A Poem A Day April 2005
Day One
Call by call,drink by drink
He tries to unravel the years
that hide him from old
friends,old lovers,old dreams
Tries to track down the past
through unknown cities and provinces
disconnected numbers with recorded
voices that deny his search
Another night where alcohol
replaces the emptiness on the line
as call by call,drink by drink
he tries to unravel the years
that hide him from old friends
and hide him from himself
Day Two
After the clean oak door closed a last time
and she was left in the dusking and alone
She wrapped the silence around her gently
petting the quietude like cat's fur
Later she will brew tea in the kitchen
her feet padding softly across the
black and white tile to the kettle
the tea steeping slow as history
But for now the light fades into
the quiet silence and she strokes
it along the folds where her skirt
spreads in grey billows on the chair
She sits with a slowly spreading smile
and disappears,cheshirelike in solitude
Day Three
He wanted to write a ballad
a dusk world of knights and faerie
the music a pilgrimage
of life finding love
She wanted to be a song
deep sensual bass driving
along her veins within a
beat of lust finding life
They met in a grey concrete
field of the silences noise can bring
and filled it in time with
laughter and shared hearts
the metal lady and the man of myths
singing together through dangerous rhythm
Day Four
Travelling with the sounds of nostalgia
along the universality of back roads
empty farms and small towns left like
photographs of forgotten times
Southwest Ohio, Ontario, mutualities
birds and small animals scamper across
tattered cloth cluttering warped boards
in the windwhistled lost nurseries
A brick oneroom school house gives lessons
to the weather, these are the skeletons
of what was to have been someone's future
near tumbled headstones in family plots
and the rumble of traffic on nearby highways
where people rush toward something
Day Five
step by step on old steps
measured prayer to old loves
in a moonslipped night of
introspection and reflectin
In the morning she will wake
in a polished world on flat
land, her children creating
their own future nostalgia
day by day, memory and incidents
her husband, from another world
and another past kisses her
on the forehead over coffee
Brushing crumbs off a long gone skirt
she smuiles sadly and rejoins today
Day Six
From across the crowded room or sea
she pulls him across the night
light swirls around the edge of her smile
while she watches him
She stretches and whispers in his ear
fear not, I know your desire
fire and downing mix in your mind
find here what you may
She whispers again as seasons pass
as a dolphin drowning in fresh lake
take your fleeting moment of pleasure
treasure it awhile
THe smell of coffee wakes him in the morning
and with mixed feelings he moves to get online
Day Seven
We lay in the slim still bed
and quoted other generation's poets
in the ale rimmed edge of night
and the geese kept watch for the moon
We did not make poetry of our own
We did not make each other our own
But lay side by side in the dark
lines from seperate stanzas
The next day you lay your dreams
by the lake and left for stability
I left for other mountains and
other nights of listening
as words and music built
me note by word to more
Day Eight
There are songs that no one can hear
Melodies that wrap around the hearts
and draw the skyclad lovers near
Though the shadowed singer plays clear
as the dance of life in joy starts
There are songs that no one can hear
Hope or lust together banish fear
Lift and join from seperate lives the parts
and draw the skyclad lovers near
Joy or sorrow can each bring a tear
within the music of the lover's arts
There are songs that no one can hear
From moment to day to week to year
The bodies move the music starts
and draw the skyclad lovers near
On naked blended skin the lunar sphere
as if lust and love rode the same carts
There are songs that no one can hear
and draw the skyclad lovers near
Day Nine
Walking Vancouver Island a cougar
turned to me as if to ask what
right I had to scramble the glacier rock
and I had no answer
And now I sit and wait and watch
as a mad squirrel chitters to the window
and shows of his daily take
before brushtailing off again
And now I sit and wait and watch
as a raven looks in the window
daring me to quote poe at him
before winging his night into the sky
and crow,raccoon, opossum,deer,coyote
here we share our moments by the skyline
Day Ten
Flowers do not feel the music in their growth
or the poetry in ther generation or
Or anything but the green urging that drives
toward appreciation and pollination
Left hand wrapped in support of the lotus plant
she opened the door that offered her a future
blossoming only to find emptiness and a
torn note of farewell and bias shifting
She sat for hours in the dark
a small pile of shredded blossoms
building by her feet a visual
kaddish for a lost mutuality
The shredded plant rustling like
the small deaths her life had become
Day Eleven
He rimmed the ash of his cigar
against the spinning schoolish colours
Of the globe that he had
lifted as an orb and set back down
"You see,"he said while watching
the colours move beneath his hand
and beginning to bleed through his words
"This is the true loss of Reality"
He stopped the globe and spun it once again
"These colours, these lines are not real.
