Oddly Woken

A phone call

Did I catch you sleeping?
They Say

Just my morning meditation
I lie

The phone call ended
Now I doze

And
dream of gods

The Music of the Spheres

Someone gave you a book
The Music of the Spheres
You passed it on to me
Here
You said
This is more your cup of tea

You died
And I tried and tried
To read the bloody thing
I only understood
That I was thick
That it had something to do with Pythagoras
And chromatic intervals
And music

I checked the edges
Of the pages
You’d only read the first part
You crafty bugger


Every now and again
I’d pick it up
For a little while
And even in my frustration
Before I set it down again
I’d smile

One day I came upon a bookmark in it
Just a small scrap of paper in it
Your handwriting on it
A single word upon it
Writ clear

My name

A name that I had never heard escape your lips
(You never… ever … said my name)
But you wrote it on a little slip
And left it in a book

Music to my eyes
If not my ears
Perhaps this was the music of the spheres

Bohemian Dry Cleaners

The streets are too well-swept to be considered squalid
Perhaps it tries too hard to be
Bohemian

This clapboard ghetto sat behind
Spadina’s downtown – Chinatown

And it’s sad testament
That recent refugees
Disregard its cardboard seediness
And live elsewhere

Though old, old immigrants
Mainland Portuguese and Azores
Owners of cheese stores
Seem to live
Seamlessly
With new age wiccans, cyber punks
Under-performing performance artists
Under shopping at the
Butchers
Next to Reggae historians
Fishmongers
Milliners
Compassionate cannabis clubs
Hats

Too many bookstores
Too many strident coffee shops
Too many vegetarians
Of the proper sort
The punks who
Are too too polite
So all the grunge looks like it has been dry-cleaned

And if Toronto is New York
Designed by someone Swiss
Then Kensington Market
Is Amsterdam
Without the hookers and the water

Despite its smugness and its neatness
Its well preserved graffiti and its too too tidy soul
And even though it isn’t ugly
I love it anyway

Poetic Polemic

Poetry Lesson
One: Poems are not lessons
Two: There is no two

Private Screening

Inside
Anonymous eyelids
I fail to see a label
I fail to see storage instructions or directions

Distracted by imagination
My mind plays movies
Absent of production credits

(Subtitles are unnecessary)

There is nothing to disclose

No mug shot license plate
No date of arrest

No benchmark of
A … “Best Before”

No insight

I erase this all

I open my eyes

Again

Now it is a Writing Desk

It is a writing desk…

It was a kitchen table
Back then
When I was unstable
Back when
I pushed her till she finally told the truth

Seven years before
We bought the table new
Alright, alright
(She said)
It’s true, you’re not my type
I’m not attracted to the what you are… become

Struck dumb
Not with surprise but rage
The ages that she’d lied

The steak knife by my side
Cried out
And over-handed raised it high
I stabbed the guiltless pine

Wanted to do violence
Experience
Some sense of vengeance
To scar as I was scarred
Marred

The tip broke off embedded
The argument was ended

Today the knife is gone
And so is she
The shrapnel dent is all that’s left

Some days I think about removing
This remnant shell
Bomb fragment from a former war

But that would change no part of what it was
And change too much of what it is… become
It was a kitchen table

…Now it is a writing desk