Smoke and Mud

Smoke and mud
In curls, licks, wisps, and tufts
In an exchange of breath
And wealth
And life and health
Which evaporate in puffs
And condense
In hurried emotion

1 Bedroom + Den

We existed on a diet of nothing but gruel
With peat moss for fuel
Living in a hovel
No bigger than your navel
But what was really amazing
In the midst of all this navel-gazing
Was the enmity I bore you
How I loathed and abhorred you
And, had the world not been so flat
I surely would have pushed you
Off the edge of it
Or something like that

King Street Day Job

I have a day job on King Street
I sit on a sidewalk and weep
I lie on the asphalt and sleep
I spit on the subway grate
And slowly decompose
Picking apart a symphony
In tragic, symbolic telemetry
In elegant, wasted dysentery
Like a TB wretch with the King’s Evil
Coughing; and
It’s the scrofula talking

(a word of explanation: sometimes when you are watching Barry Bonds chase down mythical numbers, you remember that you wrote a poem about Ted Williams and the fight between members of his family to see who could desecrate his memory fastest ...)

Ted Williams Decapitated

Splendid, he thinks
Splendid—Ted Williams decapitated
No, not some other .400 hitter come ‘round
Not some new ballgamer with an eagle’s eye
Ted Williams—Ted Williams himself
Has been decapitated
By an eager cryogenicist
With a startling lack of respect
For the Splendid Splinter’s mortal husk

Fab Five

I’m listening to Gord Downie
Bash me to sleep with elusive brilliance
With inexplicable, dense, and convoluted meaning
With terrible disasters and snarling beasts
With memorable one-liners
And high-wire sonic feats
Of tight-rope syllables
On steel-toe beats
That dangle in the ephemera
Like a cigarette perched
Agonizingly
On the rhythm guitarist’s
Out-thrust lip
In the total mythology
Of the tragically hip

Ode To Blank At times, I see you walking At the edge of piled steel At the limit of our limitations To imagine how you feel At times, I see you squirming In the wake of everyday In the wash of common-placence Where it laps at disarray At times, I hear your “so-your” voice In the violence of a phase (In the violins of a phrase) In the abstract of “just-so” thought At the meeting of our ways