WINNIPEG DOWNS from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland”

Journal

When a mother prefers cards and bingo to cooking and childcare . . .

Winnipeg Downs

Games of chance. Sleight of hand. Games invented
to wash us out of her lush, chestnut hair,
setting little sister and me off to stoop and scoop
discarded tickets. Plucky as yard hens. Two bags
full. Staggered, not by one-too-many beers
but a winning wager, she whooped I can buy
you girls supper! Dragged around like carrion
in a diesel-rank yellow Beetle, we fought

to hide in the nausea-inducing verboten slot
where balled-up fists could not reach.
Dutifully she ordered a Mama burger
though professing to prefer the Teen. Two bites. I bet
she had no appetite after six months of whiplash prescription.
Her lumpy thumbs hefted fivers, entering the weekly lottery,
blowing crumbs of crud off a scratch & win ticket between pulls
on a machine-rolled fag, corduroy car coat pockmarked
with cigarette burns. Bingo-lottery-horse-and card-playing loser.

My hand. A mother rather like that species Continue reading →

Reading the ground with a bear’s eye

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Frantic week behind, hectic week ahead but I always make time for a walk in the woods. Josef opened up some of the deer trails on our property recently which has encouraged my bushwhacking—or our bushwhacking—the mutts and mine. I love it when they kick up layers of needles, lichen and loam. Is there any richer smell? It’s a fairly strenuous workout, with all the climbing up and down boulders green with moss and crumbling cedar logs. Like all the islands and the Sunshine Coast, Bowen was clear-cut about 100 years ago. Imagine how convenient it must have been tossing all that timber into the ocean. I’m kidding. Sort of.

I spotted this remnant lying on the ground and it brought to mind the cover of Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife. I’m no anthropologist—though I harboured aspirations at one time—but it would appear the shape could have inspired west coast native artists. It’s an eye! See?

A bear’s eye. Bringhurst talks of reading as an “ancient, preliterate craft. We read the tracks and scat of animals, the depth and lustre of their coats, the set of their ears and the gait of their limbs. We read the horns of sheep, the teeth of horses. We read the weights and measures of the wind, the flight of birds, the surface of the sea, snow, fossils, broken rocks, the growth of shrubs and trees and lichens. We also read, of course, the voices that we hear.”

Speaking of voices, I’m still recovering after hosting Penn Kemp at a boisterous salon on Saturday. Is that an oxymoron? Well, our salons get pretty festive. Penn is droll and vivacious, possessing a singular voice, literally, figuratively. She was a big hit with the 35 or so die-hards who turned out despite a nearly constant downpour, including some of my favourite urbanites Kyle Hawke, Warren Dean Fulton, Shannon Rayne and Rhonda Milne who took pleasure in the food, poetry and water taxi experience from Horseshoe Bay to Snug Cove. Penn had Josef perform some of her poetry in German! Now that’s a first, I’m glad we got pictures. I participated in another piece called Poem for Peace in Two Voices. Soundings—what Penn calls her readings, and sublimely sonic they are. Later, we let our hair down, madly dancing and rockin’ out, then lolled about in the hot tub before finally conking out around four in the morning. “Thanks to you, Beauty, for your magnificent presence and hospitality. What a hoot and holler! Glorious to be with you. And I so know how much work went into the grace of the evening!” Penn’s right. It was a hoot.

Last Thursday, I attended Anvil Press’s launch for a deluxe edition of Continue reading →

POVs, or Redheads Rule Romania, from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland”

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A long poem-for me-about my trip to Romania a few years back. Several Romanians have taken issue with it but I found their country fascinating. Every nation has it’s problems, challenges and usually, a turbulent history.

POVs

DAY 1

At Heathrow I am wan, so pooped my heart quits
palpitating. I stop scrutinizing threat level colour codes,
unattended backpacks, retreat to my insignificance,
listen as a wife recites The London Times,
as foreign to me as Rome’s Il Messaggero. Katrina who?
These are disturbing times, dear. Cartoonist hit lists.
Boils of slam. Novelist fatwas. Bird flu dread.
Spread by beak or spicy chicken wing?
Off to hotbed of Romania, host to more than one virus.
Online scamming. Corruption. HIV. European Union
bid in peril. Does the average Brit give a feck?
Do rhetorical questions require a question mark?

DAY 2

Bucharest terminal quiet but for the cabbies. I nearly miss
foundation staffer Caroline’s hand-inked sign.
She leads me to a young American with a Welsh name
and an English woman with a broken tooth. Wait here
while we search for the poet laureate of New Hampshire’s
luggage. Not another reality show, please. Pale silhouettes
amble past a riot of architecture, crepuscular on the banks
of the Dâmboviţa. Baroque. Modern. Renaissance. Gothic.
Squat, Soviet blocks abut opulent cathedrals.

