Snow blurs the barn. 

Remnants of a fence line in snowstorm. 

The wind has brought snow to music and words


The child that reads and leaps
words over midnight’s crescent—
that child has always known

there only is one road—
one road to travel home—

one road that winds so stealthily
through carnival mirages
and voices hawking realities

as though they’re vegetables
or elixirs to bring back memories
that have always disappeared—

one road that’s seemed so lost
as though it never was

the road that like a kite’s thin string
cuts through the boiling air
and anchors the kite’s bold dreams

of freedom to the surface
of this earth from which it imagined
there is escape.

Words that appeared while playing something or other in D

who are you today remade
in lines
as familiar as my bed

or the headlines in this morning’s
paper tossed on our porch
from the past

did you mix the crowds
from yesterday
into your coffee this morning

and did you repeat
those words you heard
at the end

of the play when the world
didn’t change
no not at all

when we were on
the other side
of the door walking through

first November snow

are your gestures today
as dramatic
as a soap opera play

where it’s always
absolute love
or the end

in a rush of music
that seeps
from the fabric of the room

like the sighs
of a million voyeurs
with blue eyes

watching the world
drip away
from brown to black

and disappear

behind you singing, there’s a tv looks like a microwave and I’m just damned confused

why’d I follow you—guru of Viet Nam lost—
guru of meaning-tossed moments—

there was no road, just air/
the sound of air/
the sound of sun/
the sound of moon/
the sound of imagination—
yes, that wind,
imagination stirring eye-see, ear-hear—
imagination rustling through

transport transportation into the future

and now meaningless moments
have blown from the trees, have settled
in the eaves of my history—

the child behind you in Newport lost his brain
long ago on a road he imagined was there—
asphalt stretching through his children/
through his wife/
through his body as he struggled—
the child behind you chose

to believe

and there was no road/
just settling dust/
just settling words
into the minds of nations and time
that were ready to change

if only for a moment
with the fervour of youth

hearts believing in false dawn

love) camped for campaign
along the borders

and there are mountains (as
though we’re looking
for Kurtz (as though—

a rhythm has been raided
and we kiss the music (not
(not (not the fabric and the hem
descended and ascending (dead
Kurtz prostrate before (so simple
love (and the assumption power

yes power camped for campaign
across the minutes
of breakfast and midnight

(as though an empty shell (as though
an empty wave (is not (not alone

Words and other odd theories for reality


I think we give too much mystery
away to words and that’s not it at all—

at all—

there’s always the sun, even behind clouds
and there’s always the earth damp
with rain or blistered and cracked like over-term eggs

and there’s always the grunts
we release while sleeping or making love
or drinking coffee to celebrate another afternoon
plastered like concert posters on every pole
of the conversations we engage—

the whole thing’s more like building-blocks
and macrame, the eye’s sharp angle through
a camera’s lens pointed at an event
that happening has already disappeared

and left a mystery—

but not one filled with words.

The last muskat grapes on the back deck vine and the maple on the boulevard.

A consideration of leaves caught by the flaming bush

separate I am
from the body singing
these waves to sleep
on the palm of small events

and when I am coffee or sex
and when sun and concrete
dance a tango
on the lips of afternoon

then I will genuflect
to the small events falling
from memory
as though it is autumn

and winter is coming
on the heels of my past

The Mendicant Tells the Truth


in the matter of trust
I trust
you found my message
placed on the coffee table
contra-grain to the
events you may have
judged else-wise productive
in reaching a decision

I have nothing else

nothing left but the echoes (

you walk out a door)
but which side—

which side of the sun has burned
everything to simplicity (to
a glass

of wine) red bricks—
pale constructs and someone’s promise
to reconstruct each word
Hansel thought

was a bread crumb
(trailing) from one life
to the next

and another
like so many bottles
(emptied) into (the hours)—
promises—and arguments
that convolute then pass—

are blown away by the movement
of another door (and we
sigh as though) angels are in the rafters
of the air
this door disturbs

The Poetic Stance

wonder if it’s in the hips
or the hair/stair/glare of the last minute
now discarded along with—

wonder that

when construction vehicles are backing up
as though—but no/you can always still see
the original lines vectoring down the fresh-paved road
like Gordian dreams

and into that and that and into the one standing
on the sidelines waving/mendicant of explanations
for this passworded world—

it’s there/in the back yard
where the leaves have been raked
into a sifting pile—it’s there
that we see such faces/hear
such voices/and walk such alleyways
as may populate the imaginary life line
a spider spins from eyes that were never created
to see time as more than just this moment

Yesterday was a sunny day after a few days of dull skies, like sore blisters, leaking rain. I grabbed my camera, got into the car early in the morning and drove to St Jacobs, where I parked by the Trans Canada Trail—that portion which tacks the old mill race. It was cold, near O C. The colours had shifted from the bright reds and oranges of a week ago, to more yellows, many of them sombre. It was more the colours of a razed corn field, as though the doors were being opened, the guests to the long celebration asked to depart into a weakening sun.

