Past-Partout

It is not enough

2010-02-24T03:20:00.001-08:00

It is not enough that I read Roberto Bolano

That I follow the trails he makes through Western literature

It is not enough to make of me a poet.

It is not enough

That I am obscure

And stuck in an oubliette of literary endeavour

Stuck there, waiting with Poe-like hope for some intrepid

Detective or scholar to drag me up

Into a common light.

Who am I trying to impress, anyway?

And in the reeds of a stagnant pool

A dead duck bobs and turns slowly, so that my face

Meets its face, bloated with decay

And our eyes briefly search each other out

(the dead duck and I)

and we gaze together, we exchange

information.

The duck knows what it's all about.

Werewolves

2009-10-16T05:25:00.000-07:00

I am

writing a book

about

werewolves

it's getting brighter

2009-09-01T02:20:00.000-07:00

the train is chock-a-block,
as they say

they're saying somebody died,

and we were told to get off

and everybody got off,

and we had to catch the next one
(which, of course,

was chocka
block)

you can still hear the sirens, actually

and it's getting brighter these days, with the sun

closer to the earth

and the fire season's coming, and everybody's talking about how they're going to

keep the trains running through the fire

season

and somebody screams in the carriage

somebody over there past the girls
the ones with the shitty songs leaking from their ears

and all the eyes turn and look, and somebody's screaming, saying

'stop talking to me, stop talking to me'

and other voices saying, calmly,
'we weren't talking to you, lady'

and now the sun's really low down,

and the shadows are long on the house roofs

and the trees have branches that look like fingers

and all these people in here,

packed in together, and you can still hear

a pin drop,

even over the sound of the train wheels turning

and the one over there, screaming

'i know what you are'

'i know
what you are'

To my future critics

2009-04-20T04:55:00.000-07:00

To my future
critics, to all the haters

To the hacks, to the low-rent literary
shucksters, to the pushers of opinion, the poetry
pigs who snuffle in scat for a whiff of fame

To the vein, the forked-
penned, the silver-tongued professors,
to the limp-dicked pedants, the
pusillanimous po'mo
poseurs, to them,

I say:

I shall be wronged!

And
though your crime remains
uncommitted, though my work has yet
to disgust you, to bore you, to
offend your noble
aesthetic

I demand satisfaction.

We will fight to the death.
To the death of
letters.

Men must be men
about these things,
after all.

And should my wounds be
fatal, should I swoon and
fade in a cataract of my
own hot

blood -

well, sirs,

at least,
at LEAST

it will spare me the ignominy
of your
rejection.

my poetics

2009-04-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

I actually don't know anything about poetry at all

except that sometimes you have to be drunk

and when you write it, you can't expect anybody to

understand it

because you don't really

understand it,

yourself

I googled my dad

2009-04-06T04:16:00.000-07:00

I googled my dad

we haven't spoken in

thirteen years

he's an asshole, a

drunk, a faux man

of letters

I googled him

it took me a while to find him -

I forgot how to spell his

name

his family name, by which I was never

known

my faux father.

with a little digging,

I find him living in the same

town

he's written a

children's book, of all things

to think of him reading it aloud -

some public library on a tuesday morning

his sour, pipe-smoked breath, his red

boggy eyes fixed on the

kids

the great man of

letters

who used to hit his own kid

with the back of a hairbrush

who chased him through the house

demanding justice for imagined

crimes

who courted academics and

poets, who wore berets

who had unwholesome

predilections

I googled him.

the great network

amplified and routed

him back to me

my disconnecting dad

my 404

and when I googled my

own name

though the list of my achievements

runs three pages

deep

I am sure

he has not googled

as I.

poem to a preternatural friend

2009-03-23T04:29:00.000-07:00

Lukumi, Makumba,

drums and blood

the voice of Omolu, whisperings,

things moving in shadow, the

sound of bones

Swedenborg, his dreams, Crowley,

his ciphers and his airs

snake-handling Pentecostal

sects, rites of the holy ghost in the deep

mountain

you get it on you

it gets you hot and

unhinged

it banishes Truth, our

atomic fate, our quantum

providence

then,

like a drunk

you wake up sober and

broke

you open the curtain to let the light in

and it hurts your eyes

you think,

shit,

i must be going crazy

you have your shower, you get

dressed

and then you go off to work,

as usual

critique of ordinary people #2

2009-03-20T02:02:00.000-07:00

he sits

imperious,

banal and ostentatious

eating a banana

talking on his mobile

to the builder

about his new French

doors and how they should

swing

when he's done his banana

he lets the skin fall

to the floor

it stays there.

you know the old joke

the hapless fool slipping

on a peel

everybody laughs

except the poor guy

lying flat

on his face

I had a paper route

2009-03-18T06:15:00.000-07:00

I had a paper route

it took me three hours to walk the
empty streets of my
suburb

the bag slung across my shoulder, getting
lighter as I walked

and in winter it would be dark by the time I was
on Victoria street

and the cold wind on my face

and through the falling snow I summoned ghosts of dead

girls and strange lights that hovered two feet above the

frozen creek

in spring the sun set the clouds on fire
I believed I could jump into other people's dreams and talk

to God

he was talking to me,
on my paper route

in autumn
I would collect subscription money

I would knock on doors, and behind one of them, in the
basement of an apartment block, there lived an old
man

he wore tweed jackets, he stunk
of wet beer boxes and stale looseleaf
tobacco

he gave me twenty cents less than he owed me
and his walls were covered in photographs and the
television was always on

I jumped into his dream once

it was
heavier than the rest, heavier even than the
bag slung across my
shoulder

I stopped delivering papers to his door
soon after.

pep talk

2009-03-08T03:47:00.000-07:00

i fail at everything.

you get a certain knack for it, you

hone your art

you arc toward a perfection of

failure

its like the song says:

every time you step forward you are

falling

slightly falling,

and then you catch yourself with your next

step

Laurie Anderson said that.

