“and I believe you when you say that / you’ve lost all faith / but you must believe in something”

i desperately wanted to believe in it, not knowing that i only wanted its idea.

summer reading #2

the resistance

kept me sane throughout second practicum

don’t forget me

live @ slane castle, ireland

whereto

there has always been an inconsolable knowing that this town, this Toronto, is too small for the life that i will lead.

summer reading #1

all in all i learned a lesson from it though / you never see it coming, you just get to see it go

hits home

endings are new beginnings

you taught me first and foremost to love life, to walk through the fire with hungry feet. this i will always know.

“A blind lover, dont know/ what I love till I write it out.”

Proximity

This is the surface where I end
and you begin:

a landscape
with a mirror sky of skin

you kiss the unglassed air
between the vague lines of love

belling the spine to shiver
like a long magnet

dizzy in the dark swell
of brain fire.

We are here
in a place bloodletting meaning

out to a blue linen pool
kept later for the drag

to drowning.

“I did not want to write poems/ about stacking cords of wood, as if the world/ is that simple, that quiet is not simple or content/ but finally cornered and killed.”

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”

The Annex

I half expect
to see you
standing at a corner
here
in the Annex

where we used to dance
past the BMV and
the late night scavengers
and past that dog at Futures
who loitered there
a peruser of feet

where I saw
looking up
from the pit of my elbow
what gum drop eyes
could do to a man.

But the street has changed since:
there are store fronts
I do not recognize (or did I
forget)
the Lebanese vendor
now sells fruit
(has he always)
and the saxophonist
with the blue, blue arm
has abandoned his corner
for another

and

I’m standing here
now
in the phosphor glow
of this rainswept road

somewhere
in the lost time.

“He has smoked 5 cigarettes./ He has written slowly and carefully”

City afternoon, 1987

A shrieking man stood in the square:

what heron cry
could slam time shut to stuck
hinges,
sharp bellow of want — I heard it
across the late afternoon,
the primordial noise, and
              the sky hung

over the huddled buildings,
and over the people
as they stopped, clench-beaked,

leaned to see how his teeth
might fall to where the sewer mouths
dream of
dropped marbles,

or the soul of a man
suddenly loosed in the air

“If you ever stop writing, I will hunt you down and I will kill you.”

a peer in my writer’s class–whom i greatly respect–offered these words to me, and it was damn encouraging.

“the balance is preserved by the snails climbing the Santa Monica cliffs”

one for the los angeles man

i’m reading Bukowski
on a late afternoon;
the sun has already begun
its descent
and i’ve only just woken up.

he makes me think of cigar
ash and vagabond nights drunk
on 15 dollar wine
on irreparable love
on crapped over dreams,
the kind of
falling over
everyone learns to know
at some point
in their lives.

there was a salesman
at a party
who was floaty
and knew too well
how to be amicable;
he described his beer
which i did not recognize
as tasting “like
the bottom of a barrel”
and i thought,
“what the hell does
that mean?”

but reading Bukowski
it feels like the
bottom
of
something

it feels real.

feelin’ this

from Adrienne Rich’s “Letters to a Young Poet”

“4

From the edges of your own distraction turn
the cloth-weave up, its undersea-fold venous

with sorrow’s wash and suck, pull and release,
annihilating rush

to and fro, fabric of caves, the onset of your fear
kicking away their lush and slippery flora nurseried
in liquid glass

trying to stand fast in rootsuck, in distraction,
trying to wade this
undertow of utter repetition

Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it
means, to stand fast; what it means to move”

“there’s a trick with a knife i’m learning to do”

It is easier

It is easier to sit
and not write a thing.

This way, you can watch the blankness
gleam
like feckless paint
or milk ledging over;
you can suck on the
white immortality.

                                 (This is comfortable.)

It is easier to do this,
to play at it,
than to run ahead into the tallness
and discover
hard bark
and nobody there.

from Coupland’s Generation X

“R E
C O N
S T R U C T”