1 New Poem

Dishes

I used to wash plates

at the restaurant

my high school crush’s

grandparents owned, just

off the main street

in a little town with a

waterfront boardwalk

and a high school

on either side.

I’d scrape the leftovers into

a big plastic trash bin,

line cups, glasses, bowls

up against each other,

let the steam come

up over me, and wait.

Watching waiters bustle,

through narrow kitchen bends,

watching rain fall through back alley gutters,

watching summers come to an end.

I used to wash cutlery

in the sink of an apartment

that tilted to one side,

so that water would run

at odd angles, staining the

chipped countertops, pooling

underneath my roommate’s ashtray,

ruining his Zip papers.

Watching days trace into mist,

watching the in-out procession of friends,

watching absurd relationships take flight from couches,

watching dreams come into being.

I wash the glasses while

looking through a window

that turns to the sunny side

of the street, ringed by

houseplant leaves and the

Simpsons ornament my

wife bought two Christmases ago.

I listen for the sound of

pattering dog paws, as

I soak my hands in sudwater,

splendor of the suburb sunset

falling on the kitchen mat

at my feet.

Watching children play on concrete,

watching for a day’s relief in eyes,

watching the time wind rush by us

watching my heart's love wound.

1 New Poem

Song for Those Gone

I’ve heard it said
some things lost are never to be found,
but all things must return:

new forms and shades,
new shapes and names.

In dreams, you flutter on air,
butterfly wings too soon silenced,
taken under tow of time and weight,
too beautiful to be born.

We imagined you
speaking in schoolyard codes,
pitter-patter of nervous foot on floor,
tasting the first berries of summer.

But, maybe, you’ll come
as a rainbow
a sunbeam
a songbird
a shading tree.

Something that holds only joys
for you held nothing dark of
the world, nothing to spoil
from becoming all you could.

But you were all you could be:

Ours,
loved,
all seconds we shared.

1 New Poem

 Blankets (Stardust)

When you were born,
shivering,
you already held,
everyone you could have
given to the world,

the same as your mother,
and hers before;
all hoops joined in chain,

I see when I watch
the women with exhausted,
purple eyes, falling asleep
on their husbands’ shoulders,

under the digital readouts on
healthy eating in the first trimester,
billing costs for reserve scans.

The same as when
I hold you,
glacial,
I hold all the ghosts
of troubled teenage nights,

that wash away,
against light of
next thousand lifetimes,
we hold together.

1 New Poem

 Moon Cycles

Often, in silent times, I think
of trees and death, and how
they are the same:

Circular, replenished, endless,
taking, growing in kind,

Set between plastic places
that echo art that tastes
of bitter ash, bootleg cigarettes,

Back to the spring from which
all things flow.

I think, “why the Garden,
why plants, rocks, sunlight, rain,
why things so small hold joys?”

They are circles,
reminders of home.

1 New Poem

Embers

I was a great collaborator with

wartime cigarettes, an artist

with the conical scream-sighs

of life under bombardment.

I trust you more under

a broken street lamp, under

a shattered sky space,

where time stills

Than I ever did at dinner

tables pushed together on

sidewalks where some grand

conspiracy was hatched beneath

Breath you took in so

easily, not as now with

cracked plaster, mulched brick,

petroleum haze.

1 New Poem

A Note for Fathers

You dwell in memory:
blazing, soot-smoke, refined flame,
shifting, yet stone-hard,
with weights unbound.

There are scarce words
I would have written,
amongst polish concrete monuments,
amongst pine-willow shade,

had I the blood that now courses,
breath that now fills,
webs of infinite electric complexity
that pour themselves onto paper,

now.

Then I was bereft of all,

shivering for the slight,
tender touch of idle hands,
offering frozen comfort,
knowing some other truth.

In the chisel marks,
you persist
doing now no damage,
knowing now no strife,

knowing not how
grass, water, time,
can move boulders –

do not dull wounds.

