and we turn a certain age.
Turn around again and the sunlight is turning,
turning this dim room bright. 

ARTHUR SOLWAY

August Fog

Unusual for this time and place
as there is no harbour.

I watch it roll across the tree tops
so mysterious that it hides the sun.

A plane takes off invisibly,
lost in the roar of flight.

The garden is still as if a haunting
has just taken place.

I remember Sandburg's fog,
the little cat's feet, the haunches-

and am suddenly humbled
by the history of words.

- Debbie Calverley

Summer in the 'Peg! Harvest time.....

Blue Moon

Blue moon
you left me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own
Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for
Someone I really could care for
And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper "Please adore me"
And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold!
Blue moon!
Now I'm no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own

Billie Holiday

Magic Realism

trees pasted onto sky
the whole world holds -
a ghost of a breeze

- Debbie Calverley

Two Pennies (Crush) A Very Old Poem

A woman at a grave
Flowers in the field
A farm's reflection in a side mirror

Two pennies on a track
Two trains have stopped
Before their destinations

One points east, the other west
A cricket calls, another answers
A breeze ruffles the wheat heads

She stands between two tracks
The sun is gleaming, setting
across the iron backs

freight cars waiting to be told
stop and go - go and stop
She swears she sees him

Spinning under the signals
The wind blows in the ghosts
The whole world holds

Debbie Calverley
.
.
.

Please

Please call me again
From wherever you are
And tell me you're ok

Please call me again
From wherever you are
And say it's not true

Please call me again
Laughing to tell me
your bicycle is not broken

Please call me again
to say that
you have no regrets

Please call me again
Please
Say that you're not dead.

-Debbie Calverley

Midnight, and people I love are dying. - Robin Chapman

Midnight, and people I love are dying, 

and I can't sleep so I'm up thinking
too hard scribbling these words in the dark
because the physics science news I read
before bed is making me crazy now
with incomprehension—it makes
no sense to me that gravity should exist,
what I know about is love:
that flaring up of caring connection
that lasts life-long and does not depend
on distance, and it makes no sense to me
that the speed of light in a vacuum
should be a constant in this universe
transforming at every instant along the way,
speeding and slowing, and it makes no sense
to me that there should have been an origin
of the universe and before that nothing—
surely it was everything, waiting there?
When our lives are spun out of star furnaces
and our histories of DNA mutable, shifting,
remaking themselves in us—all that stuff
of the universe spun out of nothing?
It makes no sense, and it makes no sense
that time should have a beginning and no end,
for what was the constant face of love
before time began and before matter
assembled and before that small dense crush
exploded into what, so very briefly,
would, some small fraction, run through
our bodies, changing daily, the days
of our lives—and where do they go?
Those we love? It makes no sense to me
that the light of their countenances
or the love we carry should wink out
and light, that constant of the universe,
speed on in nothingness, undeterred by loss.

ROBIN CHAPMAN

RIP

My friend
Andy Wells

Watersheds

That afternoon I smuggled lavender
behind his ear the weather was full
of bad intentions, although the sun
appeared to crack a smile.

As clouds began to scud and form
poems we were decoding became nothing
but kaleidoscopes of light and shadow.

My eyes swept up to read his face
- but it had already changed to something
unreadable and I wondered if the story
that was my face was dividing too.

I knew there were no more words
only other sounds he will not utter -
spilling into different oceans.

Grant Design Group's new offices! Sneak Peek....

still detail to be added, as in window film details - updates to follow!

Go Jets Go!!!!!!!

Winnipeg made the NHL playoffs, and KIKI says they must WIN!

Leaves

I'm tired of playing 
let's go out
into the yard
and rake the leaves
into a perfect floorpan
that I used to think existed
anywhere but here.

- Debbie Calverley

Of Yalta

Sure, it's all Chekhov this and Chekhov that,
and I am far from the only one
to keep myself up at night
thinking about his gun, 

but the man was a dreamboat,
gray eyes and smirking beard
and lips—those lips. The kind of man who,
if he were now alive at the age he died, 

would walk into the party, see me,
slide his eyes over the temperate steppe of my body,
and then talk to my pretty friend.
Better for us both then that he's dead. 

I've been rejected in two centuries, lonely
in millennia, pride of my generation.
This old story. Women who like men
love them until the men are holes 

and the women turn back to bone.
Every time a man left me, I burned
something I loved until I was left
with only the gear knob of a Dodge Omni 

and wine stains round my mouth.
Maybe that is not all true, or quite true,
or true in the way that you want. All I know
is that we do not have to have a thing 

to lose it. I mourn the children
I am too sad to have, and the disappointment
of the lover I am too tired to take.
All day I feel them, their ghost limbs' need 

and heat, the echo of their bodies
against my teeth—absences expanding inside me
like the flower behind a bullet,
the blood inside a lung.

