“Lucille”

Collector of strays,
zookeeper and feather-saver,
red fingernails and black hair,
a bottle of beer and a friendly cigarette,
quiet, with eyes like half-moons,
black coffee in a chipped jadeite cup.
None of us should look like you
or smile and laugh like you
or leave food out for lost cats
or refuse to cut down trees that bring ants
but we do, we do.

There is not a drop of your blood
preserved and pushed on through my veins,
for as much as you cared about all else,
you could not stop to save yourself,
and instead snapped a neglected twig
from the sick tree, and pushed it into
the ground, where it sprouted
a family that had nothing at all
to do with you.

Three people and future generations
owe their existence directly to you,
one quiet woman who collected coupons
and didn’t much keep house or husbands.
You seemed to know you would be forgotten,
that nothing of yourself would survive,
except three people who now smile as
you once did, and collect strays, and
believe that angels might drink beer.

“Puzzle Pieces”

About three-hundred blackbirds
chattering on the branches
of the blackened tree,
filling the spaces
with strange conversations

scattered in the tree
like puzzle pieces ready
at a moment’s notice
to be fitted together
against a backing
of blue felt.

“Downspout”

You take what
the sky gives
and regurgitate
onto the cement,
unsympathetic.

You drink tears
and make vomit.

A cat triptych.

“Grey and White Cat”

It’s late morning
on a Saturday.
He’s sleeping in,
like every other day.

His ears are nicked,
his paws are curled and huge,
a few teeth missing in action.
He’s old, he’s had some hard
times, but he’s here now,
on the business end of
retirement, safe
on a worn carpet.
He is fed and loved,
sometimes makes a tired
attempt at playing with string.

It won’t be long now,
It won’t be long,
but let it be as long
as you can make it.

“Orange Cat”

The fat one
guards his food
not so much jealously
as afraid it will
be capriciously taken away.
He lays in it, sleeps
next to it, gazes on it
with blank fascination.
He’s had hungry days,
somewhere far in the past,
now enveloped by his
luxurious weight and heft,
somewhere inside there
is still a pinprick of cold
and hunger and no hope
of food.

“Grey Kitten”

Little one, little one
your traumas have been
confined to the loss of
a mama and your front claws.
You jump straight into the
air at grinding sounds,
vocally and loudly
explicate on the mysteries
of having no mama, where
is your mama, where has she
gone to, where is she?
You’ve grown into just barely
more than a kitten, settled into
a middle age in miniature,
loving and doting on two
large males who bear you
no relation; still you mother them
and they are grateful.
You cannot understand the strange
ways of humans, those large
monkeys who keep you fed,
who cannot submit to your
wet, sandy caresses like
normal children, but there you are.
A tiny mother unto herself,
you have found what you lost.

Commercial.

I just saw a strange commercial. Here is my rendering of its subtext.

GUY: (I do not possess the requisite social skills to begin a conversation with you)

GIRL: …

GUY: (But I can see from your hair that we are into the same kind of music)

GIRL: …

GUY: (Therefore, we should have sex)

GIRL: (TOTALLY)

Candy house.

I am not what I once was.
You have changed that.
I was nothing when you met me,
even less now that you are gone.

They say nature abhors a vacuum
and that’s what drew you to me,
the sucking sound of a wound
penetrating through to a hollow space.

Drained of blood, it revealed an absence,
and as a force of nature
you could not let it stand
just as you could not stand any chamber

not hung with portraits of you.
I let you in to redecorate:
you reupholstered the furniture with your hair,
changed the locks to the shape of your irises,

dilated just so,
moulded the ceiling into the cathedral
of your mouth, closed the shutters tight
like your lips in moods of disapproval.

I now live in a house,
an interior castle
built of body parts
reassembled by a blindfolded pervert.

Each night I lay on the warm flesh
of your stomach and pray for good digestion.
My fingers curl themselves into soft fists
the size of your navel.

My morning shower drains down your throat,
and I cut thin biopsies of your liver
for breakfast, moisten my palate
with shimmering albumin.

Like a candy house, I might
eventually consume you,
if you would only stop
growing back.

Independence day.

Picture me a dying day in fall,
a calm walk through a park while
daylight stumbles in darkness,
the ground thick with leaves,
softened, a place you could lie down
and respire, asking nothing of existence
but this,
an independence day

and my hope is larger than any burden
my hope is bigger than hate, humankind,
tragedy, mortality, fate, illness, despair,
mediocrity, halitosis, sore feet, all the
discomforts of home,
and you –

it is bigger than you,
it is yellow,
it is glory.

The morning will wake
to a black president and the
hope will seep from my pores,
my eyes nose ears, like particles
of light, like atomised blood,
like the vomit of honeybees

and I will bury you,
I will bury you,
I will bury all of you

under the weight of this,
my first riotous happiness.

“Beauty”

Beauty,
you have invited yourself over
to my house too many times.
I have been on your good side
and your bad, and neither one
made my life any easier.

It is hard to get mad at you,
just look at that face.
But for all your golden autumn
trees and softly falling leaves
kissing the green ground with
a bow and a scrape that’s
meant to be endearing,

you’re a decided pain in my ass.
I can’t get you figured
and I mourn bitterly
all the years I spent trying,
painting your face
onto my face,
conjuring your body with
just-so clothes.

It doesn’t matter.

It’s evening, and we
turn our lights dim.
It is a rare time of
year, neither cold
or hot, the window
open or closed, it
doesn’t matter. The
cat keeps vigil on the
balcony, above the
garbage cans. Inside,
we shift position,
trade chairs every
now and then, our
faces turned to one
screen or the other,
it doesn’t matter.
We are young, but
not so young as we
once were. We feel
old, but are aware
that we’re not. The
building is old, a giant
yellow mansion dis-
membered in cheap parts,
back when the money
ran out, and now we live
in its remains. We can
hear the flushing of
a dozen strange
toilets. Across the
park, another mansion
suffers the same long
disgrace. The carpets
are cheap and frayed,
the linoleum blistered
and faintly sticky.
Nothing ever looks
clean. There is dust
and rotten caulk in
every corner. It
doesn’t matter. We
love each other like
a pair of gloves. We
could live without each
other, but it would be
somehow beside the
point. We like to tease
one another about
trifles when bored. We
like to take walks,
describe papercuts
to each other in great
detail, make grocery
lists and plan the week’s
laundry. We like TV. We
avoid difficult subjects.
I once left him for a
period of six months
to be with another
man, moved into this
shitbox in a fit of
independence, and he
moved into another
one a block away;
we got our groceries
together. We will
wake up next to one
another for an
unknown number
of mornings, until one
of us doesn’t. We find
the whole thing some-
what ridiculous, but
have no choice but
to tough it out, maybe
find something interesting
to say. If you find yourself
reading this in a book on
some unfixed future day,
that will be one ending.
If you’ve plucked it out
of the garbage, that will
be another; it really
doesn’t matter.

“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”

After the movie of the same name.

Today I baked cakes,
picked up toys, and daubed
calomine on the rosy
pox of childhood,
but now in my pink dress
and pearls I lay
on my face in the grass
where he left me,
because I can’t be sure of
my lover’s love,
I can no longer be sure of
his love.

The bridge parties and jokes
I sent him in brittle letters
gay with fear, paper ribbons
that tied my wrists to the world,
kept me alive without him, while he lay
on his face in a fine Roman bed,
on top of another woman.

But I curled my hair and
I kept my lips red, waiting
for the day we’d get started
on our home and our children,
and our life delayed by the
seventeen people he slaughtered –
in his gray uniform, with his officer’s
orders, he made a dutiful soldier –

and with the ring on my hand
and his hand in my hair,
he bound my life here, to his,
gave me my name and made
me a wife, tied up
in this strip of gray flannel.

July 26, 2008

Music from my adolescence, part 2: Dogbowl – Mermaid in My Coffee Cup

This is another early favourite song of mine, from when I was 16. The video is an interesting choice, of what looks to be an old episode of the Twilight Zone or maybe Outer Limits — something spooky and supernatural, at any rate. It fits the song quite well.

Dogbowl bio.

Music from my adolescence, part 1: Bongwater – Folk Song

YouTube is a treasure-trove of music videos (either original or improvised) of songs I loved as a teenager. I thought it would be fun to look up some of the more interesting ones. I had not heard this song in at least ten years.

It was sent to me by an early boyfriend, when I was 16. I loved it, and hearing it again now, I realize that it heavily influenced me. Plus it’s just really, really funny (but kind of long.)

The little slideshow is interesting too, but not original to the artist, obviously. Enjoy.

More information about Bongwater can be had here.

Don’t write a poem about the truth.

Don’t tell how he held the gun so tenderly

in your ear, under your tongue,

deep inside the stretched-out skin

of your nostril, and you could smell the click

as he cocked it, and you could taste the click

in your throat as he made you call him Lord.

~Excerpt from “Don’t Write a Poem about Rape” by Julie Buffaloe-Yoder. Read the rest here.

This struck me because, obviously, I write on some similar topics, and they are really things that really for-reals occurred, in real life. Really.

So, once I had a poetry teacher tell me to stop writing poems about things that actually happened. I tend to write all my poems about real things, describing actual events, except for two instances (”Since Alison Died” and that one poem I wrote for the 3 x 3 word game.) When he said that, it made me mad that someone should think the truth wasn’t important, or worse, wasn’t poetic enough.

The truth is always more poetic than some crap a community college dude with bad facial hair and an earring made up out of his head. And if you can’t make it poetic, then maybe you should stop writing poetry. It would be like an art instructor telling a student not to paint landscapes, or maybe to just slap a big inflatable clown in the middle of it! For artistic interest!

