PEOPLE'S CHOICE
SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
A poem that does not follow a consistent meter or rhyme scheme in its structure.
On TV it looked like a high-speed photo of a milk drop
the dying leader of the Pana Wave laboratory cult smack in the
centre.
Acres of white cloth streamered his followers, who
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
After the celebrations,
people, TV channels, telephones,
the year’s recently-corrected digit
finally falls asleep.
Between the final night and the first dawn
a jagged piece of sky
That feeling of my soul getting yanked
I wonder where my soul hides when I’m sick
My heart feels as if it’s getting beat up
Is it because the restless ocean is clumping up?
An eagle egg fell into a farmer’s chicken shed
and when it hatched the farmer gave it chicken feed
even though he was the king of birds. The farmer
clipped the eaglet’s princely beak and raised him
I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you —
Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.
I was a kid other kids’
parents gossiped about.
They told their children
what I was: too negative.
I get it. Fair to fear
contagion of bad attitudes,
You’ve changed.
You used to be so
and now you’re all
like, you’ve transformed
I don’t know how to describe
it’s like
you don’t like canasta anymore
you text IN ALL CAPS
my friends, my sweet barbarians,
there is that hunger which is not for food —
but an eye at the navel turns the appetite
A ruthless catalog of sorrows:years in front of the screen, diplomas before jobs,and languages—all that torture—now ranged under Languages.Where are all the wasted days? And the nights
It turns out however that I was deeplyMistaken about the end of the world
The summer she turned seven
they gave her a wooden pencil case
with a pencil and eraser.
The pencil, so she could gnaw the lead
until she found the vagus nerve
of the word.
Some need some Body
or more to ape sweat
on some site. Bloody
purl or dirty spit
hocked up for to show
who gets eaten. Rig
Body up. Bough bow
to breeze a lazed jig
Even staring out the window is changed,
the private peak above it all brought down
with the erosion of the poise between
the viewable and the mused unseen.
Dissolution so nearly changeless as not
You forget the lines smells colors and soundssight weakens hearing fades simple pleasures passyou lift your face and hands toward your soulbut to high and unreachable summits it soars
Won’t let your bad self.
Let go of your old debt.
Tiring of your old self.
Won’t let your made bed.
Let your bad blood let.
Your grown debt get.
On the black wet branches of the linden,
still clinging to the umber leaves of late fall,
two crows land. They say, Stop, and still I want
to make them into something they are not.
Good Friday, the day they delivered
that sad bouquet, was the day our cat
ran out on the road and failed to look
both ways. I’d stashed the candy eggs
under the sink, in their pink raffia nests,
& if you follow these ants
they’ll lead you back to
stone tablets
an older desert
where black bones
once buried are
now words whereI wave to you
at 2:34 am they survived
I am held within these claims: that I have kissed unlucky
things, buried pets, eaten sugar-free ice cream, endured a first
blood test, made friends without benefits, and lost them
The sky was never my court date.
If I died once. If I left the body.
Habeas corpus.
This is not my grave.
The value in a dead woman
That red bicycle left in an alley near the Ponte Vecchio,I claim; I claim its elongated shadow, ship crested onstacked crates; I claim the sour-mouth Arno and the stonearch bending sunlight on vanished medieval fairs;
We have no need
for scientists to
tell us things
we already
know
like the
sea is
rising
and the
water is
getting warm.
My imaginary brother speaks of our migration and history,how time pulses like the green waterin the South Saskatchewan that sputters by our home,success measured in how still he’d lie after wandering
It was clearly understood,
there was no ownership of land,
so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.
My water from the river and my nitrogen,
a buffalo protein.
Poems about night
and related poems. Paintings
about night,
sleep, death, and
in the broadest conception
of black music, which is the
truest conception of black
music, black music can't be
conceived. a music of covers,
black music covers, and cover
It is 2005, just before landfall.
Here I am, a labyrinth, and I am a mess.
Sunbeams aren’t something I notice.
Mostly it’s my own breasts, bobbing with effort
like I’m a man writing the story of a woman
and the way her nipples strain politely
i know she wants me
by her side in sleep. i do not really ask her to stay,
only imply she is invited. i speak
This is a prayer for the dead and dying -
and those that may never know a life on the outside
I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave -
I have so many now.
There’s one where we were giants, playing with our size by falling over
houses and trees, laughing.
There’s another where I was racing the old ones in a game, and we stopped
it’s hard to feel power from my ancestors when i don’t know
who they are,
where they come from,
what their stories are
we share blood
blood shares memory
what a glory feeling it is to sit in the sun by the oceanside
as tulugait and naujait sing circling above
and scrape skins with centuries of arnait guiding my ulu
commencing to the place of beginning;
emptying;
in 1959 the South Saskatchewan river was dammed;
forever altering the boundary of Treaty no. 6;
it is friday. we have come
to the paying of the bills.
all week you have stood in my dreams
like a ghost, asking for more time
but today is payday, payday old man;
my mother’s hand opens in her early grave
I
some towers are made of cladding
some made of ivory
some burn in the night
some built by slaves
wind rushes through coarse hair
Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-
gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and
It takes eight matches, a burnt thumb, and a quick Google search
to light the sweetgrass braid Mom scored for me from an elder
at work. Always use matches, she said. Spirit likes matches.
Do you speak your language?
I stare — I just said: how are you?
I thought English was my language
apparently it isn’t
I thought Halkomelem was gibberish
the devil’s language
What struck me first was the sheer numbers, queers everywhere.
Battalions of sailors and infantry, proud in their uniforms.
Eventually, I made uneasy peace with this equal right.
…
on the day the chief of kâ-awâsis announces they have confirmed 751
bodies in unmarked graves outside the residential “school” in their
community, i google things like:
