In fog
the edges soften
for the eyes
but not for the shins.

They are each and all still there
The moments we have lived
Toss them bright up in the air.
Like diamonds out of soil sieved

All exist like coins we've scattered
Time's the path between them taken
We keep the ones that we think mattered.
Memory-sounds like spare-change shaken

Uncertainty too in our exact position
Life's velocity with no certainty known
Entanglement tells naught of the mission
And futures sprout like crystals grown

And thus we dig as life goes on
And smash small things to find their meaning
Until we find our Higgs Boson
The pieces fall and scatter screaming.

Somewhere the path turned from forest, to brush, to tundra
Then to the breaching pink granite of yesterday.
The features are familiar and the scrub trees fill the same crevices
The glacial radicals, still sentinels that are always watching.

I can still gather together the sticks to light a fire
And it warms me against the northern chill air
The swell of rock is cold beneath me,
And my body is a poor reservoir from which to warm it.

Already the moon of November is here
Though the calendar hasn't yet announced it.
It comes unbidden with piercing icy tendrils through ancient trees
All silver and platinum and stainless steel.

An inky lake laps at the base of the granite whale's back
An intimacy born quietly over the millennia.
Of a petrified swelling-surface relaxing under the pressure,
Of jack-pine root fingers snaking through ancient seams.

Spent.
Rusted.
Encrusted.
Barnacled.
Manacled.
Chaffed.
Reddened.­
Arrested.
Transfixed.
Calmed.
Balmed.
Blamed.
Inflamed.
Infiltra­ted.
Intrigued.
Embarked.
Engaged.
Encompassed.
Decompressed.
Col­d-compressed.
Chilled.
Thrilled.
Spilled.
Spent.

I have been writing many poems
For a long, long time, I say.
Volume - surely that is why
I've earned such rank today.

Don't bother reading what I write
Save yourself some time
You know it must be very good
'Cuz it's a poem of mine.

And I've written them since back in school
Oh, such words I've strung together.
Many times upon the page
I described all KINDS of weather.

On special days, I wrote such words
The likes of which are rare
Seeing them would steal your breath
And put a sparkle in the air.

The myriad poems I've crafted now
Oh a dozen or two or three
Surely there are few by now
Who have written more than me.

For I am very nearly twenty two,
And oh, the things I've learned
Like people change as seasons do
Such accolades I've earned.

Someday when I am old and grey
Maybe thirty-one or fourty-five
I'll look fondly back upon these years
Though barely still alive.

The wealth that poetry will have wrought
Will those golden years make sunny
For surely there are markets wide
Where poets can earn money.

In a vacant and a pensive mood
Lonely and cloudlike in my wandering mind
No daffodils are to be seen,
Nor bays upon whose margins to tread.

Sitting in this café crude
Drinking beverages of the caffeinated kind
The world around feels mean
And the possibilities for the future dead

Projects call but beginnings elude
Progress is something I cannot find
The page before me sits there blank and clean
And only echoes ring inside my head.

Hello poetry, where have you been?
When as a child in a row of pastel desks
With stubby pencils and long paper sheets
Where we learned the paste from the scissors
You were there.

Loosely gathered into a discovery corps
We turned pages in tiny-finger worn books
And alternated voicing two or three lines.
With us who hoped the teacher would allot just one more
You were there.

When we waded through chest-deep angst
To spend hours tracing sidelong glances
Or the smoke-trails of our tiny flaming arrows gone astray.
Across chasms of the first decade of life in double-digits
You were there.

As we interwove whispers and fingers
Biases, peeves and favoured paths.
When we constructed habits and routines
Built of the fibres and sinews of our hopes and needs
You were there.

Hello poetry.
Like a ticket carried inside a woolen mitten,
Or words coalescing during a savoured conversation –
Sun-warmed pebbles discovered along the beach.
In our ears,
Our thoughts,
Our songs.

The potatoes to eat with our meat
Are waiting under my feet.
And so here I toil
In bad clay-filled soil
Hoping for something to eat.

Along the sidewalks of Somerset Street
People pass upon purposeful feet
Rice and noodles up for all
We each hear the call
Come! There is much here to eat.

From the western end we embark
Just near where we usually park
On the street's sunny side
Past diverse shops we stride
Windows hung with ducks roasted dark.

To the place we were aiming to get
A table with chopsticks is set
There we eat such a meal
That it fills us with zeal
A lunch that we won't soon forget.

We are just back from an autumnal walk.
Gold, red, and yellow lead green by a nose
And the sharper neighbourhood edges are softened
With leaf piles that fill the dips and voids.

We are just in from a loop around the 'hood.
The unseasonable warmth has even coerced
Teenagers onto patches of parkland to play ball
While their digital assault rifles go unused.