I brought only my macro 150mm lens, so I was limited in the types of photos I could take. I decided to go for isolated objects, though I did try a few scenic shots, with limited success, especially at f 2.8. The depth of focus is just too shallow.

The above photo was taken at the head of that portion of the trail. Someone had obviously found a mitten and placed it upon a rock for the owner to find. I took it as an omen of what was to come.







I had too much lens, but looking across the mill-run, the leaves in the woods there were spilling toward the water as though they were a lava flow.







Leaves over water above, with an old stump supplying an honour-guard of sorts.

Sunday morning drive along Lakeshore Boulevard, north shore of Lake Ontario, winding through three cities. The charter boat docks are empty, it's the last of October and chilly. 

Howls, 2005

for one nation / for one colour / for one way of life
to tell another that they’re not worthy of—

and to sit back and say that prejudice is justified
and painful discrimination will be a way of life—

that is for that nation / colour / creed / to lose
all credibility as a voice that should be heard—

a voice which says it speaks in the name of freedom
and humanity when in truth it speaks only

out of narrow self-interest

First cup

coffee (coffee and) coffee cup—
container (contained though)
coffee fills cold morning (rills
in kitchen air) and we (we are)
alive (radio talk) and speak (though)
heat on activity (yet frost)—
and our words (tumbled sounds)
broken on indifference (our) words
mock shepherds (flockless) our
(words) scattered words (odourless)
assume indifferent invisibility
(between sips and) coffee fills
unfettered time

Not now, I'm vacationing with words


Words are setting—long slope
of the sentence as though

though we have tongues which are
wet clay / though we have tongues
which are night / though we have music
which drifts away

and we touch so little.

Oh, always reaching / surrounding
in the cocoon of our imaginations

and we imagine warmth / we imagine
motion / we imagine the linear between
point and point

on the plain which is wet clay / which is night
where we see daylight

and history / and the ownership of history
which is definition.

It all comes down
to moment and words
which stretch the moment / which stretch
the moment’s skin over
the emptiness between / which stretch the thin wet clay
until the moment
we imagine we
see purpose
greater than the void.

The lingo of travel


This is harbour.
Ships dock
here. Forever in the rhythm of harbour.
And waves.
And the music of docks.
And the music of descending sun
stepping into
the enclosure of hands
grasping stray notes
of harbour.
And docks.
And clouds airbrushed against harbour
wavering in wind
strayed from confused sun.
This is harbour.
Rising. Falling. Named the confusion
of civilizations. Rising. Falling.
Docked in earth.
This is harbour.
Tree. Roots. A singular line shot
at the horizon’s mouth
which eats the earth.
And eats the earth
because this is harbour.
As small as
a moment never lost.
Or a hand. A look.
A hair which is flag in the wind.
This is harbour.
Ships dock.
And also hope.
Hope in the eye of inevitable storm.
This is hope.

The Snake Speaks, After All These Years

I am naked
sitting on these concrete stairs
between door and street

and the sun chases shadows
to the corner
and the lights go green and red.

Windows are closed to October
to the sounds tree bones make
with cold wind—

I am naked
and the garbage waits
to be picked up Thursday.

On the skin of the snake
always shedding
and growing

I am naked and though I recall
the beauty of Eve
before societies

the truth bores under my skin
and I am as naked as
one drop of water

in a storm-tossed ocean—
as naked
and as alone.

