Exit
1.
heat like death swelling
in midsummer afternoon
a fly on the wall
2.
black cat, a statesman
a frowning old man of war
dead grass scratches paws
3.
golden summer sun
beating down, bleaches the grass
burns my sweating skin
4.
life flees from my grasp
long days running like water
cut a channel deep
5.
no love in weak hearts
no hunger in weak bodies
no wind stirs my soul
6.
gracing the long day
smiling eyes at the garden
the rose petals fall
7.
it is cold downstairs
the basement offers refuge
from oppressive heat
8.
how I crave nightfall
longing for the moon's return
to displace the sun
9.
imposing mountains
rise behind the escarpments
cloudbanks in the sky
10.
striking hot iron
forging opportunity
in the summer sun
11.
at the waterfall
dipping your toes in at night
a glass kicked over
This is all recent work of mine, and all first-draft (as it were), unedited and presented as originally written.
Apologies for the formatting, I'm unsure how to have this in the middle of the page and still justified left, my coding is not very good.
Suicide Attempt
I sit on the front step and light a cigarette
watch it burn away my life
Stand under the streetlamp
I stub it out
the smell is acrid, foul
I will bury it in my garden
where it will doubtless
kill my sprouting plants
----
(untitled)
low whitecaps fold their foamwhite heads
between the isles and me
on georgian bay
an old man, staggering and nodding accross the main
implores with voiceless breath
that I not waste my life -
submit to eternity
find peace in death
and yet, here in neurotic paralysis I sit
numbed by the steady static of northern winds in trees
and down on the shore, the waves pound out
their solitary watches
----
(untitled)
out in the yard my father works
sawing branches, clipping the stem that irks
pastoral framing sensibilites
----
are all our lives as small as this?
a mink, small and black
dashes into the road
no time to brake
it passes under the car
I turn
and see it writhing, curling
black on the tarmac
the small lives of small things
who cannot know, crouched by the road
that they are about to die
-----
Pro Eleutheraen
The hands that sculpted form
that lucien praised - as earnest as ever was
that sly assyrian
moved by the coiled arc
of the bronze discobolous -
so seized my lost-wax heart
artereal sprues fast run
and over his kiln has burned out the mold
leaving a hollow
into which his bronze might pour
Exit