Tuesday, March 12, 2024

In Another Heart

Today I’ll be somebody: a black girl,
Too slowly growing into womanhood;
An Indonesian Muslim, in a whirl
Of stark transsexual need. I’m feeling good,
Prepared for anything, darkness or light,
Forgetting, memory, lies, truth, love, hate,
Exasperation, joy — with one great bite
I claim the freedom to appropriate:
Another old Jew in his seventies
With thoughts and feelings so foreign to me
I understand a dust mote in the breeze
Better than him. It’s only poetry,
A few short moments in another heart.
So human, we can not be told apart.

Monday, March 04, 2024

Off to the Slaughter

I had just visited my Mom and Dad,
Then flown back to my home, my wife, my daughter
As June began, the weather getting hotter.
My father said, “It’s time. Now, don’t be sad,
Take me to hospice care. I’m feeling bad,
But not about the end. I’ll watch the water
Through the window.” So, off to the slaughter —
I missed it all, and yes, I did get mad.

I should have known. Time learns to twist the knife:
Instead of thinking I was pretty tough
Maybe I should have waited. Things got rough
When I was with my mother, then my wife,
As each of them endured the end of life.
I’ve had enough of that now. More than enough.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Never Shaken

I’ve loved you more than you ever loved me —
No, don’t suggest your love’s as deep as mine:
Would you have died in endless misery
If I left you? You’d carp, complain, and whine —
But never mind; just take the adulation,
And remember how I grovelled here
That time when you succumbed to your temptation,
Living life with neither grace nor fear.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I’m willing to forget the past, and hope
That when you do feel sadness, when you’re moved
To wonder what will happen, how you’ll cope,
You’ll know my love will hold through any storm,
And at the edge of doom I’ll keep you warm.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Free of You

So when will I be free of you, sweetheart?
You can’t really believe you need a gun
To rid yourself of somebody you shun;
No need for you to fire a poison dart,
Display my shortcomings in works of art,
Or secretly pose as a restless nun
And stab my kidney. You already won,
And I’ll be over you, soon as we part.

I think we’re done here, or as near as dammit.
I’m done for, right? Time to abandon me
Beside the road, under a willow tree
Like the victims in a book by Dashiell Hammett.
No need to find the victim now: I am it,
Splayed out, played out, and made redundant, free.

Friday, February 09, 2024

A Forgotten History

Good-bye, old Bishop Mountain, and hello
De la Montagne, and Édouard Montpetit.
We were a not-by-much minority
When I grew up in Montreal. Just so,
I duly learned the French tongue, blow by blow,
But by the time my Dad was forty-three
We’d gone: Saint Louis (no, not Saint Louis);
No more Duplessis and Jean Béliveau.

I try to manage without losing tact,
But I remember childhood, every day,
How I felt we had been driven away,
Though, as an Anglophone, I still react
To each cool reminder of the French fact.
Ici je vois une histoire oubliée.

Thursday, February 01, 2024

The Plinking Sound

He said, “This time you’re in the line of fire.”
I answered, “And you’re standing next to me;
I hope you’re in your best flame-proof attire.”
He laughed, “Sure, with a banjo on my knee.”
“Great! Play that banjo, and they’ll aim at you,
’Cause everybody hates that plinking sound.”
“Not everyone,” he argued. I laughed, too,
And countered, “I say only what I’ve found.”
We stopped laughing. The shooting had begun,
There was no banjo, and no sound like it,
And by the time the gunfire was all done
We both were lying in a bloody pit.
Still, as the blood was neither his nor mine,
We pondered, smiled, and took one glass of wine.

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Future Bright

The young man from St. Bees, his future bright,
Has always seen the best in people, true,
But he is not an optimist: each night
He checks the door locks and the chimney flue.
His motto is Once stung, forever shy,
And he’s been stung. But he’s been fortunate,
Freed from the worst of neighbours dropping by:
The glad, the clammy, the importunate.
A styptic pencil’s on the pantry shelf,
To hand for accidents and unplanned slips.
He has no allergies, and spares himself
The griefs of gambling and relationships.
There was a time when he was bold and daring,
A time long vanished, as he found it wearing.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

What Kind of Flower

What kind of flower is this? Does it relate
To someone’s vision of the world? Who cares?
Who gives a damn fig whether Anjou pears
Are poires d’angoisse, or just how much I hate
The idiot notion that Nature and Fate
Are intertwined, as if somebody dares —
Some little deity, caught unawares
By oceans’ size, or that balloons inflate.

