FORCE FUSE

Crossings.

2012-02-01T05:39:00.000-08:00

Borders.

2012-01-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

The river fractures a city grid. Calls them two countries. I have this river running under my ground - a wet map strung through every story I tell. It comes to the surface when watched, when prodded. It ventures out when called upon like a tilting ship, forking my tongue. Otherwise it just rests along the strings of my personal codes like a nesting bird.

I pay the toll and drive into the tunnel. Tunnel long and lights punctuate the enamel of the subway tile lined up like teeth. Me, a child peering out of one of the many gleaming white American sedans that belonged to the funeral fleet – my father the helmsman in any one of these borrowed cars. Cars borrowed from my father’s legacy. I peer out one window and my brother out the other side, waiting in anticipation to see the sign with the two flags on it indicating a precise shift of countries that occurs under ground, under river, the very place where our heritage confuses itself and fractures our family’s one world into two. Here is the line that allows and disallows entry to half of what makes me. The blood in my body knows that there was a time that my ancestors walked freely on either side of this river, no countries, and irritates me like a burr under my saddle. I wind my way through the tunnel, confronting the usual panic in the back of my throat as I near towards the exit. American Customs.

One can draw and trace a conceptual line through America’s political transformation if they listen to the way in which this border crossing has changed through my lifetime. I remember my father getting the old tunnel tiles when they replaced them with new, glossy ones. Each tile told the story of car after car driving through this place, yellowing them like the ceiling of a lifetime smoker. My fathers was yellowed and rusted as if it sat under a joist that held up the structure under the river, but slowly leaked over time leaving a tiny trace of the river, the metal and a trace of time across object.

Latest Open Book: Toronto Musings.

2011-11-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

http://www.openbooktoronto.com/mfa_culture_creative_writing_and_zolfs_tolerance_project

Some thoughts on MFA's and creative writing.

Gigi and I visiting Christian Aldo, Flannery's apartment a while ago.

2011-11-26T08:37:00.000-08:00

Memories of Windsor.

2011-11-26T08:33:00.000-08:00

As my writing and research take me back to Windsor and Detroit more frequently, I remember. All of the reasons I love the people that make my memories of these places. Here are some. There are so many more.

Vintage collection (re) visited.

2011-11-23T08:23:00.000-08:00

Vintage 1940's car jacket in black and metallic. Brass and turquoise grecian necklace.
Vintage silk kimono.

Views from here.

2011-11-21T08:44:00.000-08:00

Strange hair and Mercy.

2011-11-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

The other day I woke up and cut my hair this way.

Coat by Mercy circa 2002 bought at Georgie Bolesworth when it was around. Whole line made from a bolt of vintage Harris tweed.

Cigarette Smoke.

2011-10-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

I stared at the old, painted walls of the bar that he took me to first. I wondered how many cigarettes it would have took to patina them to this piss colored yellow. He drew a map of Brussels in my moleskine, his own personal map of make believe - of a place but also not a place that I could ever locate. Later I found myself walking through Muslim thick streets trying to find the canal. It seemed to keep slipping out from under my feet and I wondered if I was even still in Brussels. I stopped and watched two teenage boys play basketball for a few minutes, hoping the canal would catch up to me if I stopped rushing around after it. Eventually I did find it, along with a service road offering me gas stations, garages, furniture shops. It took me an entire hour to double back to the trendy bistro I was aiming for. As I circled back I thought his map, offered to me as a christening of my arrival, was appropriate to the shifting plane of this city of his. Later on, in his old home near the Basilica we tried to map each other along his low bed. His garden exploding out the giant windows beside us. That too proved to be erratic.

Dreams of other cities.

2011-10-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

A meal, simple, green. Different eyeglasses looking at each other. Long woolen ensconced bodies, lean and moving. I had just read about theories of walking, which indicated that walking was a way to find unmitigated places. Locations unwatched by those who surveil, map, create geographies and metrics. As pedestrians we suddenly leave the street, try on hats, smoke a cigarette in the doorway, eat salads. Our feet can suddenly change black-booted direction. I met him for the first time in the lobby of the Carleton Arms hotel. He was smaller than I had thought, but also more beautiful. We sat on the stairs and watched Sammy the lobby dweller become vaudevillian, before playing Buck Hunter in Gramercy like teenagers. Before I knew how dirty he could be in the bedroom.

Spring Launches, Pelee Island, Sunburst mirrors.

2010-05-24T07:16:00.001-07:00

This month's Open Book: Toronto foray into things booklaunch, things reflective.

Jane Bowles and Meg White.

2010-05-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Open book: Toronto, last month.
http://www.openbooktoronto.com/news/last_night_dj_saved_my_life

Let us say yes

2010-04-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

My latest Open book article.
http://www.openbooktoronto.com/articles/callings_and_vocations

2010-04-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

Working on hybrid paintings.
Working on Sushi Glasses paintings.
SOmetimes I tire of words.

Peeling Group of Seven and Dancing Bill Bissett

2010-04-04T18:15:00.001-07:00

Shamans.

2010-04-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

Modern day shamans. Red strings. Meaningful rocks.
We all hold space for poems.

Check out some of my work for Open Book: Toronto

http://www.openbooktoronto.com/articles/swallows_if_pheasants_and_toronto_new_school_poetry

Muffins. Churches. Velcro.

2010-03-22T06:17:00.000-07:00

I have been up for some hours in the bakery. There is the coming to from the blankness of sleep and there is the realization that I am here again in this life, this body, this odd place that I have lived for now thirty seven years. As I get more conscious, I remember things like bills that need to be paid, responsibilities, resentments, and perhaps, if I am really lucky something that I have planed to look forward to. Maybe even some good hard work from the day before that I want to get out of bed for and review. Wow. Those are really good days.

Here is the trick for me. I need to get from the bed to my bakery downstairs in the cafe, before the paralysis and fear become a bit too much and I begin to wish for the day before me to disappear. If I can reach for my baking clothes, find my keys and kerchif and get my butt downstairs, I can deal. There is the silence of the cafe. I add in the familiar voices of the CBC. I pull myself an espresso. Downstairs, I turn my oven on, reach for my flour. Hope. Overcome irritation, refusal, doubt. I make muffins, familiar in routine, proof croissants. I adhere myself to my day like velcro. I erase the void with recipes.

There are days where the despair and doubt become too much. On those days, I visit the church behind my house (on special pass and special order from the minister there.) I sing in the church, whose walls were painted by the Group of Seven. I sit in the air over there and ask for velcro. I ask to accept velcro, community, muffins, deadlines. I ask for peace.

An open letter to Toronto.

2010-01-28T10:45:00.001-08:00

An open letter to Toronto City Council, Mayor Miller, Councilor Adam Giambrone.

Firstly, let me say, I am not sure what this letter is. I am not sure if it is an appeal, a challenge, a lament or a series of hopes. I just know that I am called to write to you and so I shall. My name is Melanie Eve Janisse. I am the proud owner of Zoots Café located at 1438 Dundas Street West. I am a proud resident of Ward 18 as well as a new business owner in the DuWest BIA. I am a published poet and journalist, and a lifelong Canadian artist. I have degrees from Concordia University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Communications and Visual Arts. I am passionate about cities. I am passionate about this City – Toronto- which has been my home for over a decade. I believe in this city so much, that I have taken my very life’s savings, and moved mountains to purchase a commercial building on Dundas West, and further invested by opening the doors of my café in December of 2008. Now, we all know that the financial atmosphere worldwide at this time in our collective history was one of bleakness and despair. I still chose to invest in this good city. I was not able to obtain financing. I was faced with the painful and difficult process of obtaining my building permits from city hall. I still fought to make my hopes known and this city a better place through the bricks I owned, putting myself further into debt, increasing my personal fears and putting my family in a fragile state at a time of great instability. I still went forward.

