Ink

He gave me a book,
still uncracked on my bookshelf
next to some textbooks. And I wonder now
what his final thoughts were,
and think perhaps they may
have been about his
wasted gift.

His gift, and my heart’s mortality
termites beneath my home,
and I write
poetry on my wrists, no
more paper left after the
mites hit here.

I write, but the constant worry plagues
me. A concern that it will rain
or I will sweat
and the lines of poetry
lining my limbs will
run together.

The Walk

Him and I are winding through unmarked streets and dead ends. We are in the west end of the city, quiet neighbours and silent suffering, commenting on the shabbiness of houses we pass, fresh road kill, and deriving theories on the affluence of the neighbourhood. And I explain to him my immense dislike for small talk. Talk that is small; disconnected, weathered tidbits of meaning, mumbled out of perverse politeness.

And we come upon a playground void of the energy children’s ghosts exude when caught in moments of happy unawareness. And how I wish that I could fall into the same forgetful disarray. But I cannot, and instead I am aware of his every move, the pronunciation of every word.

We wind, re-wind the streets in vague attempts to find our way back to the main road, asking our feet and other limbs for directions. Speaking of nothing, everything. And suddenly I can’t walk on for the realization that there is nothing in the centre of my words save a withered heart and an elderly, limping soul.

I sit in the middle of road, put my head in my hands, and slip into a coma of simplicity.

eating anger

In a bout of perceived
sophistication, I
attempted to write a moment,
to be that capsule of bitter rage
bursting like a stiff strewn water balloon:
wreaking water, havoc and
writing a fiasco.

But there were no letters that
would come to my service,
they demanded too much of me:
loyalty
a hefty wage I could not afford.

Here I remain simple,
only eating words that are blurred
and that draw little effort from my
cookie heart,
from my limber limbs, like
sunshine and greener grass and
happy faced houses
with beautiful garden beds.

I will live here,
a witch in her own tender cookie house,
children nibbling at my edges
until they are full
and the disparate crumbs of me are eaten
by scavenging seagulls

hunter

He laughs atop the
mountain, shards and slivers
of rocks lodged
in the crags of his under boots:
suffering pieces of
the earth at his adventures.

His voice, a bloodthirsy howl
with the insatiable greed for more of her,
more of my earth.

She surrenders her body to his feet in
climbing boots,
to his arrogance and
traps
and to the knowledge that
she may never be whole again.