wish

I cannot smile with the other children;
I have no pearl-bright teeth.
I cannot sing along with them;
My heart does not agree.

Let me be with the shadow forms
who dance on naked feet.
Let me be myself, and glad,
on the dark periphery.

Dreams

Where do dreams come from? From whither ideas?

Like children, secret, bold, they seem
who in the dead of night escape
their father's stern and vigilant gaze,
then whispering walk the way denied
down to the writhing sea.

There they run haphazardly
and in my sleep, beneath
my eyelids closed, I catch
the motions of an untimed dance. I try
to learn the steps by
heart, but joy is not an art.

and then - the sea -
the tides move - the moon,
the heavens shift,
recede - back up the hidden way, they're gone
by dawn - they cannot stay.

In the sunlight, things are righted.
Indents on my mind's shore fade;
the sand is even once again,
but the earth remains forever changed.

Spring (a poem from a dream)

All the world has woken finally;
The sun is shining bright - hurray!
Fat clouds amble, smiling lazily;
The wind is soft and sweet today.
And oh, the children, all so beautiful,
running, laughing, off they go!
But here I am cold still and silent
For no friend calls my way "hello,"
and this is as it is, and so.

10212012

does the universe
feel the pain i feel
does someone somewhere
ache with me or maybe

i'm a dot of sand
watching a great sadness
rolling in waiting
to be taken and now i know
how pearls aren't made.

beauty, and inaccessibility

What does the wind feel like, I wonder, that doesn't stick
to my licked finger-
print. The lines
of my palms politely curled
darken daily, settle down. It troubles me:
somewhere leaves blush under the sun's affections but
I can never know to just what bright confused complexion
of red and gold. Yes, it troubles me, the limits
of the skin I'm in,
the bones that bind, the beauty unseen.
But here is some consolation at least: the wind I taste is sweet.

091712

You knew me
once, the once -
I. I
knew her
too -
her two eyes charged with
violent sunlight
were mine. I remember violence. I remember
breaking
lines but now I shatter words  -
I cling to thoughts wrung out I try to
climb the rungs up, out
I try to shout, but the hand slips.
I'm a tongue tripping up, I watch
the motion of lips
gibbergabbering.
My ears are
old. My fingerprint
decays. I delay.
I've got nothing else to say.

Boogars, A Poem.

I sit here and try to be this thing I was
once - A Poet
- back when i could think and dream and
love.
instead i'm a lonely slug meandering
thick gray head bent eyes swivelling
drivelling, a trail of formless infertile muck i slap a title to:
Boogars, A Poem.
i laugh a little to think of
you reading dried snot like
tea leaves. then I weep
because i crave the touch of a breathing beating world
but all I feel all I can 
feel is the weight
of this
shell as I sludge across the page
and maybe-I-don't-give-a-shit. that's what scares me most of all.

04092012

into your throat as you slept i
mouthed let
me be deliriously weak let me

be the broken-winged bird
i am so tired of flying
i would sing for you until i die
if i could rest

like the feeling of love
here stopping your breath

let me be
precious and never break
me please
tell me its ok

the quest, essentially.

If I find a stream
that tastes like mud and the restless feet
of naked people - if I find trees
old and wild, brooding over a shade no cunning eye has seen
and torn - if I find an unknown place,
would I find a space in me
unfilled, a bit of
mind still free?

sleeping duty

she slept and as she
slept life crept
a briarbush unchecked neglected
circling about her wrists up her thighs
tight round her neck
unwary she became the whore
of thorns that prodded pierced and tore and
not a soul there was that knew
the roses were too sweet that grew
did you not stop to screw one too
boohoo boohoo
boohoo boohoo

textual frustration

Some men will strip themselves like
dead fish and lay their spines in 
my hands: They want me to stroke their bones, 
I think. I'd prefer if they were octopi
with fat purple tentacles I couldn't fight shoved into 
me against my whimpering objections. 
But no. These men are 
pens: I suck their ends and 
crack them between my fingers when the words won't 
come. 
Is there no load to degrade my hate? 
Is there no man that can break my hands 
so they'll never write again?

after a dream where i couldn't say no

I was an
I-negated self:
my body the medium of
artists who
drove instruments into my legs,
fondled me like clay
then burnt me through to hold my shape
my voice driven to my gut, throat packed
with tracks - quiet laughs and
empty conversations with girls
I might have loved. and when my mouth
was visited by a fleshy worm
i kept it shut and closed my eyes
and lay me back
a statue of a lovely sleeping naked lady
or a lonely man's doll.

i had a dream where a woman demanded
"did he tell you the lie? did he tell you the worst lie?"