DAY 3

Currency—lei—so overwhelms me with zeros I don’t buy
books or icons of Mary and the saints. Resistance heroes
in stone. An Arcul de Triumf and a monument
to the 89 coup d’état, Memorial of Rebirth, a tall, marble
pillar and orb locals scorn as the toothpick and the olive.
Redheads rule Romania now, mine violet in the gamut of tints,
ox blood to bozo carrot. I don’t blend in. Women in heavy kohl
stumble on cobblestones. Toward vogue. Glamazons vying
to be Continue reading →

Blame it on spring fever

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“There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”–Diane Arbus

I saw a documentary recently wherein young teenage girls in braces were asked about their hopes for the future and more than one said, “I hope nothing bad happens.” I’d been through so much crap by age 14 I was expecting relief not trauma, anticipating liberation, a time when I would reclaim my life from defective and abusive parental units.

2010. Wow. It’s turning out to be one volatile year, a brave new world in fact, this past weekend brutal, exhausting. Suffice to say, my personal life is going through much upheaval and I’m no slave to the status quo, not always, but ultimately shaking things up. I had to work through Continue reading →

SNOW BIRD from “Three Blocks West of Wonderland”

Journal

Rambling girl spoke of shirking her mother
land, Anne Murray songs,
the morally superior and migrating south.
She harboured an impulse to haunt
Big Sur, disturb Henry Miller,
though it meant straying off the I-5.
By Frisco, she was plummeting,
lollipops licked, pubic hair drenched,
small indentation behind her ears dry.

Illegal as any breaststroking the-Rio-Grande
wetback, she adopted derelict kittens, drummers,
ghost wrote rock reviews, screenplays, phone sex scripts.
Detected by no one, she relished peanutty Paydays,
played solitaire on the futon. Cavities, lonesomeness
swelled. She met Jello. Unrequited esteem.
He called her cheesehead as if she were from Wisconsin.
Her first LA boyfriend liked Doll, or My Nordic Princess,
as if she were a blow-up or a cruise ship.

Instincts erode. She persisted in exile.
Why not?
They don’t know she’s ditched the nation
via Pacific flyway. They’re too wintry, too white,
too busy redressing the past, the visible mistakes,
to notice she too too is exotic.
Coral in their aggression,
always courteous, gusto beneath them.
If she goes back she intends to arrive.
Like an American.
In a helicopter, like Bill Gates.
They will smile.
They will be pissed, despite themselves.
They.

Nature of time

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Heather Haley & the Zellots

It’s running out! This picture was taken when I still felt like I was going to live forever. I don’t know if 40 is the magic number, but at some point it hits you—maybe when musicians stop lining up to play for free—that the vicious rumours are true, that indeed, you are going to die. It’s only a matter of time. Bittersweet knowledge that’s supposed to make us appreciate life more. One life. Short and sweet.

Speaking of sweet, Happy Easter! Another Christian holiday we must work hard to ignore. 5 pounds. Apparently that’s the amount of chocolate the average kid will eat this long weekend, and you know it’s going to be crappy chocolate. I haven’t chowed down on bunnies since I was a kid, when I didn’t know bad from good chocolate or anything else. Maybe all chocolate was better quality or I had more taste buds or they were more sensitive. I’ve noticed the texture of chocolate bars has changed; they’re waxy. Yuk. My mother was a good lapsed Catholic and never did much to observe Easter besides buy us candy. My sisters and I would collect pop bottles those years when Ma was broke and we’d go to the store and buy our own. I always got a pop and a comic book too.

Ah, country living. A pair of Northern Flicker woodpeckers is mating on the roof of the house, which entails Continue reading →

ROUGH CUT-new poem

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Despite all the poems I’ve spawned, each time I sit down to write, I have absolutely no confidence that I can do it. The anxiety and trepidation nearly overwhelm me, but I persist, work through it I suppose, hence the writing process; my process anyway which feels like torture. I know I am not alone.

It took four years to assimilate a nightmarish episode to the point where I was able to depict it. Remember, poetic license; the she is not necessarily me, at least not in every line, stanza. Here it be, a rough draft.

ROUGH CUT

After a gestation period of eighteen months
and several bouts of incommunicado-ness
she dutifully reported to the pica-
eater’s rat’s nest to defend her lump of art
before he nibbled away all the footage.

She sang his praises
pretending the indiscriminate cravings
and grinding teeth didn’t exist,
didn’t wear her down.