ERIN ADAIR-HODGES

Impulse

He climbs the staircase of his dry throat,
opens the door and dives out and down
the spiral narrowness of air. All
he leaves behind are those
he never wanted, but this,
always, he has wanted. 

MARTHA RHODES

Orange

Everyone wants the Spruce cut down

except us, the landscapers and arborists.

You see, it’s forty feet high and doesn’t afford

the neighbors an opportunity to peek.

Shade in  summer, green in winter

harbor for birds, squirrels,  an occasional

winter rabbit.  Only the tree brings the wind

to life in the rattle of cones, shaking boughs

stretched to hold last night’s snow, or bending

to springs first rain.   Every year a particular

bird arrives – her sweet song hidden in the depths

a mystery never revealed.  And just before dusk

a slice of sun smiles the whole world orange.

Debbie Calverley 

INGEBORG BACHMANN

A Kind of Loss

Shared: seasons, books, and music.
Keys, teacups, the breadbasket, linens and a bed.
A dowry of words, of gestures, carried along,
used up, spent.
House rules followed. Said. Done. And always
the extended hand.
In winter, in a Viennese septet, and in summer
I have been in love.
With maps, in a mountain hut, on a beach
and in a bed.
A cult made up of dates and irrevocable promises,
enraptured before something, reverent over nothing.
( — to the folded newspaper, the cold ashes, the note
on a piece of paper)
fearless in religion, for the church was this bed.
From the sea view came my unstoppable painting.
From my balcony I greeted the people, my neighbors, below.
By the open fire, in safety, my hair took on its deepest color.
The doorbell’s ring was the alarm for my joy.
It is not you I have lost,
but the world.

INGEBORG BACHMANN

Q & A - Ron Koerigue

Q: Do you ever borrow from other poets? 

A: Absolutely. It's not larceny, it's homage. 

Q: Critics have said your poems are like Frankenstein's monster,
disparate pieces badly sewn together that end up lurching out
of the laboratory and eventually frightening a young woman
brushing her blonde hair before going to bed. What's your response? 

A: Say, that's not bad. Would you mind repeating it slowly? 

RON KOERIGUE

You Know He Used To

The twirl and twine of wind

across a weathered boardwalk

combs the cotton out

of her overhung brain

erasing the way he looked

at her lips, still stung by a kiss.

Storm soaked he arrived

to pierce her psyche

with his porcelain eyes

blue like a first set of china

the kind that’s supposed to last.

She perches on the edge

eyes plunged to the water below

too boiled to hold a reflection.

She smoothes her pale green

skirt into sharp pleats slanted

by a sun too bright with hands

so white they appear to brim. 

High above, a cloud twists itself
into a question mark.

-Debbie Calverley

Alone With Everybody - Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone 
and they put a mind 
in there and 
sometimes a soul, 
and the women break 
vases against the walls 
and the men drink too 
much 
and nobody finds the 
one 
but keep 
looking 
crawling in and out 
of beds. 
flesh covers 
the bone and the 
flesh searches 
for more than 
flesh. 

there's no chance 
at all: 
we are all trapped 
by a singular 
fate. 

nobody ever finds 
the one. 

the city dumps fill 
the junkyards fill 
the madhouses fill 
the hospitals fill 
the graveyards fill 

nothing else 
fills.

- Charles Bukowski

Late Fragment - Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver

Check this out..... why do I live here???

Gerry Loose

HAVING REACHED THE HOLY REWARD

  

Her body fades with her hair becomes invisible her skin is a salmon.

Singing eye sings her songs together kine alpine kine grazing.

Guarded life is guarded shielded ringed with soldiers.

South from our slit ribs bees swarm north.

Now is elsewhere jealousy did this.

Thieves clean her breasts.

A bower is constructed high in the thorn.

Three fires jealousy love and death maggot us.

Under no place there are no trees there is no place.

Pulse great throbbing blooded heart harts live in her irises.

Gerry Loose

Happy Valentine's Day ; )

But There's No Wind

He said.

It was two days after the operation

a balmy -28 celsius

almost all the birds had fled

excluding the blue-jays and chickadees –

two of his favourites.

Growing up we always had

a bird book handy 

if anything exotic to us appeared

we would find it out.