Nature is beautiful, or is cruel, or is intricate, or is interesting in some way, all on its own. So is the truth. It just is. It beats the shit out of anything I, or anyone else, could possibly make up. What’s up to the artist is to select the little pockets of fascination out of the reams of perfectly ordinary days, years and minutes, and then to find the best angle.

Anyhow, yes. In my view, editors are the gatekeepers of the status-quo. Don’t write a poem about the truth, certainly not if the truth is that you were raped. No one wants to hear that shit; it’s icky girl stuff.

“Proposal”

I thought I might
exorcise my grief
with fantasies
of revenge,
so I squeezed my eyes shut,
and up floated visions of
a large red button
that, when pushed,
would splatter you like
a boiled ham-hock
dropped from a startling
height,

and then more
psychologically thrilling
scenarios, such as
your tearful abandonment
by wife and child,
your progressively gruesome
decline into self-hatred
and psychosis, an eventual
and inevitable return to
loserdom, drugs, and
pissing into bottles,
but I could not seem
to keep the tang of
these relishes fresh
on my tongue.

So I write this to you
as a proposal,
and I cannot promise
it will be the last,
since I have failed
that same promise
repeatedly in the past,
but the only scenario of
revenge that holds
any interest for me
is that, given my
disgraceful behaviour,
you will agree to forget
me, and I will attempt to
do the same for you.

And as a gesture of good
faith and honourable grit,
I will disclose to you
the truth of this poem,
which was composed
while taking a shit.

“Look Away”

There is a pause
emptied of sound
and she is standing,
ears ringing, outside
at dusk, surrounded by woods,
hip-deep greenery, the moist
breath of an Oregon spring.
His blood is on her shirt, and
she can think of nothing
in that space of a second
except don’t look down,
don’t look down, now is
the time to look
away.

Later, there will be
people to call, the
sheriff will drop by
to make his inventory:
heart meds, pain meds
the bolt-action Winchester
a solemn grocery list of those
last hard months when the trees
fell, when he would not speak
to anyone but the dog,
muttering farewell to
himself against those
splayed, silken ears.

Then she will take
down the pictures,
remove his coat and
shoes from the hall, burn
the bloodied shirt.
People will carry away
sad little mementoes
and trinkets from under
his roof, the one he raised
over her, pack their trunks
and drive away, clapping the dust
of grief from their hands like
a job squarely done.
For them it will be
an ending.

But she will not lie down
in what is left, gurgling
like an infant in a fatal
inch of water. She will roll
the cuffs of her bluejeans
and wade out into it, hands
on hips, eyes clear, watching
his horizon-bound vessel
fix itself permanently
among earlier stars.

For my aunt who was left behind, but who refuses to take it hard.

“Hominid”

I cannot pretend
or even begin to
pretend to be
so much above,
to never have
blisters on my
feet or grease on
my face, or to not
make some awful
grunt while laughing,
to not whine
when weary,
to keep my clothing
and relationships
continually in
good repair.

I wouldn’t keep
from you the fuzz
on my toes, the
decaying scum in
my mouth each morning,
the scab on my chin
that will not heal.
I will not oppress
you with freshly-
pressed trousers
or Liquid Paper
teeth priming
an impossibly
impassive face,
suspended above
equally unlikely
stilettoes.

You will not need
to be afraid of
my inhumanness. I
will be the mammal,
the primate,
the hominid you
have been.

“Architecture”

I spent my childhood
and adolescence learning
that I would be leapt on
and talked over and laughed
at, and if I complained,
told to shut up.
And if I wondered
why girls didn’t do
certain important things,
I would be told it simply
wasn’t in their nature,
wasn’t what they wanted,
they simply weren’t interested,
and they cried too much anyway,
watched bad movies and drove
poorly, and had their periods
all the time and were best left
to straddle the hoods of cars
or drape themselves across
the appliances of their
inevitable trade.

When I come to each morning,
crippled with anxiety and
confident only that I will never
measure up, never exist
beyond this pen and this
paper and my piecemeal
existence, and am paralyzed
with fright and the remembrance
of past humiliations, wondering
why am I so weak and
so defective,
and then think of
the child who would have
saved the world with a hug,
told jokes into the apocalypse,
and driven her race car while
writing poems and flying fighter
jets and talking to animals
and cupping spiders in
her small, certain palm

I am reminded that I did not
enter the world this way, I have
been sculpted and carefully
engineered to doubt my constitution,
to be afraid of the mess
it would make to seize power,
the degradation I would face
and the violence I would suffer
at the hands of my makers,
my thoughtful architects,
the artisans who have arranged me
for thirty years down to the last
doubt and eyelash.

Citizens of Ontario, I have one word for you:

Salt.

Goddamn motherfucking son-of-a-bitching Christ-almightying SALT.

USE IT, IT IS WINTER. THANK YOU.

“Sandwiches”

Like so many others
of your generation,
you died by Nembutal,
and if it hadn’t been
forty years late,
might have even
been glamourous
in that Cassady-Monroe
kind of way.

You left me your face,
your appetite for men,
your ability to say precisely
the wrong thing,
and see everything in
the worst possible light.

Like you, my first conscious desire
was to be a boy, because
I learned early, like you
that they were allowed to do things
and people listened when they talked,
if only just to scold them for it, after.
I learned that the only way
to get respect from a boy was
to get naked or
make him a sandwich.
I practised making
sandwiches.

At my engagement party
you had one word of advice,
“Don’t.”
But by then I was more like you
than either of us
had yet foreseen,
and so, of course
I did.

“Unimportant”

You are here now.
You will listen to me.
I’ll shriek what
I have to shriek,
and you will listen.

. . .

I was 14. I was in
Reno, Nevada. My mother
had curled my hair
earlier in the day.
I wore men’s shoes
and a dress that seemed
to have lived
through the dustbowl,
black and filmy with
dim cabbage roses.
The men followed
closely behind, trailing
me like coyotes on the
thick silent hotel carpets,
through casino to arcade
to elevator.

I was 13. I was in
Leavenworth, Washington.
My grandmother was coming home
to die of cancer, but I
thought she would get well.
I wore a t-shirt and shorts,
I walked down a public street
with my hand in my father’s
hand, while two strangers
carved my chest to pieces
with their eyes and words.

I was 4 or 5. I was
at daycare, where kids
ate their own snot out of
hunger, and we were kept
in a cold garage with
broken dingy toys and
a scrap of shag carpeting
over the cement floor.
The matron chain-smoked,
collected soup labels and
yelled at us, and an older
boy looked at me in a way
I could not abide.

I was 2 or 3. I was
at daycare, my mother
had curled my hair earlier
in the day. This was how
I learned the alphabet
through my fear of being
burned in the face.
My dresses were too short,
my frilly pants showing beneath.
The matron showed me
off to guests who came by,
like a tiny whore.

I was 17. I lived
in the basement, alone
with a full-length mirror.
I dressed and undressed only
in the dark. I showered three
or four times a day. I wore
skirts and never showed
an ankle. Coerced into an
uncharacteristic hot tub one
night, I wore a full-length shift
and apologized for my nakedness.

I was instructed
from a tender age
to be beautiful
in order not
to be worthless
or invisible.
I was instructed
to use it as a weapon
against males, against
other females.
I was not instructed
not to maim myself
in the process.

I was 8 or 9 when
I told my grandmother,
who saw her face taking shape
in mine, that I could hear sometimes
two voices — one slow, one fast –
behind the rest of my thoughts,
arguing. She advised me
not to mention it in company.

Two halves of me
eventually stopped talking
to each other. The one
half convinced of my
physically deformed grotesquery,
the other waging
a scorched earth campaign
with the only kind of power
I’d ever been offered.

I was 28. I was
in another place.
I heard two halves talking
for a few seconds,
the first time in centuries.

. . .

I want to grab you
by the throat and spit
the words in your face.
I do not care that this is
not a poem, or that it and I
will be forgotten, already have been
forgotten, were never of any consequence
to begin with, and you may stop listening
now, as I have become suddenly
unimportant.

Letter to the editor.

Dear Editor of [poetry magazine],

I’ve read your magazine faithfully for years, and the poems are really not very good. Why not try some of these.

Sincerely,
[secret identity]

The Who – Happy Jack

Now, go smash up a hotel room in their honour.

I don’t like…

-That people comment, unsolicited, on my appearance. For good or ill. I do not want to hear it, because I didn’t ask you.
-That I can render myself unrecognizable to people who know me through very slight alterations in my attire or makeup or hairstyle.
-That I can only assume from this that people do not look at each other, but instead see only some crude barometer of social status.
-That, whenever I want, I can dress in a way that renders me socially invisible.
-That my aesthetic preferences are very similar to the culture’s.
-That it even matters.

However, I do like:
-That my husband never treats me any different, no matter how I look. He sees the construction of the illusion each morning, and watches it come crashing down each evening, without a flinch. He would never not recognize me, even with three inches of mud caked on my face and a troupe of contortionists wrapped around my limbs like stripes on a barber’s pole.

The moral of this story: be careful when you make comments about another person’s appearance. Not everyone is trying to make a ’statement’ to anyone but themselves. Consider the idea that it is none of your business to even have an opinion on how they look, even if you think they look good. Consider not saying anything at all. Consider other people’s dignity and privacy. Consider decency; it is good for you.

“Sleep”

There have been currents of doom running
all through your life, but what’s odd is
what’s on the other side of all the fuss,
when you get past the screaming matches
with yourself and the hideous behaviour
to all who love you; it’s oddly quiet.
It’s the part they don’t show in movies,
the aftermath of failing to die when the
dramatic tension reaches its proper pitch.
There is a choice you make daily, to get up
or not get up. It is not a choice you are
conscious of until you have racked up enough
grief to go mad over. And it isn’t mad, exactly;
not, again, the way they show in movies;
it is not that interesting
to simply, finally, give up. All told,
it is rather boring and involves sweatpants.

