Suffering on Saturday

Dear Jane,

do you think anyone cares?
August unravels,
implodes and bursts
in an explosion of time seeds -

potential.  And  I appreciate
where light lives, when the sonic
pirates board my ears, sail
straight into that song
I haven't heard since I was six -
a familiar of outliers
at the extreme limits of harmonics.

Because my body sings the jazz
of windows and doors.  Of pieces
cut like rogue bands from a festival
dedicated to corporeal ditties -
frailty, vision, memory, pain.

Cancer.

I have my bucket list,
my must do list, my make plans list,
my never give up list,
my I will list of impossible
feats.  I have what I wake up with
each morning - my will
to live dream list.

And everything is entangled
into the next hospital visit,
the doctor,
the chemo appointment,
the sleepless night,
the unending pain,
the reality my body
will fail my mind's vision.

So What


(written while listening to
Miles Davis' 'So What')

the window trills
at midnight the window
a breeze
rubber-stamped
October the window
where piers
are lit
and the river is
onyx fur
and below each light
trumpets
a tint the window
yells hard
bass sidewalks
and posts piano-rolled
into a staggered
one o'clock
walk the window opens
a mouth for
fretless cigarette smoke
clouds the window
unfettered dissolves into one unsustainable chord

A View From Horizon and Highway


He dreamed through
the winter wheat harvest
and christened himself
'Wild Fire'; dressed
in the red ochres of
a wounded and fleeing sun.

They tagged him as
'Victim six of the brawl
behind harbour warehouse
twenty'; and firmly
negotiated his three day
ash journey home.

Addiction

This miracle — water into wine,

then wine into blood —

this metamorphosis.

Or has the imagination

merely been well-fertilized

with Sunday dinners

and Sunday school. A want

of answers to questions

we only ask when

it is dark and the sparrows,

all fallen from the eaves,

are as silent as absence.

And the hole gnawed through

the chain-link fence

enclosing all that we dread

suddenly gains a voice.

We are asked to change,

we are asked to alter —

we who are less than

mortal flesh — we who

are undisciplined scree

tumbled somewhere in

the mountains by Eden —

we who have been

abandoned in a rain

which falls like wine

and smells like blood.

River Walk

Morning dresses the Grand's

curved meander.

Sun has yet to penetrate,

delineate and define

with light; denounce

the lack of clarity

in shoreline trees —

five ducks tacking

lazy eddy, time looped

and looped again —

gold ring settled

on your finger reflecting

without presence.

It's difficult to cut

night from day

with surgical precision,

remove dark garments

from the hidden,

reveal faces in a face,

translate our language

from the fog's

pidgin silence.

Ethics

Our long goodbye begins in the middle

of hello, morning, roses opening to sunshine

or rain. An ill-conceived path tracks

the lawn's undulations, ends abruptly at

the fence, where another world begins.

You're familiar with other worlds,

I'm not. The clay, which constricts the garden,

chokes the roses and the radishes, that clay

defines me too well. I'm not malleable,

not a flimsy umbrella in a rainstorm,

Superman in a telephone booth, caught

between identities. I'm the man who

secretly cries at all the right times

while watching a 'chic flick', sings along

in the silence of elevators, believes

every lie as though it's the genesis

of another universe. I'm the man

at the end of a garden pathway,

looking with longing into his neighbour's

back yard, wondering where you're going

and memorizing six tender scenes

which will make Shane come back.

For The Dramatic Woman I Met On A Toronto Street

Just like, reminds me of —
do you feel the pressure?

Less than a ten-word necklace
and already your head is —

in the oven of summer, birds
drone the air below
threatening clouds, bifurcate
between buildings

and the stream of consciousness
parades past primordial
concrete constructs.

You stroll the promenade mall,
primitive primate hunting
the ultimate toaster,

the idealized id, the question
of what exists between
money and earth mounds
flattened by falling time.

In muzak you are born,
in Freud you die, in life
you are challenged
to perform — street musician

riffing out your, riffing out
your, riffing out your
very last thoughts.

Lost Children

This is an ingrown toenail.
Something from the end of the universe,
somewhere in the arc of the belly flop
back, separated from the handholds
of the expected. Somehow cobbled together,
an old leather shoe with distance scrawled
across the sole, in an almost illegible hand,
with a dull pencil and a duller intent.
Something that presses against
a queue of events, with runaway emotions
looking for a destination, a track. Somewhere
after the canal through trees, past
streets languid with dawn. Stretching
in a jagged curve with a painful moan.
Somewhat lost and somewhat compressed
with an unknown fear. A band of words,
a camaraderie of phrases, the ping-pong path
of an atom through atoms, a foghorn
during a storm, trying to articulate a message
that must be relayed.

