winter haiku

when a friendship fails

Angels scatter kisses on

the tips of icebergs

the persistence of memory, Salvador Dali

mapping

The marks on a body are the marks on a map. They tell you

where you have been, and how to get home again so that you can stop

going round inside yourself. Look down at the map. Look up at the 

sky. Where is the sun? Now walk. Make a new pathway, walk out of the

forest...

               land of horror and sweetness...

                                                  Ann-Marie MacDonald, Adult Onset

when the forest is a map you failed to learn

and those distended days of whining roses

surreal in the constructed vase of time

melting into fey insatiate poses

geographies of countries primed for peace

for worlds where war is served up daily

while  flowers weight doves down from burning skies 

high as bulletproof kites when windfall fails to cease

petals as the love me love me not of bald desire

desert sands as grainy trees of cookied fortune

lust as monstrous notion peeking into fire

Narcissus as the lisp lined friend you fail to notice

recognizing love as something blighted

constructed raw from shell’s exploded bliss

as multi-gendered lies we build on fading beaches

unnaming that of us then we then they then this

navigating scars that bleed through stitches

finding other routes from there to here

queering broken heart’s grotesque predictions

a dream of sleep beyond the braying ditch

what when the with of why begins to wear

thin remains of fabrics worn to dirt

what hurt of how and who and when to witness

where will the whence of wanton make you cry

on high as bulletproof kites where windfall fails to cease

petals pushing doves from burning skies 

word weary war torn smorgasbords of verbs served daily

syntactic maps of hungry buried bodies

look up look down

the grimy sky’s been primed for peace

while heaven’s false promise hides in sunny paths

the cloudy frown of hope smiles through the laugh lined crease

transitory

The onanist picked up a transfer that was lying on the floor of the streetcar. Pressing it between his thumb and forefinger, he began to think of the last time he had spilled his seed. There had been an anti-climax but the events leading up to the end were quite provocative.

After pondering the limp ending for a few moments he remembered another story, one that his mother had narrated, of a young man who would not do as his father had told him, and he went blind. It frightened him as a child, and then later, as a teenager, he worked in a movie theatre as an usher. It was 1974 and a British comedy came to town called If You Don't Stop It You'll Go Blind. He saw the film several times, standing at the back of the theatre. It was filled with sketch comedy scenes of old ladies espousing profane activities, gay cowboys entangled in compromising acts, and competitive sex contests filled with horny blokes and well-endowed beauty queens - among other things.

He was twenty at the time and a late bloomer. A late bloomer who had found himself in a variety of compromising positions. Once he stood at the urinal in the men’s washroom of the Odeon Theatre, where he worked for a year just before his father died, and he saw a man playing with himself and looking straight down into the porcelain altar. He went back to his post at the back of the theatre and reminisced briefly about the size of the stranger’s assertive member.  

             

A few years later the film was followed by a sequel, Can I Do It 'Till I Need Glasses? He never saw that one, and didn’t need glasses himself until he was in his late forties. By the time he reached his mid-fifties he was buying cheap reading glasses at the dollar store. When he was fifty-eight he had graduated from a two hundred lens to three hundred and fifty. When he watched porn on his laptop he left his glasses on. But when he actually took part in auto-erotic acts without the support of moving images his spectacles were left on the bedside table.

As the sleek twenty-first-century streetcar sailed along with seamless agility, so unlike the rattling old streetcars he first rode in the nineteen seventies, he pressed the filthy transfer softly between his fingers and started to become self-conscious about the filth and germs that must be all over the little slip of grey’ish paper. So he dropped it back on the floor, and as he did so a stranger glared at him and shouted “don’t litter.” He considered a variety of responses, but luckily the streetcar was at his stop, so he just ignored the stranger’s indignant outcry and made his way to the exit. The stranger kept shouting long after he had left. But that was neither here nor there.