You become a nasty, petty person, and probably
most people around you wish you would get on with it,
though they would never admit so, afterward.
Do not lie to yourself: really, it would be a relief,
for you, for everyone.
Afterward, you are simply a failure.
You have not only failed at life, you have failed
at leaving it. You have failed to make a decision.
You have failed to love people properly, to appreciate
their patience. You have failed at basic personal hygiene,
and you are unpleasant, in a general way, to be around.
You are not pretty. You no longer value yourself alive.
Do not be fooled: neither does anyone else.

It is not a form of madness, or a sudden realization
of anything important. It is more a deficiency,
a scurvy or a kwashiorkor, except the thing you need
dissolves when you decide to reach for it. The thing
is purpose, is the ability to push yourself forward
a hundred times a minute, to keep your eyes from closing
on yourself. Once you let yourself lie down for even
a moment, once you allow yourself to close those lids,
the light will never be the same.
You will be forever conscious of the effort of propping
yourself up, of the intrusion of daylight into your weariness.

You are tired, but you will not sleep for centuries.

“Grandma”

You called me slower than molasses in January, and
I was mad at you for not understanding centrifugal force
when I innocently swung your purse by the strap like
a perilous carnival wheel on the gangway of the marina,
where tiny electric jellyfish and freckled seals lived,
and ham-fisted starfish clung to the sides of stones like
old people to their walkers and outmoded swearwords.

You taught me to kill things, polished me of my sensitivities
with the force of your 200-grit personality. One incident
of getting caught setting black snapper free from the stern
of the Laura B. cured me, and it wasn’t long before I could
wield the net and the club without a tear, once coming down
on the head of a ling cod with such force, we had to turn the boat
around and retrieve the club, happily designed for just such instances
to float on the oily swells.

We slept with the window open, in the same huge bed, under
a dusty painting of a wrangler roping a calf in some yellow
prairiescape. Bedtime was Rod Serling and rootbeer floats
and then NyQuil for my restless legs and night terrors. I woke
you on more than one occasion with my screaming. I was eleven
and for some reason you loved me. I didn’t do anything to deserve it,
certainly not more than your own children.

Each morning of summer vacation was 5am and five layers of clothes,
shoving off from Citizens Dock, and cutting up squid in the stern
until dinner was caught. I practiced imitating the tone of the foghorn,
a single melancholy boop that turned your careful navigation on its head
until you told me to knock it the hell off. Sometimes I sang sad little
mermaid songs to myself very quietly, since I’d been told my voice was ugly,
and I didn’t know until later that you heard me and listened.

I didn’t know that people might think it strange, an old woman and
her bookish granddaughter heading out to sea each day in a mere cork
of a vessel, and the neighbors treated me rough, making fun of my city clothes
and my city ways, me not knowing that compared to where I was, where I came
from was big, and I had the nerve to show up on the back of a motorcycle, missing
my hair ribbon to boot. The kids on the street wanted to play too often, while I was
falling in love with my first computer and wanting to avoid their swearwords and
precocious sex talk and sketchy stepfathers.

I was glad for the salmon trolling and our illicit barbed hooks, evading the game
warden and checking the dredge for chowder-clams, and the tiny bookshop near the
dock that sold my favorite paperback pap. You gave me a dollar for washing dishes,
but forbade my intimacies with stray cats, whose food I bought with the dollar.
I think you were confused by my devotion to old people, my reluctance to play
Hungry Hippos with the girl down the street, but eventually accepted me as a friend
among other gray-haired friends.

I was afraid to start seventh grade and thought I must learn how to wear make-up
and big hair or I would be eaten alive by my robot-monster contemporaries, who
didn’t know from ling cods or redwoods or motorcycles or computers or poems but
could make my life a misery all the same. You left a note, unsigned, on my C: drive
to let me know it would be ok. I wish I had it with me now.

You were cranky and sour, Head of the Joint Committee to Make Me Clean My Plate,
and one day in July you wrote me that you would kill yourself and then you did.
I’m not sure anyone will ever forgive you for that, but I can’t see you being
any less contentious in death than you were in the seventy-six years before.
It suited you, and I can say to you now, without anger, you were absolutely
what you had to be, and I’m happy to claim you if no one else is.

“A Way to Go”

Homer lived next door
with his young
thang
who often strutted
a solitary parade in
pink neon spandex
after beating her man.

I’m sure Homer had many
insights on life, but
we couldn’t understand
his sloshed murmur
and enthusiastic hand gestures;
a pot of whiskey, boiling.

With only
the nearby Hostess outlet,
scrawled profanities under
the mission’s neon brimstone,
and the occasional lottery ticket,
I can understand
why he stayed
so drunk.

I wonder
which cheap bottle
accompanied him on his
last trip to the mini-mart,
if he picked up the ticket
out of habit
or hope,
where he was standing
when the ticket showed
its thousand dollar smile

and who cashed in
when the shock
burst Homer’s old heart
with its fatal dose
of good fortune?

1998

“Portrait of a Canadian Housewife”

The dinner on the table
the peeling hands,
the ache

my eyes quietly
falling
out of her face.

1999

“Lucky”

It is often
a surprise
to find myself
housed in this
particular body,
staring down from
this set of eyes.
Can this really be
the life I am
tethered to?

When I was ten
and ugly, I would
grow up to be a
great artist, or
at least have
the pleasure
of scribbling,
and two years later
I can’t keep their
hands off me
in art class,
begging the teacher
with my eyes to
put an end to it
only to have her
eyes reply
“They scare me
too.”

I knew then,
if three seventh
grade boys could
effectively terrorize
an adult woman,
the sort of life I had
to look forward to.
I grew up aware
of my surroundings,
with the second sight
of every female

the unspoken rules
about elevators and
car parks and when to
cross the street,
safety in numbers –
God forbid we should
have a moment of
solitude somewhere
outside ourselves, where
we might begin to get
ideas and formulate
plans of escape –

oh, I grew up lucky,
managed to evade
demands of my name
and unwanted dicks
in my mouth, a fist
or rifle-butt
between my legs,
but aware
of these constant
threats through the
tasteful machinations
of Hollywood,
the risks I ran
by simply being
a hole
in need of filling.

I should be happy
I was intact enough
to sprint sobbing
to any strange house,
pleading with the monster
under my breath,
addressing him Sir and
fully prepared to beg
for my life,
a gift he suddenly
somehow had
the pleasure to grant
or withhold.

But I was spared
and now should
be grateful, glad
when a stranger
on the street
instructs me not
to lick my lips
if I know what’s
good for me, even
if I never licked them,
even if so what
if I did?

I am beside myself
with the good fortune
of my light sentence;
I was never actually
sold into slavery,
only servitude
living on the whim of
countless seventh graders
whose eyes condescend to
grant my existence for
the sole purpose of
their pleasure.

“In Case”

There was a guy
who used to follow me
around a bit, a few years
ago. He approached me
on the street one time,
then made cameo
appearances at my
school, my bus,
near work, etc.
until I had to finally
call security
as a precaution.

I told them, just
in case something
happens
to me, I want
this on record.

He may have been
a perfectly nice
man. But he
refused to believe
that I was married,
that I was not
interested,
that we could not
be friends.
Maybe I should
have been ruder,
but I was afraid
that if humiliated,
he would kill me.

Five years later,
he appears in my
new neighbourhood,
follows me into a
store, insists he
means no harm.
There is nothing
more ominous than
someone insisting
they mean no harm.

Yes, I am still
married,
yes,
to the same guy,
no, I don’t live
there anymore.
He looks at me
for a long moment,
pronounces I have
changed. It has been
five years and he seems
somehow disappointed
in me.

I think
it’s none of his
damn business
to like or not like
the way I am, the ways
I may have changed,
the life I might have
lived without his
interference, or that
of his extensive
brotherhood

and I’m writing this
down because I want
a record, in case
something
happens.

Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues

No video glut can be complete without this little darling.

Bo Diddley – Hey Bo Diddley

One time, I entered a draw to win Bo Diddley tickets, and I lost.
Go, Duchess.

The Rolling Stones – Satisfaction

Extremely over-played, but damn, it is a good song.

Donovan – Hey Gyp

Here.

You’ll have to click on this one yourself. I had no idea Donovan did a version of this. It is my all-time favourite song.

The Animals – Boom Boom

I’ve sung karaoke in public exactly once, and it was this song.
“Have you heard the one about the group with the dodgy equipment?”

The Kinks – All Day and All of the Night

Them – Gloria

“Gloria” begins at 2:29. First part is the instrumental “Mystic Eyes.”

“The Housewife”

I made a good survivor when I couldn’t eat.
No one seemed to notice
me not puking
not shaking
living off of the soft flesh
that you once grabbed by handfuls
and watched flash between strips of cloth
late at night when I was undressing.

I wanted it to be gone.
I wanted not to be caught
in your hands
by the vice-grip that
I somehow pulled away from
when I stalked out the front door
that night, and ran to a playground.
I watched your shadow approach
calmly, apologetically, waiting
to see if I would hit you again.

I wanted to tear away from you
so many times during the months
we scrimped on toilet paper
so I could buy flour, sugar, cream cheese
the frivolousness that kept me
from staring out the window all day.
Even so, I did a lot of that.

I tried to feed the squirrels,
tried to lure the neighbors’ cat,
tried to ignore the neighbors.
I got fatter,
quieter.
I cried more often at night
and banged my head on the sink,
I cut my wrist when you weren’t looking,
when you left me standing with my 10-speed
on a dark street going uphill.