You may say that these hopes are silly. You may say that they are couched in a notion of selfishness for my own financial interests, that I purchased a building to reap the personal benefits of this, that I opened a café to make money hand over fist to further my own interests. Some of this is true. I am a Canadian artist. I will never be rewarded financially for my creative contributions to this country. I am a Canadian artist that refuses to be poor, and so, I make choices to protect my future by making investments into real estate and small business. I do this because I am responsible, hard working, intelligent. Because I am willing to take care of myself financially.

I have been in business for one year now. I have gotten to know the merchants and residents of my community. I have listened to their hopes and witnessed their heartbreaks in this difficult time of worldwide financial crisis. This is one of the true gifts of operating a café. You meet such a cross section of a community. You come to love them. I live in a community that dreams for beautiful things. It is a community that works hard. It is a community that wishes for no hand outs. It is a community that is built on the hard work and ingenuity of the merchants, small business owners and independent contractual workers that line each and every street in this borough. From the firmly established Portuguese to the younger creative merchants moving in along Dundas West and the home-based workers that are less overt, we are a community founded on very hard work. We are a community committed to making this city exceptional one person at a time. Some of us are filmmakers, photographers, mothers, educators; some of us are fish mongers, grocers, butchers. The list goes on. We have worked very hard to make our hopes known. We set up a BIA. We established community and residential lists such as the Dufferin Grove Park and the Brockton Residents and Brockton Listserv. We have in good faith set monies aside in escrow in order to create beauty and a visual pride in our neighborhood. We have done all of the right things. And yet our district is in ruins. Our BIA is engaged in a bitter and upsetting fight with our Councilor over parking. Our money sits in a bank account unmet by the city in order to improve our area. There is garbage everywhere, a deep sense of neglect and a growing anger as one thing after another is taken away from us.

When the decision to remove the parking in this district went through, I could not help but feel that Councilor Giambrone did not do his due diligence. I am still waiting to meet the individuals that he spoke to from the constituency who thought this was a good idea. I am still waiting for some indication that an overwhelming majority of District 18 wanted this to happen. If I saw this proof in front of me I would (however disappointed) accept that democracy occurred. After the decision to remove the parking was passed, I watched as a swift crew of city workers were dispatched to Dundas Street and how in days, Councilor Giambrone’s transit vision was executed. It took days. I could not help but wonder why the impetus to improve this neighborhood is still not possible after years. This breaks my heart. It also breaks my heart that massive no standing areas were tacked on to this parking change (that to my knowledge were not even discussed at all, but simply implemented) along with no left hand turn signs that conveniently appeared along with the parking changes. This in fact may seem like a strange thing to be broken hearted over, but when, weeks before Christmas you witness terrified merchants yelling at the droves of parking authority vehicles as they tow away and ticket the few shoppers that still come here. As you watch their tears, hear about their financial despair, watch them give up, perhaps you can begin to see my heartbreak.

We watched in horror as the shuttle bus that was servicing our area (to accommodate for the street upgrades in our neighboring ward) vanished without warning. Many of us mobilized. We went door to door imploring our neighbors to make phone calls to the TTC, the Mayor’s office, to Councilor Giambrone. We asked for explanations. We demanded our right to essential service. We helped to restore the transit, and still to this day I am unsure why the choice was made and with no warning to take away the TTC in the winter, during the holidays and at a time when the residents and merchants of this area need the lifeblood of our transit. (I must point out that transit was only removed between Dovercourt and Landsdowne).

You asked us to be patient as you took away our parking, our fears brushed aside. The very transit that it was meant to expedite was taken away shortly after this. You asked us to be patient. I am no longer sure that we are able to remain patient. I am not in a position to remain patient.

I suppose I write this letter to portray some of the realities that occur at the ground level of this city, in my small area. Maybe it is easy to write us off as a few disgruntled merchants. I don’t know. Maybe it is worth it for a faster streetcar. I am not sure. Again, if I saw a reasonable plan to increase the speed of the TTC, which meant that every merchant from Keele to Bathurst also had to sacrifice parking and pedestrians, I can tell you I would not like it, but I would accept that it was necessary. But what I see is this. Not a single other councilor has agreed to sacrifice his constituents for this hope. Why? Because it is not the right choice. Because in the current manifestation of a ‘solution’ a small strip of merchants are loosing their life’s work at a time when their hard work should be rewarded, at a time when they need this city the most to protect their financial futures. You could never convince me that this is the right way to go about real infrastructure changes. You could never convince me that these parking changes between Dovercourt and Landsdowne have improved anything, for the speed of the TTC, or for the small businesses in the area.

As I mentioned earlier, I am an individual that is hardworking, decent, peaceful. I am willing to invest in this city. I am willing to make reasonable sacrifices in order to improve the overall good. I am willing to contribute my hard work to invest in the culture of my city, my country and expect very little gain in return. I ask for no handouts. I make my own way. I do what is right. I am no longer sure however, that if you work hard, invest in Toronto, do the right things, that this city is willing to support that. I do believe that I speak for many when I say that I have lost faith in the integrity of this fair city.

Barak Obama delivered his State of the Nation address last night. He went to bat for the middle class, for the small business owners. He acknowledged the pain and despair that has taken hold of the most vulnerable in these economic times. I implore you to do the same. I implore you, my city council, my mayor, my dear city to rescind the parking decision in Ward 18 on Dundas and College. I implore you to dig deep into your pockets and match the monies in escrow to improve this areas BIA. I implore you to begin to support your merchants and small businesses in a time of great need. I am asking for you to refocus. I leave you with one question. How will it matter in the coming years that our TTC goes faster by 19 seconds, when, like my hometown Windsor, Ontario, there are block after block of empty windows? How will we all grow then?

Very sincerely,
Melanie Janisse

Carnival

2009-12-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

2009-09-02T05:29:00.000-07:00

There is an idling motor outside. Birds.
Head of sand.
Thoughts like glue.
I have been thinking a lot about traffic. The cars speed by on Dundas, driving towards frantic goals. So many bicycle accidents along the curb because we rush towards our destinations. I still can't believe that our ward had to fight this by advocating road parking. That we are without a city visionary enough to green itself. I feel afraid for the longevity of cities. Of my city. What I would love to propose is less cars, bike lanes, trees. That is what I would like to see outside of my window.
My thoughts are like glue, because everything decent seems impossible sometimes. You try get a bench on a city street. Try get a bike lock installed. A tree planted.
I feel as though I am being called towards a good fight.

LOOKING OUT

2009-09-01T04:43:00.000-07:00

St. Anne's church dome sits in the sun outside of my window. Nestled in between still green trees and aging rooftops, it sits there in my vision reminding me of beacons, pregnant friends, the confusion of faith. The little white houses against the backdrop of the chocolate factory are themselves coconut treats, lined with little perfect hedges. Fall is in the air only for a short time, and so I look forward to capturing moments of it in forever. Cashmere blankets wrapped around good conversations. Leaves. Manuel in his banking outfit and cologne heading off into the morning. Scottie and his family finding their way outside, in front of the building that they manage, for a day on their chairs. Dog walkers. Our cafe waking up for the day. My heart opening one more time to this world. I declare my own hipsterism dead, as I watch my morning, unfiltered. I find other reasons in my landscape.

Meh.

2009-08-06T04:56:00.000-07:00

It smells like garbage on the concrete. There are piles of bills on the counter that I cannot pay. I am at odds with myself, with success, with the great obsession for money, fame, prestige. People that I know who chase this dream, seem to me sonambulists. Empty. Once, I tried to point this out to one of them, and they became a vampire.

Here is what I am: I am a successful failure. I fail monetarily and so therefore, I am vulnerable to the criticism of this. You never have any money. Just get a job. Get it together. Please help me. The bills are piling up and up and up. I have been a waitress, hatefully. I have been an 'assistant', with the word secretary hovering in the background like an insult. I am a woman born into a strange inheritance, born into a belief that if I just slave hard enough, become rigid enough, I can escape this word. Secretary.