(see, I fail at plagiarism)

but with each step you defy gravity, a force pulling you

down and yet it can't, it can't just

yet

in the end,

when your feet can't save you

old Gravity will have its way with your

bones

and then!

in downward death you will

excel at failure beyond the wildest of your

dreams

you'll be a regular expert!

so don't sweat it,

kid

to e

2009-03-05T03:06:00.000-08:00

you are a rare pteridophyte
growing in the crook of a low gully

you are the helix of a vine
pullulating skyward along a young limb

you are
the forest itself, its
tangles and majesties, its
beasts, its
multifarious avifauna, its

- o I'm lost.

you stand there with your arms folded,

waiting for the payoff

me I hold my thesaurus to my heart like an
old map

I am in awe of your
in-

effability.

poem 4

2009-03-01T03:42:00.000-08:00

i remember puberty well

the works of
lovecraft and poe and the faded photographs
of dead soliders in the American civil war

the slow months of winter spent huddled
in basements, listening
for ghosts

hot spurts of sex, the pages
of comic books and
women's magazines, a
friend's brother's porn film, pubic hair and
tits

and the moon -

ah, the moon
how she haunted me from her faraway cave,
how lonely her face

and her tune it sunk to
the pit of my stomach, made me
weak-kneed and tearful and I
clenched my fists and I
pounded my forehead again

and again

the moon, the
moon the
moon

i don't hear that song much

anymore.

critique of ordinary people #1

2009-02-11T03:33:00.000-08:00

i see a guy on the train

when he gets on he's full
of pep:

he's got a book to read a

bit of writing to work on

the train sinks his

resolve

he sleeps or gazes,

slug-like, through the window

watching the backyards

go by

his mind worries over knots it

can't untie

and the girls, the young girls are

embarking and alighting, their knees,

their deft necks, their morning

voices

ah but the weight of things you old

fat

bastard

the gravitas of

commuting

fire

2009-02-09T03:19:00.000-08:00

fire you are terrible,

but we are anxious of the dark
that gathers and deepens

at your edges, beyond your civilizing
glow

To Poetry I have arrived late

2009-02-06T02:01:00.000-08:00

I've arrived in your
waiting room, breathless,
hoping you haven't cancelled my
appointment.

I ran all the way to get here.

Poetry:

your waiting room is full of old people.

The patients, the old ones -
they have strange and exotic
sexual diseases and none of them can
sit down.

And the magazines on your tables,

the old, dog-eared magazines -
the old, drink-stained magazines with the pages stuck together -

they stink.

I've been told that your remedies are second-to-none, Poetry.

Well, I'm here now.

censorship

2009-02-05T04:30:00.000-08:00

I read a thick book on the train.

It's full of dirty words and sex scenes,

yet it is considered a work of great intelligence and

High Art.

One morning a red-haired woman sits next to me.

She's got a stack of notes in her lap, notes

filled with accounting jargon, notes

scribbled hastily as if to follow the pace of a breathless

speech.

I am spying on this red-haired woman.

I am calculating the odds of her eyes falling across the pages

of my thick book, filled as it is with its

dirty words and sex

scenes.

The red-haired woman looks like the kind of woman who

watches Oprah and keeps her house tidy and harbors an unspoken suspicion of

Asians.

For chrissake, she's wearing slacks.

For the love of God, but I must read aloud from my thick book

and I must squeal and writhe like a wounded animal and I must

make her see that we are not fine and noble creatures

on this earth.

Through the window the countryside tumbles.

I become aware of the sibilant hush of the air conditioner, the

rumble of wheels.

I decide to keep my thick book

shut.

The old white house

2008-12-08T03:34:00.000-08:00

When I was about seven I lived in a small town in an old white house at the end of a street full of other kids.

The other kids lived in new houses with play-rooms in the basement and tree-forts out the back. Our house had once been a general store; it was over a hundred years old and it was small and damp. My mom had to scrape moss off the livingroom walls each spring; once, when the plumbing backed up, the plumber discovered a network of earthen rooms under the floorboards.

I remember once when the walls of my mother's bedroom leaked. It was like black tears coming down the wallpaper. When the carpenter came to look at the problem, he told us that the old willow tree had snaked its roots right through our house, and it was growing between the walls and up the roof. It was only a matter of time, he said, before the tree got the upper hand.

Once, a burglar came up to my window and peeked in. My trusty dog rushed into the room and it barked and snarled and the man ran away. My mom caught a glimpse of him and rang the police and I got to stay up late to help with the statement.

A collection of memories. That's all.

Pathos / pathology

2008-12-07T05:20:00.000-08:00

One of my many pathological faults is an inability to recall the past. Last week I may have said something hurtful, but I will have completely forgotten it by today. Another fault is that I recall the past out of context, so that when I understand the hurtfulness of my words, the understanding is not tied to the event. The understanding is abstract; intellectual rather than emotional.

I've spent years of personal time and energy removing the past from my head. I've managed only to distance myself from it. It's like remembering a flashback sequence in a film: you remember watching the act of someone else remembering. Sometimes I get surprising glimpses of the things I have tried to delete, and I have to shield my eyes, and in those moments I welcome the muddling of truth, because it's hard to accept that what has happened was not the province of actors in a film, but that it has happened to me, in my life.

All of this preamble is necessary because the opening sentence is hard to write. This is how I live my life. Now that I'm getting older I'm beginning to fear that my life will be a prologue to nothing, because I can't bring myself to writing that opening sentence. Because I can't go back to the start, back to when I was a kid.