1 New Poem

 A Long-Ago Castle

There was a vanished treaty
between us, an unfinished thing
in pieces of air,
in words of departure.

A promise across waters,
in amber remembered,
that I held bright, praying
for broken bells to ring.

Your signature, after I took
the hill, bloody and wracked,
dripped from lips with
wounded tone, but I

took it sincere, in a lampshade
way beneath the din of
the Turkish restaurant ,
beneath the pale light of
London black cabs.

Mine, as I stare now into
infinite regress of couch fabric
patterns,  brutalist math
of spreadsheets, time punch cards,

Was holding something back
some patterned longing
with no words to name:

This would only be memories,
written on the parchment of
windbreaks and stream lines.

1 New Poem

A Time in Spring

I heard the Cranberries in the back

of the Yogyakarta taxi:

Transmissions from other times,

lingering like window lights

on the dusty street,

warm glow of iftar dinners,

That rushed past as we

sang into the humid night,

Irish troubles bleeding

into a symphony of

Motorcycle signals,

street vendor shouts,

Warung announcers pushing

unfiltered cigarettes, on passing

Tourist crowds.

1 New Poem

Riding the 55 Bus in Mid-Afternoon

These days, I live
in ruins of greater things,

stray thoughts of greater minds,
last embers of roaring effigies.

I can hardly imagine a shaping
of steel for shelter

A shaping of brick for walls,
asphalt for roads, bridges.

Where did the hands come from?

Were they as simple as mine?

1 New Poem

Lucky Ones

We hashed out life over
quarter-beers in the Hamburg bars,
over the foosball din and
the tap of shoe soles on pavement.

We knew how all things would go,
from the patterns of planets to
the flutter of sparrow winds,
how all of it was one circle,

Ourselves at the centre;

Two wet-soaking amateurs,
their backs bruised from
pressing against invisible walls

So tight for warmth we
never flew, beyond the hazed
windows, weeping for the fires

That burned across the alley corner.

1 New Poem

Summer Skin

When I slipped out of
old clothes for the new century,
the tired rags coming off
in great display,

I took the last half of it laughing,
luminous against backdrops of
half-filled water glasses sitting on
kitchen counters, sticky atop Formica,
sweating in lakeside heat.

I was the imaginary boy, a
boundless whirring of pregnant possibility;
all chanting in soft voice how
great the wings would grow
despite their bent angles.

Until I dropped robes of old time,
the light box of arcade plastic
and screen reflection dulling me,

As I take timepieces, calendars,
silver dollars, baby spoons,

All down to a penny pawn shop,

Sold for good firewood.

1 New Poem

Pine Tinder

In the stolen wonderland
of interlocked train cars, crisscross
traffic between stowaway kisses
off concrete paths,

We burn bright,
white phosphorus and corner store whiskey,
in ragged-end dress and worn elbow coat.

We are wonderous against a thousand
microphones held searching
for explanation, for the why/how
of it all.

We brush past,
unbothered in the acid glow,
cast by bent street lamps,
cast by quarter-shade phones boxes
with copper and change
long since stripped.

Until we round corners,
catch faces against motor oil pools
in blear-eyed dawn light;

How weary, how extinguished,
how like the spectacles-and-watch crowd,
we look in afterparty haze.

1 New Poem

A Sunset in Shenzhen

Nights in the city settle graceless,
metallic, shimmering pavement
glass of the new, recycled tins
making sturdy struts, thrust
into indifferent airspace.

In a different life I loved
school carnival fireworks,
noon tea, marching in formation
and tying ribbons on old oak.

In those lives I remember
days of thrift store couches
in three room apartments,
and Blue on hi-fi,

The days of reckless whimsy,
faced against worth of
fallen things, brutal math
of loan files and above-guideline
increases.

I remember ways things shone
in moonlit silver, before
a veil dropped, revealing
butcher’s blade beneath,

Our holy words.

