that phukker in 6-0-7!

Turn down your $@#$ music!!!!!

this is a poem (not peom), off the cuff :)

Amid the wavering providence a better sense of an autumnal breeze,
a wish for the aching sidewalk, for the ropes that dangle along the edges
of an austere building... Who climbs here?
Concrete? Young girls scarcely aware of their adolescence,
boys with flowered shirts, black boots, hanging out at school doors,
or is it that groping actor pretending the show must always go on?
It's teaching now, September: light (emaciated) descends,
the rope swings out of necessity, out of respite for commercial-like gurus,
mentors, and therapists who lock and unlock the discarded spirit,
the import of cold unadvertised sex... Perhaps it is only those
who dream of hot rain, an open forest or a discrete library desk,
who know the wind can be framed like the painted tips
of a terraced sun. I remember a place not far from here,
a meeting was arranged then, and she said within the silence that engulfed us,
there is no theatre among the clouds. She didn't pause to look at the sky...
The motioning of her hands, first there around the knee, moved upwards,
like a spine perpetually awake, then twirling idly amongst the sutures of the skull.
I remember nothing that happened next, not even the sharp utterings of a name.
Maybe syllables, nor the combination of letters S and Z,
are not part of a dream. To think of her now
is to pass through an open window onto the tops of a tree,
onto a limb of whitewashed gargoyles soaring from a newly restored church,
a bicycle ride going from sunshine to snow, flakes filling the canals,
the human body casting itself endlessly onward,
intricate colours staked out in skin and hair, in eyes that bloom and blink...
What happens here when ropes are no longer climbed,
when there's no building to hide behind? Who will watch that cherished
adolescent flesh, that goddess in the window who doesn't need a plastic sheen?

Within me, (like fate lacking in temperature), the vision is a perpetual display,
a sign without time or place. And it arises again, with a little sound,
haze of noise and isolation, how long ago did she leave, did the empty chaos
bring me back to years that digest the soul? I've heard introductions before,
phrases that do not last, rumours: the oh-my-gods
of adolescence that everyone desires because nothing is better
than rising from the dead. Everything else, like a mountain or affection,
has an ebb greater than knowledge, a vast plucking we cannot disturb.
Yet I'm only one in a contingent of disappointed men,
a perverted involuntary group that cannot leave the hammers and scaffolds
of this old church. I only whisper to a gathering wind, years are balloons you cannot burst.
From time to time, as she would say, there is only the option of floating away,
the nudity of air and a differing false sense: a star that hangs beneath a fountain
like a goddess understanding the breadth of her own fleece. Another day has passed,
has grown within the doldrums of that same ancient myth. Another night ascends,
and somewhere, (perhaps the other side of this world), the child in her womb
is as withered as skin devoid of a dream, my face a futile sleep.


*** -- poem in progress, please return as it grows, changes, morphs -- ***
*** -- D U N perhaps? not quite as cheerful as my original intent --- ***

woman in heels, a car.

It happens so fast... morning becomes morning, then another... people turn from stone to styrofoam, the door, the floor, and the window blinds become as plain as a swishing of gravel on a country road. Somewhere the sun is also rising (Hemingway?)... and not settling on a busy urban road, a woman in a blue dress, light blue heels, jumping between two bikes into the centre lane. A woman rushing for a streetcar that has already gone by... a woman who doesn't know how close she has come to my cars' dark blue hood, its first scratch?

No idea what she was thinking, but for the second time in a week I've had someone run out in front of me forcing me to be quick with the brake... I spose it's good for both of them that I no longer drive like a teenager (did I ever?) and that I'm one of the better drivers on this planet, Malta and Poland included, lol!

That's it for today. Oh wait, almost forgot my great run workout... 6 x "the lake loop" (progressive, on varying rest, 2:05, 2:02, 2:00, 2:01, 1:58, 1:52 -- LAST ONE was a "race" with Rachael, I won, jk :) Bonsoir!

early riser... no reason for this, or any other title **he says, smirkingly**

Ha! For reasons of inexplicable affection, dreams of women in white dresses dancing on a sandy-brown arena floor, **Szia!!!** this morning amid humanity's austere reality, dark skies, floods, I've pushed away all sense of despondency... I've stepped into the black tuxedo. Does this mean happiness is an eager addition to the usual morning whirrs?

Hmmmmm.... truthfully, I'm trying to avoid the seasonal affectations that follow Labour Day? Why is there such a lack of energy here, then, now? It seems the same contemplations (regressions) rise like holiday gas prices every year at this time... you'd think I'd be shrewd enough to encourage a different feeling (feelings) *lowers his eyes briefly, but refuses to shrug the shoulders*, to sing a more ebuillent tune. And you'd think **rolling eyes severly** that the fragments of the past couldn't coalesce into a barrier that hinders light from the future, light, salience... Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, maybe I awoke too early this morning... before the end of that dream, the glorious sunrise.

* happy ending *

perhaps there's no way to deviate from lifes' normal conclusions.
nothing interesting has happened recently... a walk in the woods
is more peaceful than a television reporter repeating blurbs as stagnant
as water in New Orleans old town. what a mess this is?

what morbid aversions? I see the happy ending is only a vague myth
recounted with impractical myrth... how blissful the sides of a sandy hill
that lead to a clear unknowable lake, invisible rest... time to cease
this terminal post.

good weekend, **shrugs** (not really that bad of a mood?)

and this moment is gone...

you've taken it for what it is worth.
you've taken it for the architect of epochs, for what is granted
in that time. you look, doubtingly, at the duty of your own shelter,
at nothing more than refuge (not even what is known about the self).
they say, you "will live to an old age if you do not see
your own attraction". they feed you with love and other versions of despair.
you do not flinch. your passion is immune to the birth of a different story.
you are a body fashioned out of clay... your likeness evokes a bottomless lake,
dolphins, worms, and the victory of a daughter's handshake.
if a god or goddess abandoned you the darkest spider would not let
you hang. the unarmed mortality of "this moment", what they might call
"asking the heavens for a joyous vengeance", would see you into hiding,
into a forest or a sea, into a pocket of unopposed air... and you,
taking everything for what it is worth,
would transfer the weight of bones and fleece, golden anthems,
and you would build blossoms of fragrant silk, veins that splash
like a waterfalls' circumference. you would leave no vague uncertainty,
your charm would revolve like an endless planet...
because of the narrow path between orbits you would inherit
a mother's greatest affliction. your beauty would never suffice.
cities, towns, and revolutions would degrade
the sin of a stone monument. a thunderbolt
would show no sign of jealousy. an inscription would read,
"she has punished me for having claimed to have loved her".

*** --- directed at no-one in particular --- ***

something innocuous -- idkw -- *cough*, just pluggin' away *shrug* i guess

My Slanguage Profile

Aussie Slang: 75%
Canadian Slang: 75%
British Slang: 50%
New England Slang: 50%
Prison Slang: 25%
Victorian Slang: 25%
Southern Slang: 0%

I forget where I pulled this from... some other blog I guess...
It must mean I isn't from the south, ain't that right Saving Sweetness.
Haven't done the weird thing yet either.

creating an image, a new regime, perhaps?