We have returned from exposure to the environs.
A long summer of incremental house adjustments
Pauses for the interim, so neighbours can await
The soon-to-be revised ostentation index.

We are inside again at the end of an autumn day.
Dying rays of sunlight filter through windows and half-bare trees.
Free warmth leaves us to rely upon the furnace
And savour anonymity among the bricks, stucco and vinyl.

Go toward the bright sun's glare upon the snow,
Test the crust underfoot and trek to the west.
There are no footprints here, we are like the air,
That rattles leaves and hammers the tundra flat.

Call to the ghosts of the now forgotten fall,
Sinter white coals in the furnace of winter
Gneiss, feldspar, mica and granite all of ice
Frost like barbed wire, icy borders to be crossed.

Wend through the trees, with the thawing wind I send,
Found now, the sun's heat arrives without a sound,
Among grassy fields laid bare, a song is sung.
Free of ice and wind, that brings you here to me.

A little poem to celebrate!
Alice Munro is so literate!
Accolades? There's no debate!
A Nobel Prize is commensurate!

Euphoria! Climb, energetic and prostrate yourself!
Walking each graffiti hajj
Bleak signal from an indigo mountaintop.
Iraq memoir remains constant.
You, Pavlov knew,
Coax solitary jazz.

She always knew of my old problems,
Still I managed, always finding a way onward.
From empty conversation about silly, obvious subjects
Or turning our conversation always back upon her.

Even now, I find it hard upon reflecting,
A challenge, it remains out beyond a grasp.
Our words unspoken will always haunt us.
Though our bonds offer strength and years of promise.

I, on the cold, clear days,
Found that the best hours arrive after dark,
And in the cool night
Even those that avoid people
Would find the cold makes them reach
Toward warming embraces offered humanely
Carefully, selflessly, typically
Without malice, scorn, tear nor sigh.

Another beautiful, colorful day ended favorably,
Gave happiness in jests, kindness, laments.
Morning's new orientation provided quick reassurance,
Supporting the universal view,
While xenophobia yielded zilch.

So much we try to stuff
Into those first two decades
All the pieces crowd together
Weight of one crushing another,
Mechanisms unable to turn freely.

Clarity begins to emerge in the next.
Mostly we spend it unpacking, making space
Among those things we stuffed
Into fragile, hastily-made trunks
That weighed so heavily upon our backs.

Later, the mechanisms run more smoothly
Their functions more easily seen, understood.
We learned what to keep.
And smiled as we left items behind
That we had never really needed at all.

Our collections seemed so unique,
And we never stopped to notice
The poorly made,
The mass produced.
The weight of it all.

Later we add selectively.
We invest time in the trunk, not the cargo.
Greatest become the things we share.
We enjoy the spaces
Between the things
More than the things
Themselves.

This anodyne morning *** of tea,
Is clearing the nebulous morning,
Plans that threatened to topple on me
Have muted much of their scorning.

Still there is reticence to put to the shovel
This mound of pending work-a-day tasks
They clutter my head, my week, and my hovel
Snoozing away days behind farcical masks.

Why do you mock me, oh gods of inaction?
What did I ever do to your ilk?
Did I once neglect to grant satisfaction
Tributes in gold, obeisance or silk?

Secretly though, I plan retribution
For what this torpor is stealing from me.
I'll wield hours of output and contribution
Office deliverables and domesticity.

But oaths and threats deliver poor solace,
Whilst I pontificate, not facing my work
The monster of time still tends to his malice
And here I yet sit, among the tasks that I shirk.

From the valley that feeds the great river
Beyond the hundred-league Forest of Darkness
He came in the first year of his Roaming,
Seeing then, for the first time, the sprawling city on the coast.

In the shanty-town wedged between spoil-heap and highway
Among streets one could span with outstretched arms
She often did whilst walking alone
And singing quietly in the earliest light.

That they would meet was fore-told
Not in lore or in the words of the old ones,
But in their hearts from their first days
Which each remembered without a specific age.

They both felt the world was surely a place
Bigger than the corner that held each trapped
Collecting only whispers of somewhere, something more
Hoarding words that meant 'bright,' and 'plentiful' and 'freedom.'

His clan's traditions are stronger than the bindings
That held him in his familial servitude.
The mandatory age of Roaming was upon him
And cast out, he at once felt a call across the continent.

But a release for her, from the poverty and isolation,
From the shacks, and filth and futility
Seemed yet as impossible and cruel and forbidden
As it ever had, over all her years before.

Something happened then, on that last day of the rainy season.
With the city still yet across the expanse of a black river
He saw the sun break through a dark-veined sky
As the ferryman took his father's amulet as payment.

