Electric Blue
Heaven
Electric blue heaven
Neon and never
White walled endeavor
Beam me up
Down round town
You’re the Hatter's clown
Electric blue heaven
Calculated invention
A saint hood’s intention
Callously taken
Misguided yet still reborn
Forever forlorn
2012
Words Are Not
Enough
When words are not enough
spewing out like regurgitated civility
one can respond in one of two ways:
1.
polite manners
or
2.
relatable struggles
2012
The Great
Expanse
The great expanse lives all around us
within and without our worries
whether, or weather, or not we
acknowledge it’s abounding presence
Look deep until you see the line in the
horizon and nothing else
2011
Undefinable
(Untitled With Undertones)
Then nothing, white light, and nothing
Can you feel the un-descriptive muffled sound
The white nothing all around
The pulsating throb coming through your temples
On either side of your skull
Spots blurring together and overlapping
Spinning slowly without purpose
It is in you to find and rest
The question is always can you find it
Again, nothing, warm and white, and nothing
And mostly more of less
But less is much when more is
overcrowded, overloaded, over-thought
When so much is over-looked and mostly undervalued
Whiter than precious soft porcelain
In quiet, without sound, with presence and purpose
Nothing, white and warm, spotless and spaceless
Nothing, lots of more of less
Compressed for millennia like a metal crushed to dust
Until the cosmos blow us away
2011
Withstanding
The limits are not withstanding, time is finding footholds on a cliff, crows peck seeds from the flesh of the earth, finding love in the darkness is a liars delight.
Don’t ask monkey sense if you want the tide to come in, or the captain who tugs the boat further out to lunch.
To hear, to be, to bear the leverage of the sea.
A one-liners-line can only out wit the witless, give me a witness.
Can you tell the difference.
I am saving the worst for the best, the pools life preserver is for pickled souls, bridges are for horizontal island jumpers in the middle of a conversation on electric avenue.
Take me back east, she whispered through the mouth of a fork in the road.
Take me out west, he said as waves lapped against his shirt collar.
Take me to the river, the pastor preached to the small grey mice in the wall.
Give me some cheese, the mice replied.
Only to find the preacher died from lack of eating his vegetables and ingesting swiss cheese in large quantities.
Roaming realms feed animalistic desires in the paws of my palms.
And the beast rules once more; hooves, horns and bone - give me a stone.
Can you tell the difference?
Giving fish food to the waters edge, to a small man sitting on a book, in a park, on a bench, is pointless, finding garbage in a university mind is nothing to hide from, in the midst of afternoon musk.
2011
Soundscape
Ramblings
to think the brink
fake up - fess down
so much so little found
hover to cover
and shudder’s are cedar
unclog September’s gutter
in the heg
the long good neighbor
sculpted me in with the
tiger’s fossilized saber
overburdened to handle
the cradle swings
while mother longs to sing
empty space gaze
snatches a phrase
walk a brazen maze
having landed rough
the deck folds like paper
all splinters break loose
a moose jumps the wreckage
finds new world sewage
runs back to boreal foliage
surround me with your eyes
if you want a somber sigh
on a Friday high
catcher and the whisky
all too risky
b frisk me
laugh it off
lounging soft
bloody cough
take it to the distance
blue and true
for instance
cave me
save me
crave me
blue Sue
come over to feel
something real
take a trip
take a hit
find yourself in . . .
2011
Canadian Winds
Subtle and sweet is the orange night,
outlining shadows in navy
Figures emerge and dissolve within
the black cold of early temperatures
Find a weather unchanging in September
on the prairies that has measure
Oh the pleasure living in constant change
in a haze and maze of climate scenarios
Paint a Manitoban sky that is unmoving
and I will be amazed
Sunny clear skies by daybreak, rain and cloud by noon,
with flurries to tuck us in
Burry us in our need of prediction
and controllable outcomes
Set us free insurmountable Canadian spirit
Don’t let us become tamed -
keep us malleable
Your wild winds strengthens and unites us all
2011
Let The Light Burn
Look at the light and then
through the reflections and refractions
of colour and light
Hold the prism in your iris and let it
travel through you to the back of you
Keep it and let it live there,
be aware, be there
Stare still more and more still
until it burns into your cornea
Find the room in you
where you keep all of your struggles,
the room you keep at bay,
the room you hate
After you hesitate, go,
until it is found,
until you are convinced you don’t want to be
present, that’s when you
know you should be there
When you gain access, be cautious,
this room is lethal
If you open it straightaway,
it could destroy you - be patient, be prudent
When you are prepared, pry the door open,
let the light seep through,
let it fill every crevasse and crack of you
The door will try to bar shut, a practiced reflex that you have unknowably perfected
You must resist the urge to seal the door
The shooting pain will radiate,
the light will sear like a downtown
detox at 3am
The morning after you will be released,
and set free onto the streets again.
2011
Hope
the lives we live
apart and far from the affair
always leaves something left to bestow
and the internal grief we harbor
the gash of separation, the longing
the more of ourselves we conceal
the temptation to leave is vivid
like a blue burning flame
nothing more, nothing given
2011
Metaphors for Dinner
words: shape, sound, texture
design, font, and spacing
glorious text; so simple, serene and sharp
a novel without grammar, so free, so open
the limits have vanished
only poetic exclamations of endless action
yes, if nothing else, poetry can save you if you let it,
if you are willing to dive in to a pool of melancholy.
Subtle meaning makes interpretation resonate.
The potency of subtle is the resilience of poetry,
yet is also an instrument to use sparingly judicious.
The symbolic is sublime, for the poet and the
reader, who digests metaphors for dinner.
To liberate yourself, is to rescue poetry.
For life is poetry.
Only the poets know this
2011
The Moon and the Tide
Swoon is the secret name of the moon
When dawn yawns too soon
And the tide recedes come noon
2011
The Time Betweens Us
There is upstairs
There is downstairs
Then the time between us
The monologue to our life won’t read amiable
This much I can deduce
There is outside
There is inside
Then the cavity between us
When the credits roll, and theatre abandoned
Not much will be left
We will be raw before the other
Naked and unescorted
2011
Swazi Sauce
It will stain your innards orange
Your palate channels mother earth: a gritty uncouth
Tang, with a fiery paroxysm.
2011
