two from rasputins

andrea banjoes heartbreak, sings a montreal cold storm
masters capo mathematics

some of this applicable
only in winter

like you she is
comfortable riding
the bus

a pair of sneakers
strung above
street lights show
walking down bronson
or is it up?

this is august
you continue
snowflakes of her voice
melting you down
to midnight

&&&

wind blown over bottle
anticipates an arrival

rozalind presses a pedal
to loop memory
fluted

an island where unwashed people
take her in

not toronto, not family

a microphone
guitar and small room
far from grey hound bus pass
small suitcase of lyric travels
for sale, a string of breaking
hearts

yes she calls ottawa

notes towards

[wish i could put right spaces in for all my poems, but dunno how]

(1)

before knowledge
cry * storm * song

memrie’s drench

who is there to tell

who is there to listen

to wait out lightning

snatch back child’s hand
from wrong iron gate

fallen tiger
lily

(2)

rise over kitchen linoleum

stretch your hand out and

fly thru untouchable sky

thisiswhatyouwant

nothing solid beneath

(3)

never rub brass lamp

you know the genie

keep him bottle blue

ether on the skin

with one touch

evaporate

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?

moonpieces. fragments out of ordinary

full moon

open mouth
admit a truth
too late
the man’s face
ripples a silver smirk on black water
and whisky
to the devil angel flies
play your blood electric guitar
pluck out fire
of name
your lips mouth
o moon
guppy out of water
choke on reality
oxygen’s a cold comfort now
isn’t it?


trap-ease

just a fingernail’s worth of booze
and she’s seeing the moon as if a glass half full
ever talk to her
she walks where you would never
circus animal girl on stilts
truth swallower
give her a look
she’ll set you
on fire

whereabouts at night

there she goes again
smelling the moon
haven’t you told her
a thousand times
you’ve seen her fly
pluck it like a daisy
she’s gone
there’s a hole
in the sky
where you look

this harvest

dreams of soft butter moon
lemon cake rise
big enough to taste
what’s come over you
what you crave
isnt sugar

soon, gothic

after the sun bloodset horizon abandon
geese flown vee getaway
alone no moon all this walk
dark corners sidewalk crevice night blooms
crow call black water
who’s afraid of empty sky

The Molecular Structure of Marriage

A marriage carries no electrical charge.

is made up of two or more partners,
of same or different sexes,
joined by one or more covalent
chemical bonds.

is in constant motion.

its state (solid, liquid, or gaseous)
depends on speed
on separation.

its compound is represented
by a marital formula.

A more complex structure
shows
the arrangement.

In a chemical reaction between spouses,
is often broken apart
into radicals that recombine to form
other. Two or more
will form a single larger,
or a large will be broken up
into several smaller.


of women, H2,
each consists
of two atoms of hydrogen.

of men, H2O,
contain an atom of oxygen
as well as two of hydrogen.

A heterosexual bond, CO2,
is linear.

Common law , C6H6,
carbon atoms form a ring
hydrogen atom
joins carbon atom.

More complex form
rings, chains, helices.

Polyamorous
resemble giant helices.
small
join to form a single large
polymer.

Love was interchangeable until the early
nineteenth
century.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ More from Encyclopedia

Conjugal Verbs

Plunderotica

through dark streets model
took off
kimono one hand
on parasol

go on

aching still trembling glitter of world
mummy swatched ghost
of Baudelaire
wind dying now
last of violence

do you want it, do you want it
dying eye fragment
spacious dreams of stone
toppling sluggish edifices studded
with gems coagulated with human
sperm

dipped finger in whiskey touched nipples
tips hard and red
settled regions wild
called to rise

murky light
fumbling fingers
scum on tongue
drop in eye
drink in pottle
itch in palm
gush of fundament fire
in gorge tickle
of tail

hullabaloo

pieced together by Amanda Earl.
My text comes from three sources: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Anais Nin's Little Birds and Emily Dickinson's Selected Poems.