When he entered the lobby of the hospital he went straight to the hygiene station near the entrance and squeezed a bloated dollop on to both palms, vigorously pressing the alcohol based liquid into his skin. There were light abrasions at the end of his fingertips that stung a little as the substance was absorbed. The abrasions had been the result of a failed attempt to get crazy glue off his skin with sandpaper. Instead of removing the irritating substance the sandpaper just left little cuts between the dried hard puddles of toxic adhesive. He hated crazy glue and tried not to use it often. But there were times when it seemed to be the only solution for the re-invention of a beloved broken object.            

And then he walked to the west end of the main floor of the hospital, took a sharp left, went up the escalator to the second floor, and walked straight down the hall to the elevators, where he stood and waited for one to take him to the ninth floor. After waiting ten minutes for the doctor to retrieve him from the depressing little windowless waiting room, he walked over to the receptionist’s office and asked an employee to let the doctor know that he had arrived. And then he went back to the waiting room and saw his doctor standing there looking around. They saw each other, smiled, and then went to the office together.

When he put his pants back on the doctor was standing by the window, gazing out at the downtown skyline.

“Hey Doc, I heard a joke the other day that reminded me of you. You wanna hear it?”

“No, I don’t think so. Our session is over. I’ll see you next week.”

“Aw, come on. It’s funny, and very short.”

“Okay. Tell me, quickly.”

Just as he was about to start telling the joke the doctor’s phone rang. After a few words the doctor put the phone down and told him that his next patient had just cancelled, so he could take a little more time telling the joke. They both sat down on the couch.

“So this guy went to see his doctor and his doctor told him that he had to stop masturbating. And the guy said, but why doc, why do I have to stop. And the doctor said, because it makes it difficult to examine you.”

He laughed but the doctor just smiled.

They had a free hour, after the joke, so they just stayed there, in the office, with the door locked. When he put his pants back on his patient was standing by the window gazing out at the downtown skyline, thinking to himself -

“I’m glad I dropped that filthy transfer and sanitized my hands before coming up here. My father always warned me about proper hygiene, and even though his stories frightened me as a child, they sure come in handy now that I’m all grown up.”

age & innocence

age & innocence

I've got this added tenderness. I never talk about it.

It only sneaks up on me every two or three years. It 

sounds strange but feels so natural. I know it'll get me 

into big trouble. I feel it for a certain kind of other man,

For any guy who's even clumsier than me, than "I."

Allan Gurganus 'Adult Art' 

(from White People; stories & novellas)

He didn’t know what shade of blue those loafers had been. All he remembered was that they were like no other colour he had ever seen before. All creamy and smooth and matching his American History teacher’s satiny tie. Maybe Robin’s egg blue, but not really. They lacked the brightness of robin’s egg, had a softer quality to them, with a little gold buckle across the arch of each foot - and just a glimpse of matching socks, just a shade lighter than the loafers.

Shakespeare                                                                                                          Beckett

His hair was grey and full, like his wife’s, the guidance counselor. She told him he could never be an interior decorator because his math was so bad he wouldn’t even be able to measure drapery material. There was a tone of indignation in her gruff matronly voice, even when she said the most absurd and discouraging things. She looked like her husband, in drag. They had no children and had met in teacher’s college. She had full grey hair too. But her fashion sense was not as good as his. He worked in make-up at the local theatre guild and she always talked about the plays he worked on. They both felt Beckett was too bleak and preferred Shakespeare’s comedies - never really wanting to see anyone die onstage.

It was the year Nixon was impeached and the American History teacher asked the whole class if they thought the President deserved this kind of treatment. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand any of it. Just sat there embarrassed that he understood so little about the world and barely passed from one grade to the other. They put him into the trades curriculum, and one boy awkwardly asked - with a hint of strained teenaged innocence mixed with an outrageous air of stupidity - he asked him if he had a sister who looked as pretty as him. He said no, and then went back to spoiling a perfectly good piece of wood on a treacherous lathe he had no idea how to use properly.

Richard Nixon

But he was always good in English Literature and they pushed him through  high school, only holding him back one year because he was so small and bashful, no one would ever notice, and maybe he would grow into himself, catch up to the others. But everyone knew it would never be possible.

