Exam Haiku

 Teacher knocks. Flurry

of mutely shouting hands rise

like startled pheasants.

“You have one hour

remaining. Tell me everything

you know about X.”

Nerves twitch electric.

Fifteen more minutes to sit.

Words are exhausted.

Someone always coughs.

My pen is always dying.

Negativity.

Tendons start cramping

Pinched scrawl limps across the page,

crow with shattered feet.

I just stopped to think.

Birds sang on white window ledge.

Where did the time go?

three bed poems, feb 2013

Every semester I make 3 cut-up poems alongside the students in my EWC class. It's a nice way to put a finger on the pulse of my subconscious. We deliberately let go of the idea of grammar, the idea of making sense, the idea of "proper." We follow our instincts, succumb to the sounds of words, the rightness of clusters of images. We let go of the outcomes and accept what we are given.

This time, we wrote about beds--our earliest memory, our current bed, our dream bed. Then we chopped up our writing and made poems with pre-selected titles. Here are my three poems for the semester:



#1: breathing out

        submerged and falling not a
motion sink soft into the watercolor
        through the waving growing seaweed
                down through layers of deepening night

the unspoken truth
        slowly to coral the upper air like clouds
hooked c of the arms of the world
        waning and filling the day so i can feel
                at home.



#2: like moonlight

desert moon rush across the black
waking up cold and twisted
        at hip and ankle

predatory cat in my memory
remembered fear: warm and earthlike
smelling of unexpected nouns
which surrendered the fight

tiny room beneath silent unseen fans
windows like moonlight
sleep is gone and so we
        and so
                and so
                        towards the landing



#3: seeing you around

you take the warmth. it all runs
        to morning and
the secret verbs are soft and solid
curved summer across our winter dreams
portholes in the sunset are
                lost mariners

dreams are treasures
bound down with gravity and
sinking soft

although i was never there
and love has a memory
of ourselves from the side
i wonder what else we believed
so many years fooling everyone
        guess i still do

                i hope you do too

Barbarians (πᾶς μὴ Ἕλλην βάρβαρος)

everybody's talking about

the war that no-one's talking about:

sizing up sides

stitching flags on the insides

of hollow eyelids

branding the kids with irons.

everybody knows

it's everybody else's house 

that's on fire.

everybody's banging on

the drum that no-one's beating:

sounding alarms

moving back to farms

of their ancestors or

trading cash for a subdermal chip.

everybody knows 

that hip 

is the new death of hip.

everybody's hearing horses

at the gates of gilded cities

just off the edge

of the white map of sleep.

we each decide

if we walk or we ride

if we're out or inside

that circle of light.

everybody knows

the barbarians 

are always right.

goodbye, and all that...

there's nothing special about this
last cup of tea. i mean, yes, you
boiled the water, but that's

no reason to get worked up:
just a couple cents' worth
of electricity, some tap water

(practically free) and a few
dried leaves from somewhere
you'll probably never go.

me neither. yet there it sits
steeping on my desk, staining itself
antique green, pirate map brown

and cooling slowly. soon it will be
room temperature. tepid. undrinkable.
but that's entropy for you:

of all the laws of the universe, it's the one
most likely to ruin a perfectly good
cup of tea. i could drink it quick

but it wouldn't matter. either way
you will be gone, and i will have to
make the next cup all on my own.

it's no big deal. really. i
can make a cup of tea
without anybody's help.

it's just that i have grown
fond of having you around.
it's just that some friendships--like tea--

grow stronger, deeper, the longer
you let them sit. it's just that i might
miss you a little when the kettle starts to boil.

but i'll be okay. and so will you.
it's just a little water, just a little heat,
just the comfort of ritual and good company.

no big deal. so. goodbye and all that.
if you need the kettle, it's here.
i'll keep it warm.

Unloved Children

There are no bad babies.

Some arrive unexpectedly.
Some are inconvenient.

Some overfill an already crowded room.
But that is no fault of the child.

Some are not loved:
Because their parents are not loving,

Or not in a position to love,
Or were hoping to love some other child instead.

Every note you play is a child:
Produce them deliberately.

Love them fiercely.
There are no wrong notes.

Only notes you didn't want,
Notes you failed to celebrate

Once you gave them life.

poet man (ii: a ball of clay)

how nice not to have to live
surrounded by everything we have broken:

our failures

our embarrassments

the curio shelf i made in grade 10 shop class
in spite of having no curios
no plans to acquire
no patience for right angles.

the ashtray i made fathers day 1977
when smoking was in and podge was in
and i was old enough to know
the smile on dad's never-smoked-a-day-in-my-life face
was also broken a round bowl a lump of grey
a small 7 thumb-print for a cigarette to rest
along the edge. useless. ugly.

if dad had turned it over he would have seen
poet man as child had taken the compass
from a protractor set (buffalo instruments
blue plastic case with also
30/60 and 45 angles plus ruler inscribed
in both metric and imperial: the two official languages
of how-far-the-moon-from-here?)

and carved a heart.

the international symbol for
i-don't-know-how-to-say.

a rough but dutiful thank-you was fashioned from a tongue of clay.
poet man as child waited for elves to haul it away.

add it to the list of times an apology was owed to someone.

but who? and why? the problem has never been
how to speak, only what to say.

the problem has never been
how-do-i-feel-about-what-just-happened
but did-it-happen-that-way-at-all?

let's be honest here:

all i am sure of in that story
is a red picnic table under a tall hickory tree.

that, and maybe the protractor set.

the word "podge" has the ring of truth
and so it stays.

the past is clay we mold and shape
to make our ugly useless gifts
and every broken thing we give away
is redeemed only by the heart we scratch beneath.

whoever the hell you are
reading these wasted broken words right now,
forget everything else i have written.
turn this poem over:

see? i love you, too.

poet man (i: a ball of string)

he is his cat.

he has this ball of string he bats about
worry is the word i'm looking for
i should go back and change line 2 but
part of me insists that every mistake
is a pure form of utterance
and every revision a lie
calculated to hide the honest ugly
of my mind. so as i was saying

he worries

this ball of string this scrap of cloth
this little nothing fished from under the sofa
where only tiny claws could reach
where no-one ever vacuums.
he has it. he worries it.
he worries he might actually be

normal.

that all this restless energy
this industrious assiduous creativity is just
an act he puts on
like a towel a scrap tied around his throat
to make a hero cape. poet man!
but all the world knows. and is laughing at
the underpants on the outside.

he worries--like i said--that he might just be
normal.

do normal people worry this? that they are
what they are? the fact that he worries
this ball of thread itself suggests that

normal

is not whatever he is
which leads to the counter-concern
that he is weird.
that all this sea of sounds is just
the thump of a poorly tuned engine
the whining friction of a fan belt turned too tight.

how comforting to live in a binary world
where everything not in is out
and everything not right is just
a short trip away from the curb
where garbage elves will whisk it away
to faerie land.