Saturday, February 11, 2006

Lefurgey

I hereby do bequeath my love to the following items.

a parlour stove, one lamp
a fist full of hair from the darker horse.

one dwelling
a house

7 hours of visits at the lounge table

1 riding sleigh.

6 chairs and a harness
to hold you in

a carpet, a bed
1 set of slightly worn slippers
or sheets
take your pick

the tall clock on the north wall that rests against its shadow in the open kitchen;
the north wall

our saturday mornings
our saturday afternoons

lemon meringue pie
plate

as for money
I can give you what I have
three hundred dollars to be paid in instalments of twenty dollars a year
commencing one year after
the bills are paid

signed in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and a day.

Oh no.

Apparently I died six years ago. I was 85. That's pretty good.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Paterson

Is it just me, or does every friggin poet have their own WCW "Paterson" poem these days? In line with those poets captivated by Persephone, I'd say. Sure, she was stolen from her mom, of course she was beautiful-yadda yadda, and so Hades himself made her his bride, but get over it. It's a great story as is, stop "borrowing" it. You're not making it any better. This fascination with beauty-done-wrong is just plain overdone. Go write about your mothers.

caro: population 1785 housing units

Found out a long poem of mine will be in the next Carousel. This is where they live. Issue 19. Good number. The end mark of a grouping. Groping, really. A bunching of numbers assigned a task by humanity to perform 1 to 9 deliberations. We haven't the right to fit them so. Why, 8 could exist in any number of ways. Before 7, for example.

I like the word antecedent.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Enter Canadian Politics



Thanks to my pal Antonia for pic. But, where's Duceppe? Missing photo day, or, too smart for the lot? (Nice robe, Layton.)

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

push

Tonight I was assaulted in a grocery store. At about 5:30 pm, while narrow label-packed rows were crowded with too wide carts pushed by their after work hungry-little-Quebecer owners, I was edging my way to turn a corner when I encountered the face. A scowly little face of some random grocery consumer struck me as she turned suddenly around spinning her large cart with her. She had decided to change direction. Problem was, there was no physical space for her to do so, so she made some. I casually looked at her unconvincingly, as if my facial expression would incline her to instead turn the other way, but she had other plans. As I did not move backward because I was directly behind my cart and in front of a display of boxed juices (the 99 cent concentrate juices, the really awful kind), I could not move without some manoeuvering of my own. So I did nothing, hoping she'd come to her senses and push forward, turning 2 feet ahead of her at the next aisle. But no. She did no such thing, and in fact, in what seemed a split second, she began to move her cart in the direction of the juice containers, and me and my poor cart, in effect squeezing me between the cart and the pile of display. At first I'd thought she made a mistake in distance judgement, but no. She continued to push me into the direction she wanted to go in until I could not move, my stomach was pressed against the hard plastic shopping cart handle, and I began to panic, wondering if she'd continue to push me even further into the middle of the display, or worse, completely cut my middle open with the sheer force of her scowly power. She roared by me with some cute French obscenities, to which I replied something to the same effect in a more direct English curse, then stood there wondering just what had happened. I took myself and my violated cart to the beer aisle (which, as I was thinking, was the only good thing about Quebec at that point) and just stared at the local brew for about 10 minutes. I really should have gone after her or something. But in that exact moment, I had no idea what to do. My natural inclination was to do nothing. Experience my own demise, or something like that. It's been a long time since I've been pushed. I don't let myself get into situations like that anymore. And I'm quite shocked I didn't know how to react. My 33 years on this planet have prepared me for little confrontation, apparently. What a strange thing to happen in a grocery store. I'm only glad she didn't pull out a pistol. Holding up that deal of a cereal box on sale wouldn't have helped me one bit.

Something like this had happened to me before. I was in a laundry mat at 7pm one night when some random guy walked in, straight to the back where I was folding or scrubbing, didn't say a word, and started to have his way with my body, via his disgustingly strange hands. There was a buzzer I was able to ring after squirming loose from said wierdo, and pressed it for an eternity until someone came to give me "change". Freak took off, I filed a police report. Nothing else happened. Shouldn't there be some kind of Fred Flintstone martian that pops out at those times to set you straight? Geez.

What is our world coming to? Soon, we'll be ordering groceries off the internet and rarely leaving our houses. We'll all be too afraid of each other. What are we going to do about it? And, how should I react when some strange old guy leans over to me on the first day of one of my classes as I bend to pick up a paper I've dropped and tells me that I'm a wild one aren't I... I mean, what the fuck? Can I get a bodyguard please?

I'm going to bed.

unique visitor counter