Carey Mulligan (L) & Mia Farrow (R) as Daisy Buchanan

                                                                                                    

He was good in English though. They just called it English then, unapologetically, like it made perfect sense, as if the world only had one language and all great literature was based in it. His life was like a bad education system. Shutting out so many things that would become his biggest concerns as an adult. One teacher altered his whole degrading opinion of Daisy Buchanan when he spoke up one day in class, against the teacher’s belief that Daisy was just a superficial creature - and said softly, “She knew, she knew how awful the world was. So she wanted her daughter to be a beautiful little fool so she would never know just how terrible people could be, including herself.”

But then, in the mid seventies, it was a very small world in the midst of his blighted family life and the loss of a tormented parent. The second world war was barely two decades cold and the rest of that century’s war years were brewing in places he had never heard of. He watched his father’s wounds fester in the bottom of empty bottles and unfulfilled loins. And his mother. She was another short story waiting to be written, by him, over and over again.

F.Scott Fitzgerald                                                                                                                   Zelda Zayre Fitzgerald

 “Would you like to come to my house on Friday evening. We could chat. You’ve had a difficult time since your dad died. My wife will be out for the evening. We could just have a nice talk.”

Innocence was something he wore, like the tight light blue brushed denim bell bottomed trousers everyone stared at when he walked into the classroom. Many years later a teacher he had never studied with told him, at a local bar, “you were so small, and so beautiful then.” The things people say so long after. He was mildly disgusted by the nonchalance of so many of the latent thoughts that could never have been uttered at the right time. But there was a kind of delayed thrill, hearing how he had once been perceived.

He sat in his American History teacher’s den in a chair near the fireplace, and they chatted. The moment his innocence burst was when that great throbbing head of grey hair bobbed suddenly in his lap. He pulled quickly away and said “no” - nervously, with a subdued shock in his voice, and remembered his teacher’s words for years after - as he had quickly come toward him and knelt down, mid conversation - “Well now that I know why you’re here.”

But even then, and through all the years that passed, he never knew what it was that had been said to make his teacher initiate that sudden movement from small talk and into his lap. He was eighteen, very small for his age, innocence was like clothing to him. He just put it on and took it off, according to the time of day, and barely noticed the change. But he was always aware of the color coordinates. Blue was his favorite then.

“It’s my wife, isn’t it. If she wasn’t in the picture.” He nodded - not knowing why he was nodding - and his teacher went back to his chair. He drove him home soon after. They barely spoke, but there was a kind of clumsy comfort between them. They did know each other in a way that no one else dared to.

No one ever asked about the meeting. It was just - what appeared to be - a kindly teacher taking an interest in a student who had suffered sudden trauma in his young life. And what had he done wrong, really. Nothing. It just wasn’t in the cards. But there was something re-assuring in the innocent knowledge that the next time he went into the guidance counselor’s office she would appear very different to him. There would be no power lost and no power gained - for either one of them. They were both innocent, for a moment - then - and neither one of them would ever really know why.

Collections, Anthologies, Collaborations

http://www.amazon.com/Flicker-Spark-Contemporary-Anthology-Spoken/dp/0982955391

http://www.amazon.com/Medium-Muse-Channeling-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0985557753

Seminal

The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets

Edited by John Barton and Billeh Nickerson    http://www.arsenalpulp.com/bookinfo.php?index=261

          
INVISIBLE FOREGROUND, IMPERSONATING FLOWERS, 'TIS PITY, WAIT UNTIL LATE AFTERNOON, AND DESIGNATION YOUTH ALL AVAILABLE AT;

http://frontenachouse.com/

PAUSE AVAILABLE ON KINDLE

http://frontenachouse.com/ 

from Designation Youth (Frontenac House Press 2014)

needles and hay

(inspired by a scene from the film August: Osage County)

Mother, we have been married such a long time  

so when you screamed to stop the car 

so you could wretch into the wild radiant roadside grasses 

burnt and toasted willowy in the easy baking sun

I felt compelled to pull your hair from your face with one palm 

while I rested the other palm on your upper back 

the clasp of your cheap brassiere 

rigid soft containment  

like raised warts on slippery hardwood floors of buckled flesh

but the side of the car beckoned 

and I just stood there frozen in the august wind 

closing my eyes as you ran through rolling hayfields

when I finally caught up to you 

the screen door to the car we called a home slammed shut 

the family we pretended to be, with the authenticity of  

fraudulent fried chicken in solar baked appliances, drove away

leaving us behind  and left with nothing but 

that frozen stifling latent summer wind rolled up  

in once golden stacks

faded red carpets half sick of all our toxic entrances

that wind that rings through time

bringing us so much further together

splitting us into needles, dirt and hay...