The guards of the gate pushed back the planked doors
And he entered through the wet, rough stone walls
Among a dripping hoard of plains-peasants, and traders,
As a distant siren call caught her beneath that broken afternoon sky.

To the central market they both found their way.
She on hard, bare soles slipping on the long soaked cobbles
He on worn and wet elk-hide moccasins
The throngs of the city descending to find daily fare.

Aimless wandering guided them each across the Great Square,
She, tired, finding a mostly-good apple fallen aside the stands
He, exhausted, buying bread with one of his few remaining coins.
Each sat close, yet still unaware, unseen to the other.

Unknown in the city, it was a meadowlark that brought them together.
Alighting upon a thorny shrub near them both
They turned when they, at the same time, threw a crumb.
Eyes like wells, in they both fell, cobbles steaming under a new sun.

A meadowlark brings to each now a gasp of surprise
Alighting upon the window sill.
Five decades gone in a moment,
The memory fresh again as a just-fallen rain.

Here, there are slices of deep-red apples
And rolls of sweet golden bread, and cheese, and wine
That sit on the table between them,
And a fire slowly ebbs in their hearth.

What angst was there
Among those myriad words?
I didn't reach out to let them in.
One more among the ashes.

A fragile vessel
Created of breath
Was floated upon the wind
To sing of lives and losses.

It envelops my face
And spills into my ears
As heavy summer rains
Drain into a cracked and parched landscape.

Tell them it was him
Tell them it was all a mistake
Show them something from your purse
And say that he gave it to you

Describe her face and the touch of her hand
Sing about places you stood together
Where your footprints have never been
And how the memories still burn in your soul

Dance the long-lived grudge against them
For reasons no one can quite remember
Paint it all with red and black

Mount your words on pikes
And your voice from the wires
And leave behind a Daguerreotype
That hangs suspended in the air
When you're gone

Too early,  the dreary skies, the cold days.
The warm, the sultry, the windy without-a-coat ones
Were allowed to pass without note
And our opportunities to dust off the bike
To put the canoe in the water
Silently changed from must-do-soon
To wish-we-had-done.

Too quietly, our coats and sock and over-shirts
Took up positions nearer the door.
The sandals became stacked and set aside
The lawnmower found a place further back
Behind leaf-bags and rakes that await
The spaces between rainy days.

Too silent became the phone
Too still the mailbox
First summer, first birthday, first autumn
Without garden and cooking notes shared
Or stories of people I don't know.
Too long and silent will come the winter
Without her footprints in northern snow.

The distance between me and she
When easily traversed by arm extended,
And finger tips, always is;

Nearby means a wholeness,
And in it the reasons to stitch together
This moment and the next;

Savouring the experience of place
It makes more the whole
when we both partake of the view;

The flavours, of the labours,
Of the growing, of the plants, of the garden
Are ignited by them being for her;

The skeleton frame of our days,
Is fleshed with a texture soft and supple,
By the day-to-day of us;

The being apart is the punctuation
In the subsequent being together
Of a sentence we serve as one;

It's that glowing strand of highway
That may go short or long over the hill,
That we discover together.

In the silence of the night,
It's the weight of all the breaths
We will exhale and inhale together.

Choosing a series a words for a ditty,
Those we first pluck a few at a time.
For readers it will, at first, seem so pretty
When they detect that rhythm and rhyme.

But soon, I suggest, it becomes such a chore,
When words strung together do pose
An oft-trodden pattern or insipid score
That bounces and sings as it goes.

The message conveyed in this rigid frame,
Is lesser I fear than than when we escape
From words chosen for just ending the same
Or some fortuitous fit to that shape.

So I tend to lean towards using blank form,
For verses I build by the letter,
And chose the words that I feel will conform
To that which my heart says are better.

Forlorn pleas, angst and aching laments,
Thick like a melange of surreptitiously smoked cigarettes,
And plastics that have melted and burned while too close to the heater.

The teen angst hangs in the depressions and around the corners of this place
Where it is damp and wet in the just-breaking morning.
Among the verdant green, earth-rupturing sprouts
There are flower buds that threaten to burst.

The spring landscape here reveals hewn timber,
And crafted structures
Yet also black loamy dirt
Dredged up from beneath the swollen green carpet
Of ferns and sod,
Marking the unmistakable path
Of an errant vehicle,
That skidded unexpectedly from the narrow road.

It starts like a beige tuft of fibre
Protruding from a large burlap sack.
As we pull it from the hidden source
It gradually reveals itself.
Simple and unassuming,
A uniform, coloured strand
Which we gather up into a tidy ball.

