A subdued one, no doubt and man’s best friend will likely be basking in the absence of explosions and mayhem.

OBEDIENCE CLASS

Puppies!
You won’t be pups for long so listen up.
You must learn to relate to humans,
A difficult lot; capricious,

Largely ignorant of our canine ways.
You will be required to muster
Every ounce of forbearance within you
Not to snap, bite back.

Sadly our wild ways have been lost
Over millennia and in 2020,
Mutt or purebred, we are all lap dogs,
Regardless of spirit or temperament.

We are domesticated.
Ugly word but our true nature
Ensures that you
Will always be untouchable

Even while indulging
Their desperate need for cuddles.
We are beyond their reach, torment.
Pups, you must find a balance

Between shy and biddable,
Charming and entertaining,
All before they grow
Weary of your antics;

Whining, chewing slippers,
Pooping or peeing inside.
One word; don’t!
Likely the most important lesson.

And hopefully your owner
Can figure out housetraining,
Isn’t too lazy
To take you outside when necessary.

Fortunately Doghood
Is nothing like the human condition.
Even on a leash, strolling in the mizzle,
We are beyond human foibles and misery.

Remember, you are a good boy!
Best of luck and be careful out there.
May your water dish always be full
And your future free of swats and prong collars.

Cooped up, on fire, slings and arrows.  “Ambushed into rapture/By a mind out of control/Rapture that rivets me/and my head at random.” Racing thoughts, body and soul stuck in current conditions, restrictions. C’est la vie in a global pandemic as we press on. Onward and upward! Hold fast my pretties as this annus horribilis draws to a close.

IF I WAS ARTEMIS

Instead of portraying her in a video
Where I tell the tale,

Transform you into a stag
So that predator becomes prey.

My silver arrows ace your knife,
Gun, arrogance.

I deploy Nemesis
Or rouse the sea to impede your journey.

Or, perhaps send a boar
To maim your mean old ass.

If I was a goddess
My options would multiply.

COVID BRAIN

Ambushed into rapture
By a mind out of control,
Rapture that rivets me
And my head at random

Until the mind crashes,
Pulled toward Earth
Via gravitational attraction
Like a sluggish satellite.

Changing my mind
Is a monumental task,
As gradual as turning a cruise ship.
Other days it snaps to quickly,

Bestowing dish drainer bliss,
Or condemning certain conceits as dull.
Take the hamburger out of the freezer.
Sorry, I can’t help myself.

I am ordinary.
Don’t know my own mind,
What it wants to say,
What it perceives

When I’m not there,
How it directs action
Or boxer-trounces deviancy.
Whew!

I don’t have to think
About sociopaths
In the family album,
His irascible fictions,

The legs he’s pulling
As I stand here
Entranced, basking in the glow
Of neighbours’ Christmas decorations.

Why can’t I have a rooftop deck?
Let’s get to the gist
Of the matter shall we,
Before it’s all your idea.

In case you missed it, we’ve cranked out a book trailer for Skookum Raven. Please take a look. Please share.

There are some rough and wild birds around Howe Sound — West Coast avians like the sharp-shinned hawk, the northern harrier, and the whiskey-jack. Heather Haley, an accomplished mapper of human migration, pair-bonding and predation, takes these feathered frenemies as her starting point in this assured third collection, Skookum Raven. Like her foremothers and contemporaries Gwendolyn MacEwen, Susan Musgrave and Karen Solie, Haley writes sophisticated free lyrics of a witchy feminist kind — but adds some proletarian ferocity with her bus-station grandpas and sketches of iffy guys like Ed the Fence. These are astute, austere poems which sometimes take flight into optimistic beauty — this book is “pockmarked with luck.”