Don’t mention wasps, the delicate precision
Of walrus tusks, how prairies got so flat,
Recurved beaks, bitter nectar and the bat,
Or nictitating membranes’ spirit vision:
I’ll have to treat that with total derision,
Just as it deserves. I spit on that.

Monday, January 08, 2024

How I Feel Now

I feel your presence, like a urolith
Stretching my tissues, ripping up my flesh,
Like snarling black bears in a Christmas creche,
Poseidon’s Cetus in the Perseus myth —
Use anything at all to hurt me with,
Deposit me among the stalks you thresh
Before you start, wrapping me in wire mesh,
Pretending you’re a working silversmith.

I don’t like what’s been happening to me:
You took my unused, sleeping heart and burst it,
Wrote the melodrama, twice rehearsed it,
Made me bless love for releasing me
And thank you for the happy comedy,
Until I woke up here, alone, and cursed it.

Sunday, December 31, 2023

The Last Sonnet of 2023

The last sonnet of twenty twenty-three
Reports a full year liveried in sin,
A bad society made not of tin
But something even flimsier: a bee
That bumbles and won’t fly, a destiny
Made evident behind a wicked grin.
We don’t complain about the state we’re in;
We won’t look — there’s no other road to see.

Now, understand me, I’m not crying, Look!
Move on: avoidance makes a lot of sense,
If following the news just makes you tense,
Remembering this villain and that crook.
Maybe we’ll read about it in some book,
Published somewhere, ages and ages hence.

Thursday, December 28, 2023

Apologia Pro Prosodia Sua

That’s right: I shouldn’t have rhymed “intersects”
Last week with “texts” — it just isn’t exact.
I play with rhythm, sure, but leave intact
The rhymes I use, how each word pair connects.
As everyone who knows me recollects,
I’ve been quite vocal, as a matter of fact,
On proper rhyming. It’s a brutal act
To rhyme “has-been” with “bane.” Some hateful sects

Won’t even try to fix their nonsense. Shame!
Even a robot would improve on this!
Can’t anybody see something’s amiss
With sloppy rhymers (whom I will not name).
Poems are art, not some infernal game.
There are some lips, Olaf, I will not kiss.

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Electron

If I describe electrons to our friends —
Something I almost never have to do,
I’m glad to say — my finger points at you:
“The negative,” I state. Perhaps time bends,
Perhaps (I don’t believe this one) the ends
Could justify the means, maybe this stew
Contains real mutton and not just tofu.
Not so with you, a man no one defends.

In every case, when someone intersects
With you, catastrophe comes following,
One personal existence hollowing;
A jam jar’s measure of mayflies collects
Around you. There are classical Greek texts
That speak of you. I hear the swallowing.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Too Much Steam

Divide the last free dividends by two
And let’s be on our way. We’ve been together,
Waging economic war in leather,
Masked and under pressure — now we’re through.
I hoped to be disjoined at last, from you
And from this feeling that uncertain weather
Might be all they need to cinch this tether.
I won’t face wind and rain in this canoe.

You claim that sinking will confirm our dream,
A consummation wished for; you’re devout,
But I say let’s turn this canoe about
And head for shore. This is a gentle stream
Until we meet the ocean. Too much steam,
My darling, is what we can do without.

Monday, December 04, 2023

Too Late for Dying Young

It isn’t too late now for dying young,
Is it? You know, I’m only seventy.
I feel just like I did at twenty-three,
And not quite dead quite yet, although my tongue
Is turning blue, I’m coughing up a lung,
My elbows hurt, and I’ve been lost at sea.
I still remember drinking eau de vie,
Your hazel eyes, and every song we’ve sung.

Each time I come across a waiting puddle
I have to choose between feeling the rot
And leaping in. You’re in my every thought:
Each touch reminds me how you craved a cuddle,
And each caress puts my brain in a muddle.
Too late to die young? Maybe, maybe not.

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Whet My Appetite

I will not eat this dreadful gum-like paste
Made with some awful, nasty bits of ear
And pharynx, with a too-substantial smear
Of bladder tissues. Nothing goes to waste,
But it’s the worst dish I have ever faced.
The chef prepared this with a troubling leer,
And put it on the table with a sneer
That made me think of fruitcake with no taste.

A serving of black pudding, far too red,
Followed by a blancmange strangely not white
Made this dog’s breakfast a disgraceful sight
And made me want to lie down on my bed
Holding a dark, wet compress to my head.
It didn’t even whet my appetite.