Sometimes another strand is tied
Onto the one we pull.
A different colour?
A change of texture?
And so we pull that one anew,
We build another coil,
While the original strand awaits.
The interesting new thread,
Reveals itself from the hidden reservoir.

The fibre slides through our fingers.
Slowly, when there is resistance.
Quicker, when it comes loosely.
Now coarse and wiry
Now soft and slippery,
Now thick and tufted.
Tough Scottish highlands perhaps?
Or rural Ontario?

Sometimes the hidden source seems like it may be
A hand-knit sweater that we are pulling apart.
The strands are still kinked and twisted in places,
Echoing a memory of a shape it has held for years.

We recognize bits here and there too.
Colours and textures from our own story.
"I had a pair of socks like that."
"Remember our scarves from those cold childhood winters?"

The collection of small skeins increases.
From a sheep's fleece, yes, but now too
From Alpaca, camel and rabbit.
Cashmere from Pashmina goats in Nepal?

But at last the final strand comes free.
You feel the weight of the coiled wool,
And see the diversity of the colours.
And for each coil
We remember again how it appeared
How it felt.
How the strands
Came together
And apart.

A small job, replace a bit of wood
On the old worn deck hidden behind the old house.
Textured with cracks and wrinkles,
The old man of the backyard
Would look good with a new coat.

Pulled away the sinking boards
To find rot and bigger cracks below.
Structure takes a poke to reveal
Oatmeal-like softness.
Many pieces must come out.

The whole thing should be replaced,
But I seek instead to deal with failed parts only.
Others remain solid,
Can hold on for a few more years.

Deft surgery required here, and special tools.
Excise a piece here
Replace a metal fitting there.
Don't make the same mistakes the original builder did.
We can do better than that now.

At the end it will look much as before,
But the proof will be in the putting
Of feet to the boards and walking across
With out the creaks and groans.

Another year, maybe two
And we'll take the whole thing down.
And in its place will be something new
Built out of trees that at this minute
Sway gently in a northern breeze.

They reach for the bright ring
All attention on the extended finger tips
Is a sympathetic squirm in your chair  
Our contribution to the attempt?

Can we lift them to reach further?
Can we have the ring lowered?
Resized?
Delivered by courier?

Give them good shoes
And demonstrate stretching exercises.
And at the attempt, let it be of themselves.
Let them do it alone,
And ask how it went.
Lament the failures.
Blame nobody.
And encourage another try.

People more creatively put words together
When they face some restrictified rules
Like not making up unemogryfied words
That they haven't been taught in their schools.

Once it was garbage, refuse, trash.
A jumble of foul-smelling detritus hauled to the curb
And removed by sinewy men
Contributing a harder day's work
Than anyone else in the city.

Our energy now removes its entropy.
Sorted and classified into coloured bins,
We add order to our rejected matter.

Specialized trucks arrive to collect
The date-synchronized bins
Emptying them into functionally compatible mechanisms.

Most desolate is the black box of paper and cardboard.
Brochures and flyers, old magazines and letters.
Annual reports and cereal boxes.
Once these were enameled with crafted sentences,
Painstakingly typed, edited and debated,
On the monitors of copywriters.

Now they are just millions of words printed on flattened fibre substrates,
Jumbled into the bruised and scarred black box,
Entering into the recycling stream.

The nouns and adjectives,
Prepositions and gerunds,
All jumble together.

Fragments of precisely-crafted sentences and paragraphs
Are gradually broken, shredded and pulped.
Incomplete thoughts, broken phrases
Like those of a rejected stranger
In an lonely, unknown country.
Then words without context.
Then just disparate letters
Are all that remain.
Their  M  ea  N inG
G  r a Du all y
is re mov
e d
.

Just seven minutes ago,
I was but a shell of myself.
I was unfulfilled
With only the promise of
What half-a-dozen minutes hence
Might bring.

Seven minutes ago,
Oh, seven minutes ago.
I knew nothing
Of the crazy, heady,
Seven-minutes-ahead future.

Seven minutes ago,
Oh, seven minutes ago.
Those were wild times,
With dreams,
And pie-in-the-sky aspirations.

We're all more mature
And pragmatic
In this seven-minutes-ahead future.
We work hard,
And wear a no-nonsense countenance.

But some minutes,
Very rarely,
We pause
(If only for a few seconds)
And think of what might have been,
If those seven-minute-ago future dreams had come true.

With a few clicks, fragments of my identity lodge themselves
Neatly among the grimy, toil-born ones and zeros of the Others.
Mine too smell faintly of stale tea and sweaty typing fingers,
Are gritty with the dust from between my keyboard keys,
And the sand that gets between my toes
When I walk out onto the patio
Without my shoes.

I am registered.