My growing up was no-less,
stripped to silence,
but it rattled in my belly and
rose like a gulping scream against a pillow
pressed to my face and now
I bellow! now
I wail! now I
guffaw!

some days the pebbles lying in the sun like dead fish, smoothened
down by the beating waves
will scorch the feet of those who walk on them

and one day we won't be pebbles but mountains, strong and firm and full of
echoes of words we could never say before.

fantasies of a poet

There is a beautiful poet that I love
distantly, more for his manness than
his music: for his big, sleepy eyes (the colour of
acorns or puppy fluff) and
his soft curls (how soft? I wonder).
I imagine finding him one pinkgray morning
chewing a thumbnail over a
notebook. I imagine draping myself
across his shoulders, kissing out his furrowed brow,
his little frown, us forgetting
the words together. Then
I imagine, as I must,
what he will write, as he must,
about it all later.

an august morning

The air is cold -
isn't it delicious? This
morning with the
savage city groping my
eyeballs, I blink and in that blindness shiver
the trees just under my
skin. Is it fear or anticipation of
the end that sets them trembling?
Men drive their stone stakes deep
but the earth beneath my frozen feet keeps
the beat of a defiant tune like an uroboros tape reel that
repeats:
The cold is delicious - isn't it air?
These are the moments I am me.

the art of not giving a shit

You would be something to me, maybe,
(you would be the world)
if I gave a shit
i would weave you into me
like a priceless
thread of gold across the
tapestry of my history
you'd be
the happy twist,
the thin wisp of a subplot
winding through my narrative like
a thirsty stream
only to explode suddenly, gloriously, unexpectedly into the
ocean vast and deep
or maybe you'd just be
my heart's deepest wish
murmured in half-sleeps.
maybe i would love you
more than words could hope
to explain, from a place
limitless in me. maybe I would
love you 'til it hurt. if i could love.
if i could hurt.
you would be something
(you might be everything) 
if i cared at all.
Thankfully,
i don't.
you're nothing
but a pronoun
in a careless poem.

Today's poem will be a journey to the heart of the hollow earth

travel the arid surface of a 
page until your pen finds just 
the place; then
drill!!
take no caution! take no care!
dust don't
dig or
not dig - it's breathless,
deathless - dig? so dig!
break those pores apart
exclaim, what a work of art!!
inject ink jets in lifeways
call it an effortless play in the sandbox
with baby pails and shovels
search and abandon the search
abandon the
humanity. Who needs it? What an artist!!!
oohaahoohaahooahhooahh
oooh wait! what?! oohaahoohaah
muscle?! blood! oohaahoohahh
heart??!
WE THOUGHT IT WAS HOLLOW DAMNIT THE EARTH'S CORE IS ON 
FIRE WHAT NOW

Madame Popova

**Based on the life of Madame Alexe Popova, a serial killer for hire whose sympathies lay with wives of brutes. She committed some 300 murders of husbands in the span of 30 years, until she was reported by a repentant wife to the police, to whom she remorselessly confessed her crimes, claiming that she'd freed "unhappy wives from their tyrants." She was executed in 1909.**


Madame Popova heard, 
with heart breaking 
beneath a rigid-faced guise,
the woman before her who spoke
through tears, aching 
of bruises and swollen black eyes.

When her tale was all told, Madame Popova rose;
with pity and fury she said,
"No more will you hurt. Take courage, dear lady!
Your troubles will lie with the dead!"

Madame Popova invited the lady
and her "troubles" to an afternoon tea,
and into the cup of the latter 
she slipped 
several drops 
of arsenic.
Then the lady thanked god to be free!

Three hundred such incidents, three decades later,
blindfolded, face turned to the sky,
said Madame Popova, "I do not regret
the liberty of any tyrannized wife."


Thus, guiltless she passed from waking to rest.
The firing squad put a hole in her breast
and she breathed
not again; that was
the end
of the Madame Popova's life. 

the game (II) -- God stuffs me in his pants before I can figure it out

A poem is a risk, and a temptation.
It begins with God
(a thought has tickled his palm) groping with eager hands
in his pocket for a coin. Then suddenly

Off I go! I find myself spinning rapidly, flicked
on like a light switch, revealing my faces: agony and elation -
oh the torture! oh the ecstasy! I'm a loonie

in this pocket of the universe
wondering where I will fall between
obscurity and triteness

hoping today for the latter like "my love is beyond words."
I would like to be as sincere as my
heart beating
silently,
certainly,

but I settle with a
vague little "flump!" in God's lined palm.
I lay myself out like an X
in some corner of your mind,
and hope you'll find me out 
from the text where I hide 
from the risk and the temptation of
whatever I write.

