Frost

timeless for half an hour
you dream of springtime
but outside this fall is giving in
its reins to colder days
and you of all people 

you know what it is like to hibernate alone.

Moonshine

Should we be strangers still

By moonlight

I will learn to peel your words

Before I feel them seep

Inside my veins,

Before I let your eyes coerce me,

Before I trust your ears to catch me,

Before I know your arms too dearly.

You, too, are a wonder

To me some nights

When with my little hands

I break this moon into a thousand sighs.

I want to know this light.

Whether it crumbles like roses,

Whether it hangs from the silence,

Whether it lives in a cavern of doubts.

And when it flakes, whether it coats us both in stardust

Till in the dark, we've no more moon
For empty sighs to rustle in our bones.

Gratitude

Although these arms did hold you once,

Fed you night-time from a spoon,

Wrapped your head in hopeful wonder -

There will come a day when all your sometime thanks

Will be disdainful greed

Or you might push away

These arms when they still try

Smothering your fears
With love you can never repay.

The Devoted One

You hope someone else has walked in your shadows,

Has picked up crumbles of your many lives

With lovely, trembling hands

Only to fold them, small as secrets,

Into the pockets of a rusting heart.

That same someone has written down the song

Of your soft grieving

And named it for your calmly storming eyes.

That someone may not wait for you forever

While you defy yourself by searching farther still

Into the depths of hope and great despair
(Your shadows feel familiar there)

The Victor

You always win at checkers

Always first in cards

Always the king of scrabble

You deftly unscramble

The muddle inside my heart

While I pull the wrong suit

And gratefully root myself

Into your arms and ask you

Without ever asking you aloud

To just keep buzzing your voice

Against my skin.

You’ve always been the first to finish puzzles,

The last to let the towers fall.

You are a prodigy at bingo

And you’ve always handled victory well.

But when I ask you to convince me

That this is not a flaw,

It’s just a square that takes me two steps back,

It’s just a snake,

It’s just a jail card,

You don’t know what to tell me.

You only ever land on ladders and

You only ever skip through “GO”.

Smoke and Mirrors

If I am beautiful, then it is smoke and mirrors.

On level footing I may disappear

And you will never find me,

Never in ten thousand years.

Not here, not where the light

Of morning softness breaks

The cover of my long-drawn face,

Not where the sleepy and still silent

Art of rising peels the blanket off my studied grace.

I do not know what dreams my eyes might show

When I have not yet cleansed them of their candour.

The woman who awakes beside you is too much of me

That you might break upon her insolent affection.

If I am beautiful, then it is of the study

I have so carefully embraced

And bled into my smile, my footing,

And the way I breathe your name.

If I am beautiful then it is my chef d’oeuvre,

My great illusive act.

You cannot know its secret.

You cannot ever know how deep I’ve gone

Into this hapless helpless

Desolate defenseless

Ugly

Love for you.

My mirrors have begun to shatter

And if you call for me your care will cut

Itself upon my broken voice.

I cannot carry kindness.

It is hard enough

Trying to hold back the smoke.

Aiming for the callouses of the earth

Some nights the air turns brutal

And all you can see are planes

Butter-winged in between the sheathes of wind

Aiming for the callouses of the earth

And you never really thought you’d be the kind

To make a death threat, but right now you’re dying

To kill something or other as though life

Were just the little light atop a birthday candle

Or some medal you can take away.

Snow Queen

Snow settles in squabbling rows between the bricks of ice.

It is, has always been, the call to ruin that the morning brings.

It’s quiet here. The crisp snow cover crackling,

The branches freezing into crystal strands.

The first of sleepy breaths fog up my mirrors

And let me draw a new face in the glass.

Give me a word to whisper and I’ll call it out in blizzards,

Circling its meaning on a windy leash.

But nothing new will come of your suggestions, I have made sure of that.

Out - part 1

Some nights Joanne could see the skyline from her window, if she tucked the shutters down just a touch with the tip of her middle finger. But not this night. This night everything, the sky, the shore, the stars darkly hanging as though lightbulbs asking for reinforcements, everything, seemed two shades dimmer than it was supposed to be.

