Double Haiku Limerick For Guelph Library 125

There was a writer,
Tom King, who wanted to rhyme
Library but di'n'...

He said, just nothing
rhymed with library, I thought.
brib'ry does, Tom King.

Guelph Library 125

The room full of words
awakes the urge for nuances
woven by phrases to meet a need
for all those assembled:
utterances bird-songed by
humans among the aisles;
books, Dewey-decimal filed
with conversations, absorbing
decibels of burble that
rise and fall between bebop
and slide-show soundtrack;
while the clatter of cups &
wine glass clink
are captured articulate
by camera-shuttered staccatos:
annunciations of living voice celebrate
a century and a quarter of tales read from pages
born of a thousand imperatives,
like stories for children, or large print
editions for aged eyes to know by,
mysteries and accounts and imaginative
litanies reaffirmed, tender mercies found
among the perfect-bound volumes around us,

even as time slips out of hours
and the gathering vanishes
into ways home through the dark
of Westminster Woods.

Reading Through Walls

At the reading, currents ran through the room,
empowered with possible outbursts of anger and outrage
over the broaching of old sorrows and shames, laying bare
the need for care, forcing the depths of intentions and
expectations to the surface, and around which
we gingerly trod in the aftermath
with feet too large among the hurts
and family prides, feeling our way forward
through questions and answers, first as a group
and then one by one as individuals lingered
to find a way to say something, anything
about buried rage and grief from long ago,
pains so very near, yet still unable to circumvent
the code of silence, which was wound like a wall around
some of those there, leaving only nuances
for the heart to decipher.

Legends of the Morgeti; Volume Two

is now available at the Bookshelf Guelph.

Democracy American-style

The pack is turning,
the wolves in the donkey skin
see the elephant's weakness now,

Bush will be unlinked from Cheney
threatened with impeachment
if he wars on Iran,
and Cheney will fall
because Dem backroom pols
now realize McCain must
defend Cheney or break
the elephant's back

and thus stumble to the pack.

My mother is also

My mother is also something of a nutbar...

an experiment to those in the mental health industry
to be tagged and studied and drugged into sense,

she is also an aging wild thing from rural Ontario,
a force of life-hungry wonder walking and busing
and making her way through Northern Muskoka
arthritic knees barely slowing her down
come granite or pine rise.

She laughs and cries and calls damnation down on the dour
and the lifeless living the dull devoid,
a whirlwind hospital visitor and friend
of the broken and the downward-spiraling
outcasts of all systems.

She will abide any suffering but
having to listen to bullshit from those
who know best, because she always knows better:
she wants to live until she's 150
because living never ceases to amaze her
and because those who think they know best
live half-lives of decay
that just get in her way.

With her purse and her bag in hand,
she hobbles about, squeezing life out of pennies
as she has for decades, dissecting
the politics of poverty around her
with the same communist analysis she
learned off my father in the 1950's,
bastards, she says, and bastards they are.

She laughs like a crazy lady, infectious
and effusive, like laughter was meant
for tearing light out of darkness;
meant to be flung into misery
like a rope to those floundering
in the long sadness of loss.

They have broken my mother,
but she will not stop living,
she will go gently into many things,
but she was born on the banks
of the Mad River, and loves
its wildness;
though grief consume the land
she will wade into the water,
she will rejoice
and damn the bastards
and she will guard the broken
until she falls.

Well Being

The light fractures the room, fissures
the spindles of chairs. Long shadows reach
for the back of the cafe and lay
window-prism rainbows across hardwood floors.

Autumn falls winter in the steam and
the frost glare of the front store glass
as the waitress wipes the milk and
honey shelf, dusting sugar motes
into the air.

Late afternoon turns
mid-November evening down the street where
the red maple holds rust leaves in abeyance
while the lamp post Christmas snowflake
glimmers decorative before a farther off chimney,
smoke blown horizontal by north winds streaming
steady over roof tops.

My feet slowly warm
from a day spent re-pointing stone, the scents
of lime and mortar and earth-must mingle
with antijitos and coffee and the dirty wool
of my pullover and the spices that drift
over the kitchen divider.

The work week
is over, hours diminished, pay dropping
to the cold weather, to ice and rain and
snow from sun-hot Monday to frigid Friday,
tarped-over into a kerosene summer.

Money already banked onto my bills, I have cash
in my pocket and crafted hours of rock-hewn
wall-set satisfyingly behind me.

The clatter of dishes accentuates the chatter
from tables, the waitress thanking customers
as they go, while the stereo and a whistler
at the cash sound the coming of dusk.

The sun slips behind Victorian brick.
The heat-fogged windows begin to glow
with well-being.