Multiculturalism


you didn’t grow up on my street
what the fuck do you know about how
to hide near nightfall or chase
the milk wagon for slivers of discarded
ice when July melts patchwork tar
in subdivision gutters and storms
slide along a slick horizon tearing
rain from cloud udders
or how November leaves rattle
in the graveyards of summer gardens
how winds leak through windows
and how we sat spouting Descartes
and beer after a day in the halls of
academia mixed with rebellion

oh it was future we created over
and over again with such fervour
and such music to a rhythm we’d never
heard before in the triangle of streets
we called the world of growing up
in Canada in Ontario in the region
of farmland and Mennonites in
the world which was never enough
when we could reach through our
radios and televisions into another
aspect of the whole world view

the universe explodes although there
is talk of the coming implosion
that fractal of the image I have
of myself sitting in front of a window
with a diminishing view of sidewalk
and lawn and rain falling gently onto
unraked maple leaves and a smell
of earthworms before the first
cigarette to celebrate another breath
in the world fast leaking out
of the door of life

2009


This morning, over coffee with Winston Smith, I wondered how much wine
it would take to drown the radio, the tv; to liquify words entering my ears.

And how many preachers in the uncertain world of wrong are right. Dear
Winston, dear Julia, dear god who is the keeper of time; I guess the rules.

I assume in linear routes a way between the concrete and what a camera
can capture. An aspect. The deceit of one light while piercing the dark.

Yet without...I have six hundred books of memories hiking the valleys
of my brain. No trail leads to you. No war descends on you, just reports.

The journal of deceit, the travail poets in politics. My mother keeps falling
into the East European war of insane repatriation and recrimination. She

remembers the body-part shrapnel, the justifications, wonders why Saddam
Hussein’s family was crucified. What is the sense of repeating that

history repeats itself. Time is a fractal. Time is a word. Time is
the separation between experience and the newspaper reports of speculation.

Science tells us that the fire touch
we felt in a ‘67 Chevy deep in the woods
was nothing more than near grazing
of the atoms of our fingertips and tongues.

Yet there persists this confusion between
the sun streaming through the kitchen window,
lighting up the obligatory bowl of cereal,
dripping onto the bleak newspaper headlines –

and the inner mind’s perceptions of self,
the way we embrace impossible positions
and postures – how we position ourselves
against the inertial of history’s storyline.

And accept that nothing can ever be approached.

And pack up and move into societal creations.

Mendicants.

Because it is better to have dreamed dreams
than it is to dream the possible positions

we might assume in sunlight and in rain –
in every time we reached out for the impossible touch.

some things end badly and some end well.

some things are discovered ages later as coal or oil.

to be used for the profit of someone and something.

yet at the time it wasn't anything like that.

you see the sun rose on a cool autumn day and the rain which had for days clutched the north horizon froze.

it began to snow.

as we fell asleep we wondered if the snow would ever stop.

or if we would ever again wake up.