            This, too, was common. The electricity surged in and out and the water would sometimes burst out brown gunk instead of chlorinated clarity. Joanne was lucky to have made her tea before it all went out again. She nursed the steaming cup by the shutters, watched the police lights crackle and swirl along the highway underneath her high-rise. Then, with a tingle of premonition, she reached into her back pocket just before the phone exploded in a violent buzz-ring.
            “Hello?”

A Proposal

No, I know that you and I

Would not work out

But neither do I and I

Half the time

And you seem to be a mess too

So why don’t we just be messy

Together?

Squirrels

Yvonne and Flanders are colouring pictures with crayons in class. Missus orbits around. Rachel and Francine are sitting at a nearby table, also colouring.

YVONNE. I drew you a watercolour. I forgot it at home but I drew you one. It has lillies and lilacs and blue. I know you like blue. I like it too.

Beat.

Did you draw me anything?

FLANDERS. No.

YVONNE. That’s okay. Maybe we can draw something together.

FLANDERS. I don’t feel like it.

YVONNE. Watercolours are my favourite. Do you know a lot about flowers?

FLANDERS. I know poppies.

A Responsible Guy

TOM. [leans in] My girlfriend eats money. I mean really. You think it’s funny but I’m not kidding. I don’t mean she eats money like I have to take her to restaurants all the time and buy her expensive shit or whatever. I mean she eats money. Like she takes the bills and puts them in her mouth and chews. Look, man, I know you think I’m crazy but I’m telling the truth here. Here, here, look [he produces a half-bitten toonie]. Toonies are her favourite.

Shorthand

My time moved in such summer ways.

I was stoic, I was frantic, I was stasis, I was storm.

I missed things so completely, it was almost

Like not missing them at all.

My emptiness and I had tamed each other

And grew wild in the tangles of those parts we couldn’t know.

Together, we decided that love passes sometimes

On such sweet, such quiet days

That only someone sitting in the whirling of my inside

Could discover

How like the sunset

I have made my loss.

This and That

Lifeblood

Harpooning

The mountain that dismounts from the little bike

A woman whistles as you walk right past her in the well-lit street

Railways of streetlights vanish

In the restaurant window you catch a half-glimpse of someone you once knew

Then the rip in your favourite stained white shirt disappears

Miraculously

As if it were never there

And you begin to turn around anticipating miracles

Like scary circus clowns popping in and out of boxes

But only shadows fester around these corners.

You begin to fear words like this and that

You refuse to make conclusive statements about yourself because what if

Someone hears you and it has to be true, it has to stay that way

But now you

Then Again

Alone, this rain and I

Are like lovers never meeting

I on this side

Of the glass

And he weeping

Against the side of my home

Some days I stop to listen how he pounds

Wet and thundering

Against so close to me

But then again we turn from the glass,

The two of us,

Both indifferent to the light.

Gratitude

Though these arms did hold you once,

Fed you nightly from a spoon,

Wrapped your head in pretty warbles,

Helped you through the great lagoon,

There will come a day when all your sometime thanks

Will be disdain

Or you might push away

These arms when they still try

Smothering your fears

With love you can never repay

Krystofiak

I was sitting beside the drawer in the doctor’s office

Waiting for my cue

This particular morning when out of the corner of my eye

I saw the roll of old white yarn

Waiting for warm hands

By the window.

That was in those six months when I hated doctors, when I thought

They would tell me only all the things I didn’t like to hear.

I was sitting beside the drawer where they kept the magazines

And papers

Somebody started to speak Spanish right beside me

So I pulled out my collection of bilingual Neruda

And read the poetry in Spanish

Perfectly positioned for the Spaniards

To admire.

They might have mentioned something about how cool I was

But I didn’t speak their language. So.

Hipsters in Drag

Living in our time is a nuisance

Some say

With our rooms and heads all messy we provide instructions

To clean it up

And pass them on to our future selves

Of course, we’ve yet to invent

A system of mailing things through time

Because when we get there, our future selves

Have not received the memo

And our rooms are even dustier

And our heads ache

Then we dress ourselves in plaid and canvas

To please the mirrors

And we walk outside in shoes

From an ancient generation

Clicking along, paying so much attention to forgetting,

That we look like accidents in our own photographs

An intentional case of bad timing