SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
A poem that does not follow a consistent meter or rhyme scheme in its structure.
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
Backward & down into inbetween as Vicki says. Or as Robin teaches
the gap, from which all things emerge. A left
handed…
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some …
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot…
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
Sometimes a voice — have you heard this? —
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
Constantly risking absurdity
…
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.”
Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand,
1
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands
from under the clouds where I write the first poem
its brown warmth now that we recognize them
In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.
Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a…
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish
For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’tis autumn
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into…
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and…
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
What if the sun comes out
And the new furrows do not look smeared?
This is April, and the sumach candles
