I carry you with me

I carry you with me
the promise of your bones
the urgent froth of your dreams beating
against the shore roars
always in the scooped
curl of my ear. I carry your fears.

I carry you with me
your stories like
distant stars, reaching,
tickle in my throat, coughing
fire in the gaping gut, burning
me out.

I carry the contradictions
the hate on your tongue tied in
a mouth that smiled and kissed,
the warm crinkle at the edge
of your eyes that sometimes
filled with spite,
the gentle lick, sometimes the bite.

I carry you with me
the promise of your bones
I am the why, I carry this
question and your life
folded over and over itself
in mine.

Cactus

prickly like
a sudden poem
a heart that breaks
a life undone. My fingers
to know the pain of you
reach. And there - the many million stabs - 
I gasp and pull away to find a
tiny thorn trapped in the labyrinth of my fingertip, 
maze of my identity - and now, the pain, too, me.

thinking and doing (a poem from the bathroom)

thinkers must be do-ers
just like eaters must be poo-ers. 
a morsel in the gut
ought be inclined towards the butt.

whatever thought on which you chew, 
let it digest and follow through
into the loo, its destination
without which fate is constipation.

your mind would be a bloated spot
if all there were were thoughts and thoughts
dried and clumping up to be
of a retentive sphincter freed. 

and so i will repeat once more
(in case you missed it once before),
just as an eater surely poos,
if you think much, also do and do!

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.

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.

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.

Moving Around

The heart-lights are out,

the windows uncurtained to the

emptiness that tells

callers no one's home.

The feelings have gone

north and taken

the words

there they're

lined along the shelves

by subject. But some are

in boxes marked DO NOT OPEN -

words like anger and pain

and love

and friendship.

I think she thought she would feel happy.

I think she thought too much.

I think she feels nothing.

But I feel she feels a

restlessness

and that she will come home again.