1 New Poem

 Dancing in Kali Yuga

You say bread and salt greetings
to the morning, dull sun on
the damp flatpack flats of Dublin –

Remembering the trapse through
Javanese back fields, acting
pith helmet past,

Marching with
IMF retirees, teak furniture
executives: observed exotic creatures

From motorbike perches,
from cross-wise wooden windows
set over streams, between rice stalks.

How everything grand seemed greener,
eyes sharper, less bittered
by years after falling,

than now with rain in the teacup,
how things would have moved
so different, had it all been

leading back to this stuck-on
place,  where trees bare bitter
fruit, chemical exports,

that soon drift like black fleet
sails, over all skies.

1 New Poem

Star Transmissions

I remember days when
you flowed like a river around
me, arms dangling through
Thames and Seine,

Out to oceans, seas beyond,
horizons we could tell
from each other in mystic mist,
would be severed one day.

Soon, you’d say, we’ll go on
journeys separate, taking twenty-three
grams with us, as much old film,
phonograph recordings as we can carry.

I looked back to calm when
we traced, paddled all this way to
arrive at the cross station,

Soaked and ragged to bone,
marveling, still mouthing
the winter white hymnal,

Holding you against the pitch sky
as sparks faded.

1 New Poem

 Flora and Fauna Act

It is not so bad to be
starring out the gray window,
as leaves cast shade
on November ground,
and fences stand silent
against creeping frost.

In these days,
missing a clear head
before all the world in gold
intruded, that I sing
“Al-amdulillāh” to sky waters,
river banks, tracing veins
in hungry roots,
in weeping willows.

They answer back, alarming tone:

“What did you take in every step,
things lost in daily bonfires
you set off with unthinking words,
tongue held tight until
crimson leaked on bleached tooth?”

I spin on the black, no noises
left to make in justification.

I know I have cut cloth
too close to bone;

screams still echo about.

1 New Poem

Sand Castles

When I was young I drew

sculptures on the beach,

holding tight against reckoning

waves,

In bold ignorance of all to come.

They stood, loom weaving a

hope some day they would

come true:

The fantastic scenes of monsters

slain under bed clothes before

frights could reach me

sleeping sound,

Of lovers conquering the grand

canyons that tore them asunder,

heedless the cost in gold,

in bloody bruise.

****

They wash away.

Like hearts, broken each

morning in screen glass.

They wash away.

Like loving words, silenced

by callous hallway echoes.

They wash away.

1 New Poem

 A Child’s Toys

First you gave me the
rocking horse to practice,

Then the compass to
find my way.

Two in such balance
I could barely sustain

Illusions of meaning
in façade,

Illusion of peace on
shipwrecked shore
in tent-filled underpass,

Illusions of the serene
when all things washed out

Faded paint in high sun.

1 New Poem

Wallpaper (Blue)

In Stockholm, ’67, I left
you on the train platform,
going East, falling away,
from lives we had known
bound us to windowpanes,
flower boxes on porch;

You knew of the daylight
nightmares, curious figments
that crossed my eyes:
the fire rains, blood stains,
aftershocks on hard concrete,
I never forgot despite curiosity

getting a better part
of the film reels in mind,
marked up on acid paper,
burning through dawn.

I was stuck, breathless
to the four poster points
in this room where days pass
silent, forlorn, ignorant of
all beyond:

the bombs, the Belsens,
tragic cells for what remained
of ourselves in honour, once
smoke had cleared from
building ash.

You had pinned me, plastered up
to dry and crack, curl at corners,
go jaundice in summer sun.

And there I was remaining,
until a first step forward,
a last gasp of city air.

Book Launch!

 

Very happy to announce that I will be officially having a book launch for my debut novel, Smaller Animals, in Ottawa at Octopus Books this November!

If you are in town, please consider stopping by for an evening of literary discussion and me (hopefully) not making a complete fool of myself. Copies will be available for purchase at the event but if you would like to pre-order, just provide the title and ISBN number from the publisher below to your preferred bookseller:

https://lnkd.in/e8_AZMw4

If you're interested in learning more, just shoot me a message! Hope to see you there!