wisdom of trees

A man who was broken came upon an ancient tree,
and begged, "Great grandfather oak, teach me how to be
stable, for I lack the strength to face this life."
The tree replied, "Climb these limbs of mine, child, and see
whence my strength derives." The man did so. When
his face met open sky, he saw the
leaves dancing like careless children. The oak explained,
"Mid-summer noons, angry autumn winds, jealous frosts, prideful showers
weather me, each as each will. I don't resist,
but move when I am moved, sway when
there is music. In that concurrent movement
is stability." The man, for he saw, leant against that aged tree
and set his heart free, as his roots grew
deep, deep, toward his quiet home.

on a summer evening

on days I love being alive,
i worry i'll get carried away with the wind,
rise from my toenails where
i hang around like fungus ironically
commenting on the smell,
move through my intestines,
wind upwards through the ribs
and get to know my heart
a little. Then I'll float right through
this skull of mine and fly

like a strand of hair, twirled between
the fingers of some ancient, loving spirit,

on a head of 7 billion hairs
that've all felt the wind
and thought poetry of it. 

So i resist beauty.

i don't comment on the stars
although they still my buzzing brain; i try not to mention clouds
though I would like to dangle my feet off one and 
wonder at the world spinning and blinking; i think, but never say,
that we are all notes of the sweetest song played
upon the strings that hold humanity
together like a gift from the universe; and i would never, ever, ever,  tell you that
my love for you is as deep as the ocean,
though it is true. Poets are supposed to be new,
poignant like a death adder strike (so i've heard)

and i worry it's just not very edgy or new
to say "i'm glad to be sharing a wonderful world with you."

on saying something vital

this tongue of mine's

twisted through autumns and springs, 

laboured long to wring

out these words now rattling

between my teeth; i stall with

'is THIS the time to speak?' and

store my heart inside my cheeks, 

like a twitchy squirrel, to keep. 

trajectory of a broken poet

I salted my wounds, took
mystery from the moon and
spread it like a scab over
the heart but,
so doing, i
lost my art. 

from where i love

I love you from where
poetry oozes like caramel -
the loonie-locket or paper-pocket
of sweetness that nurtures me more 
than spinach or sprouts - from a place where
i'm much more than living it out. 

on losing a poem

How quickly it escapes!

One minute, like
magic, a word
prickles skin,
frizzles neck
fuzz; a thought
charges the heart
to beat from its fleshy casket,
like love,
to startle the appled
throat. Yes,
in that minute,
i AM in love!

but then it fades into the day.
To speak becomes -- oh, i dunno.
Life is neutral

but for the poems
parted and particled
riding the wind like dust
waiting to tickle my nose.

To us!

where is our substance?

when we chant the cat is not
le chat n'est pas
el gato no es,
om for the religiously apathetic
cloistered in wide open-to-the-heavens skulls,

what matters lacks reference.

what matters, lacking reference?
all speech becomes
an emphatic stutter: N - N - N!!!

Does it come to this, friends,
this double-sided coin, our god, revolving
on a pedestal, winking
like a sleepy eye watching coals,

and us wrenching something to call poetry
from the nothing we call all,
from the - the - the -

some days

these days i want to curl up and die are no poetic matter,
although once the major theme,

ideas

age and the springsweet voice
begins to cackle-whine
fungal words so

everything sounds the same.

---

these arms
that groped, stretched liver-spotted
lose their grip on the
poetry so

the mind just curls up and dies, these days, and, just

everything sounds the same.

the game

Is it a bit? Silly

this identity,
poet -

a tattered cloth to my bones or
bones to shattered flesh? How to know

but what is ever
there: me, of the grappling

heart and head
game

red and white
inside a criss-cross mind.

rhetoric of a blue balls heart

what cruel god creates me
in the image of the paraplegic?
backbone shattered, so,

dimwitted, I tap this
and that for pleasure, forget
deeper chords once struck.

what sets me dead-eyed
before windows and watches
me, so frustrated, fap fap fap, while it

weaves this
widening void where I
grope the wrong end of
the wrench and use
screws as earplugs? what deranged power

made it so that I have a dick but no balls to use it
till I forget the life in me and dully, belly-ache?

on getting things done

Between the forceps of words waiting that heave my eyelids up is

a yellow bird swinging over a horizonless sea, the perch creak-creaking and

her cheep-cheeping and me deep

- deep in so much to do! I rattle the cage and say "what the fuck are you doing?"

she just cocks her head. I lose my -

roll the "cock" around a loving tongue

let the waves take me and make me

a sandwich, eyes closed.