I was tired
and you only said I was beautiful
when I was cleaning,
sweaty, brushing hair
from my lips.
You watched my arms thicken,
my waist disappear, and you
still took me to bed
now and then.

It seemed on those nights when there was
no sleep to be had, and I got up to cry
and watch Love Connection
that you really didn’t give a shit,
that I could have served
my eyes up on a plate for you
and you would neurotically poke them
to see if they were done.

And now I’m the one
wondering when you’ll stop crying
and when I can stop feeling guilty
for washing my hands
of you.

1998

“Employee Manual”

Hello and welcome to ____ ! We hope you will enjoy being a part of our team. As a company, we are committed to quality service and caring for our community…always.

We ask that you read this manual thoroughly and carefully; if you have any questions or concerns, please address them to your immediate supervisor or manager.

Section 1:

Customers

Customers are a very important part of our business. As such, they should always be greeted in a friendly matter and helped efficiently. Be prepared to answer many customer questions. Do not shy away from a confused or complaining customer. Think of a difficult customer as your golden opportunity to take initiative and make a difference. Be sympathetic and genuine, but remain cheerful. However, under no circumstances should you offer to refund a customer’s money, replace damaged merchandise, or exchange a purchase. To do so would result in disciplinary action. Remember, any transactions which are not profitable are strictly prohibited. This includes cashing a guaranteed money order, making change for the pay phone, or offering to carry an elderly customer’s purchases for them. If a customer starts to cry, call security immediately. Remain cheerful.

Employees

Employees are a very important part of our business. As a company, we pride ourselves in taking good care of our employees.

For your convenience, we have provided our employees with a uniform and dress code. Please note the following:

-Uniform must be worn at all times
-Uniform must be neat and in good repair
-Nails must be short and clean
-Any facial hair must be trimmed to 1/8″ or shorter
-Long hair must be tied back and held in place with a cap or hairnet
-Jewelry must be small and unobtrusive
-Piercings (other than ears and hood) are not allowed
-Male employees must wear a tie and white, button-down dress shirt (except for bakery employees who will be provided with a jaunty neckerchief, chef’s hat and coat; seafood department employees will be provided with a ruffled blouse, eyepatch, and peg leg.)

I think this is from my first job in a grocery store, sometime around 2001.

“The Wedding”

        It was June. The air wore stiff and hot like formal taffeta.  By 10am, most of the
flowers had wilted and the cake was starting to melt.  It was imperative that Naomi,
seventeen and wearing her mother’s pearls, be found and brought to the church.
	“Play an interlude,” her father told the musicians.
	“And have some water,” he said to the pastor, who was sweating.
	He gestured for the groom and his men, Naomi’s brothers, to gather round as he
groped in his pocket for a cobalt bottle, which he unstoppered with a small pop.
	“Split up.  Check the fields; she may have fainted.”  He waved the little glass
bottle in front of his wife, who sat in an invalid’s stroller like a crumpled handkerchief.
She made no reaction to the hand passing in front of her face, nor to the bottle which
swiped her nose.
	Gossip circulated among the guests like small change.  It was supposed, in turn,
that the bride had got locked in the dressing room, stumbled and ripped her train, and
caught her pearls on a hook and strangled herself.  The supposing was more amusing
than any ceremony.  Content with the expectation that Naomi would be soon rounded
up with a dull explanation, they settled comfortably into wild speculation.
	“She flew off the chicken-house,” offered a small boy with a finger in his nose.

	The groom shuffled through the tall grass of a neighbouring field, hands stuffed
in his pockets.  He turned clods of dry earth with his new shoes and muttered.  In the
distance he could hear the brothers shouting her name.  One had brashly climbed
a tree and was now regretting it.  His shouting had turned into a plaintive call:  “Naomi!
Naomi?”  The call would soon be a plea for help.
	Two of the others had started toward the village, but now stood bickering on the
road.  One hooked the other with a fist, and they disappeared below the horizon of
tall grass.  There was swearing and scuffling, and a cloud of white dust rose from the
spot.
	Tom, the eldest, was inspecting a thicket of trees.  He flung his jacket over his
shoulder and pushed through the branches.  A voice from behind brought him up short.
	“Any luck?”
	Tom turned toward the voice; his little brother Jonah leaned in among the trees.
	“Not yet."
	“I’ve checked the fields.  I’m going to the house.  Tell Pop.”
	“I will.”
	Jonah started briskly off.  Tom watched him pause at the road to yank the brawlers
apart. He gave one a smart slap in the face, then pointed his finger violently before
continuing toward the village.  Once he was a few yards down the road, the quarrel
resumed with vigor.

	Naomi’s father was pacing in front of the church, under the shade of its eaves,
when he saw Tom approach.  The father spread his hands in animated question.  Tom
shook his head broadly.  He seemed dusty and defeated.
	Jonah fell in step with him, the two warriors trailing, a third limping badly.  They
all avoided their father’s face, except Jonah who called, “Well?”
	“Nothing,” the father answered in a choppy voice.
	Tom shaded his eyes from the weariness of the noon sky, and caught sight of
something, a large white bird perched on the church roof.  He jogged Jonah’s elbow,
who was chastising the casualties.  Down the road the groom had begun strolling
toward them.
	Jonah turned, and Tom gestured at the bird.  Jonah stopped abruptly,
the brothers crashing into him like boxcars.  After a few surprised yelps, all followed
his gaze to the roof.
	“What?” the father screamed from his poor vantage-point, just as a white leather
 slipper dropped from the peaked roof, clapping his bare head like the back of a hand.
	It was Naomi, a bundle of white silk creased with dirt, swinging her legs from
either side of the ridge.
	Her veil had slipped down her back like a forgotten sunbonnet.  One shoe dangled
from the toe of a stockinged foot.  She looked down to where the other had fallen and
covered her mouth with silent horror.
	The father felt his head and staggered in front of the church to look at the roof.
The brothers stood motionless in the road, watching; the groom had caught up and
stood with them.  The father gaped at Naomi for a moment before regaining composure.
	He began to pace the earth in front of the church.  Calmly he withdrew a cigarette
from his waistcoat and lit it.
	“All right, slut.  Come down now,”  he said through a mouthful of smoke.  Naomi
watched him with wild eyes.
	“Pig-dog,” she offered, faltering.
	Her father paced in circles, kept one eye on the roof, and sucked his cigarette.
        “Whore,” he finally countered, “I will stand here and smoke until morning.”
	Naomi’s face showed the strain of great concentration for a moment.  Then she
smiled as though she recalled something amusing. “Fuck,” she replied cheerfully.
	The father snapped his head around at the group of young men.  “Who teaches
her this?” he hissed, flicking ashes at them.  Tom gave an awkward shrug, and Jonah
thumped him on the head.  The others shifted uneasily.
	The groom stepped forward with a weary face and stood next to Naomi’s father.
        “Come down now, Naomi.  We are all tired."
	Her father looked thoughtful before adding matter-of-factly, “If not, I will beat you.”
	Naomi winged her other slipper past his head, knocking the cigarette from his
mouth. With an agile reflex he caught the glowing butt before it fell on his shoe.  It
burned his hand and fumbled back into flight, passing dangerously close to the groom’s
ear, finally landing in the dirt.  The father crushed it like a cockroach, then looked up,
his face mottled purple with rage.  He shook his fist at the girl on the roof.
	“Come down, cunt, or I will drag you!”
	She hugged her knees and laughed like a child.  “Bitch-monkey,” she sang.  “You
choiros!  Maggots!”  The brothers erupted into a series of lame coughs and choking
sounds to cover their surprised laughter, except for Jonah, who maintained his severe
countenance, and Tom, who seemed to give off the odor of guilt.

2002

“Twenty-four”

I feel like I’d like to be a man sometimes, just for the sheer unconscious power of it. Some type of cockiness must come from having a dick, sticking out like a pointer, pointing at everyone you walk by, declaring, Yes, that’s the type of woman I like, That’s how I like my women to look just before I fuck them, going around with the thing pointing rudely but unawares, jamming itself headlong into any available crevice, making girls blush and pull at their skirt hems and wonder if their makeup is right or their butt too big, when really all you can think of is distracting them long enough with their own self-preoccupation to allow you to slither into their warmest and wettest of secrets.

I wish I could be brash and crude and strut as though I owned the whole damned planet, rather than limping with my apologetic female gait, feet bound in high heels, legs restricted to straight skirts, stockings, the nervousness of having missed a spot while shaving, feeling straitened as though by leathers, invisible, unmentionable bondage posing me in my most slimming profile, chin neatly smoothed of its hated twin, line-backer’s weight shoved onto one sore foot in order to cheat the eternal camera of its extra ten pounds.

I hate with a ferocity that would drive a normal person to commit violence on its object. But I have cultivated for years a serene, if stony mask, a perpetual look of restrained brutality that prompts perfect strangers to ask if I’m all right. I have held my own hand back from my throat, inefficiently at times, but altogether quite successfully. I am, after all, still living. I am even functioning after a fashion.

I work. I eat. I water plants and say “hmm” to my husband. I feign ambition and make plans for the ‘future.’ I hedge my bets, knowing my chances of surviving the strength of my hatred are 50/50 at best. If I live, I would like a life to participate in. If not, I don’t want to miss anything too great.

My insides smell of good, aged bourbon, sweet and salty to the tongue. But my body feels like it has given up, is surprised to look out of un-cataracted eyes and to still have control over its less delicate functions. It begins to lay down and die, only to recall I have just turned twenty-four. It sighs and stands wearily up again, staring at the fifty years ahead as though at an interminable workday afternoon.