                     HAND SPLINT 
                 FOR LIMP WRIST
                        day one - Tuesday October 2^nd  

the boy on the flute is a fright

his face is a horrible sight

when he walks his knees knock

it creates such a shock

his braces light up in the night

            Michael’s doctor’s appointment was scheduled for one fifteen and his poetry workshop started at two. The bus ride from Vancouver had taken an extra hour due to bad weather on the Coquihalla. But he still had time for a bagel and some herbal tea before his appointment at the campus clinic. There were six remaining manuscripts to go over, and an exercise on limericks and villanelles to prepare. He could have graded the last half dozen manuscripts on the bus, but listened to a mixed CD of all girl singers instead. Falling asleep halfway between Hope and Merritt, he woke up just in time to see the sign advertising the country music capital of B.C. On his ipod Allison Krauss was just finishing up My New Favorite and Norah Jones followed her with Come Away With Me. It was 2006 and, much to his surprise, he had made it into the new millennium with his love for female vocalists fully intact.

As he opened his eyes he found himself sweaty and drooling on his own shoulder, softly muttering the lines to a limerick he had never forgotten, one he had written in high school English class when he was seventeen. The exercise had involved giving students the first line, and then they were expected to complete the poem according to the form they had just been taught, and they were not allowed any notes. They had to listen.

The point of no note taking was to insure that the structure of the limerick would be imprinted on their brains long enough to write one of their own. It was an old-fashioned teaching strategy, before laptops littered the classroom and memory sticks were a dime a dozen.

His high school limerick had something to do with an unattractive yet musical young man whose face was not a pretty sight. So he had to rhyme the word fright with another word, and then make up three more lines comprised of one original couplet and one more rhyming word in the final line that corresponded to the last word of the opening line.

He didn’t have a very scientific, structured brain, and found himself struggling with strict poetic forms due to the rigid, manufactured quality of everything from the villanelle to the anapest. But the limerick, that was his favorite, very simple, very effective, and a perfect form for the comic edge that invariably seeped into his poetic voice.

Having been a precocious wordsmith from a very early age, his talent for writing short poems, that the teacher often thought he had stolen, was quite sophisticated by the time he entered high school. He once wrote a poem about the rainbow effect of sunlight on snow for another student and the teacher refused to accept it, claiming it must have been plagiarized from a poetry book.

Pink is blue is green is white

The colors sifting through the light

They crave the shafts of absent night

Pink is blue is green is white

This wasn’t the poem he had written, just a sudden re-creation form the dregs of his imagination. But he knew there had been something about the refraction of colour and a list rainbow tones. At the time, in high school, he didn’t think it was such a great poem, and had tried to dumb it down for the student he was writing for, but as it turned out, the student was a pudgy strange looking little creature with no mental capacity whatsoever when it came to poetry, among so many other things, so it was a wasted effort and created no small amount of conflict in the schoolyard immediately after English class.

“You fuckin’ homo! I told ya to write somethin’ easy for me to understand. Like about a snowman or hockey for fuck sake.”

And then the ugly bucktoothed bully kicked him in the knee. It hurt but could not really be considered much of a physical injury.

Later in life he often wished he had kept a copy of the original snow poem he had written for that hideous, taunting halfwit, but alas, it had been lost to the great vacuum of unsung literature, sucked up into the not so literary stratosphere like so much vacuum cleaner detritus.

He especially liked vacuum cleaner metaphors for a very specific reason. They were so efficient, and when they worked properly they could solve the most mundane of daily problems, ridding one’s self of the excess that surrounded them. Had he owned a giant vacuum cleaner as a high school student he could have taken it into the schoolyard and vacuumed up all his shrieking enemies.

