Perspective

As I look at my photographs
I realize I want to extricate
reality from the maw of
the fantasy which represents
one goddamned second.

A passing glance, the crowd milling
and imagination churning reason
into a desire smoothie.

But it was never like that,
on the bus negotiating curves,
mountains and flatlands, your
smile positioned between
alarm and joy.  Recorded,

as a bad lip day, hair floating
south,  eyes floating off
the camera’s capture, your
left hand clutching the rock
which also supports  your
back.  Moss grows there,

As does this feeling, this
reason for lifting the camera
from where it juggles against
my stomach, a talisman,
a guard against time taking off
like a runaway train,

and everything forever becoming
so different that I am
forlorn in my heretic skin.

Cobbler

A shoe is linear along
the sidewalk, ground, path,
trail, stairs leading to and
unified in intent, to rend
the air between where you
are and where you want
to be to experience
the event.  A shoe is motion’s
symmetry, whereas poetry
lumbers along, a dog sniffing
ever post and tree, every bit
of I and we, sniffing history,
yet never biting to the bone,
never tasting the tears
which flow only at night
like a karst river, so far
underground that only in
the deepest corners of the cornea
are the emotions expressed —
when the sun is aligned just so
with the stone constructs
and the reason for 
their construction revealed.

Photo Spill In Aisle Nine

This is what I inherited
from you, when you sloughed
photographic memory, more
interested in what was never
recorded, never memorialized
and never accepted as —
this is what you refused to
become, robed in behaviors
that went deep into your
genesis.  This is where I found
myself playing the accordion,
dressed in a suit, not jeans, but
a suit and this is where I found
pictures of cub camp, Ipperwash,
friends framed by their front
doors, the three musketeers
in the back yard on Bristol Street,
random relatives removed by
the misdirection life applies;
this is where I felt like a
tiny man, caught in the strobes
of photographs, one moment six,
the next nine, then eighteen,
a bracelet of time.  This is where
dichotomy is pain, because
the touch-points between us
are so divergent;  Slovakia
and Canada — they're
open to interpretation.