I haven’t produced a videopoem since 2012, since moving back to the Big Smoke and starting a business. Gots to pay my (astronomical Vancouver) rent. Like many people, I have more time these days; perhaps it’s a good time to adapt this poem, The Last Ping, to the moving image as friend and colleague Fiona Tinwei Lam is encouraging. It has mutated into song, in collaboration with guitarist pal Keir Nicoll. We’re discussing this next step, anxiously anticipating meeting up again as soon as possible, continue music-making. Is it just me or is the wait excruciating? The end of a marathon is the most daunting though and requires discipline. We’ve come this far with health intact, I’m determined not to blow it now. (Knock on wood!) Rock on and remain well my pretties!

THE LAST PING

After the girl is gone,
long gone, out of character,
statistical, presumed dead,
the verifying department
hops to it, sniffs out
the revelers, especially
the life of the party,
his liquid engine of beer.
Anyone with information,
to confirm names and addresses,
substantiate stories.
They watch your gestures.
Read your face.

Last seen wearing a blue ski jacket,
white blouse, black jeans,
Phoenix tattoo ascending
from the right hip.
Bright, unintentional dropout,
inadvertently delinquent.
Boyfriend person of interest
according to the RCMP.
Always. Constable passes the flyer.
Her cell phone may be dead,
last ping traced—pinpointed in fact—
to here. Right here. Last known location.
Right where we’re standing.
This town. Your pretty little town.

Fucken eh.
Check your property,
your shallow ditches,
So petite, she takes up little space
in one’s psyche;
turkey vultures leading us
not to her
body but to a deer carcass.
Parents pray
to repair the squabbles. Home.
Local kids clam up,
weighting the secret with smoke.

A teenaged girl can forget
she’s graduated
the fenced-in yards of childhood
to this vast plain
where condoms provide safety,
sympathy muttered. Crocodile.
She forgot
townies find transcendence in fury,
one vaguely recalling
Eminem shouts,
a catfight in the backyard.
She looked kinda posh,
smashed herd fumbling,
fawning, pushing.
Over. Under.
Dancing.
Sending her sailing.

Though disconnected during these pandemic years I continue to seek. Compose. For you, rough draft of a prose poem, my first in many years, inspired by dear friend Jhim Pattison; sweet, kooky neo-surrealist whom I miss terribly. We could talk for hours, about everything and nothing. An avowed alchemist, Jhim was a stalwart guide on my inward journey toward peace.

CAMOUFLAGE 

The land is a mother that never dies. Who said that? Victor would know. The 80s was the video decade and 1989 the year my dear friend Victor’s mother videotaped her will, farewells. Tenderness immortalized. My friend was not left out of the will, in fact Victor was the executor. A good son, the kind of son I would be fortunate to reproduce someday, a fine young man, foreign concept in the 80s. Aside from Victor, who shared unerringly, especially his apparitions. Blackbird red against a sky wall of dust, paper doll in firewater, deer head in earthquake debris, uncovering an angel face in the snow. “Yours!” Orca shadow on the incoming tide. Gila monsters, boulders and yucca trees. He took me to the sleeping giant desert, to hear with my own ears thrumming deep within bells of pale blooms, in the fossils of mammoths, sloths and giant bears. Look down. Beneath our feet. Treasure! Look up, past your head. Condors bending the boughs, light a diaphanous linen sheet. Beats! From within, from without. People being people must conjure up gods though red army ants conquer these hills each day. He took me because I forgot to leave. “See, it’s painless.” Let’s live here, in that cloud-cloaked cottage of stone, kit foxes for neighbours. Look at the way she moves through the chaparral! Loping, then bounding, coat the colour of sand, invisible to golden eagles. Cloak me Victor, please provide camouflage. You’re the only soul who can.