2004

“Little Kid”

little kid with eyes
so big & brown
it’s like touching a hot stove
to look into them

glance in, glance away
the whole ride home

2004

“Story”

I’ve decided that I only have
one story to tell, the same story
told over and over, over the years,
one story, maybe slightly different
versions of that story, but one story,
it is mine and I am it, and I ought to tell it
as many times, in as many ways,
for as long as it takes, amen.

You love someone but
there is a misunderstanding,
you are afraid to tell them.
They die or otherwise go away.
You stop smiling, you are in pain,
you suspect everyone.
You make wrong assumptions,
you find yourself hurting someone else,
someone who never deserved it, someone
you, in fact, love and admire dearly.

You don’t know why, exactly, you do it
except that it has something to do with
fear, and a misguided sense of dignity
that reads more like arrogance.
But you are just a hurt person,
wounded long ago, probably
by accident, probably
by someone afraid,
like you.

August 2007

“Suffer”

When we were young
I was not, by all
indications, the one
to end up old and
worthless and alone.

I did not drink or
send drugs in the mail.
I was not arrogant as
a cow in the road.

I did not want to look
at you, but could not resist.
You placed yourself in my
sight, and when I finally
looked, you refused to
look back.

You won’t look back.
You will live and grow
and die like every good
man ever has, while I sit

eating mouthfuls of dirt
dug from my own grave,
refusing to die as long as
there is still something
to suffer over.

“Chill”

I invited home a chill in summer
and with it came nightmares
that lay cold beneath the skirt
when I settled myself to rest.

The world is a dome of brightness:
in a glance, the eyes collect
sheaves of beauty so singular,
they choke the heart with sweetness.

Do not be fooled. The cap of this
lightness, the turn that lends such
temporal poignancy to traces of yellow light
is the same that threatens to take you away

to lay you quietly out
on the stone you’ve kept
so carefully concealed.

October 2006

“Pedestrian”

I was called
pedestrian
by one of the cowboy-poets

and I think
if being interesting
means being like you

I’d rather walk.

2002

“Clean”

Could this be some plan, the
drawn-out plot of some
French novel, but

penned instead by God or
whoever thinks these
things up, oh consider:

I was locked against you seven years
and now it is my turn to be
on the outside of the place
that is warm and lit from within,

catching at a hope that won’t be caught
in notions of you with a wire cart, we
pausing to touch near the
aisle of detergents,

our lives emulsified,
all hanging neat and simple,
washed irrevocably clean.

April 1, 2007

3 x 3

This was the product of a word game with the following rules:

USE: radio, frequency, noise
DON’T USE: and, if, song.

It was not so much
the intensity but
the frequency that
concerned us the most.

But it was only so much
noise, easily drowned
out by a well-placed radio

until things started breaking
or going missing, like the dog
that turned up three weeks
later, less an ear.

It was none of our affair
said the big ones, but
I knew they meant
it was none of mine.

I took to sitting
on the porch, facing out
where I could see what
needed to be seen.

I saw a lot of things,
like where she hid coins
in a mitten in an old
coffee-tin under a plank,

also where he liked
to hit her so the
bruises wouldn’t show.

I learned a lot
from watching, like
the best place for it
is the bedroom

among pillows, where
someone would be ashamed
to speak of it, after,
recalling their own nakedness.

I learned that words can
bind, sure as rope
but for the price

of a bus ticket,
paid in nickels,
they can also be broken.

July 2006

“Song”

It is quiet where you should
be sleep-breathing, where the
sounds of passing cars mumble
your face in my brain
and it is sacred
this spot where I never sleep,
in this place where you placed me.

Always the same, always
the hands guiding the hips,
the knees open,
the hair tossed on the pillow,
the smile and the parted lips and
the soft tongue

always my mouth in yours
always a little song
in my head.

1999

“Solidarity”

I collect the
wounds of other
people, carefully

paste them like
paper stars on
my skin –

a tribute to
the pain, the
collective pain
we feel.

I finger your
scars and bind
our wrists

together for
solidarity, for
solidarity.

2003

“Young Men”

Is there anything so
beautiful as a young man?
So unaware, lanky and fluid

perhaps smoking a cigarette,
curls of steam riding the
crease between your brows.

You avoid mirrors
seeing something rough,
perhaps ugly, there.
You squint to dim
the overwhelming light.

And your nakedness,
perhaps while sleeping, is
something else.

It translates eloquence
into mumbles
of dumb wonder.

Nothing but lean muscle,
skin like sculpture.
Elegant as no machine
since the animal.

The slim hands,
the rough knuckles,
the surprising smoothness
on the underside of your bicep–

did God plan it this way,
or is your secret
in the making?

1998

“Lose Mind”

Your hands pass over me,
the night brings unity

inks out the scratchy phrases,
lays its dark syrup over squinting eyes

quiets voices–
outer
and inside.

I lay back and lose
my mind,
my illness,
my concept of time.

When did this happen?
Your bed became mine,

our consciences fused,
our thoughts intertwined.

Your hands pass over me,
I lay back and lose my mind.

1996

“Ambition”

I have this idea
that to acquire direction in my life,
I need to
get fat.

Very
fat.

And then,
I need to spread myself
naked
over the pages of some sleazy magazine
causing pubescent boys
to say things like “Eeeeew”
in mixed company–

then sneaking off
one by one,
like cowardly thieves
to jack off,
thinking of me.

1998

Fragment

I was out of my mind
with sound judgment
the day I didn’t marry you.

“Fight, Kick, Make Love”

I am a woman
so let me be one,
not a boy with breasts

let me be a mother,
let me be fruit
ripe for God’s picking

let me be the product
of my experiences

let me sing,
let me fill the room
fed on chocolate and sex

let me grow until
you can’t ignore me anymore

let me not hunger
for want of a nod from polite society,
let me see my ass in a mirror
and smile

let me teach the schoolgirls
to fight
and kick
and make love.

1998

“Struggle”

There are hours when
everything looks like poetry,
the two big mugs of coffee
on the counter,
the four shoes lined up
by the door, your poor life
and the romantic cockroaches

who are supposed to maybe
prove something about
your sincerity, instead
of just being the best
emblem of perfectly
rotten luck,
the kind so usual
you hardly notice anymore.

There are voices in your head
playing with sentences
like wet sand, coming up
lumps and not castles.
And in the end, you come
back to thinking that
you never wanted love,
you wanted a struggle.

“The Narcissist”

A long time ago
I discovered
through reading
that you were
a narcissist.

It all clicked
into place for
me, then, there
that you loved
my regard
much more than
anything you
found in me.

And maybe you
do and are,
but as we age
we become less
enchanted with
ourselves, and
flattering de-

lusions we once
cooked up become
stale with repeated
airings, with our
constant digging

through emotional
keepsakes, looking
only for our most
beautiful self-
portraits, no
matter how
unrealistic.
So it is:

I find myself
late at night digging
through you, looking
for a nicer version
of me.

August 2007

Donovan – Season of the Witch

One of the strangest, coolest songs in the history of anything, ever.

“Miss”

It is true: I will miss you.
I will miss the little thrill
you give. It will be so quiet
in here. I won’t have
to ruminate or regret,
or tantalize myself with
possibilities so wild and delightful
they spoil my appetite.

I will try to hold onto
the way you flatten your
vowels, pronounce the word
“affection,” but I will forget.
That is what happens in
cases like these.
Our brains were not
made to hold such things
indefinitely; my memory
will betray me, and
before long,
you will be
misplaced.

I will miss the sickness
I got from loving you,
and the brilliant momentary
certainty I held in knowing
it was my duty to love you,
a duty I was born to
and because you will not
let me keep it, I will
miss it instead.

I will miss you
like I’d miss hunger if
I were endlessly filled.
I will miss the absence
at my side, the space
I carved out for you,
where I placed the idol of my
duty when I found that you,
yourself, were all I lacked.

I will miss the search for you,
and I will miss coming up
empty-handed every time.
My grief will seem pointless
like a coffin is pointless,
like a dress you wear just once,
for the sake of an appearance
that masks only
an absence.

I will miss you, who
were never mine
to miss.

March 22, 2006

“Naiad”

I think of rain
when I remember you,
the grey skies
capping my pain
as I moved through
the world, sore
as a tooth
in the infancy
of sixteen.

My long skirts,
the sash at my waist,
the brooch clenched
at my throat
kept me somehow in check,
elegantly restrained.

But you were dangerous,
palpably unstable,
a volatile cocktail
of amphetamine and
fatherlessness,
your silences
mouth-watering,
thick with the ache
of surrender,
which you told me
was all you wanted.

I have not heard from you
in three years;
you are completely vapour now,
and completely my own,
your memory to do with
as I wish.
I tie ribbons of gauze
about you, soak you
with sweet alcohol.
You ripen, mellow.
Once bitter as wax,
your flavour only
improves with age.

We continue our tryst
in the shadows,
sharing the mental space
where I have
constructed a few crude altars,
where I keep nightly
vigil over my dead,
where I cleanse
myself in the green water
of some naiad’s pool.

As the light bleeds off
I hear your car approach,
softly shudder into park.
My skin prickles at
the slow approach of your steps.
I finger the dark rope of hair
coiled over one white shoulder.

Finally, we see eye to eye
long after the rest of the
world has died
in the dark.

November 2003

“Since Alison Died”

When Alison died,
it took twenty-six policemen
to fill a bag with her pieces.

The dog-pounds were emptied and
the locksmiths shut down
by hoards of Alisons,
number twos,

who, cloistered in their dormatory rooms,
huddled over hot-plates,
murmured under frostings
of green face mud.

The dogs didn’t work out;
they peed on the pink carpet and chewed up stockings
(Two dollars a silken pair, special at Woolworth’s.)
The locks caved under the fists of angry suitors,
demanding their pre-conjugal rights.

