Friday 29 December 2017

1 New Poem

Rogue Sparks

Coming this way is cigarette ember,
put out on metal
receptacle ridge, wetted down with
ocean air and admiral fell
promises of evening balm,
of little flickers in pyre
wood, piled delicate between
sense memory of excitement
tied up with whipping chords

Of four-walled days, drawing
sense coming back metallic,
distorted, watery, no longer recognized.

To go out chasing,
the skywriting of surprise,
bowing to boot wash

But glowing there a
second more, the same
as ever.

Tuesday 5 December 2017

1 New Poem

The Music Study

The fuse, the spark
was drawn out on matching
tables for the theatrics
of it all:

All-dancing showcase
of pastime blues, grinning
with new-wed promise,
grinning with minded property.

As it was drowned in shadow,
growing faint, weary as
tides scrape on sea-glass,
a cry came:

Spared of all evening’s cold,
dulling sense with floated radiation
warmth these are not a making
of dreams except as test patterns.

Coming up, a cleaner place
of it was made for mirrored
time, a hunting whiff of
old things leaving:

Like tragedies, staged readings,
the jig is danced to float
about with accordion breath,
not a pen-scratching sense.

Tuesday 7 November 2017

1 New Poem

Clean Places

If there is some grander notion,
to these ether trailings
of sunlight across splendour brick
clicking of chatter heels against
stone, then it is unrevealed
against the washing of winter
coat flows, as much so as
under watchful burning
space of warmer times.

There may yet be some clockwork
design to the patching of curtain
draws on days too blank to
pass inside, yet still too knife-showing
to venture out.

Then go to some places, scrubbed
down and seeing to welcome,
but filed down from all threat,
tensed of all teeth-bearing exercise,
in the contemplation of old air
where you could belong.

Not even there, though, was
a planning pen found amid
rubbish bins, hesitant tea cups,
broken spindle casing,
there being no sketchbook
tracing of myself in famed
rooms.

Saturday 28 October 2017

1 New Poem

Signatures

I am in ink here: scribbled
on the postcard back page,
time with penny weight distinction
to genius papers and arms
thrown around clumsy world
corners at trouble’s first
dodging sign,

Inked like a roadway graffiti
stop and drilling away in concrete
shelter time.

There wasn’t enough drippy symphonic
grandeur for the speaking of
tithes between us, not enough
to squint for sense in dark.

There are, still, pooling in reserve
the splotch-making touches, soft sound
rocking wide night as upturning
tin cans clack to stone,
the means to make this all ours
at a pace.

The hang, waiting for lie and
form to be given by paper
contract, wax seals on letter
back,

the kind I could never afford to send.

Monday 16 October 2017

1 New Poem

The Jourdan Boulevard

Slipping between the broken paving stone,
shoes bleating a harried rhythm in rubber,
I move visibly, sallowed,
as a humbled painter,
staring blankly at the unblemished canvas
of even time:

coming through clearly, loud,
coming through in found feather ambiance,
the ego of lazy weekend wanders coming back
as united strumming on
bending jazz break corners.

The tuba honks in Metro
underpass drew a line
with pathway’s depth on
gold flake etching of what
it was in pas march to
dead hot wire, imperial
fantasia and the rest of
it.
There isn’t some idle hope
here: I’d be lying
to take it further, in shade of
wishing wells, giving trees.

Sunday 8 October 2017

1 New Poem

Something of a Symphony

Sometimes, I am astronomical:
coiling against the pallid waterfall
of night bus stations, making
clock-face shapes with arm & leg,
as it drags still upon creeping
moonlight, upon rainy spitter-spatter
in these tonal illusions of
curious object left behind like
gaslamp papertrails for seaside
walks and camera flashes in
echo trace, still lives beating
on broken wood.

Some days I am unconquered:
the regimen of sugar drinks and
half-apologies still weighted against
youthful folly, railway gage
in vigilance of etchings,
though it is not so unbearable
now, the heating of jealous tempers
bears out a fruit of spun stories,
stilling and swallowed as ever
before.

