547.
Post-pandemic mass,
They pass the bread through perspex,
Letters from postmen.
Tag: creative writing
British Columbia Feet
Several separate feet washed
Up on pebbled, shingled beaches,
Belonging to British Columbia
Across its furthest breaches
Over a decade, and various
Authorities slowly reached
A consensus that bodies
Which belonged to those lost
And neglected and homeless
Vagrantly inebriated
Often detach through natural
Wear and tear in salt water
Their hands, heartprints,
Feet, thighs and forearms.
It’s an explanation intriguing
Me because I have beachcombed
Many bays and inlets where
Collecting sea-glass, I have
Seen empty crab carapaces
And plastrons of unidentifiable
Species, but never did I see
A human head or teeth.
So is this what happens to
Men and women who found
Their escape on wide Pacific
Shorelines, or is there someone
Preparing their next murder
In a garage or a shed, while
His partner makes ablutions,
And prepares to go to bed.
Waiting Room
A crack-covered platform,
Weeds penetrate again,
Timetables faded behind
Glass with mildew stains;
Yet still I’m waiting for a train
That was long since cancelled.
The waiting room’s degraded,
Graffiti and lovers’ names spray-
Painted, names now dead or
Vacated as part of a great
Immigration, yet still I’m waiting
For arrivals to shake me.
The church has lost its steeple
And roof, and church-going
People, so I sit on a pew
On my own and look directly
Up to the grey-stained spaces
Where no one is waiting.
Driving On The Wrong Side Of The Road And Driving On The Right
In this recent dream, a series
Of reversions and events
Only I could revisit in
Their random happenings,
Driving through this city
At night, accompanied by
Two people to the limits,
I have not seen them now
For twenty years
(We were friends back then,
It’s always an implied criticism
When long lost acquaintances
Tell me Nick, you haven’t changed a bit,
And I roll the eyes of my soul,
Disguised by this enterprise
Of living incidentally);
Into a one-way tunnel we drove
With two or three cars speeding
Towards me following a wrong
Direction, I see headlamps
Before their steel appears
And flashes away in to the night;
I brake, and a voice reaches me,
A girl who lives in a house
Above the tunnel, she transmits
Advice on how to navigate
This underground straight
And narrow. I send her a
Message of thanks, haunted,
Sweating in my sleep, before
Arriving at a dark parking lot
And I have all this stuff,
So much stuff I cannot carry:
Boxes with old work documents,
Condiments, sixteen years of
Abuse, a basketball, footballs,
A laundry basket and books,
A brisket and a wok, so we took
The unusual decision of opening
Another car’s trunk and filling it
With all my dreaming flotsam.
It seemed to me like baggage.
We are permanently eighteen here,
And in the next scene I cannot
Explain how we arrived at your bedroom;
Anaglypta wallpaper, a plastic bin,
An absence of parents.
I rolled up the skin of my memories
And threw those flaky balls
Into the waste. I expect you’ll return
Again tonight, you seem to want to,
Even though one is an architect
Who is hardly in need of contacting
A dead-end poet, and the other
I don’t know anything about any longer.
I don’t begrudge it, I cannot fight,
In the next dream, I waved goodbye
To my grandmother one last time.
So my unseen mind got stuck
In an eighteen year old’s plight;
Big deal in the schemes above!
Yet how foolish I feel now, to
Have lived for decades with a
Harrowing belief that I
Was driving against the flow,
These dreams have teeth to bite,
When all the time they were
On the side of my wrongs,
And I was on the right.
Soul Slip
I slipped your hair’s length
Behind your ear as you slept,
Captivated by its intrinsic
Perfumery, garland scent,
Precluding an infusion
Deep within the marrow
And the merriment of
Undiscovered years ahead;
We can only love, you said,
If somehow we learn to let go,
And so I am letting go instead.
Haiku #546
546.
Goodness now with strength;
Goodness alone is not enough
To keep to the plot.
I Went For A Walk Outside Our Hotel And This Is What I Discovered
I found a secret pond
Hidden behind our hotel,
Undisturbed by human touch
As far as I could tell.
Cow parsley abounded,
Poppies and wild orchids
As high as an ox’s haunches,
As quiet as a glade where
Kine chewed their cuds;
Harbingers of summer rain,
They survived for years
Near this pond in a spell
Without knowing.
I later researched the spot
And read in a local newspaper
(On a whirring microfilm reader
In a library which burnt down
To appease an arsonist’s wishes;
It was not rebuilt but
That’s another plot)
About a boy found nearby,
Murdered thirty years ago,
Face down in a muddy brook
Which filtered through that pond;
His body turned to browns
Then younger dust, as does
Memory, as does Love.
The ox transformed before
My eyes to become a great
Black swan with a neck as long
As a distant sun, like beams
Which slipped through our blinds
In the hotel room we shared
As I kissed your back, and
Inhaled, and found a mole
Beside your spine I had not
Observed until that afternoon,
Just like the pond and
The boy and the swan;
They all took flight.
I kissed you there as you slept,
Grateful for your affirmations,
Your vivacity, your life,
And I thought about a community
Seeking a child through
The scrub and the reeds
And the sum of all strife
They would not find alive.
The Place Of Mistakes
Here, the God of Hammers reigns,
Long live the God of Hammers!
Swinging clubs, set me in place,
Secured in Plasters of Paris.
I looked into that pit of Hell
Where he tossed his mallets;
There I lost my sense of smell
And all the sensate palettes.
From my perch the lightning
Bruised throughout his business;
I hear that loathsome striking still
Within a loamy distance.
He pushed me through the hole
Of souls, in to new abysses;
In this way, I claimed coal,
Feeding the fire of kisses.
Il Vino Fa Buon Sangue
You were born from a glass of wine
My grandmother glugged, from time
To time, though her predilection was sherry.
She met a man who shaved off his name
And slurred his words without any shame
Before sleeping on a last ferry.
She said she had wine in her blood,
Il vino fa buon sangue;
He died in the depths of a biblical flood,
Forgetting lingua franca.
Touring pubs of our childhood,
You urged the same for your son and your daughter;
Everyday miracles misunderstood,
Wine turned within us to water.
Haiku #545
545.
I reached to hug you,
But you’d reduced to a ghost.
I fell through myself.
