Snowballs are formed, then they hit. On impact they come apart and the pieces, so small, melt quickly.

Revolution’s lead-up is prickly, its result disappointing. And its body, painful and illogical in every step.

I feel at home where there is struggle.

I feel at home amongst the rough and the poor.

More,

I feel at home where people are discontent, unquiet, where the trees are not groomed, where the concrete is cracked and where one of the doors is always locked.

I feel at home where struggle is real. Where the people I see, asking for money, aren’t pretending to be in need.

Not a false mandate, channeled hate, or one-sided debate.

And our bodies: a statement of resistance in every step.

But change can be written and change can be bitten, making rabid what was written calm.

And our words: a statement of compliance in every space on the page.

What if I had resisted with every inch of my body?

What if I had permitted his hands to slide under my arms, to grasp my hot anger and drag me into holding? Holding my resistance in his gloved hands; Quieting my unsymmetrical demands.

Would the weather have cooled, the air frozen?

And my questions: a remark on the unclarity of every step.

They have held up pillars, stayed after they have been knocked down.

Smoke and Words

They moved to the suburbs. Got pools

got fooled;

their own tricks used against them.

Peacock’s nothing more than an ornery hen.

“The neighbo[u]rhood of poetry and rhetoric.”

Party at my place tonight

Wander down the block to the house with the red door,

with the painting of the peacock

crawling up the edge on the east side. Its rising. Its raising.

They get together and play word games. Eat flambés, say beautiful

things for their own sake.

Quote Elliott and Joyce, flirt like little

girls and little boys, all curtsies and courtesies.

‘Wait til she sees my new publication: On the Word What.’

Just because.

The neighbourhood went up in smoke last week.

Rhetoric has to speak to the insurance company;

poetry never got insurance. Thought nothing bad could ever happen: 

the place was too beautiful to burn.

So all the fucking paper burned.

Smokey maché churned the words and up they flew, mingled with the smoke, forced up by some physics they didn’t understand: They’re rising, they’re raising.

Now the clouds are full of smoke and words. And all the clever

tricks that were written, that had to be read to be understood
are gone.

Free, honest again. In the clouds where they should be and

where they began.

And poetry and rhetoric are naked.

All their clothes burned.

And their neighbourhood is a pile of smouldering ashes.

Atop the pile sits a particularly elaborately-coloured peacock, all

proud and calling, his Tail spread wide and he’s tramping the dust with strong claws and toes and its rising its raising.

Our Only Hope for Peace

Our only hope for Peace lies on the gum-riddled, spat-on brick sidewalk.

Dirtied, stepped on, about to be blown away.

Our only hope for peace. Passively waiting to be acknowledged, revealed. It waits to be accepted, followed, believed.

Walk by. Rushing. We’re late for class. We need to buy a gym pass so we can go and work out our asses so we can look good and make passes on the best people in the bar.

We don’t have time for thin, wavering arguments, without enough weight to hold them down. Just trying to be heard downtown on a busy street corner.

Call the coroner. It’s turning blue.

Why should I believe you? I have a million things to do. Bet you didn’t even go to school.

Our only hope for peace is wrinkled, slight, not many people think it’s right. It stays there all night, if not brushed away somewhere else, close by, far away. It’s here today, don’t really know what is has to say. (Do they?)

It doesn’t have a good look about it, ragged at the edges, wedged between an apple core and Bank of Montreal door. Looks sore.

'Our only hope for Peace' is right there, written on pale blue recycled paper. Didn’t even stop to pick it up. Would you?

Hold.

Hold your truth.

Hold your head up high.

Hold your lover’s hand and let him hold you.

Rest.

Rest your head on his shoulder,

Like you will when you get older.

Nothing’s perfect, not even love.

Being a Bigot

Not being a bigot means never knowing where you stand.

Not towing the party line means missing out on the conga line. Not feeling the buzz from celebratory line of shots on the bar.

Avoiding the boulder of conviction rolling over you, pace increasing from the mountain of rectitude means getting the cold shoulder from the two-dimensional people. The people who got shmushed.

We may agree, but should not march ever forward in the brigade of progress, our dicks out our pride impenetrable our opponents very penetrable.

Arrogance is not something to brag about.

Listen

Open.

Open your ears; hear the

wind rustle through the trees

grasshoppers’ pinch cut through the dense breeze.

Guitar strings resist his tender squeeze.

Listen and you will hear

sipping of beer, melodiless chords,

calm, deep, melancholy.

Drive

lock your inhibitions in the trunk and drive away into the sun, blind to where you’re going, confident you’ll get there

Best Friend

I’m here.

I’m here for you,

if you need to scream, want to sit quiet, cry angry, run far and drink, lie in the grass and think.

I’m here.

There’s no reason, no doubt, (don’t have to think about it.)

Exhale a bit and know that I’m here for you.

