In China, they don't wear diapers.

Fog, chance of showers

2010-10-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

Dragon weather.
Returning to Nova Scotia
like rain to a valley.

Nova Scotia

2010-05-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

It was all so innocent, you mistook
what passes for spring here as death
the breath of the gulls as a war cry
the play of the waves as a threat.

But your armor's just a puzzle for the rain to solve
your coat's a pennant for the wind
the fortress, your body's unsteady,
borrowed, dissolving in May.

It's raining here,
It's raining everywhere.
Surrender.

February

2010-02-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

Lha!
Each good day
Begins with cold water.

"You look like a regular Phillip Petit up there"

2009-11-08T20:38:00.001-08:00

I don't need this I live on
residual heat I live on
an acre of hardwood with
bruised hipbones. I live on
and sometimes I stretch this
wire of a body to the ceiling and
hang from the rafters.

I hang there, a knitted minaret,
with my wrists turned back with
my ribcage chiming my ribcage
hammered and chiming,
my equined tendons tracing crescents
in the floorboards or else kicked up
in wild unborn dances.
my eyes open,
my breath a swallow through low clouds;
cutting small circles for the sun.

Mothra

2009-09-07T16:14:00.001-07:00

Don't worry little
Chard-eating caterpillar
Soon you will be a beautiful butterfly
Or else a monster
Who can destroy sections of Tokyo.

Murder Ballad for Whistlestop

2009-08-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

This is part of a song I wrote for Alnis, Clay and Emily's excellent new band Whistlestop. The other part I can't remember the words to exactly. So you'll need to buy the EP.

Oh my dear and darling sister
You will make it through
take my knife up from the table
take my riding silks.

I've been fighting with McKenzie
Fighting for a name
Now there's no one to protect you
No laudanum for your pain

Read my blood out on the pavement
As my pauper's will
Find McKenzie with your vengence
Find him smiling still

Fill his poor heart with desire
Waltz him through the dew
Find his bare breast in the moonlight
To cut my name in to.

Nighttime Sun Camp Thundersorm

2009-08-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

Torn, drowned light
Sharp edged Kalapa
Home.

Liquor Store Clerk

2008-12-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

Each day he puts five two-ounce
bottles of vodka in his briefcase

I think that he has a problem but then
I think that maybe he has Jesus in his heart

and is just trying to take the edge off.

Urban Planner

2008-12-14T12:17:00.000-08:00

Gaborone, Botswana

Some places were settled before they were zoned.
Some cities have intersections shaped like splayed men
with streets that twine as though
someone pressed their hand to your drafting table
and told you to trace out their veins.
So that it would be their heart pushing
you to work with your pores full of dew, their heart
drawing you lymphatically home.

Silly Common Meter

2008-11-23T09:26:00.001-08:00

When you've measured out your poor, poor life

and distributed the blame

You'll find you've held the only knife;

you'll find yourself the same

And so you'll loose your poor torqued breath

and part a space of rain

And rest between your birth and death

with neither joy nor pain.

The sky itself will melt away

and fill a mirrored lake.

and you will finally learn to stay

and admit no mistake

That you are a lithe and free thing

with just your heart to break

while you can't tell when you're sleeping
you know when you're awake

Dust

2008-09-29T18:49:00.000-07:00

I am waiting for the bats to rest

I am waiting for the sky to break

I am waiting to cool my blood

there've been no storms

nor even any mackerel to lead them

the world is dust

my skin is a dust skin and my hands

are friction conjurers drawing

a cloak of it over me.

I keep two fingers there

and one hand open to the sky

I am trying to keep track

I am trying to notice

the dust near liquid in my easy veins

my heart that pumps a splitting fist of it through.

Fine so fine now I breath it in.

Dust the velvet on my orphan lungs

dust held, dust cared for and

dust, the fire I spit to the sky

a carnival of dust rising and drawing attention

dust seeding the clouds

particles of dust raising their own armies against me

and falling, stripping the cloak from my back,

wearing my skin muddy to the ground

leaving me stretch-eyed and smiling

and clean

so clean.

Demineralized Bone Matrix Processor 2

2008-09-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

They call me wicked here

with his words

on my breath

on your ear

but they're mine now and I can do as I want with them.

And you can judge me by the way I come apart in your hands,

and by the treasures inside

by the pearl seeds I've held cupped in my tongue

by the nerves which stretch and melt spun sugared against your skin

by the revelries you coax from my thigh bone trumpets

and by the taps

you can circle my cramped untidy hands

and soften them with a season of clutches.

2008-08-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

However sharp
my chisel mind
can only cut its width.

Your open hearts
so brave and kind
remind me what I've missed

and how at night when you sing

I'm just like all the rest

as your out breath drags a moth's wing

against my uncooked flesh.

Survivalist 3

2008-08-14T12:52:00.001-07:00

They are below you

minding what's pressed

from one wet flank to another.

And you with no dogs.

If you want their blood's attention

you are going to have to do better

you are going to have to realize

that they are not that sort of animal

that they only note the cough and cry

that circles like prairie smoke

and leaves no worldly exit.