Here is the irony: I have slaved. I have succeeded in the third-dimensional world. I have taught myself how to be a puppeteer, stringing together the sham. I have tried. As I mount the production, the joint in my head gets tighter, my jaws tighten like drying meat. There is a tooth of grief lodged in my throat that I have trained my muscles to hold on to like a precious pearl.
It is not a joke.
The joke is that I was happier in myself when I had a job downtown in a law firm, as an assistant. I dreamed towards getting my certificate in yoga, succeeding in business, writing my first book. I would fill the photocopier paper, hating my job, but dreaming.

Now I have accomplished all of this, and more. But I have not escaped the bubbling self-hatred. My inner secretary. It is in there somewhere. The fear of meaninglessness.

I surrender this day to her, this unfamous, unrecognized, being inside of me.
I surrender.

Expat

2009-07-21T19:56:00.000-07:00

Wildflowers. Bike rides away from the city where I live. A lake and one sailboat. Suddenly I am anywhere. Riding under massive car towing expressways, riding, reeds, the smell of sweet grass.The hum of distant cars. If it weren't for a vintage Peugeot and the Humber river, today, I would pack it up and be out of Toronto. In fact, conceptually, Toronto no longer exists for me. I am in Paris, the south of France, Point au Pelee. I am in the great North. In Belgium visiting an old love. I am in London again trying on pants that are all too small. Litanies of insecure hipsters behind me. Naysayers. Never mind. A city built on standing on the sidelines, of the ultra hip. Speaking with Brazilian expats, remembering I myself am an expat. This town is not in my veins, as I ride along the vein of the Humber, I remember other places. Times before this tight, insecure, gossip-mongering, fearful place. Go fuck yourself, I say. Hill brings wind across my sunburn. The smell of sweetgrass. A decade here, wondering what is next.

2009-07-20T05:06:00.000-07:00

Make this pledge. I will be there when you disappear.

London Town

2009-07-19T07:14:00.000-07:00

Brick Lane. Wind shirts and lost youth crowding around picnic tables. Searching. I am searching for my friend, for riding boots, for a deep breath. Rattling bicycles, drug addicts selling urban rot on old sheets. Depression glass necklaces I tuck into my bag - for mom, for Canada. Victorian England held by beer drinking hipsters. Rescue a tin type. Rescue air. Sit in buses made into vegan spots with the Metis, with dying connections. Everything in a wind tunnel. Everyone moving around the bricks, made here, toughened here. Records, rags, little design shops. Old friends crawling in to London town from country hideouts, winding our way through sag paneer and dosas, winding our way out of town. Thatched rooves, misty winter scapes, aging DJ's, Canada. My youth coming to a close as their children climb over me like a hill.

Television and Couch

2009-07-18T16:47:00.001-07:00

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

London the Day After

2009-07-18T16:38:00.000-07:00

OLD FRIEND

2009-07-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

I hear the rain fall on the roof of my van as I sleep in your driveway. You have found yet another little wartime house in our city. You have moved and moved. Old carpets pile down in what should be your dining room,but is where your band plays. Old 1930's furniture overfilled with clothes in your bedroom. The rain falls on our hometown, where I am visiting. I am visiting you like a memory that holds different things for me than it once did. Eartha Kitt is on your record player as you and your most recent group of hangers on and scenesters finish off what is left of the night. I go to sleep at night now, and it is noted, unspoken between us. We still love each other through old vintage clothes and history. Old days where we roamed around Detroit's ruinous splendor, you my guide to its serious magic. I wonder what it will be like when you are gone from me, nothing left to fuse us together, to keep us in common. I feel that time is soon.

I have become a stranger in my own life, chosen to climb the craggy hill of wound healing and adulthood. Chosen to hang up the regalia of the outlaw, the sad girl. I am naked without it. Left to old stories of awkwardness and shame. I have nothing to offer the group of people that you are with. Nothing to ante into the poker game of cool going late into the night. I am just me listening to the rain, waiting to move on.

See Saw

2008-08-09T06:01:00.000-07:00

Moments on Pelee

2006-11-26T19:32:00.000-08:00

The colors today
swift and hay drifting
bluest and whitest of
waves
buzzing
and Orioles
earth
smelling and the
turning over of
it
into rows
into
sifted
thoughts
alone
along the grass
meadows
beachglass and
old bottles in the forest
abandoned Labatts Blue and
old 1970's
couches
sprung
in empty houses
where the kids go
I presume
to get loaded
near the airport
cold winter
mornings
having just flown in
Cessna
over ice floes
and bad coffee ready for you
Parkas
and whiteness
everywhere
the eye hits.

Sails

2006-10-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

There is the tangle
of this life
holding the fall trees
ouside of my window
holding ex-boyfriends
looking like the
homeless
across my afternoon
of hopeful laps around
this city
on my bicycle
putting up shelves
with my love
for our new apartment
the smell of teak oil
in this place
this place that held you
while you fell apart
right in front of me
how we hold our own sails
or don't
is such a small difference
as the sun comes in here
as these words
hold me into my own
strung up surfaces
we never know
what thing may
cut us down

Goodbye

2006-10-11T12:27:00.000-07:00

Tonight there is the wind
along Duluth
caresses him and I along
to our dinner plans
who is to be my husband
my love
and us a struggling memory
along the bitter winter winds
the Montreal of my youth
against the world
of you and of everything
I know I railed
needlessly.
I cannot remember the flat
you used to live in
here on Duluth
but I remember the blue
scratchiness of your
pioneer couch
as I walk along
and the Lapsang Souchong tea
across our afternoons.
I remember these things
nestling into
the fig cologne of my
love
the scented rice
of our dinner
the collision
of all I am
considered on the windy
walk back along the
narrow streets
to where I sleep.

Writing

2006-10-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

How the words form. Words across this screen, your page. This journal. How no one says anything to you after the words form across your tongue and into the air. The direction of the microphone as it intensifies the sound of what it is you wrote. What it is as the words form. Arcs and loops inside imagination. The way you wonder if it is even worth the way the pen moves across the sheets across the keys with your fingers in both soft and hard mornings. Wishing for a writing class to push you along. A friend that will make it all mean something. Who will bring pom poms in those moments where it all seems so foolish. Wishing for a reason to say something. But instead you go on blind faith that you must. Simply put. YOu must. Ekeing out fear word by word. That is how the words form.

Love's Liberation

2006-08-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

The softness on the outside,
fuzz of teenagers first growth
puppies bellies
velvet
the nose of my sisters horse
when we stand near Guelph
and I love her for
the way she faces
hundreds of pounds
of wildness.
Calmly.
Do I dare to eat a peach?
He asks.
How I dare
to
stand in the face of this
daylight
through my window, just like everyday.
But with the bottom note filled
finally
with how I dare.
How I dare
double dare.
Its sweetness
almost too much of an explosion
of possibility
for my plain palate
and so I will eat
buttered oranges instead.

To G

2006-08-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

Birdsongs along your heart
dreaming towards the sun here
in this concrete
did you ever notice that
the city is like the way men
want to remake nature.
That is what she said to me one day
Now decorated with pagotas
as I climb around the lake we were born on
at least in my mind today
Maple leaves the size of my hand
and monarchs by the millions
I cannot stay focussed on
the hipsters here
with their drinks
and all of those cel phones
ticking time away for money
lonliness
I see marshes
and want to fight for them
against the auto industry
and how
grouses nests
have no rights
as I sip my bitter coffee
on Queen street
not really caring anymore
about the way we moved here
and shared our outfits
and became city girls.
I love you songstress
Mandarin houses
and the birds of the Point in your notes
on the wings of your song.
I miss you here
where the grey is melting away
while you are gone.
Kissing statues of the Buddha
and microphones in neat
hotels.

Waves

2006-08-08T06:28:00.000-07:00

Unmitigated
there are only these stones of confusion left
as the lake breaks waves across them
like hosts.
Repetition is the most difficult in these
modern times
so quick moving.
Over and over
seems like
turtles
and mires.
Steady.
But I come here to this place.
Hold myself here beyond
comprehension.
Linger.
To be unsure what joy is.