Echoes in the Apple Tree

concrete and bricks are
the dividing land
as once
glaciers seeped into ripe
savannahs and further
down Earth’s lips we danced
on deserted beaches
and danced on deserted beaches
until we dissolved
the mad night
to conceive
conceive
conceive
ourselves into civilizations

concrete and bricks are
the dividing line
between our skins
and the skins of trees
savages on the dropping
rolled horizon
and the skins of each
mortar and clay crucifix
stolid border for rutted Gordian roads

I remember musty
cigarette smoke and coffee musk
crept to the cracks by kitchen
windows and words
curled through languid air
to cut into
the sound of jazz
and rock
and blues

one bass line became
the ticking clock
the creaking chairs
the shuffled glasses
the empty bottles
the sound of opening
and closing doors
the feel of bodies pushed
by air against the air
of frail realities

tonight street light sings to the apple tree
and a single apple hangs
from Indian ink skin
as though it’s smiling
beckoning
dancing
an erotic apple dance
to a swollen bass line

dancing and beckoning
with moves
it learned under the moon
on an advancing beach

and Indian ink skin covers
the reaching arms
the beseeching arms
the toxic torso
the ice which is a serpent’s ice
the eye which stares
blindly like serpent’s
eyes and the need
which drives us
like and is the tide
reaching even though
we chant the chant
of ignorant and crumbling rocks

not again
not again
not again

Dreaming of a different time, a different place: Mississippi River morning, New Orleans. 

Skyline structures. 

Lackner Woods, early morning. The leaves are descending slowly this year. 

Picking Apples in October

The old are dying and I’m old and the pains that run through me like lumbering freight trains on rusty dilapidated tracks are not from any recent births in my being that I can recall and the apples on the back yard courtland and macintosh have been falling for weeks and rolling in the unruly grass or forming craters in the flowerbed before rotting or being eaten by the chipmunk that lives under our deck (who has also decided that the elbows in the protruding roots of the hedge are a good place to store apples) or drunk by yellow-jackets or eaten by those things which look like ladybugs but are something totally different and perhaps sinister because they stormed our border without visas or passports or is it the skunk which I saw sniffing the front yard mulberry tree because I’m certain I’ve seen his droppings around the side of the house but this is about the four bags of apples I picked today and for christ’s sake, it’s mid-October and when I was a child that meant we were eying the sky for snow and the road for road hockey but this year we haven’t even had frost yet and the roses are still blooming the inpatients an army creeping off to somewhere as though they’re on a holy crusade and the courtland I cut into four pieces was damn sweet and that’s not the taste of October that’s not the feel of driving out of Waterloo past the Mennonite farm lanes where men in plain black stand beside their unhitched buggies selling potatoes and apples and other late-harvest farm fare to the tourists and such on their way to St Jacobs and tourist shopping and I don’t have to stop because I have the two apple trees (which I planted eighteen years age when we moved into this house) full of apples as a testament that what I see today in the falling leaves and the bare threads of bushes as though their skin has been stripped from them and only the bones are left as though this vision I have is not the truth and the aging year is just a piece of the puzzle because the apples hold something in October which is not October just as the pains in my knees and shoulders and the funerals we now go to are not the sweetness of all the years which lie behind us yes all the sweet years fermented into the taste of life.

Love Song to Residence

— we visualize in-fragment
construct ill-framed home —


1.

I receive breath / steel from
you as startling as a bullet
confused / just having
pierced a trembling artery / and coffee
brews / it is morning in
the desires of paperboys / stale
songs conquer the uplifting
choir of rising
from the night’s wrinkles / I am
repetition once again / this Tuesday
buttered and swallowed
with bus fare / a smile for Mrs. Todorovic
and her brood of garbage bags / the sun
sliced by picket fence / spread
on sidewalk where naked weeds
go suburban uncontrolled
and a past rain / so like
a past lover / has etched
its signature in the boulevard


2.

am I to believe
there was always so much
unknown in this karst body
benign above deep flow / evolution
as hidden as magma / as chilling
and abrupt / beginning crying end
with the entangled mountains liquid
hollow / liquid / bent over
each sunbeam ever shed
by this dying star / abrupt goodbyes
and bills / hurried semaphore
over the bows of storm-tossed careers
and deep to deeper the emotions’ flow
in a hand on hand / foot by foot
at the door / the car / the door / briefcase
and the door with two
confused sides and everything
beneath consumed / am I to believe


3.