Some illumination am I:
blinding snow angel along
the cliff pile of houses
we have here.

Wednesday 4 October 2017

1 New Poem

Seine Water

The ambulance siren tin-whistles
through hanging leaves, stirring
air like clipper ships darting
in grace from canal point
and matching, in true form,
carvers’ chisels on pillars on
century.

When darkness comes and on go
the hawker lights, bouncer men’s
jackets and faux-American pop,
halogen lamps as fireflies on
wave crests dance beating about
their sullen wings as wash
on mossy brick.

It is why everyone comes here:
the picture-posers on bank,
booksellers with green wood cases,
wares-men with Taiwan wires and
cheap plastic on dusting tarps,
all like the rhythm of
stopped city buses.

All came to overpay for beer,
to find their hearts and fountain pens,
in the last lapping of currents.

Sunday 24 September 2017

1 New Poem

Living in Motion

The best of times were there
behind silver-painted locking mechanisms,
sealed with Easter morning breeze,
swaying in time with suburban railway
track bends, conversing with
every conscious echo of Jazz Age
novelists, Beat philosopher and
other riff-raff whose egos litter
square, that make just overpriced
café sandwiches.

It’s when you’re there with all
the other jetsam of empire’s
backwash, trying to find those
stencil signs to head back home.

Tuesday 19 September 2017

1 New Poem

Temps Perdu

The washers still clear water
on the cobbler’s handiwork at
a strike past eight, stilling
in brisk chill of Lucky Strike
packets, crisped up as offerings
to green square signs with names
of half the freshman philosophy
chart scribbled on them by
the same half-handed adjuncts
who threw them to nursed coffee
mug mercies when they still
had breath, sparks and such
things.

The halls of wrought iron
still clang with scrap-ash of
Industrial Age candor: that time
the magistrate knew better than all
this mouth-wording weave
made of spindle-breaking code
lines near the airport, acting
mechanistic, acting charitable with
still life cadaver oil sketches
of paving stone springs we
feel as consecrated myth,

driven out with waited time.

Saturday 9 September 2017

1 New Poem

Where the Light Gets In

The harshness of city windows,
scrubbed-clean expanses of red brick,
the finishing school cafeteria clatter
up against inky cooling cauldrons
with tire rubber finish that stay
straining against foresight fever of
how much I needed, just to be
steady in the brigand morning.

Not staying there with anyone else,
imperfect in glassware revolution
style, shoelace fabric without
courage to slip out into
gossamer thread of kindred
spiriting, a blank repetition of
lyrical truth eluding us.

The darker silence of pastime
spaces consumes chalked-out light
fixture; how stars hid, blinked
beyond raising up
of old stone spires to where
the leaking of sun-faded fates

too do.

Friday 18 August 2017

My Chapbook is Now Available



After the months of hype, I am very, very, very happy to announce that my debut chapbook, Songs About Girls, is now available for your purchase and reading pleasure!
It is a short volume, consisting mostly of poetry along with a bit of prose writing, that ranges across the last five years in terms of time written.
I want to thank everyone who's every encouraged me in terms of my writing, those of you who have responded positively throughout this process, the various magazines and websites that have published my stuff previously, James and Stephen for providing blurbs and advice for the book, and my publisher, Urban Farmhouse Press, for taking the chance on me.

Please share with anyone you think would be interested and feel free to promote wherever you feel is appropriate. If you do have a particular connection to the literary world, please do let me know as I am new to this whole process. I am available for interviews or any other kind of public engagement and review copies of the book can be made available from the publisher upon request. In addition, if you have idea for book

Unfortunately as I am going to Paris at the end of the month, a proper book launch will likely have to wait until the new year. We had planned to do something this month, but there were a number of delays and issues with the publication schedule and the time seems to have gotten away from us. Rest assured, though, I do fully intend to have a proper launch, with signed author copies, once I get back to Ottawa!

I'm so happy to have been able to see this process through to the end and I hope that, if you do end up purchasing the book, you enjoy reading it as much as I did putting it together.