Heatwave

2006-08-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

Coming back to this confusion
startling clouds and clouds
in gentle sky
and this heat
off of the day like nothing
I have ever.
Why do I look for you
in nothingness
in mirrors
when
the day gives off steam
old sponges along my sink
not getting a chance to dry out
no
not getting that chance
remind me that you are not here
you are not
and I will stop this
looking
this
hunger
this thing inside me
if I can.
Love, you are a shape-shifter
an inconsistant devil
as I sweat
and trace rivers and rivulets
along my arms.

Briain

2006-07-26T03:56:00.000-07:00

Couldn't remember if it was duty first
or hiding
but anyhow, you went back to Ireland
and left me here
I unfold in front of every day without you
Sunsting
wet lakes around me
WIndsor hotels
near the Ambassador bridge
a little tawdry, but really
it's like you said
it is you I want
over the phone lines
gently.

Dog Walks

2006-07-25T07:40:00.001-07:00

A thing went snap
underfoot.
Down old country roads
off the charts of hipster concrete
my old engineer boots against
dry wheat-like grass
imagining
I feel less lonely walking all alone here
then walking say, down Queen Street
in the middle of the day.
I only panic when I tell myself that
I am supposed to
withering womb and really
noone
despite the aging club-goers
doing too many lines
on College street.
Here it doesn't matter
really who or what.
I walk the dogs on Atwood's property
without permission.
I simply walk.

Sad Pelee

2006-07-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

'Behold the tragedy of Hulda's Rock
as told by tragic, dying Indian race
our Christian mind just cannot stand
a final tragedy;
where earthly hope extinguished as
we clench to handhold: God!

A final tragedy curtian closes
on what is the end of innocent
times
here
The dump is locked where once
I could look for old bicycles
and the ferries get fenced in with the clang of
9/11
Ministry of Transportation
and the Americans
It is the southernmost point
something abour blocked passages
and beurocracy
dots this
cavalier place
with a moderninty
that may bring in golf courses and
retirement communities
across this land
wild hearts
seem to need taming
line-ups
dump hours
Rules.
I want to shout
'Leave my island alone!'
Leave the ruins
leave everything along with the mysteries
even though I know better
progress
progress
the last act always startles us.

Swimming

2006-07-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

Bring it hot sand and surf dotted with lebanese familes in large bunches
shishkebob
Sand too hot to walk on, families and floating devices.
Changing rooms I remember from childhood
dogs pulling and blankest falling and
I am too hot
and want it.
I want the lake inside of my every pore
don't care who says it is polluted
no it is not
not on this soul
In it
not even waiting for one second for anyone or
anything
In up to my neck
Lake of the Cat
people
with my dogs
sun
tacos
fruitstands
ferries
I am here in the county where my people
live
near to the end of my country
cooling off on a hot day.

Disorders

2006-07-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

Each of us alone
the lit colors of this morning
shine
the edges of you radiate, helpless
against the couch that you slept on
long and mossy
bits of foam speak of age
me
catastrophe
morning sun meaning
hoping to be glorious
against the judgment
of my DNA
coiled inside of me
cat coiled beside
my aching legs and
harrowed
hard, thick air
somatic
hauntings real and old
in this room meant for
grandmothers
not 30 year-olds with no
children
not me
a house meant to be overfull with life has this
silence
of you and me
tired and sick
products of the 21 century
disassociated
islands
misfires, misfits
orioles at the oranges
outside
wheat
farms
lakes
I hate this

What Once Was

2006-07-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

The smooth edges of you
of here
where the Aztecs once sat
Jesuits
Furtraders.
Six Nations on one firm foot
Limestone set on quartz.
The unforgiving seas of this.
Quiet libraries with you
Strangely
on Indian Road
Looking through Dante's Inferno
Illustrated by Dali
When I could not
And so

and so
when the fashion magazine
asked me to think of
the perfect man
I see you
sweaty from tennis
standing at my door
as I said no.

SIlly me.

I hold onto the rocks of this
to the urges
and the tides
of the Cat Lake
the crazy men
until I am able to
desomatize
or something close
I throw you over Hulda's rock
with some beach glass
and walk back through the meadows
of Vinvilla.

Le Lac Des Chats

2006-07-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

Every woman is not an island, but is water.
Transmutations across rock.
Placid and tempestuous.
The vehicle by which.
The storms.
Articulations
Erasures
Rythyms
Underlying currents.
We are the great
untold secret.

Despite

2006-07-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

No separation between
too hot nights
with windws open
hopeful
and silent mornings
of porridge
and the
dissolution of old ways.
I heard that you were hiding
amongst your garbage
and your glitter
some more
and I couldn't even feel right.
When I close my eyes I
keep seeing
myself
running down a hill
on Prince Edward Island
with a rabbit tail keychain
fastened to my navy
windbreaker
it all happens in slow
motion
with ocean side
mist and smells
and joy
softness on my face
bobbing
despite so much
as you know
this thing is happiness
this thing is around my heart
holding me
this light.
Despite so much
I surrender and subtract
even you.

Lake Erie Morning

2006-07-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

Noting the landscape as expansive
flat and grey
emotionally charged
red flags of
enough space to feel
enough of nothing but waves
the deeply set fishing net poles
gulls
the bloody nothing but me
having sat down for chrissakes
the need to get the hell up
banging along the shore
waterways
have always creeped me out.
Made me notice the imperfections
of skin and soul
that there is nothing out there
to busy me, really
I sit here facing my father's home
my ghosts in the pause
my inner life
my nothing
lasting
and the waves say nothing back
that means much
Everything just is and I have to go.

Double Crested Cormorant

2006-07-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

He says that there is a proper ratio that shoud always be kept between humans and birds. That is the way it should be. So, when the seagulls come to close to the picnic table there is a line that has been crossed. The strangely too smooth white feathers, as disturbing as the swans. Not right. Colonial nesters. Needing company. I am this way and yet solitary. A sleek bird riding the wind away from all else. It never struck me that this stance was in any way wrong. Joining. Re-joining. Acceptance is a thing I walked away from because I seemed to be failing at it. Sitting here in my red chair and you call to reminding me that you love me. Despite the young Lithuanian that you danced with and despite the old Egyptian that I entertained. That you love me and remember my hands wrapping up Kate's kitchen. That you remember. I too remember loving you and reading from books meant to be packed while you made love to me. Your mass against me finally making me feel right sized. He says that feathers are dirty reminders of dirty things and yet I still have a handful. Eagles, others. Lining my shelves, my archaeology. I cannot seem to part with them.

Soccer game

2006-07-11T08:03:00.000-07:00

That every thought is separate.
Individuals riding bicycles through
flag after flag
waving for Italia.
Soft seeming things recreate
become other ideas
edged with more challenging things
too much honking
too much
as I have no skin
today
That every hope is separate.
I have not learned this thing yet.
So dissapointment is astounding.

Shipwrecks 1

2006-07-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

Whitecaps today.
Cresting, cresting.
Gently massaging what lies underneath.
The ones the lighthouse could not guide.
Those ones.
Old Lake Erie and the wind.
Partners in crime.
Fierce cat.
Leaving mothers stunned.
Leaving boat carpets
and pirate lakes.
Leaving nothing as a trace.
Whitecaps tilling the surface
even again.

