POEM: POEMECTOMIES

“-ectomy”, as you might guess, is a suffix denoting the surgical removal of some structure from the body, such as the appendix in an appendectomy or a vase in a vasectomy. So I thought I would perform an operation on myself and remove a few of these things that are not really structures, but are more like processes. Nevertheless, a careful incision into their tissues is required, otherwise bleeding or infection may occur. Having washed my hands reasonably well, and sterilized my surgical instruments using my trusty blow torch, I will now proceed with the operation. In the event that some (or all) of the removed bits do not prove viable and begin to rapidly decay, start to stink, or turn out to be merely unpleasant, simply dispose of them in the appropriate receptacle, and pay the receptionist on your way out.  Have a nice day….

Artist
Her finger, with its horny,

cracked nail,

draws the spit-wet powder

across ochre-daubed walls.

A trembling torch

gives a sunset light

over the stone canvas.

In a cave blacker than sleep,

blacker than the bits

of charcoal got from a tree

struck by lightning

and brought back in mystery

to mystery,

she draws whorls

and shapes in time,

here, where dreams are borne

and others, as well.

Ursula

I thought

I could keep her,

share the earth 
with her.

But I was wrong.

I had ordered

one of her books

from the library

the day she died.

Now there are two more

on my shelf at home. 

One is a book of poems

from her early life.

So, I'll keep her

for that long, at least. 

The List

You add to that list

Of things not yet done,

There is just one more—

The long-distance run.

It follows Spanish

And that screaming need

Of acting upon

Everything you read.

It comes before “next”,

And after “many”.

It’s near to the one

About the penny.

In the beginning

Your list was quite small.

You'd hardly needed

To check it at all.

Now turning the page

You see that behind

Was more intended

Than you'd ever find.

Garbage

When innocence is dumped

like medical waste at midnight

or like a barge scuppered

off some foggy shore,

it’s then our clever faces

hide us; they disguise

us in the rat holes

of our making.

Sundial

The sun,

in its ancient circuit,

follows you around,

apparently.

The Last Ice

of the Season

A bush of

silvered angels

shivers,

as waves splash 

along the crystal shore.

Libya

The heaviness

light gives to

sharp, glinting wings

at sunrise!

Dying Days

Does it have

to be about

cooling clouds,

soft whispers and kisses?

Is there no place

for the noontime heat

of baked earth

and hot rock

under your palms?

Why soothing balms

and ointments?

Why such refrain?

Gentleness has its own sorrow.

Like hope. And hope is the bastard son

and a crooked sign pointing

toward a crooked city.

Rage is the true heir.

It shares no token

with the alms beggar.

No dishes of sweet meats

will be offered the passing stranger;

no shelter from the harsh light,

nor coin given to the cloth merchant.

In the bazar, the silversmith’s wares

tarnish and their etchings dull

as sands swirl,

and the wind blows.

Street Seen

Invisible people

meet each other.

Hand signs and signals

are offered,

but without proper rays

of refracting  light,

little is learned

or communicated.

Hat-Man

The man with ribbons and bows
and wind-spinners in his hat
pushes his cart up the street.

He’s not invisible yet,

and you can hear sounds

of kazoos and tambourines 

in the air following behind him

as he parades by.

He’s carnival of one—

just so long as he doesn’t

lose that hat.

Bike-Lady

Has bundles 

atop her bicycle.

At the lake,

in a yellow rain slicker,

she shelters from the storm

under the pump-house eaves.

Later on, she waits 
for the light to change

as she walks her bicycle

up the street.

Book-Man and the Cane-Lady

Book-Man lay on the grass,

his head propped up

by his knap sack.

His nose is pressed 
to the pages

of a second-hand book,
like a grindstone,
a millstone

around his neck.

And walking around town,

with her leg in a cast,

with her cane

and perfected gait,

for years now it seems.

At this street corner,

and then the next,

as the lights change.

Sugar Mountains

“Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain

with the barkers and the coloured

balloons...”

