keeping nights

1/12/04

out of your light and the end of tonight I see everything coming together to tell me to go back

to find me clutching at my gut like its incidence was answer enough

anyday now this fleeting coincidence will tell you it’s too much

tell me you kept some secret stash of it, hidden from my abuses and sorrows crumpled drummer boy

little by little shattered is ok and now this is the forecast you can confide in me to wreak the havoc you needed

she found a mark to go by and now she’s lost beyond the line somewhere in the great north

blinded by the snow and crunching endless through the white of those forgotten dream

was it all a hope, when your inner child freezes its deep slanted obligations to wretch into the gutter of your ambivalence?

she used to drown

I am alive and now I’m free and controlled interception is my deep dark expression in this fortitude of servery

eyes the truth and march towards the horizon, it wont recede past your vaunted definitions

and plan for nothing more than the dawn

he said go, she said to feel the stark bonds of contemplation and know the force of habit and its dark chains

this is my universal to grapple my servitude out in fresh snow angels and deep softed drifts

numb with cord and blaze your night untold

merely seek to fight the rhythm and painful flashes render memories the dangerous territory of cold beds and sleeping reels of silent reveries

a fugue on her, a reminiscence of grandpas past

I’m not so sure anymore, dived beneath my skin and kill the smell of angry men

stay there till dawns sweet steam sinks your further into seeping ambivalence once more beholden to the Ontario sun

somebody’s back

keep me warm

Desert

I hadn’t had a chance to bury her this way before,
The little discs of silver shimmering between the sealing wax -
Her face empty to the moon, her eyes sealed tight
Almost like she didn’t want to see

I laughed, the whole great study of it all –
Too much like drama to move the theatre outdoors,
Too grand by far for this forgotten dryad
Left rotting on the forest floor for leaves and worms to munch on

She turned to me and said “Boy, you’re confused –
I am not Persephone.” That look said it all, the wax
cracked open when she talked, the coins fell sidewards
And clattered to the dust, bare and silent

“I’ll be yours at the Orpheum tonight” I said -
Tilted so, I watch her dark skin glisten once again and reach
trembling towards me. I can’t be hers either - so I leave her to the Styx
and its dark judgement as I creep my way out of the desert.

Blink

{rabbitpunch}


Boxing assignation and stutter-fly beats lead
up a garden path to squeaky clean hands
Fluorescent tremors tick their own list
And filthy paper-boys deliver vials with their bare hands.
Mittens tied together with paper trails and the seeping
crushing imagination of a corporate giant,
Lose yourself in the sheer collaboration of it all -
obsequies humour and little else left
but slowly seeping dyes and quiet royal indolence,
This and many other testing trials rig their hung-recesses
like so many cowbell-fairies and dope anvil sprites - you and
all our lazy contributions to the waning genre of sleep
collapse into silent collusions like wartime poets dipped in liquor –
this, for one brief desolation, is your arcadia, not pastoral at all,
not some far-off tranquility buried deep in smoke and hills
but here in steel-grey artifice and the sloshing gargle of pure gold.
Blink and you’ll miss it dear, this terrible world, blink and you’ll miss it maybe.

e

excise the offending cliché

the wailing face of dawn

carve your indifference into art

and balance your new Judea,

born of ashes and dust-bowl sentimentalities

cast forth your hand dear arch-angel

blessed with eternal fire, cursed to

righteousness in a world of none,

we more than your why with

our when fly in the face of

seething flame with our

honoured indifference.

22

Sugar pox pie

I held you to your burning

Stiletto fucking goodness, the colour of ochre on a Sunday

Twisting your ankle on ice-cream in the middle of a circus

Beginning to understand the lessons of consent

Reaching past your face to pick an apple off the sky

Deep demented wanderings in dark remembered halls

Consecrated cream

Idle motifs and seven fat cows

Search and you shall…

Eatable intersections and far-away eyes

Kings-Cross lollies stuck to your shoe

Plays so righteous it hurts

Wanted for delinquence, solvent combatants

Venice waits for you