On Islands

2006-07-01T06:38:00.001-07:00

Islands are not round, but circular in the way my mind comprehends them. On my island there are not mythologies or faeries, but drug dealers and cocaine. Mothmen. There are burial grounds that house the bones of my ancestors and there are moats and lakes and strange peeling trees. Arbutus. Birch. On my island are the old ways of judging churchgoers and stipulations, like you cannot be too happy. Aging beauty queens with litres of white wine and the chipmunks to feed. Peanuts. Deer. Apples. Trapped into caftans and Frank Lloyd Wright houses with gossamer webs strung through the mind only, but powerful and binding. Nectars. Humming birds and oranges sliced and filled with grape preserves to lure the Orioles closer. Taught to me by pinched ladies who tipped and huffed. I called them Boston Orioles accidentally. My islands are full of my father in moments of his freedom. The freedoms from the shoulders low strung and Bahama papa hats and his responsibility elsewhere. I was too little to tell him that we did not have to continue on the ferry to the amusement park in Sandusky. I did not need machines to whirl me about and cheap sugar and stuffed things. Just leave me here in this simple place with strange things. This place that you love for its something. Its something. There are bird walks. Poets live on my island. Old clapboard homes painted white and pink. Cruising bikes and drunken drivers. There is everything in this roundness. Babies and old tractors. Witches and those who consider words like heresy while canning preserves. Tilling the soil. Both the old way and the way of pesticides and masses of steel and progress. Flies on screens and birds that are both worshipped and slaughtered. Americans. Canadians. Everything. Barns and bowling alleys from old times full of bumblebees and swallows. Gatsby and Huck Finn. Tattoos of eagles, worn. Old ink. Ballcaps. Bingos. I could go on. Take you around the edges of here. Run my finger around the line of a tea saucer. Let you see. But this is my island now. I could only try and show you the outline of it. Like a coloring book with only the imagination left to fill it in.

Sugartown

2006-07-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

Rude sheds and rough boards
Sugar camp
Trees and trees lining
the soul of us
where there is nothing but
help to give and
solitude.
Forcing the hand
of trees to shape
anything we can build out here.
For the sweetness
elixir
extracted out of hardness
trees and trees.
Cast iron pots
and campfire.
Things coming up out of the ground
finally greens and
sprouts
out of the frozen wilderness of our
yesterdays.
Ease and comfort
out of the
war of struggle.
Bread.
Warmth.
What is missing
is a daughter.
We are strangers here.

Invasions

2006-06-15T06:54:00.000-07:00

Invasions
into what was once before without me.
Sitting silently
in my absence.
Coming into
something the existed perfectly
without me.
I hope not to multiply
like the Zebra mussels in this lake
and become a
nuisance.

Wait

2006-06-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

There is that bird
inside of your wallet.
SHE painted it for you
so that you would remember to stay
FREE
Trochilus
Hummingbird,
so that you
could still sip the
honey,
still take pleasure
from this world.
The color of royalty.
Diamond tennis bracelets,
baby seats
and black, black cars
in the foliage.

Spines

2006-06-13T09:20:00.000-07:00

There is something caught in my spine
like a treasure
so that I may
remember.
Everytime I move it greets me.

Exchanges

2006-06-12T07:24:00.000-07:00

I remember mink blankets
and a Dutch painting
of a lonely blue-dressed girl.
African statues.
And you.
Hiding amongst the archeology.
Brittle-boned and saying no.
Me in my archipelagos
in the old lake.
Le Lac des Chats
Touching wood painted pink.
The keys of a Confererate piano
Americans, americans.
Red, white and blue.
Pies.
I touch every blade of grass in the meadow
thinking about you.
And you still do not come.
So I touch Hulda's rock
and consider the same demise.
Ending with water.
With the Pelee Passage.
Ireland.
The way no one, not even me
can keep a promise.
The way it all falls apart.
I touch beach glass and
limestone.
Zebra mussel shells by the thousands
kernals of sand and sand and sand.
Like the sand I have in a bottle
from your Egypt.
Purple.
Given to me in Salish country.
I would touch you if that were possible.
Over the drooping just slightly
eye
or again on your hands
if I thought that it would
but I know,
so I finger a Monarch
as it passes
instead.

Seasick

2006-06-11T08:44:00.001-07:00

My sense of balance is off, she said.
It's the barometer, he said.
Why is there all of this wind?
June is not June
it is December
confused with its role.
Either that or you are picking up on me.
I feel like this a lot lately.
Like shipwrecks and tilt-a-whirls
standing on the edge
of on my head
and back again.
I am this.
Then that.
It is changing.
I am not sure how these tides work.

Fuselage II

2006-06-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

Don't delay
ther cream of crosses
in these fields of waves
clay targets
the sleek metal of shotguns
plumage
reds and greens
dashing out of the bushes
caucophanies
of noise
color
the location of latitudes
and longitudes
a parting of the waves
where divers descend
in early mornings
as soon as the
winter can
let go
mining the depths
of this tragedy

Fuselage

2006-06-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

He was the first to see it.
Floatsam.
How there can be a hole in the ice
steely lake
graveyards
I know how the seats are
metal on the bottom
and burgundy.
Pheasants in numbers
the metal smell of fresh blood.
Thier feathers
I believe gone.
Gone.
Without wings anymore.
What fear is like.
How the lake looks from above
majestic
moonscapes
ice barges.
He was the first to see what was missing.
He told me.
The tenth to understand
Missingness.
The way dogs molt when they are nervous.
Where are the feathers?

Encapsulations

2006-06-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

I look for Jesus inside of
your eyelids
because I heard he is a good man.
That his sandals were sturdy
When he had them.
The color of skin when I shut my eyes
in the sun
almost turns amber.
Double rings
but you are gone.
For real gone.
The echocardiogram
told me I had missed a beat.
So I finger a tomato plant
and bring it upstairs
to bury in soil.

On Three Lines and Two Hands

2006-06-08T10:14:00.001-07:00

The way it is on your hands
temples
pyramids and isochrons
exactly
across our palms as they finally
find each other
in eternal triangles
The Tower of Hanoi
juggles the act
of fingers as they
weave
neurological hopes.
It's all behind the eyes
in the cones
opening the irises
Peonies.
It's all in the way
you play with my ring
as you drive me home
tiny hands
in your immense world of
palmistry
quantum theories
of fields
rasping, ebbing, pulling
becoming
Our hands touch finally
after time splits
and breaks
lifelines
dharmas.
This softness I cannot name.

Transitions

2006-06-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

There is a lull. Temporary peace and quiet.
A lurch. A meanness to its timing.
Preemergence of this field surrounding me.
Of me. Premptive as the stormclouds.
They are later.
After the sun that roosts through my window.
Running rings aroud this farmhouse.
Preemerged.
Waiting.
A mourning dove today.
Screeching out of a low-lying bush
Thought it was morning, but no.
No.
Uninhabitable, this place.
Simulcra
Fastidius copies of me living here.
I know no one.
Spin my dust, swallowing up days.
Lie and Lay
SIt and Set
Rise and raise.
The structure of the landscape out of this window never changes.
The landscape, however.
Hues.
Norm across the lawn back and forth.
Mowing.
Perfectly.
Different light.
Sometimes a rabbit.
Road passers, hardly.
Whitecaps.
Different winds.
I am waiting for the perfect time.
Watching.

The Things I have Seen and Heard

2006-06-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

Hammocks
Ganesh, Isis, Kali
Pine resin and triangles
Cabin smoke. Orange halves and orioles.
Seeds. Sunflowers and Marigolds.
Whitecaps. Watersnakes.
Bugs. Too many bugs.
Bear catches.
Chocolate. Tobacco. Trading.
Pujas and Nag Champa.
Pheasants running out of ruins.
Poverty. Coney joints.
White. Peonies.
Hollyhocks.
Too many deer.
Bags of apples and peanuts.
Chipmunks.
Deserts.
Sagebrush.
Lightening fields.
Bee houses.
Meadows.
Old bottles.
The bluest eyes.
Fairytales and petzls.
Drums.
Heartbeats.

Farmhouse Ghostings

2006-06-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

Haunted stairs and old, honeyed light at the top, where the cat goes to talk with ghosts. With the poineers of this house and of this strange oppression. Wishing for air and fresh linen in a new story, not so shut up. Flowers at the honey light and spiders and flies at the old wood of window. Swallow nest tucked into the tops of old porches that weep for the old way of sitting there and thinking. Watching the lake whitecap and the fields grow and go fallow. The old way. Lonely porches that have turned anti-social in these years. Sweeping the neglect and hoping for my own cobwebs to clear. Rock circles and television to transition the nights and the heartbeats. I am alone here on this island, tucking secrets away from myself and wondering after the secrets here thick like something in the air. Instead of writing, I messenger with you across my computer. I am asleep and cannot fill this experience with me. I live partially and know it.