I inhale your breath of asphalt dung
and dream / sweet sixteen
on the blacktop ribbon / through the rain
your songs / your words drip down
the throats of down-spouts / gutters
and licentious drains /am I
to dream / each concrete corner
bending to another door and jazz
yes jazz in the dim-lit drifting
cigarette smoke / jazz smile / jazz
frown / jazz chord-ed out
a-chord dis-chord / black and white
keys / night and day / jazz in a crib
crying with a trumpet’s voice / jazz
growing / jazz as choice / safe
jazz / choose jazz / jazz
for the life of it / tour
the USA with jazz
today / jazz lines
in the box / jazz deep
in your veins / karst jazz
on the geomorphology
of an aging face


4.

oh Harriet Nelson / I knew your smile
your home / that Ozzie
would return for ever and ever
just as I knew Donna Reed / played
with her daughter and son / in Mayberry
spring / oh the house was never
empty / I never alone / the rafters
never creaked with the pain
of being / the bomb never fell
and I learned the only difference
between heaven and hell
is the sound of a trumpet through
the open window of summer / the sound
of a trumpet deep in the veins
of youth / the sound of a trumpet
from King Street to Queen / leading
the children’s crusade through time

The Miracle When Water Floats

This woman who stands immersed in an air
of flowers / though it is November
on the eyebrows of such dismal clouds /
this woman whose hand is on a handrail
which has the scent of basil crowding in
from a former memory / this woman
has already noticed the snow lurking
in the doorways and the alleys / heard the faintest
cries of genesis in a ground yet unfrozen
and this woman wearing yellow in the grey / this woman
carrying a nothing which is too heavy / this woman
smiling at the crystalizing air / she has no secrets
and she feels herself absorbed by everything
around her / this woman who has bent
herself into the years until she’s gained invisibility.



— a sixties flashback —

Having wound down the escarpment on Appleby Line, we crossed the railway tracks and were greeted with this scene, so appropriate, as Mohawk Raceway is less than five K's away. 

October Field: The rust colour seems appropriate for an aging year. 

This Year In Paradise

It won’t have an impact on changing visitor patterns.
But, you know, it’s shameful that people would try
to scare visitors when they show up,
travelling hours to get to what we call paradise.

—— Jeb Bush, commenting on Florida’s new
shoot if you feel threatened self-defence law
and the campaign against it.



This year in paradise, the angels carry Uzi’s
and on the beach, the bikinis and thongs
are bullet proof.

The policy is neither left nor right,
just straight ahead without any thought
that deviations are possible.

Become compressed into the army of one
defending the nation of one
against all change in a changing world.

In Venice, St. Mark’s Square is again flooding,
just like New Orleans. And Pakistan wonders
if the world will ever stop rattling.

We began as nomads long before the towers,
cathedrals, bridges spanning heaven—
long before there was too much to carry.

When there was only grass and the breath
from a thousand glacier tongues
scolding us on our endless journey.

We began as nomads long before the gravity
of our potential and dreams buried us
in our places as though we are deep-rooted trees.

This year in our image of paradise, the angels carry Uzi’s
and when we drive, we imagine that the road belongs
to the last man standing.

And don’t remember that in every nomadic tribe,
some are always left behind.

When a Genre Crosses the Tracks

Mary stops at security,
says her department
will be gone
by November. Just
like
that.

She’s not worried yet,
speculates on how many more
cuts will occur.

Her daydream slips on
the banana peel of night.

And as she walks
away, I think;
this is like watching
one of those old
horror films where a hundred
people are suddenly whacked
and the monster has
yet to be given
a face.

Word


foolproof but we poets
are fools

recycle boxes
and the arms of Mr. Norm

until the juggernaut of commerce
prose melts into the human form

and we walk a certain way
from the café

to the copy centre juggling
the forms of our mentor

Mr. Will and his bill to let
the language breathe beyond the letters

arranging themselves into androgynous
greetings at the corner

of a thought beyond profit
or how Mrs Smith

will live so long before she no longer
takes out the garbage

or continues to breathe
even though her garden

continues to grow Impatiens
long into October

and the first frost of that month
when they turn into incomplete sentences

and are underlined in green

The News is Better as a Joseph Heller Novel

(from notes discovered in a notebook)


Noone weeps
anymore. The bombs go
off—percussion
for the raging
song—and we’re stunned.
Noone weeps.

In our fantasies and
nightmares, we’ve journeyed
through aroused skin,
to the heart of
the city’s heaving
lungs, its weathered,
concrete bones—
we’ve sipped coffee
watching the setting
metamorphosis of death.

On the catwalks,
we’ve rated this year’s
sleek fashions
and in the fashion
quarter—we’ve seen
it hawked in history
superstores—
retro/retro/retro.

The bombs go off
and noone weeps—
it’s just this season’s
colour.

If you say you’re living a poet’s life

I sometimes wake in poem-time / a certain iamb of olive oil and eggs / and history
stretched nineteen inches of CNN / announcers like world criers chanting
insane mantras—destruction and desire and the fire of the human engine enduring.