These are the fantasies of generations
whose anger kept Reality at bay."
"Perhaps in another millenium they will learn"
He turned, tail knocking the globe down as he flew off.
Day Twelve
Step by dusty step he
left himself standing in the yard
A black and white photograph in a
grey on grey world
He left in Mr Hanson's wagon
getting a ride to the train depot
to cities and to the War
and futures beyond measure
He came back in Mr Hanson's wagon
diseased bloated body in a slim box.
Just weeks gone he had found Death
in the Flu whispering across the plains
Step by dusty step they buried him
As eternally still as a photograph.
Day Thirteen
On a sharp day in Montana
I sat loose limbed in grey river
watching the bison gather in
packed herds like New York commuters
In Bozeman I chewed on venison
on the weathered steps of a Ukranian Church
and played guitar for the girlfriend of
a Shoshone trying to escape Reality
THey held each in the other's eyes
The Rehab Warrior and the Barmaid
On a quest for sex and a space
where silence nurtured the dawn
They left me their venison and left
I rode in quiet, alone,from the coast
Day Fourteen
A man with one shoe and a
rough singing voice moves
through a chant of
dispelling the last of the clouds
In contrast fully shod
a horse stands quietly on
a sidewalk alone near
a table of coffee drinkers
Pigeons move in scuffish
sidestep waiting for the
scraps of the time of day
to reach their plunging
As later I will peck deep
in dreams for memories of you.
Day Fifteen
In the greenshadowed woods of a spring day
The silence is like a companion in the travels
of minds and years and one foot slowly moving
against the other in the light breeze
Years later I can still feel the soft
loom under my feet and the rough
but soft oak bark as I moved in a
cycle of going nowhere but the
still silent space that filled me.
That same space that is filled now
by whispered grace notes at 5AM
and the past and future feel
of your hand softly on mine
in gentle building greenshadowed music
Day Sixteen
Almost without thought I tear
the found letters never quite written
or sentm bit even in those days when
heart and thought could pass free across borders
Stammering starts stuttering hearts
"Bukor Tov..I am writing to mention that
I lost the edge of your thin smile
on a spurious wager with a tall ale"
"Hello, have you seen my potential? I
think I left it under the blue shirt on the
sofa you always made me sleep on
until you moved it out and locked the door."
Unforwarded mail and empty flats momento
mori. The people gone long before leaving.
Day Seventeen
She turned the flat to a time machine
that helped her keep herself
doilies and woodedged photographs of
young men back from the Great War
The young men back from the trenches
and the dreams scattered in a sharp
moment across the mud as they
watched comrades become landscape
This is the way of war and peace
the sharp blows and dreams washed
down bloodrivers and then home for
some glad to trade glory for fading
on the mantel of a peacetime survivor
serving tea in an afternoon of remembering
Day Eighteen
She keeps her spandex in the closet,
which everyone agrees is for the best.
Near the last hurrah of vinyl sound
in whiskey boxes on the dustballed floor.
Late at night, with her children asleep
and the last prayer of venom toward her ex
put out along with the last cigarette
she dreamdresses her memory in spandex
The last lost lusting revel of the days
where she danced horizontal to heavy metal
beats with snowmen on satin sheets
her dreaming keeping the small girl at bay
with the cotton school dress and dreams
of growing into dignity and ever afters.
Day Nineteen
She sat on the edge of a discount sofa,
children running in the back yard and
playing on the wings and maypole,
shuffling and reshuffling the tarot cards.
Spread around us were the coffee mugs
we had been drinking from along with
the various assorments of tarot cards
she had used while trying to drink potentials
Or possibilities slipslidden on the edges
Any future she could see of mine
that led past the past in the turning
of card upon card in the afternoon
At last her children burst in with loud futures
and I left to float with music across the river.
Day Twenty
The German Brothers gathered for prayer
on the slope of a river rimmed hill
gathering wood, gathering brick
gathering the lines of tomorrows
taking their tools in hand they
carved the statuary of hope
bringing a parish together
on the hill of potentials
But the children faded over
the years schoolyard quiet
the hymns unsung until the
sacristy became silent, unused
and an empty church stands on the slope
collecting small animals instead of futures.
Day Twenty One
I follow the trail of pomegranate seeds
slick with juice and uncovered by the full moon.
I think to myself, walking through the soft breeze,
that someone seems to have been nibbling on myths.