On Pelee the Orange Carpets

2006-06-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

The taste of you. Small and tight like a nut.
I rolled up the carpets today
and underneath was the wood and the linoleum
nailed in the middle
like the old days
before carpet
became better then bare floors.
There was nothing I could do about the orange one in the dining room.
Old farmhouse sounds
as solitude settles in,
once the fake plants were removed
I am alone in an old farmhouse
in 2004
watching Oprah
and whole I want it to be a noble thing
that I am here
it hurts in my guts
The taste of you. Small and tight like a nut.
That things only happen out of desperation
and wrong.
With someone else's money.
With you keeping me company over the internet.
Crazy you.
Farmfields.
My cursor flashing.
This trip to the country
just found clouds.

Pelee

2006-06-02T06:05:00.000-07:00

I cross seas for you
with pots and pans and
battle worn
threadbare
I am just hanging onto
the white plastic seat of this ferry in late March
as it passes though the shadows of shipwrecks
mine
history's
bloodlines
What is nautical
is my father's
marine shops where he finds comfort
while I am figeting for my thrift stores
wormholes
visits away from the pain of here
smooth white things and dials
the things of the sea
I want so badly the wood boats
in graves underneath me
so that I may refinish them
and put them back across this
passage
I am whipped around
without a light house
I use the land as a compass
I am coming to you island of my imagination
of my youth
the island of my father's hopes
dashed by dollar bills and vodka
passed over for larger more bruised
horizons
I come to you Pelee
because I promised I would
along sea shore road
because I have made a life of
visiting other islands
hoping that they would compare
burial grounds
of my people
farmlands
mysteries
the old, familiar pull of
harvest

Coming

2006-06-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

Piled high in shitty vans, this life
marks the 401 in greys
in slates and sugars
of last March snow.
Leaving is the mother's milk
Grey city
grey grey
and spotted no longer
with the Husky's of my youth
these monster rest stops
swallow me up
and spit me out again
longing for something simpler.

To God

2006-05-31T05:37:00.000-07:00

You are across my morning.
Again.
And so I tell you of the missing men,
out there chasing you in all of the wrong things.
I swear I do not judge, but instead
I sit here suspended
Trying not to hope for their best interests
mothering
no one
making plans to see New York again
maybe not Ireland's greens
or his arms
but the strange silence of outerspace
driving under water
to meet Manhattan.

Phonecalls

2006-05-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

How many times the double ring of your Europe past the echoes and the you not here beside me. You tell me it is like talking to God, this and your lilt over the wires of this and the workings of this. It is you on the telephone of this now dancing with Lithuanians and wondering if you are allowed to sleep with them in this suspension. Do we drop this thing, this pretension of loving, the shouds and curtians of this, the complications. I swing from each day like a limb, a message, knowing less with each breath. What are you other than a vioce in my head, a sweaty ear and my hot breath. When I think your way, I see such greens and legs moving and swaying in frenzies, while the whole stays organized. Watering gardens and tears wondering how to do this. Do this. I let your hand go and freefloat over here with my own heartbeat and hopes. I become Canada and beating hot cities of question marks. I hang up the phone and you are gone from me.

Friendship

2006-05-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

Your pulse as you go into dark nights and into roomy rich man apartments with lake views and confusion made into small whispers. The doing of it. Actually, I am biking through silent nights and whispering in backyards with old lovers and grass seed working its magic. Winding through alleys and your dark stairs just leaving you things with the hip hop out of the garage a few down and the men's voices. You are out in the blanket of night being the you I now know and the you I now wish for in silent ways in our language we have created and continue. Plants and sharp edges and streetscapes. Pomegranites and the way we cannot reach each other and the way that is just fine. I love you in between the cracks of and slices. The pause in the story. The strange illustrations of fairy hills and holes and nothing in between. Truth is in the roots and this friendship feels real as I pedal over the train bridge that separates our houses Not many stars out tonight. No need for beacons.

She Said

2006-05-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

How it hurts this silent spring knitting something between heart and something lower. Suffering. The flowers are just to damn bright right now, she said. All of the barbeques and baloons and carrides to country homes and invites and babies in their strollers in my way. My way. I wonder after you heart leadening and things all said and done, I just don't know. Just nothing. All of these things I thought diminish against the thought of living the rest of this life where growing things settle in my stomach and ache. Where insides of me and outsides of you make me sad. All of the families and bicycles with yellow helments on the children and lime greens. Rollerblades. Wind and sun and lakes. BMW's and new sunny thoughts and white teeth. So i will stay in and ache for a while. Wonder my losses and gains. What is wisdom and who is love. Lonely, lonely mid afternoons that I do not tease along with sad music or too much melancholy. Helicopters and lakes dotted with little white boats. The park across the street full of parents and children on swings and slides. My insides ache. Silent spring running into me and voiceless anger. I can't wait until August, she said, when things start to wither.

Jake

2006-05-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

Recovered trees and hewn
I stop the city from entering
by mud lined boots
and glimpses of greens and browns
along your blue jacket

I sleep better
Cabin smoked
and full of the echoes
of our talking

I hope more
when concrete needs
a new pair of glasses
fresher smells
and car driving
wheels turning.

Cedar
Birchbark

I remember.

Ice

2006-05-13T08:23:00.000-07:00

Hoping in the cleaning
and the dusting
fury
I don't even know why
because you would never notice
and in the changing from shorts
to skirt and
back again.
When did we stop being friends?
When did it matter
what lip gloss
and the dust bunny
I see in the corner?
I have always loved your eyes
just like pure ice
deep mirrors
into you.
Looking.
I laugh as I struggle out
of skirt number three
roaming the vastness
of my universe
hoping to make you
comfortable.
I laugh.
I see things have changed.

Mickie

2006-05-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

Taking from your small stock
beholden to me
gifted
is nothing of this world
no thing.
There was this look exchanged
while no one else was around
in the atrium room.
It was a look of souls
equals
steely and straight.
A looking.
That is my inheritance.

Kensignton Market With Haircuts

2006-05-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

Protesting my sincerity
terrains of city and street
meet me
and the summer wind
falls back in laughter

eating strange sandwiches
watching skaters
whirl and crash
against the traffic

Kensington market
meets my soft
sort of happiness

Talking to boys

feeling like fifteen
for once

in my haircut.

The Reason Why

2006-05-10T06:50:00.000-07:00

Come to me poem
cause without you this day is an empty exercise
over full pragmatic
dusty
come to me
if only to decorate the edges of me
if only for the wrong reasons
juxtaposed
by the wrong choices
enter me
on this silent morning
across the bed I make
haphazardly
with sleep in my eyes
and with coffee
clearing the spaces and the cobwebs
of my world
today is silence
and peaceful
breezes
which I can manage
come to me poem
in the light
of me
because I sing to you
even when I refuse to look at you
or shun you
I form words is my sleep
even then.

Mercy

2006-05-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

Mercy.
To the silences.
Soft air through the screens
after a long pause
after weeks of nothing
here
I kept touching his arm
where that tattoo was
of the old days
punk bands
Kensington Market.
Basements with sweaty, high bodies.
I kept touching it in our silences
the curve of his bicep
strength of shoulder
his softness.
We carry the flags of our tears
like gemstones
and warlords
scrambling across terrains.
We carry each other so imperfectly
singing low
in our silences
saying nothing.

My Aunt's Funeral Day

2006-04-09T09:16:00.000-07:00

Swing fast and low
overatures
with black sedans moving slowly
over these roads that I have looked at here
hearses
rolling over the roads of my youth
carrying you
the wind is quiet here like horse barns
when noone is looking
and masks shift
and shift and
shift
shaking blankets and
whisking dust
and wind
roads with no interruptions
and interuptions
across you
and across my bed.
Keep rolling roads
and spinning stories
over and under my heart
lift me
You've got to hold on
he says
but I wonder if I need not
as I slice fruit and bring
pots of coffee into this world
and watch you fly away already
in strange nights
in violins
and in staggering women.
Clean heart
slate
lakes
my own.

