Category: Crème de la Crème (page 2 of 3)

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February 24, 2020 / 0 Comments

An Ode to hard women

This poem was found at the bottom of a ditch, behind a weeping willow, crumpled and buried in a hole. I followed a black Rabbit here (code name Richards) in the dead of night to find it. I followed her because she praised soft men with a soft tongue and she had the bloodshot night-vision of a poet, peering deeply into the darkness, into the quietest corners of the soul.

She was the kind of woman who could look down upon my life reaching for meaning the way a gardener could glare down at a plant and remark, “Thirst is good for you right now.” Even though that stare would feel as hard and dry as the noonday sun, it would translate to: “I believe you will grow.”

Rabbit reminded me of Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Rose. This rose survives beside the harsh ocean by sucking salt out of sand and turning thirst into the fragile fragrance of wisdom. Like a sea rose, the hard women in my life have always drawn me towards their aroma because it smelled real and true unlike the cloying, sweet perfume of the spice-rose. For if anything is true, it must be made of this world and I know of no world that smells so sweet – shorn of its thorns.

Show me what it takes to survive in this world, hard women. Show me the bark of your skin and the bite of your fruit.

For I know it takes a certain kind of hardness to smile at yet another bad joker begging for your eyes to lock. Will his punch line be a Trojan Horse designed to open the purse of your person? Some men dip their tongues in silver simply so they can pick the locks.

It takes a certain kind of hardness to raise a waking life into a walking nightmare and to teach that child how to dream in your stead.

It takes a certain kind of hardness to soberly see the world with punch-drunk double-vision: as you see the world and as the world of men chooses to see you.

To the hard women, I see you see me too. My eyes trace the secret scars in your smile like lipstick. I smell the acrid scent of resentment for men obsessed with the good sense of their own flatulence.

Men, I know the content of your character by the nature of your desires. But only you will know what you have sold to stoke the coals of a lustful fire.

Men, I want you to know this world bears down on women the way an ocean tide collides upon the beach. After an eon, each grain of sand is sculpted into a hardened work of art. There lies fertile soil for the rare sea rose, growing roots in this shattered shoal despite the violent undertow.

And if you were guided by your nose, you would not retreat,
for a sea rose by any other name would smell as bittersweet.

August 18, 2019 / 1 Comment

Mon frère ne parle pas français

Veuillez entendre le poème ici

Ce poème est écrit en Français parce que mon frère ne parle pas français.
Mon accent peut provoquer des regrets, mais c’est le seul moyen d’expliquer mon secret.

Il est vrai que le langage amène l’âme à parler jusqu’à ce que la langue devienne plus musclée que le coeur, à force de partager nos torsions de langage.

Mais, comme un voyage ou comme nos premières peurs, nos heures sont limitées. Et c’est avec cet aveu clair que je raconte mon histoire cachée derrière la poésie voilée.
Sans paix, mon frère était méchant parce que mes parents ont séparés quant il avait seulement sept ans.
Ce fut un moment imprévu qui n’a jamais été résolu. Le fossé entre mes parents est encore absolu.

Ensuite, pendant ma jeunesse chez ma mère, mon frère a perturbé la santé de ma mentalité avec sa colère chaque matin.

Il était circadien comme le coq qui crie au soleil : « je vole votre sommeil »

Et il aurait beugler avec un visage vermeil: « Michael! Fuck off! »

Mais, je sais que nos identités sont enracinées dans les histoires de nos parents, chance, et nos croyances. Ainsi, l’ensemble de notre volonté et puissance est tissée dans une rivière de la causalité. Nous avons la liberté mais nous ne pouvons pas nager en amont. Nous ne choisissons pas notre nature.

Avant ma naissance, il y avait déjà des fissures entre ma futur mère et père. Le désespoir, dedans un poème ou devant le miroir, ou entre deux amoureux, vole la chaleur de nos feux spiritueux.

Et quand on a froid, il ne prend que les ombres des mois d’hiver, quand les nuits sont plus sévères, pour partager un silence avec les secrets qui habitent dans notre conscience. Et ces idées nous gèlent de l’intérieur.

Alors, je crois que mon frère a eu des engelures à partir des querelles frigides entre mes parents.

Comment pourrais-je donner un sens à sa froideur envers moi ?
Un glacier ne pousse que dans des eaux glaciales.
J’espère qu’un jour mes mots peuvent lui faire fondre mais de nos jours, je gèle quand je lui parle.

Et je sais que le changement est lent donc je vais essayer d’être patient mais jusqu’à ce qu’il m’écoute avec du respect, je ne serai pas en mesure de lui parler en anglais.

April 11, 2019 / 0 Comments

The Will of the People

A protest is obnoxious because being dirt poor in a wealthy country is obnoxious.

A protest is disruptive because billionaires are disruptive to every society.