— “Sugar Mountain”, Neil Young

Oh, to live on....

Waking up pain free for once;

those extra pills help.

And for once

I’m not distracted so much

by the now of things.

I remember my dream:

I’m in my old grade school,

in a classroom

looking into a hallway

filled with the heavy,

heated bodies

of students from a later time.

They move like a restless sea,

all bobbing heads and shoulders,

busy like waves,

busy with lives and dates and places

impossible to trace or understand.

And I know if I step into the hallway,

I’ll be carried away—

lost in their flow.

I also know that

I wouldn’t mind so much.

I look at their faces,

and hear their voices,

but I don’t recognize anyone.

Again, I don’t mind that much.

Then comes the drama.

With a gnawing

in the pit of my stomach—

It looms large!

And my guts are fifty years ago.

And it’s as real

as my dream is real.

And I can’t leave this feeling:

Of course—what else? Math!

I always hated it.

(I was afraid of it, really.)

Now it’s my doom. Again….

So I move down the now-empty hall

to hear my sentence pronounced.

And to have the heavy chains

of failure once more placed across

my shoulders for the remainder

of my miserable life.

...

My mother

taught high school Algebra and science,

and she spoke French and played the piano.

I always knew she would be disappointed

in how I turned out.

That’s just the way of it.

I stopped giving her my report cards in 1968.

…

In my dream there are parts of it

I’ve dreamed before.

The dream places I remember,

those bits that bleed through

from wounds large and small.

Suddenly, I’m someplace else,

walking across thick

pile-carpeting

that’s a rough, dirty yellow,

like with Heather that time

and our awkward,

waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop sex.

I think that carpet

covers the floors

in a lot of my dreams,

where dreams of failure

and actual failure

meet. 

...

Then there’s a change,

and it’s the road yet-travelled, 

the one you walk along

when you go to sleep

even though you know

the next day

will be waiting for you

when you wake up.

But you’re up for the journey,

anyway.

So, in my dream,

I climbing down steep, stone steps.

(Are they a memory of bleachers from high school?

Are they arena steps before a baseball game? A hockey game?

Are they from a picture of a Roman amphitheatre I once saw in a book, or a stone wall that I might have sat on one warm summer, long ago with friends? Whatever those steps were, they feel safe and sweet. They’re like a sugar mountain. And I’m climbing down to join friends. Which friends? It doesn’t matter. Their dream faces are gone as I write this. They’re friends, simply friends. And as is the wont of dreams, I can’t remember why I’m there with them: they’re

either classmates or rebels skipping class, or a group of travellers

off to some promised land. But being with them, I feel I’ve come home. And I know something wonderful

is about to happen. And that’s all that matters.

And all the should-have-beens and

should-have-dones, the maybes,

the if-onlys and the

all-for-naughts

are silent.

And the song,

“Sugar Mountain”,

is on the radio

as I wake up.

And my jaw isn’t aching.

And the twenty-three year old

reminds the sixty-three year old

about all the places he has,

that he still has,
to visit.

…

With thanks to Neil Young

NEWS OF THE

WORLD #10

News-bots and androids.

Starving kids on steroids.

And which to avoid?

Me? The asteroid!

Are duties on earth

Of less cosmic worth

Than framing some girth

Of new stellar turf?

And Jesus—a sign?

Or cannibal dine?

And do we drink wine

repeating His lines?

Did bombing those shores

and taking still more

help lay down our floors,

While kicking their doors?

Is knocking so rude?

Is black oil not crude?

Their blood is well-spewed,

And red by our feud.

Is comfort so dear

that what is held near

will hide what we fear--

what sage and what seer

all tell us is true:

that earth is not blue

but black, and with hue

more fitting for rue?

Salt

This rare ocean,

whose chambered caves

along the shorelines

of the world

contain the treasure of molluscs—

soft-bodied,

calcium-drunk creatures,

with mouths of a different sensing,

that taste time and salt

with equal measure--

this rare ocean awaits the return

of other soft-bodied creatures,

creatures whose salt taste

will be both gift and payment

to those ever-patient,

and forgiving,

first-dwellers.

