1 New Poem

Branches, Bitter

You sting still with oak switch

melody, a creaking, careening half-sorted

thing of pretense to push, pull-apart

like children's building block etched

spectrum, your lips still dying to draw

pale blue-eyed passions on ambassador

brick walls in the slightly shaped, inviting

curves of unplanned sprawl, dressing gown

hem line in how, at one time, just

a right angle of porch light can

seduce us all, just a first push to

illusion can be a start to grand falling,

but for the bramble bush of thorny

crime, but for the beloved turn of

eyelash curl to tabulation, calculation,

broken by formula this manner and that,

until its pieces shone bright,

mortuary bone and sticker tags

on sterile glass, but for the cuckoo

clock anatomy revealed of gears and

theatrical spark: so simple the tick

to youth's hands, comprehended,

yet a lifetime's trial in making.

1 New Poem

Easier

Some people find it easy,

walking on hay fever air and sun-shower

prismatics, spectrum reflection

in the summer youth of their

flight-pattern passions;

Oh, how kissed they must

have been to memory, or

in some supposition those

broken hours of waiting, waiting

in the light of half-cooling

computer towers, whirring away at

heavy-eyed hours, too much

content with silence sittings.

Couple quarters on a table-set

Ms. Pac-Man machine, rigged pinball

stapled camera lens to dock lighting

set-ups: how perfected, how false,

how hard it always could have been.

1 New Poem

To Read in Five Years' Time

You live on flashed lights,

distance speculation, temporary

markings in the tribal sets of

our age; kind of dapper swirl

that stuns in midnight hours at

twenty-five but sour-stales by

thirty with the same clammy-headed

pill bottle pound awake-arise rhythm

of slanted beam ceiling, cracked lead

paint and charming irregular door frames.

Those same still-planted detachments,

coldness as some straining affect,

calm passing in raging tumult you never

faced in head charge, sheltered by

sunglass ironies, imagined wit;

how grand to keep believing

some heart beat in same teenage

time, the questions posed by one-off

mid-90s alt-group, pitter-patter

of scraped guitar chords you

could have worn as a halo,

worn as a cloudy cloth,

trail, rag-and-bone parade,

since you cracked the first

meaning of words in chapbooks.

1 New Poem

No Place in Particular

It is me and the chime bass tic of

a moderately talented 12-bar blues band,

jack skiffle beat to match the

swish of quarter-water Czechvar tap;

some half-tolerable mediocrity,

more passion than inspiration,

more rushing flop-sweat than charm.

It is you and the land of orange-fronted

storage lockers, flat middle Canadian dialects,

an endless expanse of still lives, passive

flowing the muddy creek banks toes

dug between at uncle's fishing lodge,

in relief from summer's pavement pulse,

the same shaky condolence of, now, your hands.