Dear Ellen E.

you asked for words to fill the cracks
(protect your back) and slide into the booth beside you–
hamburger and fries

I saved some words without definition (am sending
them on) without recollection of what they are
except words--like excess shoes

lost in the closet down that dark hallway where
we never talk. no, never talk.

really, shouldn’t flowers and gray walls be enough?
there is that comfort zone. coal chutes, milk boxes
and socks hopping through foreign mud.

temper-tantrum mantras, a street light burning,
encoded with falling snow, the epistle
of our hands touching on a maple table

just as the sun leaps across. it’s the void which hurts
you, burns words into meaningless stumps.

For Thirty-Seven Years

Fallen branches tied
in a bundle bouncing on my shoulder
and drifting road

to horizon. They’re collected words
for the fireplace. For the times
we discuss the direction

we’re travelling. For the coal chute
accepting coal and keeping
us warm through winters.

It’s the silences which are frigid
Baffin Island in January. Cod navigating
icebergs bouncing off the shells

of negotiations concerning
the kitchen sink. The colour of
the walls between the front door and the back.

The place we’ll go this winter
to escape the cold. Perceptions concerning
the aesthetics of our children.

It has never been a question
of the fire between your lips
and mine. The point where we

said we would. Where we believed.
It has lately been a question
of how high to turn the heat.

I Spoke to you in Jazz

I Spoke to you in Jazz

and that rhythm rushing
waterfall over notes

as though dust motes are trapped
in the chamber of women and men
moving across the aspect
of architecture.

Pick up a cigarette and light it. Blow down
memory’s streams. Ignite cognisance.
Become a wall between the philosophy
of vagrants and the sanctity of St Peter.

Judge. Then leave the crowded room.
A man watches you with a woman’s eyes.

In the infinity of common places,
we reach, touch with open hands.
A symbol should be placed at this exact
location on the road.

Then torn down by the wind, whose wisps
languish like stale relationships,
or fishing lines trolling every aspect of life–
reason in love with the quest for cause.

Ontario March

Slanted Time


In the mispronunciation of events
history is born so far
from the existent world–
a road angling through apartment pines

where men with drooping
bedroom eyes sing you
to sleep into nightmares
of postponed end days–

coal chutes giving way
to laptops and the milk
wagon horse stumbling
from milk-box to milk-box–

forever lost, forever misplaced–
forever horse on the cusp of
an SUV trolling schoolyards
for MBA candidates–

to carry on the faith,
to carry on the markets,
to carry into the future
a scrap of DNA marking us

as people who strived for.

Avian Photography

bird captured by air
branch genuflects to
that moment when wing
becomes noun,

adverb not quite
touching earth, though expecting
to alight in the middle

of conversations concerning
folded sheets waiting for
bodies and heat, the miracle
of fantasies. nothing but

death remains still
in time's eddies.

once upon a time the poet
hid himself in music and rhyme,
afraid to come out, come out,
wherever he was–

message smeared with rhythms,
costume obscuring
the concerned heart–
man without answers,
yet alway trying to give
change a jump-start.

If this were a city, I’d be going in circles around a cul-de-sac


Fractals of song. Notes careen through my space. The ethernet
is draped in fragile voice lace. In the eaves of a guitar
we are separated by chords and fretting over domino doors falling.
A glancing blow. No more. No more. The sun still gives
its love to the spaces between where fable catches the first rays.