`
Don't ask to compare tragedies, don't ask me for a death toll either. Don't ask for categories that have numbers fitting together like sections of an antique cabinet. Let the fin-de-siecle fuels run beneath this road... let prices rise, flood waters? I'm thinking of New Orleans now, of tsunamis past and devastating, I'm thinking I couldn't outrun any of them **wink** **groan, Irving, Julio ** So what do we regard as our immunity to suffering? Is the greater good (as some would call it) offset by the greater "bad"? What I mean is, does it matter how many people are affected by a certain event? Any loss of life, I believe, is a tragedy, any disappearance of a child, even that isn't on the front page of a newspaper, is distressing too... so what good is the hyperbolic media notion that leads every story with "... the death toll is climbing..." Is that really all that we want to know? Wasn't the tsunami bad enough when "only" 15,000 people had died...

Hmmmmm.... I think this subject is too morbid, these images too. What regime, I wonder, could I create that wouldn't have to breathe off this strangulated sensationalism... Perhaps I'm living too far away from everything... I'm too distant from any tragedy, and maybe if anything like this happened to me I would want the world to know I didn't die without counting.

when she's eating Caesar Salad

Is it me, a smirk on the sidewalk,
a pair of hands glancing at an eyepatch'd face?
Is it the white lights of a small wagon, reversing,
or the windows in a restaurant
that always disappear... Stars are peeled
like radishes, like little brooms in a Grand Hall
before a wedding reception. Is it her, hers?
A hint of maternal grace wiping honey from a fingernail,
an axe, a slice, an open wound? What is it
that hinges our devotion? I'm betting
on something that could lean beneath a womb,
a promise that doesn't protest...
a dream upheld by the nipples and hearts
of triple-washed vegetables. Where is a world
that doesn't hedge its own motion? A conqueror
who prays (not preys) and passes the living into death.
Where do her eyes shift? Her lashes blink... Inside,
in the moment when motion is decided she always faces
into the room, she traps grapes and napkins like a princess
usurping a raised sword from a knight...
She measures the soul of a knife-edge, the fat of romance,
she dresses a sandal with toes that abolish a stained spot
on an old carpet, a Naricissistic memory?
She asks, "what would you be doing if I wasn't here?"
The clothes she once disowned disintegrate
from her shoulders, her skin is a garden, an oasis,
a zoo... perhaps an emu or a polished flower for the expression
of bees and spiders: thoughts carving
the beauty of this view... Where else can I stare?
What petals will adapt like the supple scrubbing of her tongue?
What Flora doesn't cut our taste buds?
On that white tablecloth her bones are groping
a dead meal, cutlery, saliva smelling the vines,
olives, unpeeled onions, and milk chosen
from the right teat. She doesn't shriek
when angels pile rodents in the laneway: "oh,"
she says, "those are not for us to dispose of...",
to remember. She loosens her belt with the painting
of dour pink fingernails, she snuggles into her chair,
as though the promise of being
has yet to render this moment with more meaning.
She chews loudly. A moth flickers like darkness
at the ending of the life of an unwilling martyr...
a child on the sidewalk acting like there is no bedtime,
another glass of exhausted wine,
a third course, and in my throat the humming
of a fugitive vanishes in a paradisiacal flood.

water street, a poem taken from SALVAGE

~
3. St. John’s 2003

Water Street, above, (alone), watching the weather smolder in all directions. To the north, and out of view, a set of earlobes pretends they cannot hear, dusk, an embryo? The horizon beginning to heal, waiting on the doorstep for a maternal breeze: a tinting of birth, separation, a trace that the earlobes and the sounds of the city that no one listens to, cannot see. A young flower submerged beneath a potted maple… A stroke of unfamiliar language, an immense thought: how it is that we are all still here? That the line on a cracked sidewalk matches a drainpipe between two cafés?

Water Street, swaggering like a deck of cards, a set of keys bulging the front pocket in old jeans, a stitch already tight… A man standing in a number of spots, simultaneously, carries nothing but an untenable hum, yet he doesn't stumble. And he says all the right things, how are you today, sir? I’m a lawyer can I take your case? Resilience is as fleeting as a splash from a small puddle, a sip of beer, or a slip of the wrist that hides the painters’ keel…

Water Street, seaweed? What else would one expect? Bars and traffic lights, pastels courting newspaper boxes like grainy streaks on a shop window… Today, the damage has become washed and dried, needed, and the bakery on the corner delivers loaves to fishing boats preparing for a week away. Their long assail, the massing sea. Hills that rise to an insufficient green, red columns floating like an apple peel near an unclean sink… how is that roads always turn light brown and windows have holes that totter and bounce within their black frames? Maybe the flickering face has hands to rest in, a dark wall in the sky that brushes a distant mountain with bristles unraveling. There’s history above the clouds, (the canvass)… a fold of skin that falls like the bottom jaw of a long-forgotten explorer, a new cove, an apartment in the south of the city getting noticed by the corner of an untrained eye.

hit INTO

So this is our team name, HIT into, hit in TWO? Our team... light blue shirts, team, as in mates. Old meets new, meets young and wreckless, Art Titus, grab the railing, there's pills for that... *wink* Here is a picture of us on the 6th green, getting ready for an EAGLE!! As I said, hit in TWO! Well, we didn't quite make 3 :((( or four, fore, hit INTO again. I'd say it was blasphemous, not-so-good samaritan robbery. We did hit the hole three times in six tries though :0 From there it was all downhill, until the back nine of course where the holes start climbing again, and that's when we made our move... first birdie, 12th hole, short par 4, beautiful pitch by mees-elf, 5 and a feet, what a feat! Next hole, even feat-ier, driven to the green by an ex-pro (shop worker, haha!). Ziggy on the ground in beer cart girl agony. Another EAGLE goes begging!!! How can I leave a putt like that short... then again, next tee, HIT INTO, twice, come on ya FOUR-EYED-NICKABEET BOTTLE-EATER FREAK! Just kidding, love ya like a bounced check, have you ever played KILL THE BUTTS! No, it's not an ANTI-smoking campaign. Not a beer-cart-girl looking death mulled over... lit her... sweet but not feeling so aces today. I don't know but if she weren't serving drinks I'd think she'd probably tell me I'm using too much uPPer caSe, punctuation too! Luv ya like an afternoon pale fog :))) LMAO!

Alright well... I think the rest of the round might bore you into divoted submission, so I'll just say that we birdied the last hole (my beautiful SW to 12 feet, Nephew Pat's putt, Rosey's drive too, how could I forget such teamwork?) in front of all the other gophers, received a big rousing rousing, rising ovation... or polite applause, is it really polite if you should receive the clapping of something more??? HMMMM... the rest of the evening went quickly and without much distraction. Winners and trophies were announced, the food was delved into, was pretty good according to most (not so good according to that rare gem, well done!)... and as you can tell by this, (or that picture above of a WINNER with SOME prizes), the wind had come up and everything was a little coooooollllerrrrrrrrrr! Some were cooler than others, some people's golf balls went farther downhill than uphill too, ha ha, LMAO! As it was, we listened to FIX YOU on the way home at least three times... and went to sleep motionlessly.

more balls. swivelling torsos?

FGT this weekend. Very important to be prepared... to have patience,
to have a good time!!!

I shall return with PICs and stories I hope.

Mika out.

"I never get in trouble..."

mmmm... okay, so it isn't me that belongs to this phrase,
but someone a little younger (and cuter?), someone who has surrounded herself with flits of affection and nonchalance... someone in a town that devours its own youthful intelligence like a river gorge in the south of France swallows the fragrance of great wine. They say every town has a label, a cave perhaps, so maybe every street in these towns has its own chimney of good smoke, a sign of the cloud, or a cough.

It may not be the most crucial fact in her everyday existence but I bet that she (the one who couldn't get into trouble) could smile her way out of any situation, like if she danced naked on a cruise ship full of old Baptist ladies... or if she inhaled crystal meth outside a smalltown daycare in mid-morning daylight... huh? oh, u get the point? And you don't need to wonder how it is that some of the oldtimers (not me:) think that kids have it easy these days?

what play, what hardship!

mmmm... I think, therefore I suppose, if I could ever have mouthed those words veraciously (in that order too) then I might feel her inexcusable debris of insouciance. But would i have learned less at an earlier age? Would I just go on feeling the harmlessness of my actions?

After all, it's been a while since J. decked me, figuratively, (so that part is not really funny), and it's been even longer since I sat warm-blooded in the back of a police car! LMAO!

I guess time is a boundary that changes, that persuades and erodes the delicate balance of experience. And her? Well, I know she rocks, and she's a Superstar Sweetie but maybe she needs a good little talking to... a lesson in quandary dynamics?

for my NB sweetheart: a ray of sunshine and a lather of spit.

Sprinkling the anger from your shoulder-bladed gold. Queen?
What's happened before us would bring drones from a crowd
if a crowd or tiara were here. How naughty the swing of a weapon
and pulses of air: diamonds engaging the lollipop swords,
saliva held in esteem, as understood as the slate steps of a Country Club,
Held? A reception whose blades you've sown (as though grass
through the tip of a unicorns' horn), yet you've taken more than you need
and written liqueur and lipstick on the same napkin -- what mingling sense
does the meadow procure from another field,
another square on the scorecard? Oh, you've wished,
how those bouncing gods would fulfill their own intended wings,
buffeting pores, sweat glistening amid a mountainous haze.
Tomorrow, they say, the clouds won't form
the spattering torrent of cliché, of rubrical muse
and storms that send us towards the nape of a refuge
primping the flowers that seal your fate: an evening in white, annuals pulled
from the sides of an aisle, blooms that know every sequence equals the equation
of a sphere, of words like four plus three. Fives.
Tables full of billiard balls colliding for those unnumbered guests.
Destiny believing they couldn't arrive, and Milosz translating a cure
for the whimsy of golf and Earthly Delight,
"how lightly they walk", how constant "the hands that march in early morning"
as if wresting the soul and the "onset of an another world".
Risk, they say, is a provision of Hell, is a border that drops
like the slumber of a remembered child, a white line, a stake that leans
beneath the paint. Only here, where things like reflection and mascara persist,
where the radiant face of imagination spares us
from entering the hazardous bliss, we wait for our tee time.

*** -- a poem taken from the edge of the seventh hole, for KA in BURLINGTON!

mon ami Emese...

So we met while running for an early train that was whistling to leave.
She lives in a faraway land (city), she writes often, has a boyfriend
and a beautiful sense of knowing what I'm feeling. I'm not jealous of him
nor filled with the multitudes of envious incompletion...
because... she is listening, she waits for someone who is lost,
she says, "I am the marigolds' stem, inhabit me".

commentary...

Why is the world so bleak?

Of course not. Why am I so sad? Ha ha... isn't it humour that delegates hope?
I'm not so macro-emotional with my questions (macrocephalous maybe), and I don't see the need to comment on the whys and whines of any understanding. As far as I can tell there is no reason for that final appreciation and no order to the randomness of global remorse.

Do I comment on those seemingly greater things?

Maybe, sometimes it's just an observation and a way to avoid the inevitable plunge, the cold heart of oblivion. Right now what I need (besides her :) is some pics from my long-weekend-fantastic... perhaps you've read the post below, and didn't understand any of it?

A bientot mes amis!

THE new NORMAL? or a gift?

Just a catchphrase basin, ravine maybe? Frenzy
of water and remedial light... they think it's all
so relevant -flashes- humid skies swirling above oceans
warmed and wrinkled by a humane breeze. Anchors skulking
away, below the surface! I would never know the bombing
gods ("we trust") could feel so helpless,
so divine in the mirror of their Opposition?
I'm confused, an epochal pool, (not liquid perhaps),
though stagnant as a recent flood... what if they
crossed our shallow fateful river, would this theme
have never occurred before?

I'm not at all political. I'm not corrupt
or bemused with the role of the catchphrase medium.
I work in a garden, I plant trees near a vacant
shoreline yet I'm not imposing any special change in habits,
dreams, or irony either. I prefer less revokable modes,
like knowing the hours of a village library,
the striations of an oak branch stuck in a forested tree.
I know a quote loosely translated from a Milosz poem,
a (Gift), he would say, on which to end:

"There is nothing on earth I wish to possess.
There is no one who knows the worth of my envy.
Whatever evil I have suffered, I forgot. To think
that once I was the same man who didn't suffer
any embarrassment. In my body I felt no pain.
When straightened, I saw a blue sea and flagrant sails."

Dodge-ball

So... the rules, though they contain good memories of childhood, seem open to interpretation. the players... open to interpretation too perhaps. the referree well he's a classy guy, fair as a bowl of muslix with skim milk. and the dog-gone frivolity is a spoon chasing that last platform of grain. it's good to mix sheer merriment with the seriousness of a game, do you want to see a picture of this spontaneous ritual?

Soon :)) Mika out...

a sphere, a poem, and... we're PARTYIN'

arrive. divide the lesser evil of exhaustion, anticipation, and pure genius to come up with something as simple as the first indulgent dip in a cooler-than-it-was-yesterday lake. still arriving, recalling that breeze many years ago, that first sip of a sumptuous lounge... that slumbering chair, that part of a glowing sphere (un ballon-disco, Steph might say) that one doesn't always know or gather around. perhaps the other breezes have gone... oh, they think, the world revolves about us, our instant gracious pleasures, but here between the branches and paths that lead to a conscious beach there is no need for momentary conditions. states of mind and measure colliding like small rounded stones beneath the afternoon waves... stones, as small as perfect sand, white lace, the distant southern shore of familiar lakes enduring before sunset. arrived. My own waving, my own unwavering hope (d'accord, Steph might say), I am here. I walk slowly, and the bygone life seems as certain as a tethered road, I walk, and the people who live here, welcome me, talking openly of their poetic friends. Set free. Young again, at tables dug into weathered shores, at the prudent squint of a generous gift, at a dream, at year after year of a bonfire where the world could never end. A forest of black wood clinging to the tongue of a lake I am willing to taste... Greeting. Dreams that talk of tangible escapes. A boulder outgrown. A question, The Don might say, a quest, but why do we stand and why do we linger here? There is another place, somewhere more ancient than a gust of wind, a cloud, an old coin that was never exchanged. We all have a reason to lament! North from here, old railway lines, shouts of conducted ghosts and scenes engraved by an echo envious urban foes might allow... purchase? Paddles too, and a longing to just BE, to flower like those who have always been here. Hypothesis. Resurrection of return, familiar place and people, the creaking of an old door, 1951 perhaps, or 26, or a billion beyond time instances, the center of all flesh? or Luke the Apostle handing his child a scorpion when asked for an egg, lungs and liver heralding the absence of pain, a shaking of all hands, an atlas for the power of a sky that cannot be pretended. Greeted. The notion of all equations ceasing to exist. A chorus repeated like words under duress befelling another prophet whose armour pulsates at the highest of beats (roll of the eyes), stage (wink), pages? Lance look what the child has read! There is honour among plants, among Isabel's grooved thorns. There is beauty in the bottom bunk. There is a scintillating myth, a moral fibre cleansed of any evil that remained. Difference. Feeling the flush of a breeze when the water is warmer than the air, baptized by an eternal coccoon, garrulous worm. The serpent again. And the parable never ends, the parable "cannot get up and give you anything". And Dee says what if you were the last person on earth and you knew you hadn't long to survive, what would you do, (how would you know?), where would you go? And Dee says this is where she'd come, where Daedelus' plane would set her down, floating towards the raft, and Dee says she wouldn't want to die in a plane crash or even a single car accident. Laughter has a toe in the sand, fresh liqueur, and a dog that pees on you. A dog that yawns more than it barks, that knows you are not looking. More people too. More arms and bones and mouths, more tints of foreheads and labyrynth eyes (so blue, Steph might say). At once the table is clean and full, wine sharing its preserve, its grief and laughter uncorked, oh how time has just begun. A bottle for me, she might say. She, this time? To what end a practical dove, a guffaw! Cold air settling among the coals and luminous hearts... the moon is a likeable device, escape, and sometime later the night's bonfire flutters on and feathers to an end! day too, a saturnal peace ringing like the cool edges of outer space, degrees of serenity... creaking of doors (upstairs, bro says a concave hello). first one to rise, sun warming a square of sand where the volleyball court will settle later in the dawn, land? mist appearing like a fog, (un rêve Steph might say if she weren't asleep), eyes not opening as fully as a mindful trance, eyes like bottles scattered though not yet disposed, those half-full stray ones leaning in the sand thinking they've survived and are hidden from a relentless captor, all of the others bowing to a more mortal horizontal end. the chairs are wet. dew has a way of finding the lowest places... dew? It must be aware yet petrified by what it is, how it forms and remains, the unsuspecting wanderer, melting fleece. Jason, how cold was the Northern air? how hot the cauldron of Medea's rage? Simultaneous refreshment from grapes and Graecian woes --- single digit alarm and heat rising from the lake: all the alcohol that warmed us in the evening declares we were drunk and that no other verdict will ever exist! Dionysus, we are not guilty. We are culpable of nothing other than destiny being impaled! This is the liver, the life. These are my lungs, my running shoes and socks that I plan to wear, timing is proof enough, is a heartbeat set aside for now, like a perfect flat sea, a coastline, the delicate middle of the Mexican Gulf, an oil platform and three ducks suddenly pecking between the toes. I've watched them arrive... I've named them after three of my favorite roads (Tiny Beaches, Ul. Piastow, and La Rambla). La Rambla is the least afraid, carries a smirk and has three pecks before going for the emptiness of my hands... Tiny Beaches isn't too far behind, is peckish too, but Ul. Piastow moves much slower, seems older and stands as though waiting on guard. I return to the cottage for some bread, I run all morning with a kind-of amused glance, a sip of G&T along an appreciative shoreline. I swallow pieces of a hot dog bun, sand and water inveigle me. I return twice without the knowledge of hope or experimentation, without knowing which couch I would have preferred, which piece of meat or unbuttered grain (êtes vous heureux? Steph might ask). The panic of my abrupt discoveries would leave me, I would clean the sand, and the chairs that know desire cannot be overwhelmed by suffering. I would expect no meal, no reward. Later on someone will join me, a dog that scratches maybe, or a cultured bee hunting for something I have already poured from my loins! A queen. A worker. We are all tied to distinctions of colour, gravity, and graves. We are all destined to return, to doubt. What if, Sharon would say, that hill didn't move? I am alone. I have piled wood by the sauna, have emptied glasses and their sticky remains. What comes of nothing is nothing but thirst. We've all believed in a different god, in something more simple, one foot in front of the other? The fear is when you stumble, when a stick cuts you from below... ah yes, there is always time for a game, a seven iron or a wedge, and the disruption of a sterile factory, feathers. oh the players! They are phantoms who cannot be praised enough... watch, from here, from warm lugubrious wood, from the top of a building in one of Budapest's trampled squares. Where am I going now? home to Munich, or somewhere I haven't gone? What brave absurdity brought me this sham of a keyboard? I was talking about a god (n'est-ce pas? Steph would cajole.), I was praying for less storms, less bends in the atmosphere, yet it seems there are too many comparisons here. I am relaxed now, counting the judgements I needn't exploit: the skin on an onion that leaves no sentiment, Cebula from a foreign tongue. I don't care if anyone understands -- THIS(?), this is only an exercise, a work-out perhaps, and the weekend I describe has swam and paddled past many seas, has begun to imbibe like an afternoon amid a faraway reverent throng. What's for dinner the reader might say, how many people for your table? glasses for wine? Oh it's true, I never need understanding, I never find gold or spices like the Marco Polo of Strausbourg, the sailing spaghetti Bolognaise, but what if this meat were maddening? How many underlings would understand the underground is undergoing an undetermined and underhanded amount (of) undergrowth? HaHa, LMAO! And you thought I was only doing the crossword. 23 across: beginning of a quote by yet another American hoo-haa foreign exploder! Infamous hehe! Getting giddy perhaps, watching for the dog that likes to pee on people and chairs, only the dry ones too! 11 down: SPHERE! I'm watching Bill's shoulder as it has a projection of the horizon and his brother's helicopter rides. do you know what acrylic lightbulb just went out behind the red felt ropes of the gallery. oh my, this landscape is composure. (77 across: fleur de ____, Steph might know). There's no hiding the wind or bad roads around Eagle Lake, gravel contusions, rutted slices of the city that do not stop for a poor stranded biker, age slowing down... canine pisser, HOC gradation? I'm at a loss for that which envelopes a long forgotten answer. Return to hot dogs and not enough buns. Like they say, the early duck gets the weiner? Ha ha! It must be the moment when a beer opens and all the girls in that Slovakian pub roll their eyes. Rolling, rolling, rollin' isn't that Will in the cabin with a piece of chalk, a golf-pencil holder, extra-curricular exam! I might fail too, I'm only an expert in meeting young women with boyfreinds (you'd like him, Emese might say). Jealous anyone? Oh I could go on forever, I could go on to forget my many generous loves, how temporarily moving they became, (anything else, Sarah might say, see you at the pool). The idea is to hide one's autobiographical pride, a swamp beneath a pine forest, a poem that returns from a patch of unlamentable dew:


Running the Coast

12. Lake B****, S******dge


Don't run anymore, quiet shoreline, lure of steam,
water warmer than air, nervous hand tightening the lace
in an old shoe: one of those not used on good pavement,
(in a race unknown?).

Don't listen to the eyes: blind as a mounted bass,
a cottage dim without movement or pearl-gray light
as still as the concrete intersection from which
you arrived.

Don't let the first few steps humble vermillion toes,
a coil of bark-black whiskers swept
by an onshore breeze, a bottle half-filled with smoke
and the testament of lungs.

Don't run anymore, and make your accomplices
say, "he wasn't here when we awoke!"
Let them smile and talk openly about pets and cars,
(metal and fur), about a synapse that never fades.

Let their voices divide the echoes of grateful tongues,
bread spackled by sand or a cocktail half-gone.
Don't stiffen the legs with calculations loosely held:
how far to go, how steep the hill that hasn't been made.



Interlude. Enter Louie? It must be evening again, and the worst game of billiards this side of the Wrzesnia train station. May I leave my back-pack here and search for the woman I love? Oh how contrite is the wounding of pride, the fangs of one's longest laments. I've read old poets and reviews of poems about clotheslines and crooked necks, I've returned to the scene of my only crime... what if I didn't really love her? Perhaps the wine has fleshed me out, has discarded my sanity and the remedy of a statue dedicated to Athena. Daphne was a nymph? Myrtle mortal in the temple of the Titans... clouds descending like ivy and a chariot drawn by panthers, wet souls, (il pleut, Steph might say)... and the wind so tempting. I've devoured a collage more suitable for Graustarkian eyes, romance, I've hitched a long untenable wagon. The wheels of lust and lariats guide sincere evidence, frightening imageries perhaps, but they say we can handle it. Grab the wheel and helm... and I awake again to another day, remember that last night I was walking the beach alone, under the influence of a greater sphere, under the cogs of mischief and surprise. The early morning is not as cold as anticipated, but it's cloudy again, brief glimpses of sun are culled from the trees behind the cottage. It's windy too, very much so, out of the south and east, not a good direction for these parts I believe. I'm thinking it's Sunday and somewhere, perhaps in an earlier time zone, people are planning a weekly guidance to the church or golf course. I'm thinking they don't have ducks pecking between their toes again. "Not so easy this time," I say to La Rambla, not so fast I say to Tiny Beaches, and what's wrong, why so melancholy? I say to Ul. Piastow... and it quacks in disbelief, disavowing my supposed superiority... and I return on the wide rambling path to the kitchen of the cottage thinking all the time of J., Sarah, Sylvia and Sara, and I remember Sylvia walking along a Northumberland Street sidewalk, smiling as she confessed to once picking her nose. She was wearing freshly plucked rose coloured pumps and a flower printed dress, lilacs maybe, and we were going to meet her father at a B&B near the university. The confession ended when she stepped on a piece of plywood that had been placed across the concrete, an orange cone on one end, construction perhaps, the plywood bent concavely and tilted towards the road. She slipped and yelled, her balance altered even more by the squeal of her voice and new shoes, I grabbed her hand and swung her safely around, and we fell together onto the grass on the other side --- she was on top, not dirty, and I was wearing a good white shirt (green tie) --- for some reason I had forgotten about that til now --- and now I remember Sylvia saying (unknowingly) later that same night that her friend Sara "has the flattest chest"... I didn't respond then? Suddenly I'm back at the shoreline holding pieces of a bagel two feet off the ground. La Rambla is jumping feverishly pecking away until he has a large piece, Tiny Beaches jumps too, but his efforts are weak and low and I have to lower the bagel and drop a piece into his mouth. Ul. Piastow stands closer to the water waits until the other two disappear with their catch, perhaps he or she is the oldest? Oldest, kindest, purplest, and now I see the bottles from last night and the fire that wasn't, maybe the teeny girls were drinking smoke. Maybe the pipes were loaded... (au contraire, Steph might say), and eggs bacon and spoons have made a casserole in the darkness beneath this blanket. I'm still cold. The phlegm of the streetlights in town (across the water) is a hook for the fish that all those who leave will not catch. I'm willing to wait it out... to succeed in a different shore, context, I'm willing to eat and nap, and conjure munificence! Oh bland wall, spider web, dust from the ancient way of trousers and sandals, of cars with round giant steering wheels, a man in a cordoruy hat and a woman who works where she's not "supposed to" -- were you the first couple to kiss in the front seat? To say good-bye, "have a nice day at work", and drive off? Were you the first to grace the morning in a chorus of grave frustration? No, it cannot be, not here, not now in this driveway, this cool and windy yet soothing afternoon! Another evening bestows games beginning anew, DODGE-ball done in a bathing sweat, long skin and shadows of momentary glee... another glass of wine modelling the short ropes and sails that cover white waves.

laughings' stock!

so i know that anticipation can be a devious and dangerous thing, a double-edge sword (Rye and Ginger, maybe?) that one shouldn't over-expose. this weekend (5 days for me) should be something anticipation cannot denude... fresh pavement ahead, also limitless, stocked, coddled, driven, and sunlit rewards. oh yeah, we're going to the cottage, and... we're partying.

sentimental as she

Aha! The day is an ambulant capture, a walking paradise and not a failure as Katy might say. She? Aha, the rolling rolling randomness sleeps during another class, Geography, summer school. Hills. Climates. What a collection of cheap (yet positive) reinforcement. A building of plumes for the material projects. Smokestacks, me? I'm plumage over and over again, the cold side of the moon... over and above the belt buckle that twists in a reversible gold. I'm not so sure of what metals to make, those that sing and whittle away at time or the waves of a harbour in a distant unvisited land. A country? "I've been there," Katy might say. Oh-la-la... Okay, I have lost the life-raft and the anchor, and anything that preserves the galloping hand. Would you prefer to dream about the steamship and the crane that unloads its' hermitage-like cargo... Would you like another person's story modified by starch and shelves of cold jam? Here goes something quizzical, Katy might say...

Reached what i thought was home finally
threw my logic into the bedding of one's self,
my head doing the rest of the resting,
finally an ally? A dream resembling the pillar
and door-sign push. after that, home is not quite
home and i find a roof upon my head,
a future so... someplace in the present
i find myself wanting to contain this tenderness,
this, oh what is it called -- a feeling maybe
but if nobody ever thinks like you do
does that mean you will never fit in?
alone again
my mind lives alone...


Okay so that is what Matty (not Katy) would call dreadful. Awful. Barfatious. Spitting it out I return to reality... and the day is less glittery now: the hokus pokus of passwords and profiles seems to gild the clouds that bless this aerodromatic setting. This droning cognizance. I'm awake, aha, and Katy is a caption forgotten, a time being that never returns...

***roll of my eyes***

Okay. i was fifteen once... i was bored, and i dismissed anything that wasn't confined to the present, to the crowd around me. it was easy, and i was willing to admit that 'everything sux' (lol), besides that, I'm pretty sure I knew everything already even if I hadn't been in a car that passed the 2nd line south...bush party? my friends knew it too, at the bus stop, the arena, the classroom, but then it was probably all a waste of their fur-eeking time too eh. oh yeah, what it was? a moose? lol. i spose we all have those days, "hanging around the golf course", the mall? we thot we'd never have to learn anything really imporant, greater? -- "the sum of lesser-thans", Mr. Zeroing In On Math would say, ha, what a miserable chump he was... what to do with another nothing day? Equals what, yuuuukkkkkkkkkk! They said that guy hung himself with an electric cord, so i guess we were never that lazy (or bored), it rhymes i bet -- lmao -- like rope and penelope, but seriously whatever happened to us was just another event in a series of things destined to eliminate or postpone our perpetual boredom.... or at least deface it in such a way that we wouldn't have to think about it until it actually happened again.

a little smile for the belly dancer inserted here :)
Chad, you won't get it.

Not sure if that makes sense or if the memory of this week is just as confusing as "how many" years ago, lol. what if i just went to the mall and hung out again, old fart? supermodel? or perv? ha! our mall sux, well it does if compared to other new ones in those bigger towns, especially that thing in Kenora, lol... what did we do before it was built though? ha, the oldtimers will remember that, so will Jess and Kory, history buffs, (that's Kory with a K, OK, lol, she's a she)... I'm getting bored again, sorry this post is going nowhere, pffffffffffftttt! Time to hit the beach, play some v-ball, or ultimate on the sand-bar, i wonder who's there today, hey HOT stuff, HOT enough 4-ya? BE there, 11th or 12th concession, noon hour, ice cream? lol-LA LA LA LA-fontaine!

"there was an accident, bikes were everywhere, then a helicopter..."

`
She is only 18, so perhaps the drivers' words are enigmatic, seem lost in the fog of a greater light. Perhaps the news of this accident on a roadway in Germany hasn't affected the world like a bombing during a spectacular 'phrase-ful' day in another part of the world. Perhaps the grief is less indelible to the lens of public sympathy. Perhaps it doesn't matter to those who lament this tragedy how much airtime either of these senseless departures have recieved... perhaps, this questioning is also a way of dousing my own sadness, my unquivering fears.

Riding a bicycle -- on any roadway -- is a dangerous, defenseless pursuit, is putting the body at the mercy of society's good judgement, behaviour. Every cyclist has had close calls, inches to spare, whooshes that graze the ear... every cyclist has heard the sardonic jeers, "get your own effin' road", they'll shout, or perhaps when trying for something more clever we have yet to hear, they'll say, "nice pants lance..." and then speed away. Speeding away... "you..." not like me to be so derelict the "I" arrives here now, me cruising alone, along the slipstream of a country road, the sun behind me, the heat within, and the wind coming from the back and a little to the right... I'm nearing my home, (la maison), crawling a slight, blind hill towards the main highway... could it happen to me? A newly ordained "driver" losing control? A minivan, three kids in the rear seat distracting "my guardian angel"? A man towing a boat? Another pickup squealing its tires, the horse trailer jackknifed into a slide on the edge of the pavement, me jumping onto the soft shoulder, barely able to kick-out, stay upright, barely able to keep my heart beating below its max... the all-of-a-sudden thought that luckily passes! yes the schoolbus slowed to see if all was right, but the driver of that black pick-up barely slowed beyond the skid, he sped around the sloped corner, wheels grinding with every rev, he made a quick right turn at the next stoplight, it was red and barely acknowledged.

It happened like that, the same day the AIS Womens Cycling Team was taken out, swept into a ditch with one foul swipe... BUT me, I'm still upright, signalling a woman through yellow open doors, her hands carrying the shifting weight of a bus full of kids, I signal her to carry onward, to go, I'm okay... ready for the road again, the heartfelt finale. I ride to the same set of stoplights, turn left, feel the wind at my side and the last hill before home burning my empty legs.

New Lease on Resistance.

.
Hello grand sun!

Humid cause? I am sitting in the perch, in the craft,
and the shadow that once descended like a midnight
forum has crept away... It isn't you, my darling,
sweet star softening on a yellow sphere; it isn't you
that roughens this inflection, these strong persuasions
within the somewhere (and if) of where I began.
I'll say perhaps, perhaps, since the conceivable nuance
of tongue and teeth is a vulture waiting to arrive, like
an evacuation of permanance: the tangled run of...
hesitation, roads and vines? A question of contrasts,
of brightness, labyrinths, am I just one?

I'm not the singular wallow, the lurching of a confused
vanishing light, sunset... Three days have passed
like clouds that contest an animating breath,
your lips devouring the cause beforehand, before here,
almost four years, intelligible time racing as though
a celebration aggrieved, a lighting of candles
that needs no glass to protect "them" from the wind. Amiss,
skepticism vaunted, yet hiding beneath a gilded veil, beneath
artless oily legs. Your sign, a crossing of hands and palms,
a touch being sampled, tinges, and felonious thoughts exposed.
I'll apologize, my dear, when the drubbing resumes,
when this naked habitation edges away like hard skin
at the bottom of one's foot. This is my timid side, you'd say,
the point between my toes that feels
no impact from the greatest of steps.

Please admire the mirror and send your favoured cajolings!

the day, the dais, and Piotr Diaz, she said?

Ready. Set... am I pre-empting the cause of a post-exultant coup? The road, how will it fly? Depart. Taking care of the easy things: cards and old books, shampoo, and vague necessities that resemble a wool sweater or water-resistant gloves. She has her hands full, she says, doesn't have time to carry water, bowls of spinach salad, or even dressing made from scratch. This moving, impending move, has brought her living to a standstill, to a full and unabridged stop. Yet the expressions continue... I'm ready, she says, with a seeming unhesitance, and there another podium emerges. And there that twinkle in her voice derives a less obscurable answer, a persuasion of skin, of triumph and muscle from the lower curves of one's spine... I listen then, I follow the folds of cardboard and old warm bedsheets. I follow the voice, the lilt of silk and recognizance, the plan that she, a woman abiding in transience, the one whose lead is as simple as another slab of concrete on a suburban sidewalk, she that never loses her way, her footing assured like an evening walk... I listen then, the names of people in photos without enough light, Tanya, my best friend, she says, Peter, and that ridiculous guy from who-knows-where, another camp perhaps... I listen though the pillows leaning against an empty dresser drawer allow me a moments' reprieve, an inch of space, the lowest slope between hope and fear. What does she think when she talks without stopping? What is the catch, the equation, the loquacious hook, that which amounts to the pulpit of all bare shoulders? Is this the weight of the world? Fate revered, or the personification of blame, critiques? Momus (momentum, I would hear) was still a god reproaching Zeus for his greatest creation, man (humanus), because it had no window into its heart: that its real plans, he said, could never be truly seen.

Ready? Truth. The thought has its own repetition, a reiteration of what can or cannot be fathomed. Depth. She stands alone, unencumbered by the brevity of her own silence, the aloof siren of some emergency vehicle growing ever more distant on another street. A direction opposite to her chosen route. The city, it seems, will hold no goodbye, no parade or final embrace. And she, she prefers to leave nothing to chance, the i in "it" especially, she amends the mirrors of this rented cube downward, adjusting everything else until it is "just so"... she doesn't need the impressions of cork flying from a fine wine, she doesn't need a patch of blue sky rolling behind her, getting smaller than any blind spot could ever be. The horizon, she once said, will never determine what one actually sees!

Go? And the living goes on... the living that once stood like an unending plain, as still as a stream in the sultry candor of remorse. What guilt? She would say. What umpteenth river? Her eyes awash behind a defiant shade -- only noticing the width of the bridge or the bumps and curves that lie beyond its span... and I, I would listen then, to every thud of imperfect pavement, to every breeze of an open window, of other cars going by, wondering what direction us and them will turn, return...

operation colombo (chilean red)

'

Pinochet, limping, could put his face on trial: a life behind bars, wrinkles, propped
by the shadow of legal immunity. Innocent and sick, some say, evading taxes;
yet critics have their own health against them. The hospitals are full, too many
hearts, too many crimson slurs on the feet of absent authority. How long ago
did the chicken-bells toll, leave? (Dying like infected worms?) How old the bribes
of mammals, of scientists leaping between species? Between bamboo drums and
disinfectant that squirms within our long lost thirstings.
This Pinochet is a population, red wine drinking, seated comfortably
amid tables brimmed with salads and rice, the short fancy of annihilation,
saying goodbye with a spoon or barrel. Anything here, (whereever the here may be),
carries the smudges of a handwashed goblet, a dark chalice, a bank balance in synch
with its own confidence. Some say the end is almost inevitable, is blind to calculations,
and doesn't deviate from the master plan. Pinochet dies of course,
in jail, his carcass a swollen lozenge for the wine's incessant dread...
.
.
work in progress

on tourines, taking leeks, and tomato boredom

Not wanting to spin myself or my ever gliding words (spokes as it were) into the twists and turns of my favourite sporting event, I regard each day in July as a stage in a strange unfinished journey. I believe, more fully than desired, that the flight we have chosen, whether alone or in the presence of a "stronger team", remains within us no matter how far we try (or perhaps sometimes it happens without trying) to deviate from the intended course.

It is easy to think (feel) when one is still touring in their youth (unbeknowst as a teen per se or even in the mid_twenties echelon) that the destined end is a lot like pissing from the saddle of moving cyclone: it seems it doesn't matter where the content or spray goes... I never fully mastered this e-motion, this onion crying lack of focus, nor that of other ingredients in soup or false flats. And yet, I have not quite obtained a higher resonance for scouring the road or market for that right combination of spices, be they a riveted green, or that dry nonsensical tongue-in-cheek variety. I speak though, without hindrance, without a loss of motivation or respite. The feeling that I develop (and maybe other age-grouper chowders do too?), is of a compromise being that inches between those spaces that avoid the incessant potholes: a pot-pourri tourine without any constituent love. Sometimes, beneath the seemingly broken core, one is able to inspire...

Alas, I was once told the hills "are alive" with twists of perfection... and today the ride was right. An asparagus of wind... (urine odors notwithstanding), I was spearheaded along the concessions, all curved nose, helmet, and relaxed arms of me. I took the hill on the Cote De La Dalle, a clove of garlic and splash of curry tossed into the terrain, I flowed like broth towards Tiny Beaches Road. Sauteed leeks beefened me. Today the sun was gold and heated itself like moist enviable silk. I dreamt of onion skins... tomatoes dicing the flat falseness of giving up. The wind was hotter still. Driven like a windmill through a stainless steel hand-mixer... I boiled, yet the boiling pace of reason bubbled my metallic grill. I was cleansed of all negativity, and there was no "ending", no point in the distance where I felt the race would be done, where the last stir would stand like a signpost on the side of the road. There was no ladle resting on the ride's abiding rim.

"Any day with the bike, or a soup bowl, is worth savoring." -- a friend named Sylvia

ORDINARY ORDNANCE?

~

This post is justifiable only because the delicate layering of metal and corrosive alternative transience fuels my daily fleeing. Fleet? Today, I am here, at an exact point in momentary momentum that defies all other being... (haha, that might rhyme). Opportunity siphons the grid, the girders? Andthis meander of newly prescribed resilience is an apple core divided by a gilded brownish haze. I am at fault too. I have bitten the leather wrapped controls, and I hold close the trimmed exhaust and fetid spewing of inivisible gases... I am the tinkering wheel, the single unsexed bridge between artillery and resolution. The guilt of these debauching shifting feet knows no grappled mind... Out we go. Out. Damn brain! Limousine'd fate!

This poet is a grandstanding horizon. A small definition of gothic smog, a man and his silhouette frolicking in the assumed nature of thunderstorms. Clatters of Gods. Booms! Golden booms detecting the omnipotent everpresent shadow of the unheard ear. What follows, they say, is nothing more than progress and hearsay.

not forgetting the revolution drummed by a calculating spire

architect. light wind encasing fields of trees
and an otherwise intestinal haze. locomotion
remembered? blue spheres
denuding a soft unbreakable change,
rectangles that dangle like pieces of sky
in paintings the weather forecaster could not see.
a pink blouse. a lawyer forgiving a night of red wine
and photographs to be used in a munificent frame.
slab of concrete descending,
foreboding "center of the universe"
designed by something, (someone?),
whose technique would never yield a singular
grey smokestack. nameplate similar to words
devouring the small print on white cards,
resolution of form over content, a seagull
chewing a red and white flag beyond the green-tiered dome,
the flapped angle of remorse, or justice to a boy now hollowed
by the summers' holiday begun. a parade of leaves
felled in the gardens' suburban home. a place of unpalaced
gold. a whisper of old men walking a boulevard once held,
embraced, in the discerning upheaval of masculinity. crisp
wind twisting again, becoming erect,
grave in the mouth of gravity, teetering
amid soft flesh as though a cushion invented
in one's long intervallic sleep.

Pula -- travel locks

They moved the bus station... brought it north above the hill, they didn't tell the mapmakers or the driver of a taxi who happily collects his tip for tossing a single bag from the trunk. The knapsack is yellow, like the colour of sand beneath a street now strewn with construction.

Pula, one could say that all roads lead there, but there's only two ways in and out. Only one view to the Roman Amphitheatre too! What brings me here milennia after Jason and Medea escaped with the Golden Fleece

Member States of the Pageant Universe

`

We have gathered: a night full of breezes,
shores unsettled. We have lips that whisper
like backgrounds to a river, a voice too,
shedding in pools denied by this (or that) evolving hope.

We have substance attached to our bones,
red sand, mineral water, a flavour that gives
the sky its unending light. We have a leg
to stand on, two that walk, (gold teeth to lie through).

bereft or adrift? breadth or width?