*

As the bus rolled into Kamloops, about an hour after waking, he was putting the finishing touches on a poem of historic and culturally astute proportions about a certain vacuum cleaner that revealed his penchant for finding the erotic within humourous semi-autobiographical modes, a style he had cultivated during his late teens and early twenties, and something he had become known for as a middle aged poet whose presence at readings was sure to arouse no small amount of laughter from an amused audience. Michael called his new poem McLuhan’s Bride, acknowledging, in the title, that some of his poetic voice, but certainly not all, came from an extended leap into a joint major in Cultural Studies and English literature, a leap that had taken up over twenty years of his life before landing him in the  groves of a struck him as a comfortable but unstable academic cul-de-sac. But he had some wonderful memories of his time as a professional student, and the new poem spoke frankly of one of those memories.

McLuhan’s Bride

Once, at a graduate student soiree

the Professor’s wife told him

that Mcluhan’s wife

was afraid of her first vacuum cleaner

clearly shaken, he hesitated to add

that he, on the contrary, felt little techno based fear

when it came to small appliances

and all of the strained emotional ties

they liberate their lovers from

and had, in fact, experienced a prolonged affair

late sixties, with his mother’s first vacuum cleaner

an avocado green Westinghouse

amply accommodating his great pubescent shaft

in a most delightful way

stored in the basement

this mechanical bride

this compact galaxy of carnal pleasure

pre-dating certain groundbreaking

post-structuralist thought

stood proud

alongside boxes of old clothes, hunting rifles

bewildered WWII army uniforms

broken rear view mirrors

pocket westerns and his father’s empty Mickey’s stored in heating ducts

among the detritus of lives infused

with sex and booze

standing squat and satisfied

his thoroughly modern fully equipped paramour

astute and wild-eyed in ‘her’ stolid ambient purring

giving him uncomplicated joy

strengthening his love for his mother 

her taut brisk arms pulsing, strong around her fervent breasts of steel

pressing that small appliance into layers of 1950’s synthetic pile

the charged erotic ways of her domestic engineering

giving him pure uncomplicated joy

and reminding him of the ways in which she kept her house in order

providing sons and lovers with the necessary tools

to survive in a world where

as Mcluhan once said;

“each of us lives hundreds of years in a single decade”         

and

“when you are on the telephone you have no body”

inspiring one to think

when you are screwing a vacuum cleaner

you have no conscience, no need of one

save the sudden onset of a short circuit

as you engage in one final perfect act

of consummate industrial self indulgence

and the grand sweep of history

that will one day go the way of

items stored in a musty basement

works of art, mechanical reproductions

boxes of old clothing, hunting rifles

bewildered WWII army uniforms

thoroughly modern fully equipped paramours

canisters, astute and wild, eyeless

in their stolid ambient purring

having borne silent witness

to the grand, eternally pubescent

shaft of time

Michael didn’t think it would be a good idea to share his new home appliance poem with his students. Generally speaking, bringing one’s own work into a creative writing class that one was teaching was frowned upon. He did it the odd time, but due to the sexual nature of this one, he felt it might be best to show a little restraint this week. Little did he know, on the five hour bus ride form Vancouver to Kamloops, as he scribbled the final words of his poem into a notebook, that quirky written sexuality would be the least of his worries by the time he arrived in the classroom at two fifteen.

He apologized for being late and began to wittily improvise limerick exercises from his rough notes. To hell with Villanelles. They could wait until next week. Under the circumstances, the limerick was all he could withstand for now.

In the classroom, despite being visibly shaken by the news he had received at the clinic, Michael still managed a bit of pseudo-prudish humour by telling students that he would prefer that they did not use the word Nantucket in their limericks because it had become such a clichéd occurrence within this particular form.

Faintly vulgar innuendoes often managed to work their way into his teaching style. It was something he couldn’t seem to resist, and on this particular afternoon it lightened the load of his astounding diagnosis.

How was this diagnosis even possible?

It must be a mistake.

But he knew it wasn’t.