I will leave at 3 am to sit in silence, bring you soup, find you Cream Liqueurs when all the stores are closed.

I will procure midnight oranges and make sure you eat them.

I will make faces, bad jokes; I will sing with you.

When you are angry and nothing will change that, feel that. And I will be there to hold the anger and pain with you; look at it, feel it, let it wash over, cry until there is no more salt.
We’ll go to the park, remember when there was less to think about but seemed like more; we have more under our belts, our pelts are longer, our hides are stronger.
Its how I know you're ok.

Solar Powered

But then they cry at the movies or when they hear a song. They want catharsis but if it’s due to fiction then they aren’t compelled to act on it; it’s just a story. Fiction-derived emotion could be harnessed, like solar energy. Collect, store, use when needed. Change happens in small, unexpected ways.

Street hip-hop doesn’t unquestionably pilot revolutionary change. It may mean that a boy has a way to get out aggression, and has something that he’s good at and somebody likes his rhyme and positive feedback feels good. Maybe this contributes to less conflict with his girlfriend. Maybe she’s able to talk to him more, maybe she gains more confidence and feels safe in saying ‘not without a condom’ and maybe he starts taking pride in that.

Maybe.

And maybe that’s social change.

And maybe revolutions are minute, like the world turning – you can’t feel it but it’s happening every day all the time. And maybe these small things mean that the world turns in a way that lets the most sun in and keeps the trees growing up and the rivers flowing out to the seas and maybe these are the revolutions we need: constant, unglamorous, quietly vital.

Welcome Mat

I hope you’re enjoying that cigarette.

That would make one of us.

I hope you’re enjoying your freedom

to smoke uninhibited, while

restricting mine to

breath.

Its hot, smoke going

down to that verging on painful spot in the bottom of your lungs.

I hope you’re healthy and you stay that way.

But more than that, much, much more than that I hope that

I am. And that I do.

See, every time you calmly, unknowingly, satisfied, exhale

directly into my smoke-hating, and until recently, decently-smelling face

rage builds.

Its cold: a snowball, growing, circling, collecting.

And if the unforgiving smoke doesn’t kill me

this grey loathing surely will.

So enjoy that cigarette, enjoy

blowing its refuse into my face and feel my fury as you go home,

relaxed after your café chat, climb your winding staircase and find a steaming, fiercely putrid pile of shit on your welcome mat!

Teach the Mountainside to Drum

I’m trying to pull what is quietly there in the back of my mind,

to the foreground.

Metaphor, piano notes, these things hold meaning.

Can I explain on ruled paper, rectangular, thin?

Can someone explain to a mountainside how to drum, each on their own djembe, congas, some leading now others some dropping back a little girl dancing clouds gathering?

Some things cannot be orchestrated.

Metaphor, images of a cloth-draped man calmly holding a flail,

Men linked together ankle-to-ankle, orange, no hair.

One look and you know.

Ideas of punishment-revenge, loss of freedom, loss of choice come and you feel it and you don’t need an explanation.

Play the game.

Wrestle the song to 5 lines 4 spaces. Remember the clef, the signatures.

It’s not enough to hear it; to play it. The proof waits on paper.

This is what we need:

We need the proof.

Traffic is slow with no cars on the road

This poem is happy.

It’s happy because it is sitting in warm summer grass,

Because it saw a good friend today, and because soon its going to fly away.

When it’s written it will fly.

Clouds will rise, lifting the smog,

drivers will            slow,

then stop.

Guitar toters will put down empty cases and won’t replace them.

Mowers will relent, lawns will grow up around them.

Swings hosting kids will whine as they grind, moving only slightly

with the wind.

Everyone look up.

Words, letters, stretching like loose white cotton float gently up.

No destination, no constraints.

They stretch their toes, clap their arms.

Together they read:

                                                         i           M           

L   o      V                               t                                    e

                    e                 S       

                         TH   i                                                 

The Ancients

(Another winter poem, reworked. Don't worry, I'll have some optimistic spring poems soon!)

Occupied by the materialness of truth:

What colour is the truth? How long is it?

How wide?

Is it wet or dry?

Would it respond if I said hi?

Does the truth make the tide go and the birds fly?

The Ancients:

I see them as the oldest trees in a green grove.

I see their faces tired and stretched,

wrinkled and hanging from the places they once were.

I see them but they cannot see me and so I cannot ask them

what they think, if they need

a drink, if they smell our polluted stink.

They are tired. No longer interested in the truth.

They remember the days going to the hilled place with my love.

He to snowshoe amongst them,

I to swim in what was once their waters,

But is now perverse and burning, responsible for their wrinkles,

their colour-fade.

The truth once had colour. It is now grey .

 

Wings

On the wings of a plane there are

footprints, an opaque hue; a mirage.

On the wings of a plane there is oxygen, still breathing.

There is time, still beating. Caught between places.