They will note you

and the pitch fire that drips

from your outstretched hands

the sounds you make

as it raises blisters

along the seams

of your wrists

They will note you

running downhill with the wind,

the storm and the mackerel that leads it,

burning out your star for the unfired

Meteorologist

2008-08-14T08:46:00.001-07:00

The snow's been cut to lace
while you lay, tawny tawny,
half asleep through every dawn.

Which I count unlucky
because unbuoyed is unwell
and I can't trust the spring.

Not here.
Not in in this land of better fogs
that clots me sometimes even until June

Not now.
Not after a winter ruined
by rotted rinks on January lawns.

I need you to throw the windows
and declare it no false breath
upon your shoulders

I need you
to smooth my pillowed hair
and talk of something less sinister.

I need you to stretch your hands
against the raw-born sun

and strike into it,
Never turning.

Occupational Epidemiologist

2008-06-21T08:24:00.001-07:00

For instance I know

that rose pickers are less

fertile than uranium miners.

But take this one and

maybe our baby

will have blonde hair.

Train Operator

2008-06-14T07:13:00.000-07:00

Well when you put it that way,

maybe the arteries of empire

were actually running on the bodies

of the dead.

But look at it from our perspective

they planted mummies through three kingdoms

and hydrocarbons

are hydrocarbons.

Shock and Awe

2008-06-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

Somebody is walking their bicycle through a thunderstorm.

Someone forgot (or never knew) that you walk these cloudy plains

with one eye on heaven and one on your holloway.

I am in mine counting seconds.

I am counting the seconds between and it is getting closer.

They measure everything with light and the cesium atom and

I measure the height of my peeking boots and the seconds between.

I think that I am safe and well to ground,

but I can't breathe well in the seconds between.

Now there are trees exploding and there are no seconds between.

There is nothing but flesh, nothing at all

between the flash and the thunder. The shock and the awe.

The man with the bicycle is now screaming and now quiet.

I count nothing but the flocks above

retreating in formation.

Odd Jobs: Cemetery Groundskeeper

2008-05-14T14:44:00.000-07:00

The sun is past its piety

and climbs higher up

on them each noon,

ignorant, childlike;

decoration days

* * *

We go together, piano piano,

picking wilted flowers

from the graves.

"Angel Duty" you call it

but don't talk much as

we walk two paces and a row

of dead between us,

the bowl of your arms

filling with cellophane.

I've never been deadly

these are just stones

just myths beneath,

just dropped virgin guns

filled breach and barrel

with useless shot.

I've never stood and stared

at the names which

ring round like warding signs

and when I walk through the rows

with my head turned, I am not

searching for my own cleared patch

I am only watching you and watching

the fans of headstones

ceaselessly close.

In Utah

2008-04-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

"Chad Hudgens volunteered for a "team building exercise," went outside and laid down on his back with his head downhill. Then co-workers pinned him down while their supervisor poured water on his nose and mouth."

-The Dallas Morning News, April 14th, 2008

In Utah,

they held him

head down and told us

to fight for sales like

Chad there fought for air.

A rag over it, his body

a dog at his own throat.

I steer mine

like a riveted miracle

of my own design

and never feel its tyranny,

never feel it root

for a scrap of sleep, or breath or rest

from any of the soft measures

which crack the hardest stones

and leave me untroubled

here somewhere

in Utah.

How to Survive any City

2008-04-14T19:02:00.000-07:00

North,

I am telling you.

North.

Odd Jobs (true story, brought yucks)

2008-03-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

Furnace Operator

Don't you raise

your lip at me!

Can you imagine

a nation recalled

by Chicken Soup

for the Teenage Soul?

No. The world wants

for culling and the

Random House Remainder Co.

needs heat.

Do you think you could? Wish You Would.

2007-11-20T10:39:00.000-08:00

I'm just saying don't
get your hopes up
because this world
will break them just
to see its pretty eyes
dance in the pieces.

You've got to harden,
harden and darken
like volcanic glass
until the rest of
us poor savages
can chip pieces off
and rule the stone age
clutching what once
were deadly
little dreams.

Baker's Song

2007-11-15T11:01:00.001-08:00

Come waste the morning
in my kitchen warm
with risen fruits

I've been told that
my dough scaled fingers
are light enough for biscuits

but far too warm for pie
and that breakfast
could always be like this

cooking coffee
as my true skin
flakes away

Sock Pairing.

2007-10-21T07:01:00.000-07:00

No that's not it,
I never meant to
waste the summer
figuring which gray stories
go with which.

I only came here to
see how my new shoes walk.
I've been rubbing
ox blood into them and
now they are bright
burgundy mirrors and
I don't have to look.

I can walk stooped, watching
the world's carnival reflection

swing by in the toe caps.

The shreds that crowed

2007-10-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

There are no words,
no letters anymore;

the shreds that crowed
so nervously
from my mailbox
those years ago.

What's left is lacquered,
carefully scraped clean,
and polished blue by
these straightforward things.

Two below middle C

2007-09-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

I always thought of
Castrati as perfect instruments
manufactured by choir masters
or convenient farm accidents.
I imagined that they
ruled Europe singing
like fat angels but
inside were indolent
little demons raging
against a world which had
never allowed them sin.

