A man waiting on someone to die
drinks another cup, sighs
and looks at his watch, the face
everyone rememembers
for its twitch and drooping eye,
always running, always losing
a second, an hour, sometimes a day,
a year on the wrist of the dead.

Ha!
Just hitched my pants
Above the waistline;
Added a tight notch.
What's to become of me.
Should I consider
Knee-high socks,
With Bermuda shorts
To match
My peppered stubble.
Perhaps man-scaping
And Botox,
A ****** moustache
And comb-over,
Or live life
Like Benjamin Button.

Spring reminds me
Of being thirteen,
And sprouting.
The verdant tufts,
And budding girls.

I live in Chemical Valley.
It sounds horrible:
Better you than me.
Perhaps.
I grew up here,
Where the southern sky burns
Bloodstone red,
Mixing colours with the evening suns.
The St. Clair carries Huron's ghostly horns
Past the flaring refineries,
To Detroit's waters.
We have stop signs
And other amenities
Small cities are proud to maintain.
I heard the housing market
Is sustained on the divorce rate,
And not the petro-chemical industry;
We're closing another high school next year;
And there was a gruesome woodlot-****/******
Last week on the Reserve.
Maniacs living out some sick web-site.
But the soccer pitches are full,
And our Mayor is the longest serving one in Canada.
Just around the corner
(everything is just around the corner),
Our flag flies over the bones of our second Prime Minister,
(he's from Edinburgh, Scotland);
I've walked a good stretch of the fifty miles
Of beach we have running north,
Past cottages, parks, camps, etc.
We've way too many ***-holes;
And for many years,
We were featured on the ten dollar bill.

But the new houses!
Who is buying them as we move eastward,
Away from the lake and river?
Newly minted single moms;
Rejected men.
We lived in one house,
Once,
One house.
We now occupy five.
Two of which
Are too far away
From Chemical Valley.

I told her marriage was an institution.
She went mental.
I consoled myself with shooting the tortoise.
It was for the best.
There was no way it would win the greyhound derby.
She was beyond reason.
I was bringing it out of its shell.
I sort of laughed uncontrollably.
She didn’t.
She actually was trying to bring it out of its shell.
I suggested mad passionate love.
She wanted chocolates.
How about a toffee crisp and a fumble.
How about you dropping dead.
Who would pick up your pills if I dropped dead.
I would pick up my own pills.
What, you don’t know what day of the week it was last Thursday.
I was in love last Thursday.
Not with me.
No, with the pet shop owner
You do know he’s married.
He was leaving her for me.
He’s married to a bloke.
They’re both leaving their wives for me.
Is this about the tortoise.
What tortoise.
Never mind, let's get married.
Just now.
Yes, we can get married in the chemist shop
Somehow that makes sense.
What about children.
You could get them at the supermarket.
Three for two.
They hide them behind the screens now.
Children.
No silly, the alcohol I think.
They don’t hide the chocolates.
Did you really shoot the tortoise.
Yes, but the bullet bounced off its shell.
That’s good.
Not really, the pet shop owner was holding it.

After fifty years
I slipped into the school.

Madame Bela was visibly pleased
The classroom was too empty
Now I've one to do maths with

No less happy was Auntie Aloka
My favorite student is back
She lifted me up and said with a kiss
So vacant felt my class of English
Without a boy from olden times
Sweetly singing nursery rhymes

My eyes searched her and before long
Miss Jaya spoke in her softest tongue
I'm so glad to see his face
Sans him Bengali class was all emptiness

And there he was the only Sir
Amiyo Baboo the sports teacher
Isn't this the boy never won my trust
For always being in every race last

Fifty years haven't changed a bit
Either their age or their spirit
And surely the fun was doubly more
When I stood before the school mirror.

Even this latter
lingering emotionality
will vanish somehow,
masked behind an affable reflection,
but already collapsed
into a black hole.


Bigger and bigger.


Mastery of nothingness
in satisfying myself
as mute, stripped leaves
observing their art
of turning into glow of warmth.


Autumn’s heredity.


Fierce hyperbole is Melancholy,
remote and severe sixth sense,
obsidian monolith
in this too mild dimension.


Melodrama of light
is the vacuum of such empirism
saturated ad nauseum
by the ceaseless delay
of the most natural
and contemptuous ease.

Depression isn't a black cloud.
That cliche implies that eventually there'll be a torrential downpour,
And then the cloud will fade away and allow
The sun to shine through, ending that terrible storm.
Depression is a starless night.
An expanse of black where even the stars have abandoned you,
Long since dead, and you try to make sense of the loneliness
In a world where people have turned into zombies.
Thoughtless, repetitive phrases become their instincts.
"Think positively," is the mantra of the dead to the dying.
As though statements turn into directions when the sun goes down,
Like signposts leading us to a brightly-lit land.
But the sky doesn't respond to artificial lights,
And nothing but time can force the sun to return.
Their second statement, under the facade of help,
Is to remind us that day will always follow night,
And no matter how starless and eternal the darkness feels,
The sun will eventually break through the horizon, waving pinks and oranges.
Sadly, not all lifespans are created equal,
And for the many colourful transitions people have seen in the sky,
There are plenty who never see more than black.
Some souls are born at dusk and are dead by pre-dawn,
Never having lived through anything but darkness.
And to the zombies, accepting that fact is the hardest.

And my living corpse walked on
Walking in the perpetual dawn
Of all the things that have gone wrong
This is the wish that I will sound
I hope my body's never found
And I just melt back into the ground