Although he had told the doctor not to call him regarding test results over the weekend, she still managed to leave a message asking him to come to see her at the Royal Inland Hospital during her weekend maternity ward shift. He had said to her, clearly and emphatically, that he would be away so there would be no point in having any information until he returned on Monday.  But wouldn’t it have been lovely to have been able to walk over to the hospital, through the sound of wailing newborns and joyous parents, only to receive grave tidings from an over eager health care worker with the timing of a rattlesnake at a baby shower.

The first thing she said to him after revealing the results was, “a lot of people are prone to suicidal thoughts when they first get the news. Perhaps you might consider counseling?”

            He had one gay nerve left, and she was all over it.

She had ruined Michael’s weekend. So he retorted, as gently as possible, without resorting to an excess manifestation of his signature sarcasm - yet managing to fill each word with a subtle, underlying rage over her forgetfulness about his wishes regarding the results.

I appreciate your concern, but no, I won’t be experiencing any suicidal feelings. I am well acquainted with the immediate emotional effects of this sort of thing and on several occasions have helped others deal with their initial response. Thank you for your time. I have to run or I’ll be late for my limerick workshop. I’m really looking forward to it, especially after you’ve managed to inject such a strained poetic rhythm into my weekend. I’ll contact you later in the week if I have any more questions or concerns.

            As he walked toward the classroom he thought of how he often liked to alter the final rhyme of a limerick in order to punctuate the brief narrative with a slightly jarring tone, bringing faint chaos, and a kind of contradictory open-ended closure to an otherwise ordered poetic microcosm.

the man with the lisp is afraid
he hides his rage in a cage
as calm as can be, he makes merrily
concealing his status
regarding HIV

                stay tuned for day  two… of
                hand splint for limp wrist

painting by David Bateman, photo by Dan Bazuin

gone to gone quartet- 36 heartbeats           

1

thinking love might have held you

when the gone of love was long

2

hoping love might have melted

the memory of  love's throng

3

meeting love in slowness

when the pace of love stung quick

4

taking love from the places

the hand of love prefixed

5

knowing the syntax of feeling

when the suffix of love left out

6

greeting the word lost once when

the third and the twice were in doubt

7

leaving the rhythm behind you

when the shout of love’s distance pretends

8

praying for all love’s beginnings

the middles that stifle the ends

9

lifting the core wrought by sorrow

when the heft of the verse falls through

*

1

we answered pleasure with promise

where keeping had run out of time

2

we traversed the summit of loveliness

where the beauty of heights failed to shine

3

when the air left us panting with lightness

our hearts were weighted by fear

4

when the fusion of souls moved beyond us

our darting eyes filled with tears

5

what of the keeping betrayed us

when the pact of our breath was made

6

what then could leaving have left us

when the steep of the hill failed the grade

7

why was the empty of flow

over the brim of our hopes

8

why do the loveliest rathers

over reach that upon which we dote

9

what do the leaves tell the flowers

over seasons begging to end

*

1

pulling the ripe out of blossom

greening the rot of the ear

2

corning the ship of the mast on

the rim of the cob left to rip

3

plucking the tuft of the cotton

wiggling the lobe of the mirror

4

when the sound of the food ripe to rotting

and the shaft of the lip loses grip

5

tonguing the lapping falsetto

left to the tonsil of cheer

6

castrating the balls of the diamond

filling the ballast by the pier

7

smirking the spine bald of fear

cringing at heart’s lost facade

8

towing the line left to curvature

roping the calves left to leg

9

keeping the handout palmless

robbing the borrow from beg

*

1

twirling the stick in the mud

pulled from marshes of sheen

2

tweeking the pads of the lilies

curled by the glint of esteem

3

thinking love could have bound them

when the plinth of love crumbled on

4

hoping love should have coddled

the memory of  loves tumbling song

5

meeting love in retreat

when the backwards of love came forth

6

raking love from the gardens

the fingers of love pushed in

7

knowing the grammar of stealing

when the clause of love fell through

8

greeting a world lost without us

the thud and the splice cut down

9

leaving the lyric to heaven

when the rasp of love’s stammer distends