Cinquain

Life is

like colliding

atoms — you never hit

the same atom every time

you try.

Anniversaries

God sells tacos at that corner place —
the one I passed each weekday last winter,
snow falling like Mexican jumping beans —
falling onto La Cucaracha traffic.

It was the season of the living snowman,
appearing in front yards, brazen in
his bravado, his lack of understanding
that time is transient, not a local fixture.

Spring arrived jazz blues — warmer days
cut into frozen snow nights, crocuses rousing,
stretching their arms — supplicants
to the returning warmth of Eden.

This is a year now and leaves fall, scratch
across sidewalks and yards, obliterate
the green and gray — those days which
stretch through the heart of will.

I no longer understand the difference
between heaven and hell, the difference
between you here and gone, or whether
I purchase tacos from God, or just walk on.

Imagination

The morning. The flower. The clouds.
Hand on railing, flesh. On flesh.
A drapery of skin, then river.
And flight. Soaring flight.

Into the weakness of words and vision.
The erupting peneplain of perception.
And small tracks across memory.
A place on park bench.

Trees which speak in foreign.
The office tower bowing. To concrete.
Cool concrete. And a hint of roses.
A pinch of quarrel.

An answer of writers' consensus.
The murder of crow carries.
Aloft. The precision of doors.
Open, close, open, open, close.

A code. And nothing sustains.
Means. Because dissonance exists.
A hair falling across a sentence.
A perception dissolving.

And rain falls forever. On beliefs.

Image #005

mendicant in the strip mall,
by the bike rack, with a dog,
carrying three plastic
grocery bags, dressed in ripped
pants, ripped jacket,
on Sunday, at closing,
people a blur of activity,
hardly recognized you — truth,
isn't it, you strange kid.

Image #004

know time the moment when
(latch sound)
the moment is, know time,
latched against when
the moment is
time (know) the moment
listing with meaning,
know latched moments
listed when the moment
was time picture perfect,
a perfect picture of time

Image #003

The grackles have returned to strut
the back yard lawn, to chide me
for my presence there, I sawing industriously
at the limbs of the Cortland tree

until it is down and wood-burning stove sized
on thawing ground. One launching pad as they glide
into the cedars with food for the nests
is now gone. Tomorrow, I begin on the Red Delicious,

a larger mass, with more intricate limbs
and memories. It's age, you know, this desire
to level the topography around until
only a peneplain of effort remains;

and what needs to be accomplished mimics
transcendental meditation; nothing to stir
the heart. The side yard pine tree is safe
for now, haven for robins, harsh xenophobics,

who last summer swarmed a wayward grackle. I don't
need this war zone, which is something the chipmunks
digging under the back deck should understand.
There is a place for wildlife and for man.

Image #002

between (here and/and there
and the conceptions memory stores
in the front corridors of stories)
here and on St Lucia, Soufriere,
Soufriere, saxophone in St Louis
cemetery number one, Lofoten
leaking clouds out of north Atlantic
ocean (here and/and) at
the bus stop where I wait,
where I wait, where I remember
where I was and having been there,
between, untouched and touched,
between understanding and a brush stroke
in any colour of lady-slipper,
there should be understanding
and conclusion, resolution, but
there isn't/there is
just wind, an alley, an open
window, a cat, street signs
covered with graffiti, twelve
commandments stapled to a telephone post,
a photo album of pictures taken
while trying to misunderstand.

Image #001

Never imagine life linear;
never perceive a spiderweb world,
strings running everywhere,
roads bunged with snow,
awash in June rain —

never, never, never expect
anything but the misty froth
of memories bumping against you
like distracted shoppers
in an overcrowded mall,
where direction is
as aimless as electrons,
photons, a half-second after
the big bang, twenty minutes
before closing time, a thought
before the open door blast of.

Time

Because you're here,

then is problematic,

the way doors in motion

might be...either-or,

open-closed,

exposed or persona

clamped tight,

a death-lock on time.

Three urns beneath windowsill
in this house, sun set bottom
left, east/west, west/east....

Perhaps by attire, how dishes
hap-hazard write the kitchen table, time....
Conversations surface, dive, dive, dive!

Forty years are strobed onto
smoke screen, each moment falling
from the imperfect linear —

and these arms (one in shadow)
are feathered into empty/full —
sunlight through an open window.

Capricious woodlot vine
slices light windershin —

passionate drama with
bluejay chorale.

Dusk diminishes and jells —
the innocent leaves.

After Abstracts (edit)

Death departs
hand in hand with love. 
Sensing abandonment
time abdicates.

In the corners
of this room —
restless memory.

I ride my bike north on Weber Street. 
Afternoon sun
wears a tu-tu of clouds —
sambas with soul.