“Tart, taut and terse, Haley’s honed poems of lust and loss, wrath and remorse are imbued with hard-won insight and subversive wit.  Her wry x-ray eye cuts to the quick in an array of deftly drawn portraits that will make you grin with recognition.  Haley is a master of assonance, consonance and dissonance, intermingled with flashes of a distilled lyricism”.  – Fiona Tinwei Lam

“Skookum Raven is a text for the tricksters within. With spondaic pow-bams of language, these lyrics harness neologistic energies to evoke punchy lust, back alley bravado, and coastal croonings on sex, the wild, music and time.” -Catherine Owen

“Heather Haley’s Skookum Raven honours the west coast with brilliant side-eye observations couched in words drawn from a wide palette, from Chinook trade language to Pussy Riot. She brings us on a stroll through the village, showing the underbelly of every house and garden, then deeper into domestic disharmonies and unease in relatedness, writing sharply from a woman’s point of view. If any reader has become lulled with the beauties of west coast living, she will shake you into more fulsome awareness of the “hard blessings” shared. “No lotus-eaters we…”-Joanne Arnott

“Haley has the gift of writing to suit her subject in all its raddled variety, from wired and jarring to lyrical and tragic.”-Vancouver Sun

Available for purchase online via PayPal at www.ekstasiseditions.com

Contact Ekstasis for details or to arrange appearances, events or media opportunities. For further information: Richard Olafson or Carol Sokoloff          Phone: (250) 385-3378    email: ekstasis@islandnet.com

Poetry. That’s all I got. I’m thankful for the escape writing provides and still, do seize the day. My psyche must favour the inherent irony of “good as dead”. I’ve used it in Houla in Skookum Raven. I’m considering replacing “hooks” with “talons.”  More work to do, thank gawd, not that I believe in god.

AS GOOD AS DEAD

Unless the court directs otherwise
The parties are named
Sweet edified spouse,
Salty street-wise co-respondent;

Coolish if not cool,
If “cool” is still cool to be.
Still, all three parties wince
At infelicities, clumsy speech.

She is a galaxy viewer,
Especially at night,
Scarce as a hinny,
Or a bedmaker.

Each morning dammit,
Before leaving the apartment.
An atypical good habit
Which surely makes no difference.

A longtime waiver of claims,
Acquiescent you might say,
And lately, a sniffler.
Something in the air?

Upthrust, untagged,
Missives lost in the ether,
Petitions kiboshed,
Appeals squashed,

Letters sonnetized,
She hangs her sentiments
As if a body in the limbs
Of a leafless tree, the gibbet.

Gallows humour intact,
The only thing left to do
Is remove his hooks,
Godsent or not.

Torn. Partly because I feel like an outsider after being out of the CanLit loop for six years as I ran a business-I had been planning to apply to a local university’s creative writing program but now having serious doubts. My son thinks it’s a waste of money. The tuition is thousands of dollars I do not have. Attendance would help facilitate the production of a new book but perhaps I can find some other less expensive program. Can’t even join or start a writers group thanks to the pandemic.

And then there’s the matter of genre; should I tackle another novel or stick to verse? It is my forte.  Perhaps I should determine to do it all. *sigh* Do I sound confused? I never should have run away and joined the punk rock circus! Back in the day I had accrued two years of community college credits intending to apply to UBC to study literature when I fell in with the Subhumans, the Dishrags and DOA. Oh well, at least I gained subject matter.

And now I am a variable. Perhaps we all are during these plague days. Though aspects of my life suck at the moment, the muse has stuck around. First draft:

NOBILITY EXTRACTED FROM THE VIRTUAL

Via language, despite methodized
Connections, monetized clicks.
Influence down to a science.
Resist Google. Manipulation.

Toast Twitter, or at least,
Notifications Off.
How many Likes will it take
To get through puberty?

Pass the imagination please.
So full of information,
Content,
I could retch.

What’s so great about virtuality
After all? Language betrays it,
Stabalizes,
The way language steadies
You. Me. Us.

So theremalize me dear, for
I am a variable without you.
Be my rompish beacon,
My poetic vane.

Language will ennoble.
Language will
Extract the nobility
Within us all.