SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
A poem that does not follow a consistent meter or rhyme scheme in its structure.
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —
& the shadow kept arriving in segments,
cold currents pushed minerals
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
the re-invention of oneself
through the tongues of whispering mountains
the re-arrangement of the universe
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
sometimes I find myself
weeping
at the oddest moment
Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There…
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
For Hetti Corea, 8 years old
‘The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical
…
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
You are still on the highway and the great light of
noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled
shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of
arsenic in calculators, mercury in felt
hats, mad as a poisoned hatter
pyrophoric undercurrent in mundane
It was down that road he brought me, still
in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,
but it did feel expected. The way you…
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
Today doves flew from my head
and my hair grew
the longing is gone from my body
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
dont worry yr eyes
dont worry yr brain man th snow is
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
