Don’t fuck this up
with your feelings
Went to sleep without
him
Tried to dream him
back
But it’s zero sum the
summer
Nothing cold about it
it’s just that
The closer I come to loving
the closer I edge into elegy
Shh. There are
poets trying to die
HYMN
Wicked tension bloom
blast wistful tenor
tensor black winter
Wilted tenure blessed
blown window terser
tepid bloke wither
Wilful tested blame
bliss winded temper
tester bleach widows
CSP
What is a sign?
Some grand logic?
Some cradling?
HYMN
Method whistle sense stab
tenure rapist tract traces
mother split pencil stretch
trainer nonce tensor spurt
Clever brine tory magic
branded libel scandal lice
cloister sacred wax mental
bail snap willing scoundrel
CSP
A critick of arguments
A most necessary question
So many meanings –
An injury to language to add a new one
The word ‘I’ is apparently
an essential indexical unit
I hate
this
I lost you in November
and if time isn’t subjective
it’s November again and I am
appalled I grieve
Time is subjunctive
I am your index now
HYMN
Hitches in stance prog
jab injure ginger strut
hinges on hand hips
jar conjure sidle walk
Graft pilfer menthol mask
draper mortar swagger lean
great button tender grime
drifter bindle twist cap
CSP
Primary protegé
Secondary supplicant
Mediatory muse
Every failure follows from a failure
Memory is kind
kindness kills
my em dash is tired
Verbal version comes
iPod wrecks the soundtrack
vice conjugates the visit
Indicate indecent indices
HYMN
Nab when glottal wince
lick limber water tread
nick nature nurture this
lie code ethics shift
Act yourself skip langue
icon freight measure safe
ask symbol fissure pose
index metric like nest
CSP
Indices and indexicals indicate the direction
Icons bore us to death
Insofar as we can see
Every sign, rote signs all the way to hospice
YOU WERE MY ONLY TERRAN
Shift subaltern
lonely all shoot mental
shun St. Dominique
why rent mini-Terran
shawl fist alternative
Slow eon tool name
lull yell lamental
saltwater hymen
wall comely diy
stall innate comedy
HYMN
so lisper deeper plebe
bass range glitch crackle
sect tenor pocket tone
bitch sever gloss pitch
fever range check in
Xerox line strange break
fractal knowledge sever it
Xbox lever pulley snare
CSP
Spectral analysis
Embolum – bolt lock –
thrown together
Parabolum – collateral lock –
thrown beside
Hypobolum – platen lock –
thrown underneath
The fall takes forever
Still thrown for a loss
MY SINCERE APOLOGISTS
They knew him
like
So stunned by
your
And how dare
it
Because we never have
very
But if s/he
only
Troll, you
trawl
Shhh
I object to your secondness
your leaving
autumn slippage
yellowed paper
small
pressed
Sick of signage
turn left at Ayer’s Cliff
stick to the side road
trail any direction
All roads, side roads
all text, signage
All seasons, autumn
all memories, winter
Steven dreamed of you the very second
you died
(So the poem goes)
and you may have visited him
But I’m pretty sure you don’t believe
in poems
Home is where the arc is
home is where the arch is
Begin with digression
rerun of the archons
Alone in ink and whiskey
wasted well on paper
Obliterate this order
eliminate signatures, signifiers
Make it sense –
home is where the chart is
Domiciliation dance
constrained in little rooms
Tied up in theory
so cold on consignment
Dust gathers
librarians dust
He’s dead
Too much displacement
not enough condensation
You have texts
to be completed
Left them on a
jump drive for us
Archive key
Terrible symmetry
sorrowful telemetry
Start again with
signatory stature
Make nice with
old signposts
Make strange with
odd likenesses
Make new icons
drop old habits
Proceed without familial
consent
Rob,
Jay, Dave and I
stashed all the expensive
whiskey at your wake.
Not sorry,
Jonny
The invalid townships
insist
The sickening tenured
posit
Let it rest
no more mythologies
Stash pain
in a volume of poetry
Where no one could possibly
find it
I miss everybody
Me too
Where are the other senses:
the sick twist of what you strain through metre
The feelings, notions, street corners, alcoves
jargonistics, sidewinders, string theories, me too
Flesh and no lungs appalling m’appelling
never no gerund me fixate when and recalling tome
Question for every sense and infinite use
despotism of the finite and drink it, slam it toward me
Yeah, Robert, I feel you, want you holding on
me too
Composed in 1946
compost in 4/4 time
Then
comprosed –
a new verb
wicked and defiant
Missing you
Send in the nouns
Transprairie
(A Post-Prairie Suite)
The open prairie conceals a chasm.
