SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
I understand you.
I get what you’re trying to say.
What you’re trying to say is you want me to get it.
I get it. You want me
to understand. You want me to know
(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)
if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to
outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization
— say the names say the names
and listen to yourself
an echo in the mountains
Tulameen Tulameen
say them like your soul
was listening and overhearing
and you dreamed you dreamed
Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips, decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.
As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
(a twelve-tone poem)
trite yap show
rosy twit heap
A thousand martyrs I have made,
All sacrific’d to my desire;
A thousand beauties have betray’d,
Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid
the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf
might see it all as too hesitant for truth
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
i am writing to tell you
that yes, indeed,
we have noticed
Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of
…
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
Today doves flew from my head
and my hair grew
the longing is gone from my body
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…
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
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…
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair,
And gaze upon her smile;
Seem as you drank the very air
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Wife and servant are the same,
But only differ in the name:
For when that fatal knot is tied,
Lord of my heart’s elation,
Spirit of things unseen,
Be thou my aspiration
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