Mr. Gibson’s lectures resumed,
a drab daily vaudevillian revue
of wars,
beheadings,
witch-hunts.

And there sure isn’t
a thing interesting
since Alison died.

2002?

On being “tagged.”

I’ve been “tagged” to share seven random facts about myself, thanks to Poetman, who I’ve now given myself permission to kick in the shins.

I could tag seven entirely random people, but I probably wouldn’t read their responses, so it’d be pretty shitty of me to do that. Anyway, here’s something not entirely random, but almost:

Tribute to Kafka
for someone taken

The party is going strong.
The doorbell rings. It's
for someone named me.
I'm coming. I take
a last drink, a last
puff on a cigarette,
a last kiss at a girl,
and step into the hall,
                                bang,
shutting out the laughter. "Is
your name you?" "Yes."
"Well come along then."
"See here. See here. See here."

-Alan Dugan

See here, see here, see here.

Do you get the feeling he’s laughing at you?

Cause I sort of do.

“Now you have a child”

I sat for years watching
nails get hammered
into the sarcophagus
of what should have been
our friendship; even
hammered a few myself
back when I was young and
didn’t feel things so much.

I let it pass away,
blissfully unaware of
regret or self-reproach,
and in latter years have
come to know these things
better than any criminal
whose ass ever graced a
well-deserved electric chair.

I always hated myself a little
for loving you, for believing
in your carefully-sculpted tics,
your tacky alcoholism and
your uncomfortable Aryan
admiration of Jewish writers.

Soon you will turn mild
and funnel the work of creation
into the life you have made
to replace of the one you
fucked up so irrevocably.
Tired of the work of hoisting
weighty dreams, you lay the load
to rest on small shoulders,
and you can coach comfortably
from the background,
looking dull and wise.

Now you have a child, now
we can never speak again.

“Little Girl”

Little girl
I have watched you grow
from seed to stem
from a palpable attraction
between two teenagers
hidden, an always-forbidden want

I watched you grow
into the labour-room, your striped rasta cap
in the arms of your first father who
adored and made jokes
who wore plastic jewelry
and paraded you on his back
a faithful animal

You were the first baby I held
amazed at your ugliness
not knowing how I could love
anything so alien, come from
a place so strange

I watched you grow into two
pushing at cupboards, your curled
pigtails and drool, diapers heavy.
I learned love was to close my eyes
on a warm day and open them to
your mouth on mine, the most
honeyed kiss I’ve yet tasted

At five, you beguiled my boyfriend
with ladylike offers of coffee.
I saw the hope of fatherhood
in his eyes, the speechless tender-
ness in his face, same as he’d
looked at me, the first night

Eight. You have grown away from me,
the latency period. I assent
to your impatience with my childish whims
my chest breaking open silently at your
newfound cynicism

We eye each other cautiously at ten
afraid to hug. I watch you when
you aren’t watching, loving you in secret,
without words. I am keeping this love
for when you will need it.

One day you will look for your father.
You will seek different pictures of him
from people who are not your mother.
You will seek every angle, every person
who ever touched him

I visit his memory daily, and wait
for your call.

February 2004

Also needs editing, but I am fagged. It was a rough couple of weeks.

“Evening”

What is it about evening,
the sky softening like a bruise,
cool fingers drawing shades,
lighting lamps to a slow flicker

the scent of bacon fat
melting over onions,
smoothing out bitterness,
painting in tones of smoke–

What is it about warmth
against cool blue night,
lights against drowning dark
the slight crackle of a phonograph

singing a hymn against silence?

Dictionary of Things Not to Say

When the maintenance man is hanging a bulletin board above your desk at work, and you burst in to see if he’s finished, do not say, very loudly, DID YOU GET IT UP?

“Can I Keep Selling Sex For Money, Officer?”

If you are a science nerd, you will find this pretty funny. And useful.

“Fail”

what if you should fail
like your neighbours

who sleep off their nooners
on the sidewalk,

unable to get it right
even in the gutter

you could miss rent
or end up on queue

to the abortion clinic,
another resident of the park

in your sad and hopeful miniskirt
in a twenty-below winter

the traffic browsing your wares
with a tense indifference

your mother, your father, forgotten
at the long end of a telephone line

unwilling to look your former self
in the face, to disappoint

to share your parlour in the grass
your bed in the bushes,

the leaves scattered around
like yellow confetti

“Lament”

I swallowed a small, crystalline seed
with the realization that my dog
my grandpa and three friends lost at sea
would not come back,
and these things happen
routinely, to everyone.

I found myself holding
a cold hand in the spare room,
scraps of the quiet woman who
adopted the wailing baby next door
and raised it to be my mother.

She liked yodeling cowboys
beer, red nails and cigarettes.
I helped with the nails
when things got too shaky,
the Pall Malls did the rest.

I spent three days in a crooked house
with her senile sister Vera
reading Harlequin romances
“I like Ike” buttons, and
yellow notes pinned on the wall

reminders to buy milk
some busy Tuesday in ‘54.
Vera paced like a toothless ghost,
interested only in bright colours and
the male anatomy of my biology text.

But I could not swallow this:
Your daughter, three,
who asked me why
I cried, and how
I could not say

she looked like you, and
I loved her father too much

the pathways now
dying from misuse
that once led
to the memory
of your
face.

2000 (?)

Who’s Frank?

I like to kiss
the smooth boyishness
of your temple
as you shy away
looking flustered.

There are times
I see you in certain lights,
from certain angles, and
am struck dumb by
the pale planes of your
face, the frank intelligence
of your eyes.

When you are cheerful
and you chatter,
making everything fun,
I am carried along on
the current of your vigour,

your willingness to meet life
with shoulders hunched
dukes up,
ready to give
as good as you get.

October 20, 2007

Reader response: “Good poem! Who’s Frank?”

“A Day Like Any Other”

Listen.

It’s a day like any other.
You shower,
you dress,
you catch the bus.

It is hot.
Your shirt is sticky
and the woman next to you
sits too close.
The bus is crowded.

It smells musty,
like urine and old people.
It pulls into traffic,
halting every two seconds.

Everyone else is driving.
You,
sitting near the window,
look at their faces
through glass.

Some smoke.
Some gaze ahead.
You wonder
what they’re thinking,
what jobs they have.

You wonder
if they wonder
the same things
about you.

It’s a day like any other.
You are fifteen minutes late,
not enough to be noticed.

You sit at your desk,
you type a poem.

Summer 2002

And … … … we’re back to sex.

“Sweat”

I like the smell of sweat
the smell of a man
whose most pressing concerns
are spark plugs and
timing belts, lining up
wooden beams two-by-four
engineering elaborate structures
to excuse the way
he’s wasted his life
on beer and
sometimes
women.

1998

“Fraud”

keeping alive is hard

it requires patience
and effort, walking when
you’d rather lay down

breaking your silence
when you’re already
sick of your voice

it requires junkmail and smalltalk,
and the climbing of stairs
after work, with one bum knee

then bad sleep
menstrual cramps and
sobbing over biochemistry

it requires quitting and
starting over again,
again and again

as long as it takes,
it requires hope in
the strangest forms

but you keep on.
you think there must
be more to this

than the fraud’s glamour
of an early exit.

“The Collapse of the Uptown Theatre”

You are Tommy Cho,
a kid playing on the computer
when the world falls down
around you.

It was none of your
business, and now
a dead man’s hands are
clasped about your waist.

It is the rage that
surprises you, the terrible
anger of a building
destroyed before its time.

It wished you malice;
you survived.
It wished you harm,
but you were saved.

In retaliation you
refuse to heal. You
cannot accept such hate
revealed now by the

empty space in the ground.
A man has died
for you, and you will
not disappoint his memory

with forgiving.

February 2004
(Read about the collapse of the Uptown Theatre.)

I feel kind of slimy writing about real people, but it happens sometimes. And I don’t think Tommy Cho was actually playing on the computer, or maybe he was, but I probably made that part up.

The reason I wrote the poem is because I read an article where his mother or another family member was interviewed, saying that he just couldn’t seem to get over it, even though it’d already been months since the thing happened. Maybe he was refusing to talk, or something. For my part, I was with the kid. When you’re ten and you realize in some heinous way what a shitfuck of egregious injustice life really is, how can you be expected to get over it and forgive life and go on?

I never did, and I turned out just fine.

Anyhow, Tommy, wherever you are, I hope you are okay. I’m sorry I took a horrible thing that happened to you and turned it into something I can take credit for. You don’t know me and I’m sure I got it all wrong.

“Gone”

I loved you
and you were gone.

Maybe you went
missing or died or you
never looked at me.

This is how it was for me
this is how it has been:
I loved you and you were gone.

Then it was later;
I loved you
and you stayed.

I loved you and you looked at me.
You stayed, you looked
you loved me.

I loved you
and I was gone.

August 8, 2007

I’m preparing to declare a universal morality.

I get a sick thrill from the absolute indifference of the internet. I also sometimes feel lost among all the educated people around me. I’m not terribly educated, but I can’t help fantasizing maybe it’s made me smarter, somehow. That’s your friendly neighbourhood egotism, hard at work. Times ten for my husband, who never graduated high school.

So I’ll get my measly applied science degree — hard-won, too, because I am a truly awful student — from a university that resembles a high school full of sleepy teenagers who’d rather be shopping, practically a TRADE school, for crying out loud, and then go feel superior and make fun of everyone who learned about the things I’m secretly interested in. It’s the snobbery that’s snobbier than snobby — The New Snobbery. Gonzo Snobbery.

But maybe I’ll also help people, and make some contribution to something bigger than my own self-absorption, and be able to support myself into the bargain. For all that, I could be deservedly proud.