– Robert Kroetsch
in that person is a site
dreaming of floods and r
ivers woke gagging
– Jessica Grim
TRANSPRAIRIE
Please step away from the scene
nothing to be here
It follows that the primary unit of poetry
in flatland is the line
We have arrived: world class in our way –
our way is lost: we like it Rich, standby
The dreams you don’t know you know
and the dreams you know all too well
You are tranced
I am incidental
But in which kind of poetry
do we place our dead dreams?
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SPROUTING A POET IN WINNIPEG
It’s non-arable land so go hydroponic
once you sprout, lay low
don’t make eye contact with teachers or ministers
Shower three times a day
don’t pray. There’s no god in Winnipeg
there is an understaffed drop-in centre
Use fine-tip pens
red ink is more than fine
only write on receipts and parking tickets
Pitch a tent. Stay a while
but don’t get comfortable
when they find out, lay low in Selkirk
When they forget, come back
or don’t. But always remember:
they will forget you
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SPROUTING A POST-PRAIRIE POET IN WINNIPEG
Hydro sprout low
administer shower shovel
loyal writhe receipt
Accept sense tenting
sell member hideout
comfort brace remembrance
Get growl forget
PROCESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
(talking points from the Winnipeg Leadership
Symposium for Leaders, March 1994)
•What you need to know
• is the brain is so very good
• at picking stuff up.
• Are they really
• reading the labels?
• Really?
• Remember: the idea
• of the holy grail
• is viral.
• Fifty percent of readers
• will actually do something.
• That’s a big number.
• If you think about percentages.
• Remember the soaps?
• Remember watching them?
• They were soap-driven!
• Remember the soaps.
• People love advertising.
• they buy things.
• I will show you a chart
• that will knock you out
• literally.
• Think of it as a good workout.
• The name of the game
• is brand fitness.
• Is there an occasion
• that’s not a purchase occasion?
• Maybe a funeral, but I don’t think so.
• People always have rational
• passions and interests.
• Use them.
• If you probe popularity
• you will avoid playing
• hard to sell.
• The question
• is not ‘why?’
• It’s ‘how come?’
• Just think about it:
• four percent penetration
• in just five seconds.
•Who doesn’t want that?
LATCHKEYED
Sick of the trains
left the conscience
West of the Seine
dream the Albert
Prayer of the contingent
drone the late shift
Next to November
tell the mall to swell
Please the Perimeter
will straight lines
Pay homage at wholesale rate
rent-to-own disappointment
Croon any scrapyard
insulate the empties
Drive by the winter
sleep summerfall
Wake up furious, deadlocked
daydream latchkeyed
MIASMA MEDICATION
Take the North Main Car east
watch your strep
Selkirk Avenue and so on
sad insistence. Dark matters
How’s your labour?
the smug get paid
The old dreams never die
never really lived
And some of us were
already someone
FAMOUS GREY CHEVETTE
Listen, when we were younger
we drove to the legislative buildings
in my famous grey Chevette and smoked
oil from bottle caps and bought
licks from street kids
And then we stared at the floodlights
until our retinas burned and the city
turned purple. We called it ‘purple city’ –
it was the only thing to do in Winnipeg
Do you remember this?
I think we were trying to
upgrade the city or go blind
ST. TRANSCONA
Transcona calls me at three in the morning
demanding a rewrite
But I’ve moved to St. James. And the Free Press
is already printed
The rivers are bingeing and purging again –
you see them only in the spring on the early news
This love moves toward something
at bonspiel speed
Consider yourself unhaloed in a trailer park
in St. Vital
You can lead a tourist to the Red River
but you can’t make him drink himself to death
It’s Saturday evening
I’ll be at home, fucking up locutions
Sunday morning
I’ll be at the floodway burying Saturday
STOP KNOWING HOW I AM
When the punchline is chlorine
you transgraze, catch cold
When the punchline is Advair
the side effect is death
When the punchline is adjunct
high on grad school Sudafed
When the punchline is prairie
periodicals spiral
When the punchline is hockey
tell it antiseptic