The Word

i worship the idiolectical 360° gradation;

my altar is all:

plato, buddha, allah, darwin, and the

rest that lulled to sharpness gray

matter under mind

and you

and you

when you say what you think you know are

All Mighty.

Neither bible nor textbook can

hold The Word i seek, but i bow

before each

eye that looks and mouth that speaks.

033012

was outlining

the petals when

they began to

look like little labia -

l lips...

that spoke me out,

a lively whisper,

that keeps me in.

I roll around

my spongey tongue,

its clay -

dirt -

anyway; molded and

molding, mushrooms tickling my scalp,

sometimes feeling

the terror and the joy

to move (ahh)

by association

to the end.

advancing back

'Have we grown?' has been

the question; but have we grown

too far?

we've come down here

where

"your happiness is not my responsibility"

echoes in the

mother, wife, n children,

an incalculable deluge

grew - who knew?

we did - too much - and then

did too much - kill

the light -

grope and sniff

ache and lick

touch and kiss and

see through

bright blinking hearts

you are me

me

are you

ok Oh

hey, I forgot...you mean the world to me.

on never speaking

No beloved Queen Virtue whose

door red porphyr is,

but I, vainly clothed,

send my shadows dancing

through a guarded glow.

My walls are paper - thick

as rock, and maybe Plato had it right

or maybe I just fear to talk

(In the moment of the crisis forced

an image of the swollen

mind torments me

until I withdraw

trembling) by the fireside I

pump pump

pump my pen

sweating earth pigments,

burnt bone,

ground calcite,

the ashes

of the heart that moves me.

I am not I no more nor am I wholly one.

Read me like a hidden painting,

awful in the dark,

and hear the glaring handprint sneer:

how petty, your tale of me!

umi

:

the lazy beginning:

the no where of no ones:

seeking the inspiration of

an inspiration: I,

into the density of

you, ambling, plunge, a

stranger, from the outside you are

seen

by the unambling, unknowing they-me.

But here I see

the outside lucid like a

DREAM; HERE

grown men and women

pound the floor unhappily.

Spirits hurled like

poster paints, childishly,

colour me you. Friends,

don't I know

the yearning frustration,

the frustrated yearning,

the yaustraned frerning

to say

just

just

just

what you mean to mean to say!

and the seeking of an inspiration...

the no where being no

one...fearing the lazy life that

steals like sleep...all this world

began with a colon conclusively: but now,

oh, where to go to be?

Frightful Farming

Sometimes I see

my heart is full

of poetry ripe for the reaping but

I am

an eyeless ant

in haggard denim overalls

and that

is a garden brimming with Aphrodite's

choicest mousetraps. The musky scent of

life and love reminds me yet of death.

∞ mL

There is a

majesty in the murky

creek that bespeaks

its kinship with the sea;

there is a glory. In

the pen is the god's

finger, life-laden trailing across the Nothing.

I've seen The Dream in the dreams I've seen

in half-hearted poets' eyes. There is a greatness,

the Vast Uni:

verses contained.

Drafting

Who here hasn't

worked her veins into

an arid argument

outline?

The blue bin is bursting

with so many rough draft heart-

ideas exchanged

for evidence of

what makes existence good.

But what makes existence

good?

And so I uncrumple

the discarded bits of me to re-

consider. My work is incomplete.

the calm

I will let you off me

like a tear, like water

drops down the drip tip, into the dirt

where things lie buried,

and into the air and into the dirt and

into the air; your words go as far as

oceans and you mean no more at all

than the breath of me.

art of detoxification

Think of her how you must today.

Make of her the villain that you need

to hate. But when the anger has

abated

know her, too, as the smile.

Fill in the gaps not with the permanent black

of an iron mind but

with all the swirling colour of

sunrise and set

that make us human,

that make us an

"us."

fish

i hang my heart on fishing wire

and cast it out to sea,

to see what creatures of the waters

wide will come to me.

it comes up, mostly always, with

a sick thing starved for care.

i lay it down and watch it slowly

die gasping for air.

Conception

They tremble at the

pentip-paper

fornication beneath my

hunched figure,

tremble at the birth

of the harvest, of clouds gathering,

the damned infants of my labour.

I fear them too.

They are and will be death and hurt and once

they were. One does not forget

the monsters one sees in a reflection.

And thus the fear.

And thus the hate.

Thus the fetal thoughts

waiting waiting

for a nurturing hand.

To love these bastards is my greatest struggle, now.