Tribute (Mickie Michelle Mc Ivy 1953-2006)

2006-03-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

No name for this remembrance
of chachki dolls in blue skirts
and dog thrones along your windows.
Angels and charts of bones
you are my blood
decorated as Suzanne
smiling cheshire
with neat rows of
lithium
and wisdom.
Attic rooms lined
with yardsales and
making things work
the way your eyes looked
green tea with popcorn
that Nicole brought down for you
from Kensington
Lookit how beautiful it is
Greens and nutty seeds and tender white
resting in a strainer
so who cares how it tastes
this bitter pill
I send you oxygen right now
and richness
colors
and the images I have
of you
porch sitting
staccato cigerattes
punctuating the wisest things
I have ever heard.

Beyond Pretenses

2006-03-21T07:37:00.000-08:00

I took my time coming back to this feeling that if you drop it
it will break
open into
despite masquerades
I sit here
cracking.

Harvey

2006-03-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

Speaking of innocents
you rage
and complain about pink cotton candy dreams
founded on darkened nights
dreams gone wrong in your
sugar town
and you are driving cars and wondering
if it will come right come Sunday
or if the candy will get you
I wonder why you want to take
Montrealers
fresh out of rehab to night spots
right under the
Waverly.
I wonder your rage in
dark parking lots
and blood-rimmed eyes of fury
at the way things are, more
inside than out
and I hope that you speak to Harvey soon
and adventure into the frozen trees
long drives
and foggy graces
go talk to Harvey soon.

Borders

2006-03-15T06:40:00.000-08:00

Unstring the boarders in my heart
surrender the girls along the mean swingsets
of my youth
banane, orange
the overs and unders on a dare
that I never could take
parting my hair in the middle
of this working class
Ontario
with these girls who shone to me
the rollerskates
and gypsy jeans
that my mom would buy me
but only if they were baggy
so I had a crotch like a boy
and was left
never forgetting
the swashbuckling and
freewheeling
and those who would hold my hand
but only when noone was looking.
The slumber parties where
I was invited
in my blue cotton
girl gown
against thier
undies
and tee shirts
and toe nail polish
Suzie Jacsic's mom
making pancakes shaped like our initials
in the morning

Forcing the Fuse

2006-03-14T05:21:00.001-08:00

The light of day steely and here right now
springing my illusions from slumber
freeing something
stuck in my throat
threaded through
my muscles

You are the light of day
surrounding my dark folds
and forcing the fuses
re-knitting the wires
that are painful
here in the world
of men

I yelled back at a guy
yesterday
who catcalled me
who startled me into fury
at the way things are

not just my suffering, but his

that is the thing
if women are in the trash heap
so are men
and over and under we
die against the light.

Nor was I suprised
when down the road he turns towards evening
churches
where the crack addicts go to mingle

in the candles
yet
not quite mornings
against the moths
of this

so really
where is the violence
as I forgive
my brothers
while hating the way
they never call back
or tell you how they feel

the conundrum of me waiting in the dark
for nothing the dark can give
and I feel sad for the human race.

On Paper

2006-03-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

He tells me to send him paper forced through slots and folded into paper aeroplanes of finished and done and believed in like prayers across the silent morning like heartbursts and palpitations. Saliva. I promise him thickets of sheafs, of beliefs and borrowed things sunning themselves across my floor like my moments in my hands and on my tongue. He leaves me here wondering my gains and those strings like vines through my heart collapse here on my screen as I imagine him taking to bed my box of leaves. Stored on a shelf for this very winter night warm with cottage blankets and patterned sleeping bags splayed open across cabin beds with hunters and dogs. Or feathers with satin and city cottons all breathing like white white white rasping across skin. For I cannot imagine how it is he sleeps against the snow. I try not to bronze things and bruise things and stand in one spot watching things move and shape like waves and wands. Words. I try not to reach into this old shoebox of oaks and chokecherry, arbutis and the maple of my Ontario. Aspens so slender and slicing from the Catskills of my yesterday. Witholding the draw of the earth, the stiff smell of rot and flashbulbs and smoky clothes of old nights. Musty fingers and bruised eyes, redrimmed and growth. Wishing and wanting the crisping the earthing the touch of parchment and veins I promise not to touch but instead to send messengers along the pool of my reflections. I listen to my muse playing Mozart on her bass in between lapdances and brown sticky roaches warn me of and warm me to the emptiness of narcissists. But in her world they are all men. So I shoebox my boat my treasures off to him across pools suburban in my youth floating in his sheets hoping we will meet somewhere amongst the sheafs. That I will not eat them like hosts, these papers as they float.

Bi polar

2006-03-12T07:37:00.000-08:00

Compelling to communicate the loss of language, the dance of making sterling moments sunning themselves across the page like those turtles we saw in Lake Henry. The day we walked along mussel shells thin and fragile crunching shelf feet above soft sand and biting flies nature protesting our idyllic insistence of expectation. And us. You like the tides cycling from the winds to the mud mind spllitting feet bare my vacation chainsmoking and crissing and crossing between the beach glass that we picked like treasures for a table we could make in our minds for our home. Except for the storms. I watched them come off of Lake Erie like small cels of destructon and expression streaks of black beauty and torrents crackling and coming and passing one after one like your moods. Descending upon me like insults and powerlessness and shock. Bolts. Watching from haunted farm houses behind glass and curtian one by one small storms and crashing thunder that made my bones jolt and nerves weave wired messages to brain that I am in trouble. Trouble. Storm in your eyes and across the smooth sand polished feet of you and of me crashing the crushing the drum beating too fast forgetting the metronome and the rythym accelerated to screaming and loosing and dark weighty resignation. The rythym of you crashing about in me schoolgirl losses for lack of sunshine and strong trussed up paper doll husbands that still always hold sway against the rain against this rented country window and here I am again wondering my losses while sunkissed and beaches smooth blues and greens and beer bottle brown sit on kitchen tables with bits of sand collecting hopes against the hateful silence that you do not mean, cannot mean, but have.

Black shaped hearts

2006-03-11T09:25:00.000-08:00

Forget about the times of youth where
on islands rekindling contact with her Magesty the Queen
careening high teas alongside of boat sways
causeways
with the rastamen and the magicians taking turns with the tourists

Seen feeling overatures of different shoved down into the pockets
Boys decorated in 1950's shirts and Mao caps
plaids punctuated by the red of stars hearts.

Skating around the hum drum, the tourist's wind breakers and so very white sneakers.
So very white families
missing rose gardens
singing to fir trees and fashioned longhouses along the groves
to the sea rocks of lessons
With their small holes filled
with things swimming in miniature oceans.

Our feet.
Our feet.

Strung with cameras and tea-breath
jasmine
as we walk off our chess game
played in the sun hitting Chinatown
formica with springrolls and rice dishes.

These are the things of our youth.
Me and you who made contact
forcing time into funnels
These are the things of our kisses
and furies
lacing heart to hand
lips to words

I cast towards you
black-shaped hearts
and walking sticks
sleights of hand and
the colors red, yellow and green.
Orcas
and protests
plackards
laced with forgetting
like old folks.

Today I sit in the furrows of
the stones of the Empress
with Carr's monkeys
and you
remembering bracelets with
psychic hands
lost and found
amongst the furies
and mermaids
amongst the retirees
resting along the waves of their house-boats.

Clash t-shirts

2006-03-10T09:01:00.002-08:00

Middle of the night sweat
moody silence of sleeping things
so quiet
holding hands with imaginary lovers
across sleep
enough to send me checking e-mails
and forgetting to forget

steeped in no waking breath
and brittle bones of rainstorms
and clash t-shirts
across damp skin

make me form
heavy words
across the sunsting of my revelations
across happiness
come pinecones and puddles
that drown out
sand dollars and
hydro glass from old Douglas Firs
somewhere outside of Whistler
where we stopped

where I have never

paces of the mind
and places of the body
that I forget to remember
so I may broach solitude
with the lifting up of me

beyond disappointment
are bone-white shells
from the Queen Charlottes
that still line the walls of my studio.
Still.