Maybe what you see before you is a generation convinced that everything worth doing or thinking has already been done, and done to death. And, after struggling a while to claim some new ground, to break some unbroken barrier — only to find all the ground has long since been bought and sold to developers, and all the barriers were already barely-there, figure-conscious little silk nothings (free thong included) — just gave up and decided to have a nap instead. Because, for crying out loud, what can you reasonably expect from those who stand on the shoulders of shoulders of infinite generations of giants? Even the farthest-reaching contortions will, from that perspective, look pathetic and hardly worth the effort.

So, like someone dead once said on a very hard surface, “Don’t try.” Sums it up nicely, I think. Especially for this fellow: my advice to you is, for all our sakes, please, stop trying!

(Or I could just be jealous again that someone younger than me got something published. Happens all the time.)

“My Mother Finds an Egg”

It lay
winking in the sun
blue like candy
an egg nestled in grass.
You saw it and instantly
thought of me:
my mothering ways,
my obscene interest
in all
things
small.

You cradled it in your palm
as you ran to me eagerly
across the yard, and
it became my child.
On sight I planned
its incubation,
childhood,
college fund.
It caught my devotion
by the throat
before it even touched
my hand.

Promptly, it broke.
I washed violently,
then hid under a bed.
Your impotent explanations
followed loudly,
as if on cue:
it was rotten,
it laid in sun
for too long,
it would have
died anyway.

As you spoke
I heard the splintering
of my hope
like yellow liquid splattered
across my white and
delicate fingers.

1998

We’ll just see what the school literary journal has to say about THIS!

The Green Beans

It’s been a long damn time
since I saw the outside of this place,
sunlight, or even the underside
of my belly. If the bomb dropped
and the street bore corpses
like a slow-moving river,
I’d go and get some fresh air.

But here’s how it is: TV, the cat,
some cold cereal and my bed.
At first, I just preferred to stay
home; now I can’t recall when
my feet last touched the ground.
I won’t talk about getting bigger.
I’ve always gotten bigger and
it’s not like it’s news to me.

But I start to wake at night
in strange frights, my head
struggling up out of the sheets
like a kid scared of the dark.
It takes a week before I find
I’m not breathing, and now
it’s in the daytime too.

I’ve never wanted to leave less
than I do now, but people say
I have to, there are doctors,
people say they will help me.
I have my own opinion on that,
but it’s got so bad I can’t think
what else to do. I leave a big plate
of kibble for the cat.

People tell me to be hopeful,
so I am dutifully hopeful.
By the time I sign my name
to the paper, I almost believe myself.
At hospitals, they know things.
They pour bubbling liquid on a cut
and it heals, they sneak pills
into your applesauce and you
stop hurting. They can cut
you open and sew you shut.

I know breakfast is coming,
after a long night of blood
pressure-readings and pulse-takings
and oxygen-checking, where I was
somehow supposed to sleep, and
I’m scared. I don’t like to eat
in front of people. I don’t like sweets
and I don’t like to be stared at.

The tray comes with a nurse,
and when I take the cover off the plate,
she turns away. I look at it and see
all the things I would do
if the bomb dropped

               -- wear a dress, or nothing,
               put curls in my hair and
               sing out loud in the street,
               go to the store and steal
               ingredients for a dinner
               that wouldn't be cereal, but
               mostly I'd breathe, I'd have the air
               all to myself ---

because here on my plate
for breakfast, there’s nothing
but a mound of green beans.

Something in me breaks and
falls off. I think of the cat
staring into her plate of kibble,
me into my green beans,
both of us knowing
I won’t come home.

May 2006

They’ll probably be confused, and that will make two of us.

“Fall”

You start
to fall down,
hard, face-first,
but in slow-motion
and half-paralyzed.

See: the look of
dumb surprise
veiling your face,
negating any and all
wise decisions
you ever made;

your apartment
a time-lapsed flower,
blooming filth and
dishes, old food
and cats puking
aimlessly.

Your marriage
dries up like a
creek in hot weather,
leaving a rocky bed
of silence, and blank
eyes that only seem
to say, “Oh what
have I done?”

Your body follows
suit, buries itself
in muffling layers
until even your hands
and face are strange to you.
You can barely walk
and each step takes
you closer to
the ground.

When the end comes
the slowness of your
fall belies its thrust.
You slam into the earth
like a buffalo,
head-smashed-in,

so hard into
the dirt that your
body digs a ditch
and the aftermath
fills it in
above you.

2006

P.S. Don’t leave your husband.

“Girl in Bed”

Noises spill out into the quiet room
from her throat and her
dreaming mind
as if communicating strange
secrets to invisible demons
crouched low by the side of
her bed,
the product of some prescription
painkillers she took.
In the morning she is mildly surprised
at waking up.

1998 (?)

He says…

“Found (somehow)”
by Josh

We were drifting fast in a
small yellow roller coaster through
fields and forests in between
cows goats and sheep around
towering trees and under
rainbows and I think you said
that you remembered running
through a small cemetery following
a rabbit through the dirt on your dress
past the twigs in your hair
at home inside handsome stonework and
through the three church bells to
a wonderful view with white stone statues
and we slowed as we passed through
villages smelling big old fruit factories
but we tried not to stop
and we listened to a silly fortune teller
through the screen in a small dark box who
made us laugh (things we already knew)
when she got us mixed up, and I think
you said we should forget about
the pro-rated bills and go make soap
instead and grow ourselves small as
ladybugs in a bright red and blue
flower garden (coconut marshmallow vanilla cake)
and the hail passed us and we laughed and waved
sighed and shivered as the sun set and
left us to turn around in the blooming darkness
found our way home and (somehow) never
got lost.

1999

…I says.

“Summer”

Summer is far from
my basement window,
little flakes skidding
past the glass in some
dance with gravity.

They were so brief,
the good times,
remembered in elegant
little flashes, neatly
packaged sentimentality.

Long drives through the
Oregon countryside, like
something in a romance novel,
too good to be remembered with
anything but drunken clarity.

The drives we spent
laughing, singing
as loud as we pleased
not afraid of each other or anything.
You began to puzzle me

by stealing things.
First a shirt at
the Sally Ann, where
I couldn’t speak up.
Later, you casually pocketed CDs,

a pair of sunglasses
perched on your brow.
Things started to go downhill
when my dad tossed you out
of my room, late at night.

I dropped my motorcycle helmet;
the ruse was up.

The weather got hot
and my fiancé came to claim me.
It all ended with a ring
on my finger, and you in your car
beating a yellow streak
back to Arizona.

2000

“Be Blue Jane”

You can be blue, Jane.
I’ll help you through
the times no one knows

when no one
can quite see you.
Be sad, Jane

it’ll be alright
if you just stick by.
We spent dimes

we done our time
we bandaged up our pain,
we suffered

we made it through
Boise droughts and
Tacoma rain.

It’ll be okay, Jane
hold steady
flex the strength

in them skinny arms
and know that
after today

comes another
could be worse,
might be better.

2002 (?)

“Vera”

We arrived in the afternoon
at the small house
clotting a large bypass artery
that resembled a road
on which no one travelled but us.

The small house grew larger as we grew near;
the sign on a shed warned,
“God will get you for stealing insulators off this house!”
It was a tourist attraction
(had there been any),
a precariously leaning tribute
to the old man coughing up
cancer inside.

The door of the house
marked with its cryptic ‘M’
opened for Vera, stepping out
to check the mail every ten minutes.
Beautiful Toots.
Paranoid, witty –
she’s 90 some years old now
with no teeth
and less mind.

We arranged graveyard roses
red, in a vase.
We attempted to untangle
a hopelessly tangled bamboo door-hanging
laughing and failing.
We wandered through the house
past notes pinned on walls
from fifty years past,
Ovaltine and ointment
growing old gracefully in a cabinet,
the 1940s quietly fading under dust
in a corner of every room.

She would stop now and then
to sweep the carpet with
a dirty broom, smiling,
poring over my 10th grade
Biology text.
And I thought she only liked me
because I brought the roses.
Toots likes red,
the dishrag disappears regularly,
and in her room are crushed
creamy fingers of red lipstick,
mouldering kiss-less in their tubes.

That night she woke.
It took me three hours
and 800 milligrams of Benadryl
to quiet her restless, deteriorating mind.

In the morning I sat in the irrigation ditch
to talk to the cows
but they were afraid
and could not be bought,
like Vera, with red roses.

1995 – 1998

“Delva”

You lay, a Donna Reed relic
liver spots and horn-rimmed glasses
face sugared with age,
hair frosted with distant memory.

Your sons shuffle humbly
to the bars on your bed,
looking for Mama.
They can’t find her
and shuffle out again.

When you touch my face,
when you stroke my cheek
with your white, withered hand
I wish I knew you.

You want so much to love
something, but it is difficult
to concentrate on anything
through the fog.

You can tell me your name
and to get out of the kitchen.
“Is anybody there?” you ask.
Five minutes later, you
can’t remember me.

I wave and call,
“Goodbye Delva.”
You wave and reply,
“Goodbye Delva.”

1998

“I Am Woman: A Brief Biography of the Media’s Favorite Gals”

1.

Average may be healthy,
but boy is it boring.
I am the sickeningly obese,
I am the deathly thin,
I am anything that will catch your
          attention deficit
before you change channels.

I fought and suffraged
to give your little girl a voice.
Now she has the right
to talk about how fat she is.

2.

I have the biggest hair,
I have the fakest nails,
I have the makeup designed to look like it's not there.
I have taken it upon
          my surgeon, myself
to correct nature's horrible mistake:
She accidentally made me human.

Fucking a high-ranking official
gets me more attention
than becoming one.
I'm the girl your little girl
is learning from.