A protest is goddamn loud because the clanging of empty pots will never ring louder than the hunger that cries out from empty bellies.

A protest is violent when the void of delayed justice is considered to be peace.

If you were an elected band council member of the Wet’suwet’en territory, would you let the oil and gas company encroach upon your ancestor’s lands, lands defined in spilled ink and spilled blood, so you can sustain the fraying clans that are alive and needful today? Or, if you were a hereditary clan chief, would you resist outright the insidious intrusion of surveyors and their company men presenting their Pandora’s box in a simple, auburn briefcase?

We can only imagine how such leaders shake their heads at night, aghast at the choices laid before them.

When noble leaders for noble causes are pitted one against another, a violent protest is born.

When there is no way out but oligarchy, gerontocracy, autocracy, monarchy, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, corporatocracy, theocracy, we say NO!

We will not be ruled by oligarchs, who plunder using the law; we won’t be ruled by old people, ignorant in their infinite wisdom; we won’t be ruled by autocrats and their goose-stepping quislings, or by monarchs and their divine, inbred families; we won’t be ruled by morons and idiots, or by thieves, banded together by their thieves’ honour; we won’t be ruled by corporations who worship Mammon, the god of wealth, or by theocrats, eternally washing the coagulated blood off of Mammon with their holy water.

When heavy metals rain, red rivers run, and hurricanes swell;
When antibiotics fail, anti-vaxxers prevail, and frogs go the way of bees;
When plastic rains, seed vaults sour, and the permafrost melts;
When fear feeds on drought and the seas thrash our cities;

We will eat the money, eat the money, green with envy, green, feverish and ravenous like hungry ghosts until our cheeks drool with machine oil, until our bellies distend and our throats tighten into straws so we roll the bills and insert them lengthwise, one at a time, hungry for more, forever more, swallowing serpentine cents upon cents until senseless.

Who among you can defend the defenseless?

February 5, 2019 / 0 Comments

Old Roots

It’s not hard to uncover that I hide my pain from others.
It’s not meant to be witnessed unless I have your confidence.

Poetry became a way for me to show off some of my pain.
To talk it down in public, so to speak.

I wanted to be publicly vulnerable.
Better yet, I wanted to be praised for being vulnerable.
I was easy prey so why not be applauded along the way?

Outside myself, far from who I was then, it’s clear I was an outsider.
That younger me knows I did not escape myself, the hider.

My ‘come to buddha’ moment was when I realized I could console someone else who was in pain.
Maybe, I told myself, if I could be understanding,
then I too could be understood.

Of course, I had this notion first with my mother, who was Atlas holding the roof above our many screaming heads.

Her mind a carousel of childrearing, always spinning to stay centered

I turned my newfound spirituality outward. Which is when my song of innocence ended and I began to perceive such strange suffering sinking behind so many eyes glassy as an egg being swallowed by a snake.

Worse still, when I tried to help others, I found their pain was stitched together by a home-brewed prophylactic and the reasons for their remedies or the source of their symptoms would get lost in translation no matter how earnest and loving our conversations.

When my song of wisdom began, I left my home town to study and to seek
the friends I knew I could one day have.
And I had them.
For a time.
But the old wounds lingered.
In me. In them.

Old roots wriggled and took hold.
Adult kids sought shelter from this this storm of a century in their parents’ nest.
But I could not. I could not have my hometown and I suspect it would not have me.

So instead, I weather the barren reaches of a random field alone drinking water from the air and vying for a melody or a tune that could land my pain home.

Perhaps, with one divine breath of air, I could sing a tune so lofty and sorrowful and sweet it would sail upon the tides of some languid weather system drifting between my abode and my father’s home, and he, ever the lazy lion on the Savannah, he might pause a moment to take in the air and instead hear this pressing, poetic tune and finally wonder about the inner life of his strangest son enough to beg the universe to grant him a single burning question.

And some notes are barely forming now like static electricity, I feel them first, on my fingertips, it’s a heat storm and so I reach for the words on the tip of my tongue and

February 4, 2019 / 1 Comment

Happy Birthday, Mom!

In my poems, you’re the titan Atlas,

enduring, “holding the roof o’er our heads”;

I’ve seen you master your torrid feelings

but know that you cry at night in your bed;

the same way everyone does.

I hope you can find a wellspring of hope,

the way a tied rope finds itself more rope –

beauty and love and joy suddenly spring,

just because.

April 21, 2017 / 0 Comments

Coherent Pain

You never get the time you need to say the things you can’t afford to leave unsaid.
It will always take Herculean strength to speak.
It doesn’t make me weak
To concede that I’m in need of remote support,
A beggar’s brigade, even a house-poor cohort.
I’d resort to a children’s crusade
if it meant graduating from this façade I’ve played.