Cross-billed, red-breasted, the way

they perched or landed

all part of discovery.   Now at ninety

the hospital was just a perch

that he successfully flitted in and out of.

A winter bird that wears the feathers

of endurance, and most of all
never cease to soar.

Debbie Calverley

Thinking of a Friend At Night - Hermann Hesse

• In this evil year, autumn comes early...
• I walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters,
• The wind on my hat...And you? And you, my friend?
•  
• You are standing—maybe—and seeing the sickle moon
• Move in a small arc over the forests
• And bivouac fire, red in the black valley.
• You are lying—maybe—in a straw field and sleeping
• And dew falls cold on your forehead and battle jacket.
•  
• It's possible tonight you're on horseback,
• The farthest outpost, peering along, with a gun in your fist,
• Smiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.
• Maybe—I keep imagining—you are spending the night
• As a guest in a strange castle with a park
• And writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping
• On the piano keys by the window,
• Groping for a sound...
•  
• —And maybe
• You are already silent, already dead, and the day
• Will shine no longer into your beloved
• Serious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,
• And your white forehead split open—Oh, if only,
• If only, just once, that last day, I had shown you, told you
• Something of my love, that was too timid to speak!
•  
• But you know me, you know...and, smiling, you nod
• Tonight in front of your strange castle,
• And you nod to your horse in the drenched forest,
• And you nod to your sleep to your harsh clutter of straw,
• And think about me, and smile.
• And maybe,
• Maybe some day you will come back from the war,
• and take a walk with me some evening,
• And somebody will talk about Longwy, Luttich, Dammerkirch,
• And smile gravely, and everything will be as before,
• And no one will speak a word of his worry,
• Of his worry and tenderness by night in the field,
• Of his love. And with a single joke
• You will frighten away the worry, the war, the uneasy nights,
• The summer lightning of shy human friendship,
• Into the cool past that will never come back. 

HERMANN HESSE

In a translation by James Wright.

In the New Century I Gave You My Name - Alex Dimitrov

The orchestras kept playing. They had a gin fix.
Why in this fog I still see you I can’t say.
With your beard and high darkness around me.
In your small machine many messages
and faces that once let you in.
The ocean drowns time all the time, slowly.
Everyone had a birthday and buried something.
I was coming from one person and into another
when really what are we: some accident.
In this show where we all have a favorite.
What we have is a taste for that thing we can feel,
will not say. Some of us wanted more
and in all the wrong ways too.
There was of course an escape…
in a year, on a street, in some near distant past
when what had us was childish and flame.
And maybe it would have been different
and maybe it would have been this.
Do you remember my hair when I met you?
Much longer. The violins ended it well.
Outside, the city continued to tease us.
Hurricanes came, storms couldn’t please us:
it was all very fast and beautifully made.
You ask why I’m thinking of death
but I’m thinking of you and it’s fleeting.
We were terrible, unrelenting and everywhere then.
All I know is I can’t stop writing about people.
So much happened. I can’t stop writing about love.

ALEX DIMITROV

Pine

Pine

She opens her heart, a heart
full of needles 

and stands at the sink
pulling flesh from bone. 

She waits and watches
the broth for boiling 

and wonders if
she'll see him again. He, 

the stack of wobbly
coins. He, the train 

shaking the rails. The pine
bent heavy with cones 

whose boughs
reach down to sweep 

the roof this morning as
she opens the door 

and casts her hope
on the new snow, but 

finds the tracks
on her threshold are stars 

from raccoons
last night casing the house. 

LAURA VAN PROOYEN

Our House Was on Fire 

Knowledge of Snow

Looking out at the sea
her heart pangs
to the endless beat of blue.

The tips of her fingers
hold secrets, words like frozen -
her toes remember squishing
into boots, while teeth recall
the chatter of an open mouth
the gasp of inhaling January
all at once

Back home, 'tis the season
of stalled cars, frozen tires
plugged driveways, the way
a sun looks warm but isn't.
She knows looking out at the sea
her heart will pang
to the endless beat of white
always longing for the beat of blue.

- Debbie Calverley

Je Suis Charlie

One more in the name of love.

This film, like many others,
claims we'll enjoy life
now that we've come through 

difficulties, dangers
so incredibly condensed
that they must be over. 

If the hardship
was undergone by others,
we identified with them 

and, if the danger was survived
by simpler life forms,
they're included in this moment 

when the credits roll
and we don't know
when to stand

RAE ARMANTROUT

Still lots of beauty in the world