Parking Ticket

I come with words. They’re untrainable.
You know the moment—November sun
sits in your chair and graves
are being back-filled. Pretense
is the funeral. Yet we stare at each other
speechless as though silence is
our polemic. Then we walk away in opposite
directions—forever remembering
what we didn’t say. I have all these words
written down—in a poem this time
though it could as easily have been
my signature on a parking ticket—
parked in a tow-away zone—deduct three points
for not knowing you couldn’t stay.

Eddies and Spider Webs

Eddies and Spider Webs

in the crawl space beside old skates
(ten years of National Geographic)
wine and spider webs age

these stairs have creaked through three children

*

sun bleeds through the neighbour’s mountain ash and
the way I remember you is in eddies

(gravity and sheer stress) that movement travelling
forever yet always there (freight train shattering midnight)

*

spider web tatters dance in October wind

when I open the garage door to be faced
by rain (not suicide bombers and madness)
tap-dancing Fred Astaire and a smile that circles the lamppost

*

spider waltzing back into the cedar as I approach
with my macro lens—I imagine each step as a memory
of what was built and how that hour tasted consumed
in anticipation and existential faith

*

it’s a matter of scale—the Magellanic cloud passing sheered
towards us by gravity—your youth circling through our age—
each part of the web conceived out of the spider—king
of the empty carapace jungle—victim of the gravity of place

Random Drinks and Illusions

before the event
time

and a posse of poses for time—

don’t forget I brought
you flowers
in a jar

shaped like your work station

and you laughed
when I mentioned
they were looking
towards the sun of profit

* * *

can you bend that way—
into the shoal
where you drift the driftwood

collected from conversations
we had

it was a winter day
and you imagined sun—
you imagined earth

opening like the vaults of a pyramid—
the only treasure gone—

spent on a cigarette and gin—
on sand and last breaths

* * *

alleys and roads—alleys and roads
as though

there is no difference between
dead ends and choice

we always know a short-cut
cut out of our experience

I imagine a café in a dead-end court
and musicians playing songs

from somewhere else—always
in the key of my life

* * *

we were on our way
to early farmer’s market

the car just parked on King Street
and the sky opened up

when I glanced that way—
a landing plane—

a shooting star—
a comet falling

into the rising sun
and the dying host

of my shadow

Destination 5

Destination 5

Time is the leaning tower.
Lengthening shadows.

A word—from falling out of a conversation to
history discovering that word’s discarded shell
against a failed friendship/the silence of death
in the deafening bravado and thunder of war.

Time is stretched and released/stretched and released.
Hand between atoms. Hair sliding into the valleys of a pillow.

Costumes and masks. Purpose for clouds/horizon.
Sidewalks in cities when summer is the only gravity
that exists between sunset and sunrise. The sound
of emotion snagged on window-sills and fridge doors.

Time is the vanishing point where roads
and railway tracks become mystery/situation
between two non-existent/incomprehensible points.