Even though I am new things
like brick buildings
and awareness
concrete
dog fur
and prayers.

Still.

There are the mountians in me
full of the silence of snow
and white rocks
beside old hydro roads.

Where I ghosted you
when I dropped you at the station
beyond the heroin addicts
and ragtags
so you could take a train
to see a bullfight.
hoding my poems in your heart like a host.

Still.
You are here still and always
A murmur beside my heart
when
on strange occasions I forget to
forget
the taste of your salt
the hope of your love
between sleep and awake
I find you
sometimes still

P.K Paige

2006-03-09T06:51:00.000-08:00

Rain punctuates
debates along the lines
of what is desperate
and what is reaching
in roots
and tendrils
towards humility?

Rain ruminates against my window
rasps against my thoughts
runs along the pavement
wonders if the grass can come out now
or if March is too soon for hope.

Bicycle tires spin along dark Victorian streets
of Richard Scary
Omni-directional streetlamps
and tree skeletons

Silent and creepy city streets
of delicious
as I fly towards
P.K. Paige and friends.
what more COULD I want
except vaulted 19th century libraries

and words
from English lips, like a reed
as I night dream
about making this library a home
a live-in loft
just for me
steeped in books and age

I am reminded of Montreal
and stringing together a
line of warm apartments
blessed with artists
and thinkers

her Montreal and mine
once

I am asked to live
and travel through
countries and my own
mind's make-up

A call to arms

Sitting here with the damp
no
the wet
in my bra
on my way out into the modern world
of doctor's appointments
and late internet bills

I pause and hear the words of an old
woman poet
living amongst artists
earning a living
falling in love
holding words in my heart

This is happiness
that I refuse to diminish

Love's Liberation

2006-03-08T07:44:00.000-08:00

Where packed in against the dissapointments
there are catchers mitts
and pom poms
sing.

Levity comes after
the man who
smoked with too many patches on
and
after watching his jogging pants rot
I sent him to the curb where
he could roll his joints
and lie about it with impunity.

He had to run extentions
so he could loll around
in his piss stains
watching Simpsons episodes

while his wires crossed.

Join me in a revelation
that there is more
to sing about than
disorder.

In between the dissapointment
are clear bowls of water and clapping.
there are ballads and strong upwinds
to report.

The smell is gone from here
I can tell because women meet here
with ovations
and glory.

The animals dance past where
they once were spooked.

Better to Light Candles

2006-03-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

Coming home last night
In silence to silence.
I heard a pin drop in my heart

and it sang

despite the way you are
right now I love you
in the vacuums I make of
these chambers

I hold you and sing
from the songs of merriment
my father used to sing to me
in the darkness
against the darkness.

I never knew that we were to
light candles
that this is the bravest thing
bent fathers
singing.

I ask everyday to leave the folds
of self
to someone better fit
than me

Branches break over silence
hearts too
and so who am I to not love
and the most broken?

Coming home in silence to silence
I hear my neighbour sing through the wall
and the hum of my computer
the breathing of my dogs

Birds
bottles being rummaged
swift car wheels
and I am no longer alone.

Five Minutes Ago

2006-03-06T09:37:00.002-08:00

Good graces
what do you do with the dying people
that come and interfere with this denial
of
how short things come and go

how we lace ourselves up

lately I have been so lonely for
someone in my bed
and how my family used to all live nearby
inside of my heartbeats

I long to kiss
but not like those desperate
frightened
things that we all find
on late nights
with beer and veils over our eyes

Not even in that girl way where
I wish to finally finally finally
find a man
with those things
that they protest.

No

That was so five minutes ago.

I long to kiss the day
as it comes over to blindside me.
To tongue the words
that sidle up to me
in short skirts

And where I am human and frail
I wish for some kind of grace
to sit in front of unchanging
unmoving real things
and move myself

I wish to move myself

Five minutes ago
I stopped sitting here.
Wondering why you do not love
me
Because I know you do
I do
And I feel the lips of it
as I die.
I feel the moist and definite pressure.
as I die again.
I do.

2006-03-06T09:37:00.001-08:00

THE DAILIES

February 28, 2006

Easy does it there miss sadheart
Cannot always be where it drops off
Jesus there are enough broken wings out there to make a go
So what if we take it up some

Yesterday you just kept telling yourself that it was March
And cold and wind and Canada
And it took another friend to point out
That it was beautiful the way the sun heard the few flakes
Dropping in on us

The sun hanging around
Past the bedraggled skyline
Hovering above the stories that we tell ourselves.
You just have to look.
Take the time to move visions and veils

Troubled hearts of March
Pinched faces and hold it
Sit there in the middle of
A rock and a hard place for a minute

Be in it.

February 29, 2006

So I hear it’s the end of Saint Valentine
Where the sun hits the paper folds
And the man is busted for writing smut to
Young girls who are afraid.

The root of this yearning is in the garbage
With the orange peels
The unearthing
Of the fruit
Of the real fruit
That is not love but

Love.

There is a time where it is asked
That we let go of the rock star status
Of our youth
Yawning
Stopping the compulsion to look ten years younger
And flirt with those we used to call babies

To realize that underneath it all
We are old and sitting in our homes
Alone in prisons that do not look like the
Accolades of our peers.

Panty magnets do die on the inside
And I cannot help but annal the stories
Of the twenty-three year old girls
As they tell me of their dying vaginas

As I tend to the mending of their hurts
Because I am the only one to be trusted
Because I have lived through the gore of
Self realization.

Saint Valentine is enshrouded
In a death dance
And I am watching with falling crests
And cinamins

Weathervanes and trumpets
Allowances and pardons
Heartbeats and deserts

2006

is not a time for romance

but for rescues
and life preservers
we are done with celebrating a man who
diddles about young girls

because it is wrong to do
but also because he will die
a waxed air guitarist
like peter pan
gone wrong
in desperation

March 1st, 2006

The snow is hard on top today.
Forgetting its soft nature
Steely underfoot
Unforgiving.

The air is announcing
My breath as I dogwalk
And fight myself

Today is rent day and
I again do not have
Litany of poverty
Imposed and unforgiving.

Where does a poet find a couple of grand?
How does one carve it out of
Self esteem and stubbornness?

I am mean to my dogs as the bile rises
As the day hurts to look at

I forget my softness
As defiance and rage settle
Into stones of resentment

I wish to be alone and so instead an
Off leash dog comes bounding around the corner
And I gather my brood and stare hatefully
Until the owner finally leaves

Probably thinks I am crazy and
Uptight
But I really just want to be left
And I donÂ’t want my dogs to fight
As dogs sometimes do.

It would be the last thing
That would make this shame
Give.
It would become hot tears
That I cannot bear.

March 2nd, 2006

This enterprise
Starship
Hell it is all brokered
By tenacious meanderings towards the sun
Just you watch
As I wiggle my ass
And jump the jetsom

Somewhere back there
Dodging bullets and vampires
I made a promise to myself
And said a fuck you to the doubters

This is my world
With stretchy metallic belts and
Scary doll heads.
Old Parisian street paintings
From bipolar aunts.
Wheat Jesus
Hands touching
Annals of pop culture
And creeping out

The daily machine.

I shoot the finger at the GO train every morning
And smile.
My knees knock at the loss of biweekly cash infusions
But my heels dig in
Stilettos, of course.

This morning
This defiance.

It is only mine so long as I can mute myself and hear
The context of my creaky floors.
I believe that god will pay my rent.
I do.

So I write cheques to the sun
And send them airplanes
From my soul.

I will not live in fear everyday.
I will thumb my nose at it
Fear.
Fuck you fear.
I'll do it anyways.