AVAILBLE TO PURCHASE HERE

Tuesday 25 July 2017

1 New Poem

Harps

When songs go slow,
city lights grow effervescent,

I think of Haringey foot traffic

When the sun swells and drapes
these little rooms in finery,

I think of gold harps
on green tapestries,

and of you.

Saturday 22 July 2017

1 New Poem

Dull Rainbows

Rustwater clank of rattling awake,
these post-Soviet planned models of
worlds, with their grease wheels barely
touched to track in friction form;

A meeting in soapstone
centerpieces, town names tongued
over with untrained whiplash,

belying those dreams of a Judt
reader all the same.

Back with the tin can charmlessness
of slanting roof cars, there lies
the snow-bound winter wash of all
that’s being sung on fire escape
stairs;

Ever-draining-colour copy
of old wounds we kept over-painting

with trinket-seller timing,

with flat-eared generator hum.

Sunday 9 July 2017

1 New Poem

Still Bleeding

Second-hand pains, worn washcloth
in downcast river triage,
that won’t do so much from these
red-white blood rushes I get
outside of exact modulations,

When I don’t want to speak a
single thing more poisoned with
firewater wash and boot-heel echoes,
as I knew it always did with
the muddy tracking over grass carpet;
still committed, but dulled with click-clack
tables.

How I heard still the trilling of front
lawn keyboards, in the brittle whine-chant
of police sirens.

Two being one, as cheap kitchen shears
to rip and tear at bones, to chip
away at map lines,

But didn’t hit the same damp way:
firework pageant,
forgetfulness.

Friday 7 July 2017

1 New Poem

Bigger Things

Something to say was:
you taught me the difference,
between peppermint-vodka stings
of sticking throat in younger
dalliance,

those ways I always thought
it felt for boys whose shirts
fit bitter, who sat more
still, could focus on time
signatures.

Between all that and
stiff breach it feels to
not know what to call you
in tumbling digit-point,
except alive,

Alive in wan hues,
but without a word in
infinite scripts to call,

Making it so seeming bitter,
these half-spun living rooms of
faces scarcely held to minute
flicker of waxy imprint,

Marking the celebration of high holy
nationalists’ days, that scale so
far to stretch a sink water sky
itself.

Sunday 9 April 2017

1 New Poem

Marching

It goes in dry lightning time,
the unroofed ambition exposed
beneath bombastic clamour of sky:

how I came in as a foundling
on brow tile kitchen floor,
how it begets the bunk science
of heartworm checks, copacetic
constructions for the dawn’s

call of bracketed faces chased
through myth mazes of foggy
forgetting; fallen, stippled daguerreotype
in the word-spent witching hour.

You absquatulated, rushed as
electric windmill swift, to
be but dank rumour again:

a cold tomb kind of place to go.

Thursday 2 March 2017

1 New Poem

States of Movement

The glass still traces blood oak aromas,
a tilling kind of cross wind about cabin
planks: how you kept names in mind,

How little you brought up separations in
voice, the mild blankness of clock
faces, when we had nowhere to be.

This is racing to a kindness calm,
a criss-crossing shrug of rewinding
tapes that trace too much back,

Too much the literate piecemeal,
Monday nights with computation cracking,
spirals to same ends, as ever.

But I’m still here, still the light dust
of heavy airs, they find a long release
in, still pretending to float

Above the muddy-roofed buildings,
above the petty fading of shirt collar
kiss marks, diving back to cold ground.

Friday 10 February 2017

1 New Poem

Doorways

I watch you standing, framed
in palatial stone, red and still
with crackles of unbound telephone
wire, hints of burning grass hillside
draw a smearing blood trace,
a sheet metal sprawl;

You lean against the chalk dusting
walls, finding rune carvings of old
gods upon them,

You are light, glow in the breeze
of six-lane streets.

You turn from the noise, back
to swinging cranes of capital
infusion, the umbrella stands
of blanket street sellers;

They looked so coloured, something
more than barren trees and Weberian
brick that stare back from
daylight windowsills,

I can’t walk through
so easily now.