Because I’m more worn-out than a mask at a masquerade and I’m
fresh out of lemons for my life’s acrid lemonade.
So, mark me like Marquis de Sade, I’m glad for a touch of coherent pain
when I’ve gained so little from singing in the rain.

& yet & yet, I tell myself, this too shall pass. Everything I’ve lost I swore I once had.
You’ll slip through my hands like the sands of Xanadu.
Too lax with my use of xanax, I’d do anything to fool you –
even lie about my use of xanax. The proof is I panic when you turn the screws.

The truth is I’m more screwed up than a screwball enthralled by a bottoms-up beer hall putsch
and I fear all put-me-downs ‘cuz the brutes just try to put me down the hatch like toxic hootch.

I want to walk you through this windowless room
you may presume to be my mind. I’ve dressed it up with demure rhymes
sanitized by turpentine.

But I don’t know if I make more sense as a poet or as a musician
but I know a good chunk of my change comes from when I just stop and listen.

Silence can be a powerful force.
John Cage proved that of course with his symphony 4’33”,
an excerpt of which, we all played just this instant.
He showed how incidental music could be
as it courses its way through our fluttering hearts,
as we shift and we sigh, or we grumble and moan,
and we cannot deny that this all makes a tone
that registers as music when we hear all its parts –
the highs and the lows, all joy and remorse,
taken together as one tapestry
woven in secret like a morse code beat
which may seem, on first listen, arbitrary
until you bear witness to the mystical melody of humanity
and watch order dance amid a chaotic drone.

Cross that border, decypher, discover you’re not alone.

For silence can still contain music even when you choose to break it.

September 1, 2016 / 0 Comments

Drawn and Quartered

You make me feel drawn and quartered,
sending me to all four corners of the galaxy.
In love and war, you give me no quarter,
I’m not half the man I thought I was, I’m a quarter.

You make me look smarter the way a tuxedo
can show that I chart my own charter.
Loving you is like walking a high tightrope –
it’s a hard barter but the vista is like no other.

I’m smothered by pure wind – an angel’s breath away from flying,
a hair’s breadth away from dying – but I can see farther
than any landlubber. I just can’t look down – it’s forbidden.
For if I fall, I will land harder than any martyr’s mother.

I’ve been bitten by a love-bug so I feel stung
when my cheeks blush, I’m not kidding –
It’s like I’m a kid bidding his mom to let
him eat the forbidden cookie dough in the kitchen.
Lucky licking. You’re butter dripping.
And I’m thinking how can I get more of you into my system?

I’m insistent on walking a straight line but
on a tightrope what you need is rhythm.
So you can bounce in time
like knowing how to land on a beat with a fresh rhyme.
Or knowing when to pass the mic to an MC
who can speak to the moment with some truer lines.

What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours.
Household chores feel like foreplay.
My romantic regimen is a mix of making you
moan in bed
and serving you coffee when you wake up every day.

I love the way you love my way of being.
I love that we see each other’s way of seeing.
Some days I swear I’m dreaming.
Can you tell me are you seeing what I’m seeing?

It’s like I stumbled toward a mirage and found an oasis teeming
with fauna and flora fit for a corsage
and I thought to myself “Oh my God!” even though
I don’t have the confidence of any god.

Faithless atheist baiting higher powers with a lightning rod.
Show me what you got!

February 18, 2016 / 0 Comments

The Unanswerable Question

Whither music?
And where from?

Listen: I have fallen off a fading fanfare a few times too many.

Often, hot-jazz musicians hopped up on pomp and pizzazz drag me by my ear whenever their cadence spills into a doo-wop two-step
and I find myself toe-tapping against my will.

How now, rhythm?
Have you stolen my body from me?

I forgot the sound of your fury:
the fleet-footed fandangos and soft, silky tangos
which fasten my feet to the floor.

Whether I’m rich or poor, you move my mind from within with no engine.
I can speak without words.
I understand without knowing.
I feel beyond mere being.

It takes me back to when I first felt blessed to hear my heart hearken hard against my chest, when I knew that this drum would become the meter of all this strife.
That in my core, a metronome would measure and mete out my life.

But when I grew up, my brain began to scan and train itself to be
a kick-ass pattern recognition machine.

And my dreams became unseemly, tainted by hormones raging.

Amid all the acclimation of aging:
the acne, the awkward locker room showers,
the eternal hour of unrequited love,
my heartbeat became a background pulse in the orchestra of my culmination.
My heart a faint ticking time-bomb dutifully noting the beats per minute.

For what it’s worth, I’ll listen to the tenor and timbre of my body,
until the drone reminds me of my birth and the warmth of the womb.
I know I first timed my tempo to my Mother’s measured meter.
Ba-doum. Ba-doum.
And my heart did match her tune.