Meth-heads don’t generate, they spin
scratched vinyl, shoot blankly,
regurgitate turbulence,
brew dandelion wine
because it’s as free
as the blackberries and psilocybin.

Pirate of his own ship-
bachelor pad bouncy house,
he slept in a pocket on the floor,
close to the cache
when he wasn’t busy
snipping,
sniping.

Under the red toque
a mind’s eye so muddied
it could see nothing
move.
Images, frames, shots
blurred unremittingly.
Recreate, rework, repeat.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.

With no redress,
no kind release,
she considered murder.

Adapt or die

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Brutal, Darwinian. Natural. Around the dinner table last night my family and I discussed life in the 21st century, digital native Junior marveling at how much technology has changed in his 15 years on the planet. An island boy, he doesn’t text yet but understands the appeal of the iPad. Me too. I’m getting tired of lugging my laptop around but it wasn’t so long ago that my iBook provided mobility as compared to my desktop-personal computer. We want it all!

A self-taught code warrior since the age of 14, Josef mentioned there are now laptops available for a few hundred dollars, but right away, Junior dismissed the idea along with their limited capability and RAM. Josef admitted that a USB port and word processing doesn’t cut it these days. People want to text, Tweet, iTune, email, Facebook, GPS, snap photos, shoot video, read the Globe and Mail and Google on the go. They want power, convenience. What’s so great about having a pound of newsprint delivered to your house so you can read one, or two, maybe even three articles, before running out the door? So wasteful, inefficient, messy and involves an errand- hauling it all down to the recycling depot. The other adaptation we’ve all made in this family is watching television on the Internet. We no longer have the patience to sit through network TV and its oppressive and boring commercials.

I’m slowly learning to text, with both thumbs, motivated in part by Continue reading →

“Motoarson” or “Motoarsonist”?

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I’m not sure exactly where I’m at with this poem, what it needs, if it’s complete or not. Oh you know the process. I’m leaning toward “Motoarson” as the title but maybe “Motorarsonist” is better. What do you think? Let me know if you have any other suggestions, it’s a work-in-progress.

Motoarson

Distorted in stature
duke of a wilderness family
winced at the price of fuel,
the carcasses in his wake.
Malicious by accident
depending on which room
the grilling took place
by which cop,
the good or the bad.
Benevolently slamming
he braised ugly hams in the sun
daily ate a shit sandwich at the wheel
of the taxi he drove all over the city
and its sidewalks.
Nothing can stop a provocateur,
nothing can stop ignition,
the fires
set at night
to divert shame,
flee scandal.
Detonated plushly
the flames trebled, jumped rank
puddles, lakes, roads, cliffs,
roaring into the ocean
to singe mighty creatures,
giant squid and the blue whale.

Health care or semantics? Or should I say “wellness?”

Journal,

Whichever phrase I use, I will try to say it politely. Have you noticed there isn’t much flaming on Facebook? Enemies, or the merely tedious, are eliminated much the way the feeble are culled from a herd of wildebeest. The annoying and the toxic as well, get Blocked. Booted off, or out. It seems honest opinions are what you scroll through, consort with. How civilized.

The hot topic today is the historic passage of the US health care reform bill. Many fellow Canadians can’t understand why Americans—the majority of Americans according to the Republican party—wouldn’t want universal health care. I was an expatriate residing in the U.S. for many years, understand it and Americans better but still don’t get it either. Is it Canadian or Utopian to expect a civilized, affluent society to be ready, willing and able to care for its sick and, or elderly? Are we not human? Or are we wildebeest?

Born of revolution, many Americans possess a streak of individualism that borders on libertarianism, self-determination to the point of Darwinism, where only the middle class survive and the rich thrive. The United States has instituted Social Security and Medicare and pride themselves on providing their military with only the best health care. Why is it so difficult to ratchet it up another notch and provide insurance to the estimated 32 million other Americans without coverage? Because that constitutes socialism! Unlike Canadians, who—rightly or wrongly, strongly or weakly—depend on their governments to provide not only health care but infrastructure, education and a guaranteed income, many Americans equate universal health care with socialism, which equates with communism so many years after the Cold War. Perhaps it all comes down to semantics.

Oh and apparently the University of Ottawa, and most Canadians, according to its Vice-President  Francois Houle don’t want to hear American and professional talking head Ann Coulter’s opinion unless she’s not only honest, but also polite. He sent her a message basically warning her to watch her mouth. Bad move, which only backfired. Why recognize such a hate-mongering pundit for now she’s threatening to sue-milk it for all it’s worth-but of  course that’s a whole other can o’ worms, or rather, words.