I guess I didn’t get the memo, because I keep leaving these silly poems out where other people can read them. Sorry about that. I try to obey all the condo rules. But this new one on poetry is a bit much: “Poems can become an untidy, disorderly mess and must not be any more than six inches (15.24cm) in length during the growing season. Indoor cultivation of the weed is prohibited.” (Hmmm… As the mouse mused to himself one day: “I’m going to go FUCK the cat!”)

ARTIST—So, I was thinking about carving doodles and drawings onto my living room walls, but then I thought that my landlord might not share my taste in art or shamanism, so I wrote this poem instead. That moment when ink first meets paper, paint touches canvas or whatever, is magical. It may not end up magical, but it ALWAYS starts out that way.

URSULA—is something I wrote in memory of the SF and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) who died last year. R.I.P.

THE LIST—Yeah, baby! We all have one. We all make ‘em. Or we make bunches and batches of them! We complete some; we ignore others. We rip ‘em up and start over, or say: “fuggetaboutit!” But, what happens when we stop making them?

GARBAGE—I can’t remember what I was on about. It may have been a "baby-in-the-dumpster" news story or just something I read about garbage tossed about in general. Whatever it was, I was a bit ticked-off! Indeed, we are clever in disguising all the garbage we make and putting a pretty face on it—lipstick on a pig—and not just the actual garbage we toss around in the street, either.

SUNDIAL—Q: Did humans invent time? A: Apparently.

THE LAST ICE OF THE SEASON—Some years ago, in March, I was walking along the lakeshore and it was still cold enough to nearly freeze the water. The wind lifted the icy spray and showered the nearby grasses and bushes, coating them in a shimmery sheen, and thus revealing their angelic natures.

LIBYA—I wrote this as the fighting was just starting in that dumb-ass ‘intervention’* Hillary and Barack O. thought was such a good idea,  in what would become yet another failed state created through ham-fisted American foreign policy actions. I thought about how we always seem, like magpies, to be attracted to bright, shiny things—until those bright, shiny things start dropping bombs on us—then, not so much. We always forget: where there is light, there is also shadow.

*and other complicit nations, incl. Canada, by the way—there were Canadian jets bombing North Africa in 2011—“Operation Mobile.”    Q: "Siri, why did we do that?" A: "I don't have a fucking clue!"

DYING DAYS—I’m not sure about the title, but I thought this went reasonably well with “Libya”, because it is such an angry thing—not sure I like it much. Rage. Passion. Violence. They’re close to the surface sometimes. Maybe that’s where they belong—purged on the outside, like toxins through the skin. 

STREET SEENS, HAT-MAN, BIKE-LADY and BOOK-MAN AND CANE-LADY  were written for the people I see on the streets—homeless, disturbed, angry, sad, happy, despairing, or just plain crazy or lonely. They should not be invisible. They each have a history and a skin beneath the skin we see them in as we pass them by each day. They’re not anymore disordered than the rest of us.

SUGAR MOUNTAIN—I threw this tray of tissues down because it gives me heartburn. It was a dream I had a number of years ago and it’s mostly as I remembered it. Sometimes dreams are so vivid and pleasant and hopeful, or they are places where you just belong, so much so, that you don’t want to wake up. (And one day--you won’t!)  In the meantime….
NEWS OF THE WORLD #10—I put this in kind of by accident; it was just there as I was cutting some loose bits of this and that from my body cavity. I hope it's peppy enough to overcome some of the doom and gloom of the ending. I’d be sorry about that--if I was sorry, that is....
SALT—I've always liked this one. I find it a bit icky to think of people slurping oysters at oyster-bars or swallowing—egret-like down their gullets—all those poor mussels, but hey, who am I to judge the eating habits of millions? When ya gotta eat, ya gotta eat! Still, what goes around, comes around.

Cheers, Jake.