Fresh-cut chives and ground pepper / comics / the obits in the morning paper /
Gordian politics supporting a sliver of wealth / arms reaching through coffee steam
into tai-chi moments / the fear of evo&devolution / a dancing asphalt pearl—

elocution Mrs. Manners of the failing sun and sea / oh let’s not touch the hem
of so much empty eternity. Poems come and go with each changing mood
of an autumn sky / poems come and go and never say, goodbye.

Pine Trees on the Escarpment South of Tobermory

here where the river froths icy over
bear bedrock even in summer’s cyclonic eye—

here I wonder what dreams the bent pines might have—

if they dream about equatorial winds and the burnt
coffee odours of strict summer days—
do they consider life between lukewarm waves
slipping down the zipper of another ruby sunset

or are their imaginations as frozen as a January morning
which groans and creaks like a factory manufacturing
precise stamped metal parts for refrigerators, trucks,
weather satellites and fine French guillotines

perhaps they listen for the distant drone of saws, the rattling
of chains; perhaps they wait patiently
for metamorphosis, for release into another purpose

perhaps they pray to the god of tables, dressers and studs;
perhaps they wait for their cryogenic moments as bookshelves,
wait to emerge again and again, as though considering themselves
in the mirror of what they are, they’ve fallen into endlessness,
these skeletons, these bones that ignore death

Stalker

Between the mother
and the child,
there is—what?
Genesis hijacking
the bedroom
and the boardroom.

I never cried
for revelations,
never wanted then.
Yet consequences
creep like stalking
lions, knowing

that no matter
how large,
the kill is a matter
of time.

When America

When America went Latin, the Hondas slipping
between Fords and Chevrolets hummed Mediterranean.
And trash talk dripped mucho manno testoster—
one voice, one mantra.

When America went Asian, food was a flood gang,
drug and under-aged and naked against
fifty-plus stars waving in a Louisiana wind,
staring down the gun barrel buggers of government.

And fat slowed down the human flow—fat flowing
from house to ghetto, from want to empty restaurant
to dreams in the respite of fat dreams under a fat sky
sinking into the fat minutes, hours and empty days.

When America ran on empty, only tough words
remained on tough streets, empty-eyed and large and dry
wind whipped flags into a political frenzy and a solitary
rat slipped through the empty halls of sacrifice.

concrete surfer 

Time the pacifist
wears a black coat—
something torn from the back of old
disaster—rumpled with death
and the dust of lost civilizations—
the dust that never seems
to settle long
and time the lascivious
lecher preaches at each
crooked corner—sings
lullaby’s to dour clouds belched
from the throats of hope.

Time hangs out, time hangs out
with gypsy history
and they drink,
exchange strange stories concerning
the most recent uprising
of deluded ants.

September's Susan 

Side yard spider 

Three towers stand in the field like deserted buildings. Nothing stops time and change. 

On the Block


The time of teflon ideas has returned. Once
out of fashion, now sliding from each word.

And in the silence, the world escapes me, events
dumped on a table in an inaccessible corner of

what art I thought I had. These last years,
there has been little glue. Now there is none.

And like a mendicant on parliament hill, I hear
the words, the endless words and have no faith.

A familiar trail this warm September morning. Spider webs are everywhere, as though there is just time for one more hunt before cold October jack-knives down to this world. My mind is still on things further south. When I went to save this file, the immediate title that came to me was, eye of the storm. 

Blues One-Ten

I suppose the sun sings ballads
to the clouds, a conga line weaving
to the twilight bar.

And buildings nod to trees fanning themselves,
planning themselves into suburbs,
barbecues under the stars.

The dimensions of a heart
are found in the flowerbed,
chatting up sober roses for a lark.

How could anything exist without us,
there to orchestrate and name
each petal and leaf into flame?

I look at the waters of New Orleans,
too placid after the rage of the storm
and wonder, how could it happen—

it wasn’t dropped from a plane
or shot from a rife,
it wasn’t legislated after too much debate—

it isn’t the aftermath of an insurrection,
it isn’t the demented plan of a despot
tearing the world apart—

this is the result of an earth being itself
against all men wandering
across the shelf of history’s misery.

Speechless

When words fail,
I feel as though
I walk through waves.
Events wash back and forth
across a world
where each breath
is only the illusion of movement.

Though sunrise and sunset
click by like miles
and mountains disappear
into the night to rise as meadows,
the wind which moves
past my body, the wind
which trawls clouds, the wind
which is a blender—that wind
is the same wind
that has always been,
though events once washed
over me now recede
without gaining distance
from the fading footfall
I drag across this beach.