But some of them probably
never made it really
and washed up heavy and pale
talking endlessly
about how they had once
opened for Farinelli
in Vienna, 1731.

but Christ, what a great
show that was.

Square Poem #2

2007-09-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

I found
letters and wasted
days unfolding

until they cracked
along their creases
like my father's

paper skin.
My eyes blur
the sun turning a corner. I

think back to
the last real winter
and the wind

which shook grout
from the brickwork
of 3803 Laval.

I never learned to
treasure that glass
world or

the ice
February tied around
my blinking eyes.

I found letters and
wasted
days unfolding

on the morning
streetcar pulling
around Spadina Crs. Now

I can walk through
the blueprints of
1874

when we moved by omnibus
pulled by draft horses
along iron tracks. We

round a corner
and the sun ignites the dust
rising from the machine.

Ring that doleful
bell and take me
all the way

to Union Station
the dreams of a younger city
made stone.

End Times at Maggie's Diner. (square poem #1)

2007-09-11T18:49:00.000-07:00

"If there's justice
in this
world or

a god in the next
you'll get your
eggs before me.

I know what's coming.
I do.
Brave to read the signs.

I can survive on
kale and goat cheese
I've been practicing.

Stick with me
and I promise
that you will

be able to
live in what's left of New York
for next to nothing."

If there's justice
in this world
or a god

in the next one
you'll get your
eggs before me and

sit here
in prophecy
as the endings change.

I'm going
back to Halifax
to hear my sister

shake hearts
with a mezzo range.
No one

will ever
believe what a shy
child she was once.

Notes from an engineer.

2007-08-29T18:21:00.000-07:00

This one is about sun camp.
----

We haven't seen much of each other
but I've been around
tethering wild horses
to your flagpoles
and lifting circles of sod
from the fire pits;
earth-blackened to the elbow.

I am here,
tireless and strong
because of how your drill cries
cut the air
when the rain came.
Because, like you
I grew here in fits and starts
with Rigdon's blood on my tongue.

After you go
spiraling with parents and luggage
After we pack up the flagpoles
With heavy eyes
I will sit with my hammer and ax
and wait
to rebuild this crystal vessel
and wait
for you to fill it.

2007-08-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

On the advice of jojo, my long suffering best friend, I've decided to create a poetry blog. Let me start earlier.

About six months ago I started writing poems and sending them to five people, jojo, Alnis, Jess, and my two sisters Vivien and Alexis. I started doing this because I've always wanted to be sort of good at writing poems, but have always produced indulgent ill formed things. My intuition was that poems are the type of thing which spring effortlessly from the mind and plant themselves on a page, but I think that the reality is that it's a lot more like digging ditches -- you dig enough ditches and eventually some of them are going to be ok. Thus was born the five year poem project: write poems for five years and surely somewhere in there surely there will be a well dug ditch. So I started sending these things to friends and family.

Anyway, it recently occurred to me that sending somebody a poem is a strangely sort of aggressive thing to do. It's sort of like saying 'well what do you think of this thing, do you like it?' and since these are my good friends and family, and I am a fragile and willowy person they will almost always yields a 'yep, it's great'. So rather than do that I am now going to publish to the wilds of the internettes poems which seem to mostly be about girls. There may also be witty reparte, but that'll come later. So now these five people can read poems at their leisure, and not be bothered by pleading emails.

g.

"Take my bones they are gone gone gone"

2007-02-13T09:51:00.000-08:00

I research bone graft substitute markets. Yes I have a philosophy degree, no I do not have any qualifications in the field, why do you ask? Bone graft substitutes are things which surgeons use when they are trying to get bone to grow, and do not want to harvest bone from your hip (called an iliac crest harvesting procedure, icky.) Some are made of clay (synthetic), some of animals (xenograft), some of dead people (allograft). All of them make me very uneasy. I've learned a few things:

1. The other day it occured to me that the way I'd thought about bones my entire life was incorrect. I think about my skeleton like the frame of the fantastically complicated machine which is my body. This permenant, dead structure which prevents flopping about, but that's not it at all. Bones are alive, they bleed, and breath and shit just like every other cell in the body. There's a disease people get in which the top part of their hip dies and eventually disintegrates. The idea of a bone dying, not breaking, but dying was such a strange idea to me. In fact the whole understand of the body as a machine is ridiculous. For years we've thought that if you ran marathons, or lifted heavy weights you'd destroy your knees. Because, after all, if you drive your car long distances under heavy loads you eventually fuck up your car. But the body isn't a machine, it's more of an ecosystem, one which has to be stressed to prevent it from fading away. To remind your cells that they have a job to do. Amazing.

2. There are people who process tissue for a living. Can you imagine that? A life spent stripping tendons and ligaments from donated femurs. And here I thought forecasting the motherfucking markets was a hassle.

3. Orthopedic surgery dispels any notions I had about surgical precision. My office mate and I watched a video of a spinal fusion and man, did it involve at lot of banging on things. There are orthopedic surgical hammers. What do these large men do with these large, sterile, enormously expensive hammers? Oh, they pound large expensive nails into your spine. Wonderful, sign me up.

g.