Wednesday 1 February 2017

1 New Poem

The Protest of Widows

I look upon the harp-string, still emerald
with graceful touch of old Eire’s whimsy
fingers, still ringing with notes of
scrap page brustling upon whiskey
sting of washing ice, the sunlight
orange-tinged through panes of Sunday,

the morning with police whistles and
charming coffee shop signs,
where I sat with warming water
radiator, the spikey paint job of
staircase handrails, where I fall down
in heart with pitter-patter logic

of staying in with equilateral
electricity, of having that choice
to organize the bric-a-brac in
closets or standing with dynamite
stick girls on grey stone corners.

How I came to be so believed,
talking about both sides of
chewing through a sinew spark
of crashing waves, too much drawing
of digital curtains from the problem,

but why did I have such choices?

Is it skin that I have lost in
scrapping up against bars of
dead iron gating?

No, the kind I still have.

Sunday 29 January 2017

1 New Poem

Paper Skins

The pallid sting in off-yellow afternoons,
we turn once over as sandstone rummage

to make quiet bearable
(but I like the silence with dressed

blue you, and the bedknob artifacts
of wind chime naturalism; could have

stood in it longer than that since left
stutter I wish I’d lose like twenty

pounds of unneeded packing), to make
our writing on each other’s sky-like

vestments a slashing, ancient kind,
burning stalk field alight with

brittle confession, alight with
pausing persistence of hostel fridge

beer bottles, with frazzling
hand gestures when words are over with.

Papyrus script hand, click-tapping
a heel-shoe rhythm with rise-fall

of knotted chest muscle, accidents
of close quarters where you draw

an olden symbol upon our days
without meaning to, and crossing

wires in haphazard design.

Monday 9 January 2017

1 New Poem

Tides & You
This crashing stretches out,
infinite in crest and ever-looming
shape, the same as water salt,
mixed solution.

You never loved us like you did
the sunshine, the humid air,
the longing liberation from too clean
streets and last year’s fashions.

But it isn’t some crafted secret,
something you have to work
with plastic line-make triangle,
with bureaucratic nooses and parchment paper.

How much more could it be,
else written between the space
of Renaissance star charts and
space age thinking of the year?

But, then, the obviousness of cross waves
becomes an often mystery at these
elevations, the winding down of roadways
procession-like in exact time.

Thursday 5 January 2017

1 New Poem

Books in Bed

It was well enough for me,
this silence in summer-mocking air,
this calm of constant refrain from
the bedside bookstand to the motioned
figures beneath sheets, living like
we’d gotten on in years past the
fitful flirtations of collegiate clumsiness,
past the blues of honeymoon contemplation
to that open water of cool-eyed passions,
still embers that heat rooms when the
windows are open.

It was so close for once,
that shade of sun you kept imprinted
in skin, that sinew of toughened mystique
you had in glittering presence, and
all those figures you had in shapely
dresswork.

But aren’t you still that bad girl’s
blandishments, that one all those Llosa
novels, all that cheap whiskey talk,
all the tired grandee strutting
had warned against?

Oh, in stillness, how wrong it was
to believe,

though it was enough for me,
if not for you.

Sunday 1 January 2017

1 New Poem

Stay Awhile

Someday I’ll smile upon this smoothing
of Sol bottle labels with thumb
under jazz band din, circular fluctuation
of brass man’s hands flick-fluttering
against a winnowing of Christmas light
shock, against the drawing-up of plentitude
maps we write as youth’s cartographers,
our muse of darkening light-fingered
persuasion,

yes, some day, but without the
flesh-coloured mortification of dancing
about these old-time words for a
great motion of meaning, stirring
renditions of pastime prizes and
the things that never seem as they
do in greeting cards, in Halloween films.

You stay, though, the breathing of
heavy traffic but a bitter memorial
of honesty’s forbearance and the
swung tempo of attempted lover’s
hands; you stay, though why
can be but yours to answer.

So, stay. Here. Just a little while.

Just until the greyer dawn of
years, just until forever stops.