3.

I'm ambitious,
I'm educated,
I'm shrewd,
          I'm homely.
I try to look past it
but all they talk about is my hair.
Maybe if I cut it dye it shape it kill it
they'll shut up and listen.

I'm giving your little girl
her first
positive role model.
I'm giving your little girl
her first
victim.

1998

So far it’s just “The Very Rude Poem.”

Darling, hold still a moment, let me say it:
I adore you. I adore you with the power of
a dozen romance novels,
a thousand Hollywood endings,
and half a million of those pop songs you can’t stand.
My heart condition worsens when you are around.

I love you so. I would cook your dinner with perfect spices,
bear ten of your babies without anaesthesia.
I would assume a startling variety of objectionable sexual positions.
I would gladly pick your nose and eat it, should you ask.
I’m not sure why you would, but if you do,
rest assured: you can count on me.

Please, my dearest love, hold still a moment, hear me out:
my skin calls for you.
But we’re so apart, the timing so laughably off:
I fall in love with you when you’re not speaking to me,
and vice-versa. We have done this a long time.
It is almost its own sort of marriage.
I cleave to you in this state of holy absurdity.

If you’re mad at me now, I promise, it will soon be my turn.
But don’t mistake: my rage is another shade of rapture.
I threw your thousand letters in the garbage;
you never returned my books.
Sometimes I wonder what you could be doing with them.
I hope you sleep with them,
I hope you fondle them,
I hope you take them to the shitter.
There are yet traces of me on their leaves.

My exquisite beloved, I’m embarrassed to say
you’re more important to me than almost anyone.
I can’t think of a better use of my time
than stuffing your parts in my mouth.
I wear my love for you like a figurehead;
your form oversees my daily voyages.
Like a cold sore, you may at times be invisible,
but I know you are always there.

I have loved you long and hard.
I have appointed you the office of my bitterest regret,
my favourite topic of drunken conversation,
my most frequent masturbatory fantasy,
and you have performed these duties faultlessly.
You are perfection because I say so,
because each glimpse of your faults makes me giddier.
If you crapped your pants in front of me,
I might expire from unbearable delight.

Lovely pet, how could I get on without you?
How could I bear an inbox devoid of your name?
You send letters like most men send roses:
sporadically, and only when in deep shit.
How will I reconcile myself to knowing, when the phone rings,
that I won’t have to curse you for never calling?
That you will never be the hulking man who leers at me on the subway,
stalks me in the alleyway?

Loving you is like sucking a tank of nitrous dry:
I’m falling all over myself, but I’m having a damn good time.
My lungs are freezing and my lips are blue, but I adore you.
My brain is dying for lack of oxygen, but I’m yours.
I’m functionally retarded, but you’re mine.

February 2006

Wow, you really like coming back to read this thing, eh? Vain.

“Each Vital Organ”

I wanted only
that thrill
the joy
that makes tears
spring in
the eyes.

I wanted
the want that
sears a sharp
path through
each
vital
organ.

When was
the last time
you felt your
gizzard?
When did you
last weep
on the mouth
of your love?

2002

“Dog”

She was water
flowing away from us
gradually, ebbing like a tide
changing from river to stream
with the seasons

she is washed away like tears
she is passing under the black bridge

while a young man
drops stones from the trestle,
emptying his pockets of the past.

2001

“The Bride”

Photograph of a bride, white
like a ghost, formed of mist.

How odd to never see the sky
except through glass, as though

pinned down, a specimen collected
and killed for its loveliness.

2004 (?)

“Night Shift”

Factory shipping docks open,
white mouths swallowing
the night shift like a mist
that rolls over the night-blue
fields of southern Ontario.

2001

Fun fact: I used to work the night shift in a plastics factory, inspecting the plastic containers for birth-control pills. I drank a lot of tea and called everyone “Skippy.”

“How Dare You, Britney Spears”

How did you do it, Britney Spears,
go all ape-shit on us and cut
off your hair, squeeze out some
babies, and then dare to dance
on a stage to some music in
very few clothes, blonde hair
and sparkles, maybe slightly
thicker than before?

You lipsynched like you always did,
you writhed like the writhing thing you are.
But you are not now what you were then,
sixteen years old.

You have disappointed us all
and must therefore die.

Sept. 2007

P.S. This poem is a joke. Extra credit if you can find the humour.

“Fool”

If I can but spend faultless October mornings wrapped in a blanket,
discussing with myself, at length, your absence;

If I can wring blood into the remembrance of sounds your tongue has made,
the ever-present regret of missing your mouth’s tender epithelium;

If I can allow what scraps I possess of you to blot out the living creature of my days,
the joy in contemplating my chosen future, the pleasure of present being;

If I can hover, pining above a reflection, splashing my face in chill regret,
sketching lines bitter with the sickness of their inadequacy;

If I can do these readily, with much complaint, I might say I have perfected the art,
when you ask what sort of fool I am.

October 2005

“Philtre”

You suffer to think of
the dusks in your childhood
backyard. The place took
on an air of unreality,
leaving it, as you did, when
you were only ten, only
partially formed. Everything
before that seems to be
underwater, like the time
you dreamed you could breathe
and swim as deep as you liked.

You begin at once
to dream of nonsense,
like the eyes of people
you never knew. Red,
you had thought, they
were red then, they
reflected his hair,
but now his hair is
darkened, or gone,
and you can only see blue.

It’s the people you didn’t love
who haunt you the most,
the people you didn’t stop to know,
or accidentally insulted
and have regretted ever since.
Do we all make messes
of our childhoods? Is it,
for everone, like remembering
some past life and instinctively
rushing forward as if to say,
“No, no, do not drink the philtre”?

January 2006

“Love”

This is for you:
these simple words on paper
this is for love
the silly, overused expression

that came back and back,
held me at the mercy
of your childish whim
to see every part of me

and your face,
the floating resin of a light
shining too bright, scarring
and kissing me stupid.

1999

This one is listed under “terrible, nonsensical,” which I suppose is accurate.

You’ve been awfully pale lately.
The big body that always protected you
from all the rules you never wanted to follow
stops feeding you. Nourishment rolls around the
stomach like ball bearings in a tin can.
A slight pink tinge in one eye gives away tears,
sleep that is not sleep.

It’s as if you woke up one day and decided, while
brushing your hair, that you’d like to build
an aircraft carrier. Sure, you tell yourself, flipping
your hair, it will be hard. But in the end, I’ll feel so
much better for it, and the world will be a better place.

You know better now that the hull of the thing has slipped
its dry-dock, landing squarely on your face. This is not fun
anymore. You don’t know if you will make it out alive. Everything
hurts, even the parts that have nothing to do with being crushed.

You’ve always had this impossible longing, but did it have to be
an aircraft carrier? Couldn’t you have been happy with a birdhouse,
or maybe a pony? With your face caving in, the corners of your mouth
splitting, widening into a ghoul’s grin that will soon reach your ears –
couldn’t you take up jogging? Everyone would like that so much better,
so much less disturbing than all the blood and screaming over at the dry dock.

You rest with the weight on top of you, in that four seconds of forever
before your brain curdles and decides to blow this popstand out your ears.
If you could, in that impossible moment before everything ends, you’d answer
“Fuck jogging. Fuck everything else. This is what I came for, and I’ll take it.”

March 2006

“Cecilia”

Happy birthday, little love,
I wish I'd never heard your name.

I wish you were tucked safe in sleep,
in your childish bed, safe in its little frame.

I wish I'd never seen your face

I wish you candles and kisses, some lucky small red thing
some lucky little wishes, to hang on your little bedframe

high above your pillow, your secret sleeping place.
I wish my dreams were sweeter and

I wish I'd never seen your face.

March 2004

“Cold Comfort Freedom Song”

There are slim chains
feminine and fashionable,
circling my throat like
a lover’s jewels
on this snowstorm night.

I have the sickness
with your name on it;
I got it engraved at Tiffany’s.
I wear it secreted in
my blouse, near my breast.
I can almost forget it is there.

But if I move too sudden
it tightens like a choke-chain
with a simple whispered warning:

	“You are not like other girls,
	 so don’t you get too comfortable here
	 or I will take you far away.”

I won't play Persephone
to your Hades;
wherever my chains lead

	 I refuse

to let them
lead to you.

November 2002

“Bird”

Bird, where have you
been. Have you flown
over home, traced the
scar-marks of creeks,

the best route through
the trees. Have you
skimmed water-skippers
from the surface of

streams. Did you give
love to the sequoias,
pay respects to the
salt-sea. Do you

dream? Does the down
of your breast curl
at an old breeze,
your tongue lash at

familiar seeds. Do you
bring a message to me.
Do I dream?

March 2005

“Insincerity”

Honest is my first name.
I professed love to every
woman I ever met, and
a few I didn’t.

I’d give you the sleeves
off my vest. I could pull
wool over a wolf’s eyes.
My good teeth and

headful of hair
make men better than me
jealous, women too good
for me swoon.

I prescribe sugar pills
for pain, tincture of rosemary
to forget. I dilute your
good whiskey with piss.

I keep my word only
by unfortunate coincidence
and when I say:
You’ll be seeing me.

2004

Inspired by Stephen Dobyns’ poems along similar themes: Hunger, Distance, Envy, etc.

It all starts with sex.

“Haiku”

Our bodies cling like
two halves of a peach, playing
nice, you fuck me twice.

2004 (?)

You’re not welcome.

I have the bad habit of writing poetry, and the even worse habit of wanting to show it to people. The problem with this is that, first, poetry is stupid, and second, no one with half a brain gives a royal flaming fuck about poetry. I’d like to say I don’t either, but I’d be lying.

I like poetry, and if you’re here, I guess you’re going to read it.