In sum, music precedes me from before the time that I begun.
And when I go, and my time here is all done,
whither music?
and where from?

a cappella

_{Dedicated to my Mother}

July 5, 2015 / 2 Comments

The Cottage in Hearst

Some comely cottage
towers timidly
upon a rock outcropping
nestled next to a precarious forest,
on an insignificant island
encompassed by Lac St. Thérèse.

The mosquitos here live tiny, yet stolid lives. Only one in every ten generations feast upon the family that has gathered here – also, in its own haphazard and inconstant way, like a writer’s pen late at night, finding meaning in the wayward direction of meandering ph(r)ases.

Exhausted dogs litter the living room while the children constrain their chaos to the borders of a Talent Show sign.

A royal-blue robe rids the rat-a-tat rumble of the genny from Neko’s ears. One should still hear the exclamations of “Fish On!” from the fishing party echo across the lake. I salivate as I think of all the fresh pickerel that Lacey, Avery, and John have caught for me.

We shall eat like kings unless the rotund rain clouds discharge their boiling burdens upon the lake to chase the fish deep into their homes: hoarse holes and hovels. Not even Kiel could catch a decade-old patriarch if he were cached away from the anglers of heaven.

For those who are home and sleeping in the haze of a lazy mid-afternoon: Meeka, with her drooping eyes and ears; Shilor, elongated on the rug like a fleeing leech; Seren, with her head couched upon her shoulder, and her body slumped into the couch – their dreams wander without direction like the capricious smoke of yet another mosquito pic.

The hours hang light as the fresh air billowing through the tightly-knit window screens, cut apart a million times only to reunite into a single draught, or memory, unperturbed.

Whether you work on wood, on wonder, or on welcoming one another to the dock with a landing party, or to the morning with percolated coffee, or to the pink-gold night with fireworks, there is joy and filial fraternity.

What rites root this family down? How shall we pass on this sense of togetherness? Can we build a memoir of this quiet island cottage in the character of the kids or in the wisdom of the adults? Every year, the memoir seems to grow and every year the wood that built the ceiling and the floor adds another ring to its ingrown ridges. Their grains line the colours of Maddy’s sign as she scribbles on the floor, adding texture to her art, adding wrinkles to the inside of her multicoloured “i”s.

This is no desert and we are not stranded yet we celebrate as if we were somewhere tropical. We gathered here like moisture in a desert and together we form an oasis. Under one roof, we bellow, thunder, and storm and between us all, there exists a calm. The grey clouds hang low as treetops, bowed beneath the weight of a lifetime of wind, harsh and shrieking from the Polar North, even in the dead of Summer. Up here, we can draw out the dampness from our souls with the magnetism of this hardy land, and with the kindness that would have us understand one another.

March 22, 2015 / 0 Comments

Jack Love Jill

Jack Love Jill.
Jack will love Jill.
Jill is loved by Jack.
Does Jill love him back?
No, Jill does not love Jack.

One day, they are asked to fetch the water.
The elders say, “Work together.
Hold hands, do not let go –
or you will teeter-totter.”

So, up the hill they went, with the pail in tow.
Hand over hand, they drew the water from the well.
But then, their tender grip slipped, and down the hill they fell
And so begins this tale of woe.

While rolling down the spinning hills
Jack wonders, “Can grass grow in tousled hair?
Do I see Jill tumbling there
or just a cloud of grass that spills and spills?

Which lands Jack on his head.
“Thud!” is precisely what the ground said.
Wobbling to her feet, Jill sees, and screams.
Collapses back down upon her knees.

But now! Jack howls, cries foul, and gets back on his feet.
Runs wild, while Jill rubs her eyes in disbelief.
Stuck dumbstruck and then, whew! relief.
Lets herself release the tension
in her butt cheeks.

Then she speaks, “Jack, you spilled
All the water in the pail!
You really ought to be more careful!”

Jack stops stockstill and tries to tell Jill
That he may have broken down,
For he cannot produce a sound –
That something else must have spilled
For he has never felt so frail
But alas, he fails to tell this tale,
And collapses upon the ground.

Jill sees and agrees to lie Jack down while telling Jack that Jack looks pale.

Now, Jill is talking wrongly.
Or, is Jack not hearing rightly?
Did Jill just say, “Must you more hold the pail tightly?”
Jack wonders, “Did hear that I correctly?
Why do feel so sleepy I?
Nighttime is it, blue, bright sky?”

Now, Jack is snoring soundly.
So, Jill runs down the tiny trail and yells so loud
You would have thought she had a siren in her mouth.

And out they come, one and all,
“Jack with the cracked head,” they said, was the village call.

And when they found him lolling there,
He was tearing up all the clover.
And when he woke, he only spoke
The same words over and over:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

Nowadays, Jack, head cracked, can not love Jill.
Does Jill now love him back?
Jack is loved by Jill.
Jill will love Jack.
Jill love Jack.

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