The Who-Dunnit Collage

pieced together by Amanda Earlw/c = 389 wordsThe consequences of two men wrestling (1): the infinite erotic civilization we created is declining now (2). What manner of sinners do you have in Rome? They must be grand ones. I have seen much wickedness and cannot be deceived (3). All these people! Intermingled and jabbering and as much confusion among them, to me, as there is in my own mind. The sources reveal a people endowed with valuable qualities, hemmed in by stormy seas along a narrow strip of coastline, dense forests and steep mountain ranges behind them (now filled with flunkies, whistle-punks, chokermen, cat-skinners, the fiery mountainsides and stands of trees disappearing. (4)

To think the connection between my introspective black companion and those outcrop rocks taking the brunt of the ocean-this requires a stretch of the imagination. (5)

Her eyes were set so deeply the colour was hidden from a distance and he was surprised now by the emerald shade of them. Green as sea glass. (6) If you have ever seen the green in water that is forever flowing out to mystery and adventure then you know something of the colour of her eyes. (7) Along the river, trees are stranded bare as witches and dark as the woman who never learned to love one man. (8) She could never have imagined that a woman would lie beneath a man who grins like an ape fully clothed in a tattered tunic, ten feet from a body freshly abandoned by the spirit in its blood. (9) He lies there in a wilderness of sheets and his body inhabits strange spaces, oblique dimensions; like the keen emptiness of a child's eye, it offers me no entry and no alibi. (10)

Warned her to keep indoors with politic goodwill, not haste into a landscape of stark wind-harrowed hills and weltering mist; but from the house she stalked intractable as a driven ghost. (11)

I knew that it would happen like this. I hear the clouds of kestrels circling. The leaving. The solitude. (12) Finally the shape of the dream appears. Her arms in the cold air, holding the cutting tools. Space like glass. (13)

I see her head bowed in thinking of me, by the river, her beautiful eyes searching inside for the proper famous thought of me she loved. Ah my angel-my new angel, black, follows me now-I exchanged the angel of life for the other. (14)

(1) "certain works of carl stewart, artist" rob mclennan, name, an errant p. 44
(2) "The Erotic Civilization" A.F. Moritz, Night Street Repairs, p. 33
(3) "7. To The Church at Rome" K.I. Press, Spine, p. 56
(4) "Resources, Certain Earths, John Newlove, Moving In Alone, p. 72
(5) "1. Otherwise than place" Don McKay, p. 16
(6) Michael Crummey, The Wreckage, p. 13
(7) "Poem For A Tall Woman" Robert Priest, Scream Blue Meaning, p. 118
(8) "At Nootka Sound" Susan Musgrave, What The Small Day Cannot Hold, p. 6
(9) "Adrienne, Stephen Brockwell, Fruitfly Geographic, p. 47
10) "Hypnos" Gwendolyn MacEwen, Volume One, The Early Years, p.163
(11) "The Snowman On The Moor" Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, p. 58
(12) A Basket of Distress" T. Anders Carson, Folding The Crane, p. 49
(13) "Hope Stories: I Signal Fire" Erin Moure, Sheepish Beauty Civilian Love
(14) "The Legend of Duloz," from Maggie Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, The Portable Jack Kerouac, p. 70

For an explanation and call for submissions for Plunderverse

When did you first know you were happy?
not till now, really, on this bench, in the sun

Why now?
i can let air touch

Do you still dream of flying?
i’ve already flown

Where is home?
you know

& if you could sing, the song/is all that would go/ anywhere
Barry McKinnon, Bushed, The Centre

with this beat
you can lose yourself
annihilate perpetual rhythm
electro-guitar shock therapy
drum a saffron thread thru veins
only then you unclench

find the shade
move further and further
away
soon the light needle silvers nanosecond

sells you by the jug, the hour
wind fills empty
echoes
hollow
echo

out of body

When did you first learn to levitate?
there are times i can’t touch down

Is it like swimming? Can you do the elementary backstroke?
i stay on my back, almost never look down

Are stars hot or cold?
they taste good with a little salt

Are you always alone?
no, i am not the only child to float

these are the fringes

of everything
the leaves, the vines,
the twisted
boughs

don’t you know
roots are contagious
spreading under ground
tangled planted
mud rotten and gnarled

when you walk
don’t let your feet

touch

tornadoed

is your suitcase packed
what will happen when you discover
there are places like home?

you carry it on your back
pack animal
whirlwind
don’t touch
(d)
o
w
n