Poems

Nuisance

Only the thickness of log

and triple-paned glass

between my children and

the open maw

of a bear.

I slip warm chocolate chip

cookies from the pan

Nocturne for a Moving Train

The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window

of a night train were

the saddest trees.

They seemed about to speak,

then—

An Online Friend Dies Somewhere Outside the Internet

Freezes, goes blue screen, shuts down. Dead pixel, dark.

Ghost echoes, lossy in the source code. Time zones away,

people who have actually shaken hands with my online friend

A History of Houses Built Out of Spite

The Young Poets of Winnipeg

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

Sonnet XV: When I Consider everything that Grows

When I consider everything that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment,

That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

A Virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.

I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,

For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;

Wet Market

From youth I was taught that fresh meant alive

until the moment you buy it                                   My mother

The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

The Dead

How great unto the living seem the dead!

How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;

How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

I Am

I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes —

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

Insomnia

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.

Ornithology

There's no time to think

about the feathered creature I'll become.

Time is an unsavored

mouthful. It's time who chews you up.

Yesterday I lost a bunch of feathers and

some teeth.

Adam Father

He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear

on sun-fermented garbage.

Hungover and queasy and riled up by

bees.

Nothing going well today, he moans,

life being short and the craft, ah, long.

Opus 75, Sestina in B-flat for the Glockenspiel

In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl

sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.

She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand

Sweet Like a Crow

For Hetti Corea, 8 years old

‘The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical

…

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

Family History

Only the beginning is true.

There was an island

and an orphanage

and a boy.

There was a train and a country

to cross.

Through Time and Bitter Distance

Unknown to you, I walk the cheerless shore.

The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine

May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war,

Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine,

In Jerusalem

In Jerusalem, and I mean within the ancient walls,

I walk from one epoch to another without a memory

to guide me. The prophets over there are sharing

the history of the holy ... ascending to heaven

Tractatus

The sun gave our shoulder blades ulu-shaped burns, and the sun gives nothing to our sort

I sleep now, and furiously

Clouds excreted shadows on the shoreline, and there were no clouds

Claim Laid

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 - 

The Swimmer’s Moment

For everyone

The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

With the Dying of the Light

I recited to him,

                      Now as I was young and easy,

and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,

A Stone Diary

At the beginning I noticed

the huge stones on my path

I knew instinctively

On the Last Day

I left the protection 

of my plan & my 

thinking. I let my self

go. Is this hope I

thought. Light fled.

We have a world

to lose I thought.

Summer fled. The

It Couldn’t Be Done

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done

But he with a chuckle replied

That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one

Kitchen Story

My mothers says she has something to tell me,

turns to me from the stove where potatoes

boil and bump in the pot

I stand still to hear, a bundle of forks

in my hand for the table

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

The Last Laugh

‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.

Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,

The Bullets chirped — In vain! vain! vain!

Wow! You’ve Changed

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

Unfledged

Weekends too my father roofed poor neighborhoods,

at prices only his back could carry

into profit.  In the name of labor’s

virtue—or was it another bill collector’s callous

Life in a Love

Escape me?

Never —

Beloved!

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From Verso 4

I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags…

A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales

I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.

I have discovered something, an entirely new species

with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy

with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided