running the coast (toronto)

` Running the Coast '


Breaks like day or hour, urban coast.
Between trickles of a gravel stomach,
panged steps, and breaths
that ripple along railings and a shore
of pebbled concrete. An unpainted mass.
Here a path with green and blue broken
lines, geese that acknowledge their own trails,
vomit, the ascended summits of small hills.
Vapours as permanent
as an afternoon grid, a long series of lights,
vehicles not moving. The twitter and curse
of a helicopter watching from above, reporting,
perhaps seeing my miles per hour
rise ever so slightly -- like a curve
of Nature that gleams amid a "mobile wind"
a sketch of breakwalls and sailboats. The setting
of bows beyond suns and an island
which the Natives wouldn't bridge or name.

Still the wind is a hurdle for those who remain
behind glass, behind land or sail, a configuration
we may never know: strength, temperature,
or era. Was it the shield of Achillees
or the fleeting skin of Zadopek? Achillees, I know,
has come and gone -- has grown, like a hamstring
stung by the hills of Troy. The achillees
comes and goes, entrusts itself to the mind,
to a cold-water recovery, a cross seperate and bare
from the rest of the body. The body saying,
"tomorrow I may not go!"
Tomorrow the forgotten moment
of dehyradation, limbo - both feet lingering
in the air... a raised white bridge where one
wants to turn around, feels the wind at their back
and another runner climbing the steps from below.

resuming the scenario --- of use and miscellaneous testing

.
I fling the fast and dying merchant a faint denomination,
ask that memory be kept like pavement
beside an rageless river --as though the yellowy lines
had buckled only once before. I pass the market
where statuesque rows linger well before dawn

i am damp and heavy and tilting towards...

...
a dry camera lens.
my head rises beyond the edge
of the film. a computer labours
behind me,
its screen is blank,
a kind of grey one
sees in a Southern swamp,
there is a bottle of water
near the keyboard,
half full with its label
peeled. i remember
high school and how my friend Erin said
that meant you were horny. i remember
the difference between then and then. we
never made it to a hotel room,
to one of our own beds

miscallenous percussions, symbols of reunion

`
`

with

so this is how we define ourselves,
with a world protected by harbours
redundant in the size of theiir shore. with
miraculous pebbles, and a conscience cleared
of all extinct currents.

this is our defense. a body of water that moves
like a crowd but doesn't nudge, that doesn't resist
the visible bottom -- or carry its hat
among the waves. there's nothing but
pleasure here,
the fortune of holidays
and weekend receipts,
hard work that once was.

this is our visiting breath,
a willingness as dry as the sight
of a neighbour in the yard, walking
slowly perhaps,
deciding which colour of siding
she'll use for her house...

the green is brighter than chlorophyll should allow *

those words are not mine, 'my title', mon bon joue!
they belong to JLo (he's a runner-poet & not the singer-cum-actor-ess).

how does two months go by with barely a thought for entering here?
I'm guessing I'm not remotely as obessessed about blogging as the people
in the article I read yesterday at maisonneuve.org. Maybe I was too
busy getting ready for the big race, big trip.

The plan was to blog from the various places that I visited,
to let the world know what I was doing, thinking, seeing.
But, the truth being what it is, I didn't even think about blogging
when I was at any of the internet cafes --- all I did was check
e-mail and stock prices :)

Perhaps it would have taken too long anyway
considering some of the charges they were asking.
The only real cheap / reasonably priced cafes I found were in Ljubljana,
Besancon, and Valenciennes.... the other ones seemed to be a bit
exhorbitant given the quality of their systems. Alas, I was able
to stay in touch and find out what I needed from over here...
not that I really cared that much,
I was on vacation after all,
and getting away is really
the whole point of being somewhere else.

from a plunging boat: body wash

.

soft breach, waves deafening their own momentum.
a bathtub that deserves a better name --- like Agamemnon
or Argos
or the bays near Pula
the amping blue Adriatic,
resistance and mist
stones garnering what's left of an empire
what hasn't been voted out.

automated fist.

.
AUTOMATED FIST
.

The mind of its own is permanent,
has tenure, stretches upward,  
an umbrella beneath a distant rain...
The mind of its own is permeable,
floats amid metallic spires,
dandles with the wind - like
a shrine's brightened extremities.

The mind of its own is pedantic,
covers itself with a simple skull,
with shadows and hymns,
and the roots of a city that once grew corn.
The mind of its own is motion,
clenching the horizon like a new moon,
like a fist admitting -- it cannot close...

a milestone... memories bereft?

It's been little more than a year now, since this breath of experimentation began, and the bark upon the brain seems a little less fixiated,  and the circles around the eyes (swim goggles, you say?)  aren't quite as clear either.  Yet I wonder (STILL I wonder), are you really planning a visit to a place called KISKUNFELEGYHAZA (sans accents, mais it sounds like --- le meme chose!)?

Input country guess here: __________________________.

I believe my first ever blog mentioned something about the Tour and that Lance was about win, well a year later and it's happened again.  Hurray, Boo!!!  No not really any of the former or the latter... to tell ya the truth the tour was a disappointing cake-walk, the cycling / action was good and I enjoyed watching most of it but the outcome was never in question.  How is it that one team is so much stronger than all of the others?  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....  there's always a question.  So now after another year of my own internal combustions, overhead cam-eras, this blog thingamajig hasn't quite progressed as planned... it's cool and I like but it hasn't become part of my daily agenda --- perhaps because I don't have as much time to spend on such inanimate objectives as I'd like to, and also because I guess I prefer to keep things (my life, for instance) as simultaneously simple and convuluted as possible.  How can that be?

I'd like it to be more pedantic, like this afternoon a gull flew against my window, the CN tower drowned (doused?) in fog, a shroud of noise from the building of buildings below, a crane, and a fast unscheduled walk through Queens Park (thoughtful monarchs avowed).  And yet I don't want to dull or devour the reader with quotidien simplicity, perhaps there is a balance amid mundaneness and my penchant for obscurity, oh yes the fever is rolling, the great awakening, the sonic concomitant (embodied by the weekend sun -- not weakening)...

Or maybe I just want to use this forum to explore my language, my relevant voices...  maybe something concrete like the building of buildings will cement its towering authority here.  Maybe I am not a single a pane of glass...

the long wind

.
A blast of contuded oxygen?
foreign flecked assault.
Rain and dust peppering
the border between assumptions
and retrieval. Perhaps none
of the followers in this grand redundancy
need fear the pricing of information,
the breeze that rises from tills
through holes in translucent windows.
Circles of undoubt?

Seeing the White Fence

There, passed by tractors and convertibles,
hands fluttering unbeknown to a naive eye,
flickering grains of refuge
left by the breeze of teenagers - their long skin
seeking those sands and suns of independence...

or he says, ego is self-contained,

renders the unamused.
Terrible lack of animosity,
here? Post-haste me your thoughts
my dearest betrothed... felled voluptious
tree,
innocuous branching of fate
that yearns like lengthwise pavement,
a heart (is that what I really meant?)
parallel to a grey de-summarized sky.
Only humanity could go more unnoticed.
Not really sky, I should think,
or light years away... not really
justice, he said.

They say it rains when it pours,
that ditches cannot feel pain,
and freshly cut shrubs don't need
the rich impediments of a newfound spring
that they will be warm and speckled
where-ever they land --- like whiteness
on an innocent wooden fence, like a gate,
unopened, or dichotomies... ever-present
torrential streams. Blue-boxes
at the edge of a gravel driveway.

I do not check the Recycle Bin anymore
but I still adore you... how does one say

au revoir without really meaning it?

GOODBYE.
GOODER-BYE.
DO-WID-ZENIA.
Effing OFF... for now.

. HEARTfelt MIKA.

x marXist the spot... Sopot? or Hel?

*
ELeCTION dAYLIgHT
*

pourquois les références vers la Pologne?
have you seen the zagging of epitaphs?
the Great Danzigian Bay, imperial wit?
yet they say, he is here to confound,
with inexplicable (yet understandable) French
inserted like a string of modified starches,
with 12-carat mischief clenched by a democratic hand.
There is always an abrasion to communication,
a diamond-held finger cutting the layers of a golden cake,
there is remant food (nourriture) housed in strange buffets,
and votes to be served... still? somewhere else,
maybe trailing a plane that circles a city skyline
it may be written, that words and pictures cannot be objectified,
yet here, plain, invalid here, I can pretend, I understand the message,
I can say, I have heard the people and their power.
*
I suppose the resulting anger was devoured by an inconstant fear,
by red lights ascending to the tips of bells and parliaments,
to benches stripped of their blue and green,
to orange juice squeezed from Caribbean Cafes
into glasses inured with feckless spots.
These are the times when the roomy tables of the New Proletariat
are infested by the ranting of political thieves, children smiling
in the background, daughters as pure as those lonely girls
on Bikini Beach (Wasaga not discounted), daughters as dour and aplomb
as the feelings for their one inherited brother,
the ones the reporters have named (gratitude Rich?)
the one that waltzes away, tabulates,
and spends each last pellucid moment of the everyday
scouring for safety.
*
Perhaps it's also true that their long, slim hairlines,
and slender mouths, have yet to spark riotous acts in suburban grottos,
have yet to tremble beneath the poor brinkmanship of indebted contractors,
have yet to waste their gorgeous (and stubbornly generous) ulcers
on small wooded ravines that tussle the roads straddling the city,
have yet to feel a day going by that couldn't be won...
*
Later in the evenings, whilst the elder Richard
ponders an inconstitutable sky, white yet puffy,
the clock passes the time of Szymborska's Universe,
and brandy becomes a flicker of pine-scented verandah,
and that daughter with bikini entrails,
with waxed poetic legs and polished germs --- seeks nothing
but the hypnosis of a good photograph, of the ridges that linger
on rouge'd pursed lips, that cleanse the teeth
of anything leafy or green. And in those ravines
where the city is safe, unusuable 2x4's are now discarded,
a discomfiture of metal and glass bubbles towards life,
escapes its 4x4 past, opens its mouth and gazes at the iridescent stake,
with tepid indulgence it sends a shiver of momentum onto the roadway...

sadly, the sun has turned around again!

Physics, they said. Ergonomic heavens, and salutations from a smiling (solarity)
re-drawn by children in the last hours of the school-year. Hurrah! Hurrah!
What happens to the universe when the faint strands of grassy fields need
moments of watering? What happens to -----saturated------ apologies! I've
summoned myself to a momentous cause, to making the sky feel less debilitating
at five in the morning...

Sadly, un-sporadically, the day has dawned for the sun to turn, return,
to take back what it once wished was given away [like a cave man (woman?)
who decides a hut of straw is better than a cave]... alas I loathe this
celestial timing almost as much as the seventh hour of the seventh day
after finishing a marathon. One thinks then, what's next, is this Recovery
all that I've waited for?

Contagious congratulations (con-graduations) to the true Pillars of this post.
Les enfants (not really enfants, are they?) who move forward into the next biggest
challenges of their lives... to our f****ite (careful, Uncle) niece who's roamed
thru Nice, who is very nice and kind (and loves her Frances). Congratulations on
your awards and accomplishments, and get ready for all the new challenges and
successes of high school: those next "best years" of your life (at least until
university or unitl your 35 anyway)...

To our f*****ite nephew who's climbed the hills in Vaduz, who once said, the last
step's a doozie!. Well, (to paraphrase Bob Cole) I can tell ya, the next step
IS a doozie! Have fun in London with school and athletics, and remember that from
here on it's not one's talents that are not so imperative: it's all about Hard Work
and Determination!!!

the resulting fire was conceded to the onrushing foam

Mon Etape,

où disparaît-il ?

ocean sphincter - say what? quoi? qui-vas-la?
okay juvenalia, sumpsimus retort, a bientot, "GO --- a-way!"

from AFM (EP, pg 138-9)

SONNET OF ESCAPE

Even the body's resistance transforms
a sky delivered without sight, eyes lean
with the weight of blood, gray-worn mountains,
or a Winter's breast disguised as motionless ice.
Sleep prepares for the pulse of dusk,
for clouds contoured like bells or parliaments,
like humanity bleached and absolute.
Even the heavy hollowness framing the body's
absence passes further than the protection
of a glacial shore. Beyond the valley melting
in its own distant remorse a solid singular stone
flickers with gravity, hue, and a fountain
of vacant colour straining to perceive...
Here, a narrow ray of flesh, a mineral
as grateful as any ore, unveiled, remaining
ever so briefly, like a spark
only those who've never been free - could feel.

track & field reality: happy, skippy, and a little bit jumpy...

~*~*~

Today then, with a little conjuring from the wind,
and a little disguising from an adjustment in attitude,
the brave issuers of joy
will prevail. Today, the stops
and starts of hammers and nails
will not cause the world to concede its pain.
The swishing of moisture that once was home
will subside like oil in a field of unused locomotives...
nature has its way of returning the grain, the miniature
grroves that seize the day. Never mind the arses in AVPs,
the cold filaments of their egos...

I've never met an emergency that couldn't wait.

And mon ami Pat, congratulations on your ninth place
jump. it may not seem so ascendant right now
but perhaps, in the middling years it will become
more inspirational (optimistic?).

Get this day over with.

Flush!! (a soldiers' armour in decline?)

+*+

FATIGUE and EQUILIBRIUM

for no-one in particular (again!)

*+*

At the sign beneath the airport
which says no smoking or firearms,
walking amid dust and reconciliation,
a mysterious gray passport draws no attention to itself.
From its eyes comes the conduct of a bland ocean, whispers,
while the limited carrying of foreign words ascend
like resolute ramps, like a conqueror whose downfall
from an endangered disease never felt more imminent...

Yet before the hero understands the ambiguous guard
staring at a stage made for a many-headed Paris,
the true face of dying light looks, not only of Athens
or Rome (or the views of an Empire
in decoration and narrative),
but of mysticism against those scenes through which
the blinds of another 'better life' seem transparent.

My favorite act in this perception
is a narcotic we've called enviroment,
as practical as a cannon
or a television screen: (easy to inflame).
Yet the one who engraves this flag-induced participation,
this cynical escape of gallantry, yields nothing more
than the staggering last stamp of a cause that resembles
a curse.

the making of...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

this is the making of
(the making of)
this poem. watch me now,
hands wringing with the inserts of time,
inked feet smiling so smugly - as cool

as an unwashed phrase.
eyes tickled by the tap
tap-tap of the ocean,
the crossed beginning

of toes,

of triumphant teeth, a melange
du jour in the body's movement.
watch me now, as I was then,
in the making of, in the "ness"
of me -- tribulations

of veins and vesseled
ingredients. the tap
tap-tap

of camouflage,

uncoloured dreams -- this is
the making of (the making of),
who says you can't eat your own cake?

the no-lookers

^

had it been the just gods wearing sunglasses,
the baggy shorts that loom with shadows
covering their knees. had it been the repository
of sandals amidst the sand-splashed cross-walks...
imprints, laughter and the dogma or climate,
perhaps here the pavement would never be dry,
the glossa of insects would hang from the roadside,

a sudden turn of fashion.

it was the past that crept by, while we,
the peasant cloaks divided our words
with photos of descendants whose time
had yet to flee their hearts.

heatin' up in there.

at last summer, real warmth and sun.
enough to make the zig-man happy. Moi aussi, running
without tights, or a vest, imagine. Who'd ever thought
we fell such freedom.

good luck with your exams. Mika................

UWAGA!

For some reason this is my new favourite Polish word...
it means attention, ATTENTION en francais, I think it might also mean
"look-out", beware, or take notice --- but that's just my guesses.

If, (when), I start my own little publishing thing, it will be called
UWAGA Press, and it will go hand in shovel with my other as-yet
begun operation ------ GuiltyAsThin Productions.
This replaces my former favourite Polish word --- Przsyprazsam (sp)
and of course the belaboured Prszypraszam Press, which along with
meaning "Excuse Me!" has yet to find its beautifully translateble
self.


Okay, so how about I write a poem now, perhaps I'll call it...

Change Due

Belly Dancers wriggle into the background,
a man whom I know, or more correctly,
who is from my town - lets twenty dollars
drop from his lap, his fingers are stretched
and uneven.

Somewhere -- in a corner vestibule
there is only the cold silence of a newspaper...
there is waiting,

`~`

april is a cruller month

if, one goes by the institution of advertising, one might believe that Maple Crullers
will soon be available at our most infamous Canadian institution. perhaps, not
disproportionatley so, the bark that carries the thirst that is gradual and addictive,
has never been greater.


me --- you would think after a month of blog (Quebecois?) abstinence, I would
have something less innocuous to put here. Maybe tomorrow.