the sand elegies

published in ottawater.com 3.0

waiting rain

willow blooms
brush curb
sing lightning, sing whisky
swig august indigo
dawn fog burns curryhot
shrubs turn black
bugs fly sluggish across parch
mud is a story for fools
spinach unfurls in sand
corn spills into cracks
slam dough on board
too hot for wood burning
rots in sun
nobody’s hungry
dusty mouths fill pails
a scratch of moonlight through clouds
finally moist drops
in air
brooks overflow
moon drips luminous

marauder of the fold

to be published by my self-publishing imprint Angel House Press and to be launched at the ottawa small press fair along with two other chapbooks on june 16, 2007

Hallelujah

published in Last Tracks, In/Words, 2006

www.capitalysyn.com

Minutes Fo(u)r Last

“It’s a hymn to being alive. It’s a hymn to love lost. To love. Even the pain of existence, which ties you to being human, should receive an amen, or a hallelujah.”
--Jeff Buckley, 1994

choose a river single malt
minor lift ~ major fall
sink
three-octave-smooth-fire sub
merge
Rickenbaker 360/ 12 string
plug it
wolfe river boots on love is
not a victory march
swim a broken cold
hallelujah

holy dove
your draw is

every breath

Plundering Elizabeth Smart

Apparently when Smart's book By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down And Wept came out, her mother went to every bookstore in Ottawa and bought out all the copies. I fell in love with this book. Here are my plundered parts:

Pt. 1

Monterey waiting moment
desire madonna eyes
postpone miracle fire hung with vines

faith across leering world
pacific in blue spasms red
avalanche double-size flowers
legends of bloodfeuds
suicide the very silence

he only a word
hermaphrodite love
thru appletree golden indeterminate
metaphor unhappy moon
under thumb
thrust insinuation thousands
dead grown to fruit

shadow
is written escape
hawk far out of world

jungled angelic unhealable velvet wing seeds
damp dark sorrow
tenacious goddess of all empty
grieving

gravity connected ripe
no beauty in denying centre
huge and simple
smoke to hold on

Pt. 2

come dying body future ghost
drips remembrance
waters another pearl
beguiled to lie down
bones old trees decipher
parchment anagrams
torture windiest symbol
egg gabriel michael
truth brushes trembling night

Pt. 3

floods everything over
liquid gratitude
inside ticking remorse
fiery spill behind gauze
crushed bamboo birth
disrupt envy
noise of inside subtle
fluttered circle
no room urging song

shabby tables mojave
silver poise
take
everything

Pt. 4

border turn lilies guard
bracelet scrawled white
liberty clefts heart carbon
sought thirty million
lineaments of gratified
desire milk none happened
swear

Pt. 5

returning thru
gullies willow whips
moulded flag wav-
ing allude history
intoxication

Pt. 6

swivel symbolic medieval
pin placards frozen chaudiere
eleven thousand faces
illegal kiss ottawa new year’s
bruised goodbye
jazz of warzones ship
down
twelve more useless hours
power to endure temptation
sidles up devil justice yearn ease
salvaged from blood

Pt 7

letter folded steam on coils
artist orchard blood on clothes
stalled passion burnished scene
but no no

Pt. 8

antagonists swept up blizzard
bleeding minute near dawn
exact lightning glaze spat
liberated cunt
mad face in half lit
room foolproof games
clay archetypes return nameless
crucified over five hundred
squeeze grief killed daily
murder has ceased
to beat
foreboding jangle burrowing
whirlpool like armies
generations of heather comfort
old
no consquence

Pt 9

drug to ease
blank days caught
eclipse unremembering
joined mouths
volcano imagination pressing
sedative monotony saints pedantic
blur message elaborate so cold
lace sexy kindled lavish spring
squander relentless
retrace tigress ultimatum
Pt. 10

By Grand Central Station
I sat down
and wept
fallacy signals iron-muscled
fated island craves violence
all-night cafes third avenue
failure
eye full of dust
longitude of inevitable great globe
separated cells falling stars
corolla
O hurricane
as air
rivers beckon dragonfly lined
sterile battles lost

do you hear?