There is a slight scurry of small animals in
the Aprilgrown fresh greenery still low
to the ground but the dreams of lush
majesty in warmer days.
There is no sudden end to the trail
just a gradual dispersal of old
godthought and demons hidden
between the moon and skyline
I turn like a clumsy raptor to
nibble the beauty of you in the night.
Day Twenty Two
The madeyed prophet of drunken gods
stands for a moment against the wall
and lets the world stagger on for him
before he lurches on in the night
his mind dribbling in small dabs of
soon forgotten instances of the world
small tributes demanded as he moves
tobacco, chance, acknowledgement
that he does in fact exist in the
passing sails of his tattered coat
his underbeard mutterings trailing
like hungry gulls behind him
the drunken gods whisper his navigation after
bringing up the last memory that was anchor
Day Twenty Three
This, in delaying darkness is dead rain
this,in martial tattoo is the dying rain
pulling the last frayed edge of winter
around the lost down to drench to the bone
the drilling precipitation of frustration
the rains of lost opportunities discovered
while drinking lukewarm coffee the next morning
and listening to the beat of nature against windows
this is the steady downpout that lays bare
the memories of lost loves in dawns that
never came and left each person alone
with less than themselves in the rain
treecanopied small birds ignore the lack of dawn
and chirp to each other of the rain's presumption
Day Twenty Four
Mischpoke loosely spread in a land
where holy days are joined at the hip
of commerce to allow an semblance
of escape into a concrete desert.
But even now there are people who
gather Chametz and the sales blossom
like flowers before Pesach and
the gathering of hearts begins
Her stories gather around her at sunset
like a new grown Haggadah each
of them one of the questions
that lead beyond the Seder to Truth
That Abba sets days to gather us
so that we may embrace ourselves better.
Day Twenty Five
There are instants of ghosts in dusk
whispering through the half dark moment
as though unsure of their movement
along the borders of night and day
I sip their conversation with coffee,
tasting more than hearing the soft
syllables that flow between the trees
not quite understandable among branches
that shuffle demigreened between words
of was or might have been the pastel
lust and memories that wrap around
the first or last moments of the day
I rinse my mug as the shades fade
like dreams that I will not remember
Day Twenty Six
In coltish steps of laughter and tear
fear and hope unite in twinned threads
bright lines as her futures arrive
live reminders change life's reason
arrange her priorities like flowers
howers that spread a bleak blankness
dead feelings as the needled sorrows
borrows a debt from the next dawn
gone now as laughter in child voice
after time brings the feeling that she grows
knows that she feels new understanding
kneels sometimes by her daughter and son
hardwon each clean tomorrow comes to land
hand in hand her children bring her home.
Day Twenty Seven
Small countries rise up in rebellion
against the empire's dictatorship
that has been built up over the wrong
times stacked within his apathy
they wield armies weaponed with
forgotten moments against the walls
holidays in places of the magic
that youth knows so well attack
like siege machines against immobility
of the heart in slow laughter echoes
shared smiles shared hearts the shadows
of mutual plans not so much lost
as set aside and then misplaced and now
remembered in sleep's half smile
Day Twenty Eight
Along the fragmented arteries of old dreams
that lead from the fading neighbourhood to
to the pulsing traffic that leads from the
used life stores to the grey downtown
Empty homes turn to empty houses turn
to graffiti tinged nests bright coloured
in their shattering like a phoenix
awaiting the spark of rebirth
And in the whisping of the river at dusk
detached from the grey from building to
house to home Coyote dances the empty
bones back to the once had beens
and with wild laughing music
leads them home into the night
Day Twenty Nine
Bleary eyed in an early hour
Dreams having winked and lurched
their way in low waves across dawn
and through the edges of memory
Drinking coffee in a greygreen hour
with thunder still a southern muttering
whispers of a springdeep storm to come
in deep counterpoints to the barge traffic
Trying to bring myself to myself
gluing my mind together with coffee
as the radio softly lets in the world
I look out the half blinded window
where a smoke limbed cat stretches
and accepts the world as tribute
Day Thirty
Bleary
We are what we are and what
the world brings us to and
surrounds us with in shades
and sounds and slim shadows
I sit in the deep quiet owl hours
and shift through the scattered words
arranging,rearranging them in slim
lines and slimmer thoughts
until the poems are finished
and brought out for reading
in small nibbles of our worlds
in a casual intersection of experience
As elegy or epigrams or epitaphs poems as seeds
that may or many blossom in other worlds