The e word

So he asks me why I care about equality.

I’ll tell you:

Equality calls to me like an old friend, wind carries her voice past the lighthouse, over the foghorn’s moan, through the darkness.

Equality wants to be here with me, holding my hand, kissing my palms.

She wants my emancipation; she wants me to feel ecstasy, she wants my river to overflow, sending all the villagers with no eyes, no colour, downstream never to return.

Equality wants to braid my hair and warm my neck, letting me spill the tears from my mouth from so long ago.

She wants to know why I won’t cry.

Equality wants to hear the things I refuse to say; the things no one knows are scratching at my throat; clawing, scraping to get out. They dig and they dig, but no daylight do they see.

Equality.     

I need her and she needs me.

Citizen

What makes a citizen? Who decides? Who doesn’t belong, and who, legitimized, never considers it.

What makes a person? Their flesh, their thoughts?

How long will it take for me to become a citizen? The grass that I stand on does not grow for me; the air, reserved for someone else. The earth, the seeds, have been nourished by hostile soil, so that no matter how I toil I am not here. Transience, such a funny thought.

The branches all point in the same direction: away.

Paper tells me things that I cannot believe. And so I dig, deeper, deeper, searching, imploring these pages, these words to tell me what I know is there: valleys, unseen, hiding, affecting gravity.

Gullies in the fields, spaces in the equality that is described on the pages that I read.

And so I ask, what makes a citizen? The land they own? Do they stand alone? Do they need the outside to define their own? Like a home, does its structure protect what is inside?

I turn to the soil, that births the wood from which the house’s outside is derived: but the wood is hollow, lacking detail, monotone. Its song, thin and dry.

And the builders forgot so many things.

What if words disappear?

What would happen if words stopped holding significance in the world, and images took their place as  force? Well, people would stop reading, except to get that retro, non-conformist effect. The same effect that makes teenagers play records on their parents’ old record players that they dust off and drag from the garage into their bedrooms.            

            People would stop reading the news and would only see the news. (This has begun to happen.) Images of cars exploding and mothers with dark eyes, crying, would tell all we need to know. In some ways interpreting things for oneself is better than being fed a pre-interpreted story by other people’s words. The problem is when we are shown a tiny fragment of the situation and then have to try and interpret our way into its reality. Footage exists to replace live experience. But if it offers a narrow view of an event, accurate understanding is not possible. We run the risk of being led to believe the belief of the footage-taker (or their editor). In this way, image is more powerful than word because the viewer is unaware that they are being led to the conclusion about what they are seeing. It’s manipulative. And it would lead to a similar-minded society (wherever the same images are being projected) without their being aware of the reasons for their ideas.

            Relying on images for information rather than people’s words could be liberating; it would mean not relying on ‘the expert’ for their opinion anymore. But some people know more than others about certain things, and so we’d loose out on legitimate expertise if we did away with all authoritative force. And words, because they leave more to the imagination that images, require a level of involvement from the reader. They allow for and encourage thought on the part of the reader as well. Even the strongest one-sided text (early Marx comes to mind), provokes other thoughts, critiques, expansions. Images hold the beginning and end of themselves, in themselves.[1] They do not provoke critique, because what one sees is what is. A video or photograph of a car exploding is a car exploding. And when one sees an image of a car exploding they have an immediate emotional reaction. Seeing this does not provide time to sit back and think about the reasons or the person who made this happen or anything else. All the viewer can think about is that a car with a person in it just exploded and that is bad. Text on the other hand, while having the ability to evoke strong emotional reactions, and lasting ones, does not have such an immediate response time. It allows the reader to take time to digest the words, and analyze them. When a person sees an image that they have an immediate emotional reaction to, they are more likely to have a knee-jerk reaction to it and act in a way that is not fully thought out. There is more chance (not that it is by any means a sure thing) that someone who reads about something will analyze and critique what they read, providing a chance for a more level-headed response.

            So what would happen if word were overtaken by image? The world would be less thoughtful, would criticize the information they were given less, and would have less perspective. Lets keep reading.

---

[1] I am not writing about artistic images, such as paintings or sketches; these forms do allow for and encourage involvement. The images I have in mind are those of TV news.

I'm riding in my baby's car, his hand sandwiched between my left knee and hand.
I ask him if he thinks I could be a writer.
He asks, 'what kind of writer baby? Novels? Stories?'
'No,' I say, 'more like philosophical ramblings. Personal rants.' I laugh awkwardly.
A pause. The classic rock station hums along on the radio.
His hand intermittently slips out of its spot to change gears, adjust the wipers.
'I'm going to say something kind of unexpected and probably cliche..."
'Ok,' I say, nervous.
'Why don't you start you a blog?'
So this is for Shayne. (If you can dedicate a blog to someone, I'm new to this.)
Thank you for quietly and consistently supporting me; I think I finally believe you when you say you believe in me.