` '

not sure exactly? perhaps hindsightedly, what the previous
poetic "tote" was trying to achieve. it began with a distinct, implacable
or shall we say distinctive intention... the Symbolic,
somewhat pointillistic approach didn't quite develop
like I thought it should.

the weekend arrives, dour, deepening realm,
unwilling to depart with foresight. and us?
they say you like to do your own thing, go
your own puzzling romantic way. lay down the statueque bikini,
let go the pride and imprinted zeros. remember the ancient children,
boys and girls carried by the seven rivers of the underworld.

meet you at the LC - 1823?
the BS - 2059? no confirmation necessary...
my love.

poetic tote for an idealistic friday morning

'

bliss? uneventful footsteps, spreading like
an assembly of emblems and roses ready
to bloom. the garden traps an immigrant
in its turnstile, flight is destined.
the field, with hydro wires and termites,
consults a lone dark window in an office building late at night.

the parrot repeats. men sweeping
in the morning on a distant roadside
do not hear, take the hamburger and fries.
frites, another language might say.
a symphony tills the edges of a skyscraper,
vinegar rubs its own self-inflicted wound.
a woman, who climbs and climbs, never looking
up or down, ascends the blade of a circumvented
helicopter. there is wind.

the fencepost potrays a raindrop
beneath its colouful wings. the immigrant
shelters a family with magazines and packages
of gum. a child reads,
listens with parrot-like obedience,
parody? then, consequence is oblivious
to knowledge, readiness they might say
in battle. a pigeon not eating green olives,
an old man descending to a park bench.
acorns shouting like parents at a hockey game.
faster, over there, get rid of it!

the ideologue (part III -- near Labin, Croatia)

. * part 3 of a poem already published in a well-respected
journal -- this is the draft version of course* . though i think
it may be retitled --- RIDE and RIDICULE

The bus cannot be painted, he says.
it is always moving, side to side, or rolling
raucously, and it rains when mouths are open,
when dips in the road elegantly flow.
"The bus", it speaks slowly, on and on
with an insurmountable flare... i'm alone now,
like another man, sitting at a window in a blue t-shirt,
twisting a cigarette package,
his adroit nervous fingers
unable to reach that greater pause. The length
of his emotions growing shorter, shredding
like a forested hillside that hovers above
a newly carved gravel quarry.

The bus cannot go faster, he says.
This highway is lodged between steep repeating hills,
is as gray as the chimney of a meek village chapel.
It moves like smoke undaunted, like three pines, tall,
sparse, peaking from the apex of a treacherous corner,
it turns like rare food in a weary traveller's stomach.
It is a bucket of conversations,
two businessmen squeezed together, (behind me),
cajoling the prospects for another seaside hotel;
a young girl, cell-phone tucked within a pillow,
promptly saying, or so it seems
from an acute angle, i'll see you soon.

the bus cannot be inert, he says. his accent,
though it is not local, replies like an autumn morning
amid a dearth of luminant steel.
The sun, slow to arrive, commisserates
with a cool fog at the end of a long canal;
the road, its agony unknown, a skeleton
stretching from century to century
to gasps of quotidian time... I am alone still,
breathing lightly, reading a map,
(an arrival plan), believing the Roman Amphitheatre
and the bus station in the city of Pula remain in the places
they always were.

buying that CAR. right now?

`
I'm not over-awed by this contusion
of fear and financial decorum. I'm
not trying to wait for any subsistence
LIKE a lottery winning, or death.

at some point I will find the dotted line,
the space where my signature is less
evasive the smile for a child
whose tears have only just subsided.

a long way from Lourdes

.
where are you going?
where do wish to go?

finally, it seems, the answer is less mutative than the flow of Westernized lead.
gold, a machine that makes your little toe feel the consolation within the wind;
there is relevance in a time stamp, in poor timing.
can you repeat the name of the place again, please?
Encore? how much money do you have? how much
can you get? I feel badly about bringing you
into this world. this province?
the taxes are worse when you cross the border. there are no fences
for finely chopped herbs, these are the products of a soft hand. a moon
that emphasizes "the light" and nothing else. gravity is a link,
a contagious spell the young will never avoid. did you pass
'that strange' baton to the daughters and sons of your friends?
do you have another generation?
i am concerned for the conscience of random summations,
for suitcases in distress. Some say,
Belinda is a dictator. I plotted a coup for the Marxists...
I flew like a cormorant. This is what they eat when the island
in Rice Lake is cleared by Zebra Mussels.

do you own the SE model?
how much did you afford?
these crackers are stale -- this jam, not as sweet.
I discovered these little locks and pop-off things
do not work without automation. i can open the garage
from the next street over.
I can discern my ability to swim
by staying in the medium-fast lane.

Someone, a middle-aged man perhaps, is accustomed
to the fit of an old-cold speedo. This fabric is gratuitous,
generous. This is a leather-wrapped steering wheel.
I paint dots, small circles, from the outer atmosphere
a score of army invaders, red and blue
like malfeasance, or habits that can only get worse.
I prefer the skies of Renaissance artists... a convertible
of the mind... are you sure you don't need these extra
options? let's invoke ourselves a little playtime.
i'll pace this anxious showroom while you make your decision.

no rushing please...
I can deal this for you in twenty minutes,
your credit will be approved. you'll be burning
fire in far-off places
by the middle of next week.
Cut down trees,
Belinda is a dictator driving
an out of gas Hummer. I've played
both sides of the leftist argument.
I've played
random consultations
with grievous enemies.

Didn't you know this would end with a question?
You walking out the glossy showroom, shaking your head
and the hand in your back pocket?

Aigues Mortes -- travel trim.

Compared to the rest of this resplendent country it may seem, at first, that this area known as the Camargue resembles the dull lowlands of Florida. Inland ponds, small rivers, marshes, even a few untidy "tourist traps" spot the minor highways and national routes. Not to say that this area (or even Florida for that matter) are tedious to the first impressive eye

They cave has relocated, beyond the walls and paths where bulls are made to walk.

Saba -- travel bangs

They wouldn't move the island or its harbour on the south slope.

have I been... away?

`

what time is your bus?
do u know the cement crumbling from this curb
does not flow into a sewer grate?
charity is a whiff of diesel-blend grass,
the sloped sides of a forgettable road.
the cold arctic airmass above us
is like a pasture accepting its long wait.

what time will u leave your office?
do u believe in the shadow of the hubcap?
i am in the beginning phases.
i am a shallow area of low pressure -- light blue
on the radar screen. the lines you see are formed
and faced by miserable glances...

commuting is an inglorious waste of one's
death.

CAFE DES CERCLES...

Boulevard de la Grotte

the clouds seem closer here,
the sun, a less-defiant harbouring,
the mountains seem undivided
(like the memory of an insufficient God,
a point above where miracles come hindered
by candlelight), a walk is only a pilgrimage
if the intent is there, trinkled offerings
remains as they were -- winding roads
of second-hand shopping, two star hotels
with celestial gritty bends... a grotto