Baseball Poetry

right field deep
waiting with seagulls
where the big bang occurred

words were born
coalesced into silk
running colours to memory

and we stare forever
into the lunatic face
of communication

Choosing Ancestors


—From the vast annals of world literature,
we choose our ancestors.—
(Stephen Henighan in,
When Words Deny the World)




It was a loveless topography,
concrete containing green blade pools,
sun aging clay with drought—
come out, come out,
the sun is setting, come out.

The dark didn’t rise or set
in the milk box world,
yet everything was better,
except the immigrant dreams.

Dreams went to the old marketplaces,
sat in the old sun, reading rerun news,
saw scrawny villages in clouds
strangled by a flat horizon,
played too familiar pickup stix
political games with emotions.

It was always sandcastle against
wave, neither able to sustain
their structure.

And word scurried like rats—
history’s rats—sentences
hiding in rippling barn day
school days, cheating the milk
from breakfast, tearing
the flesh from ideals
drunk and dead in gutters
attended by pallbearer Queen’s Anne lace,
biting with winter’s teeth,
biting into the facades.

It was the age of shape-shifting
personas, page by page
becoming and receding, to become again—
sandcastle man standing against
a plague of rats, sandcastle man
wavering in the knowledge of hands,
young hands, willing hands.

I’m a man with arthritic hands,
the circles I spin are small, comfortable
circles. I’m a man with arthritic hands,
in pain, I’m a man afraid of storms
on a cold Atlantic, I’m a man afraid of rats,
content to rock in the comfort
of a rhyme, rock and sip iamb.

Dinner dishes on the deck table
are a minor chord, a breeze ignored
and the minutes lengthen
with diminishing wine.

The maple catches a falling sun,
shakes it onto latticework ground,
our eyes are drawn to clouds
drunk with evening blood.

I see jazz, as though this scene
is a score tossed from a window,
in so many riffs and twisted
notes—fractured sense non.

You have a brush, your pallet
filled with colours dancing
a dance of words leaked
from passed memories of love.

And we’re thrown through
the prism, emerging bifurcated.
You whisper how moments unite,
I know them separately.

On the Blue Heron sunset cruise, we saw much of the rugged east coastline of the Bruce Peninsula. Somewhere on top of the escarpment, the Bruce Trail makes its way to Tobermory, as rugged as the escarpment it tacks. 

Drafting with the ferry to Manitoulin Island. It's early morning, the north chanel fog-bound, as though the great Manitou has misted our eyes so that he can pass in peace. The passage is uneventful, South Baymouth revealed finally, as another highway leading deeper into the north. Little Current is north on Highway 6 and still far from Espanola, where Tim Hortons and civilization again return. The land changes somewhere in this region, becomes igneous by the time the tailings of Sudbury are spotted. 

Seagull and Ferrry to Manitoulin 

Crossing to South Baymouth

There’s always one person
leaned over the rail, head
angled toward unheard
streets, their cosy (as small
is often named) bars and
the ferry cleaves on through
indifferent water.

Early morning, the world
is mist, scattered islands
indistinct promises.
This is the beginning
of Ontario north.

Between Tobermory
and South Baymouth, we’re at
the same latitude as
Venice, though everything
is different here—we’re
on the nose of the north
and Venice—ah Venice
is a southern promise
of masks and canals and wine.

Perception—how the mind
dances with overheard
words and ideas, twists
them in the same way
we twist the sheets on a
restless night, awaken
to tell the world we dreamed.

History becomes
the inhalation of clutter
as though November wind
has blown a city's worth
of litter through our desire
to consume.

Nearing retirement, stripping
weight from ourselves, we discover
forgotten scraps—notes crusted
with remembrance—from a life.

We're reinventing ourselves—
an empty warehouse—
once a depot for general auto parts—
Desoto, Edsel, Studebaker—
empty, a thought in the minds
of the planning department.

In visions, new pharmaceutical
school arises—pristine tower
awakening a city's core
once presumed dying.

Not yet—no, not yet.

Waltz of the Wallflower

you’re a flower bordering
the Trans-Canada Trail—
yellow petals delicate,
five and open

I’m a kilometre west
of St. Jacobs—there’s
a hint of Conestoga River
beyond thin cedars

that’s north—south, a corn
field wafting to scrub bush
and new suburban development

I aim the camera, focus, shoot
the photo flashes on the LED—
you’re yellow flower in front
of green brokah curtain—
gorgeous star of this morning
scene and I don’t know your name

Camouflage