Many of these poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in: Amelia (USA), Writers' News
Manitoba. Germination, Repository, Arcane (USA),
Jimson Weed (USAJ.lron (U.K.), Muses's Brew Poetry
Review (USAJ Northwoods Poetry Journal (USA),
Lucky Star (USA), Winewood Journal (USA).
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CONTENTS
The River Cuts a Channel 9
Primavera 10
Sanguine 11, 12, 13
Hamomlette 14
The East is Red 15, 16, 17
untitled 18
untitled 19
Rocking Horse 20
Rouge and Gray 21
Cubits 22
Buzz Phrase 23
Ambergris City 24
Wincing 25
Toronto 26
Crying Scene 27
Night Sky 28
The World of Tezcatlipoca 29
In the Cenote 30
Belize 31, 32, 33, 34
Picaroon 35, 36, 37
The Cable Car 38
IL Giardino 39
Every Man's Hand 40,41,42
Ending Up 43
Offerings 44,45,46,47
Regalia 48
San Cristobal 49, 50
Guadalquivir 51
Leaves of the Cecropia Tree 52.53
Southwark 54
Kublai Khan 55, 56, 57
Homuncular Forms 58
Antarctica 59, 60
Blue-eyed Grasses 61
Moccasin 62
The Bullfrog 63
Ancestral Memory 64
Entry Point 65
Bloodcount 66
BloodStream 67
Rogue and Privateer 68
The Camera Cage 69
Fence Line 70
Adversaries 71
Bargaining Unit 72
Palais Royale 73
Alcatraz 74
When Labouring to Break 75
This way to the Sixties 76, 77
Pogrom 78
Baggadocio 79, 80, 81
Dress Rehearsal 82.83. 84
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page9
THE RIVER CUTS A CHANNEL
People with money but no fortune
or stomach for the life of an albatross,
watch him soar on self made wings,
fetch the dingy redness
of morning's, first catch
with a long necked bottle
he calls the captain
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page10
PRIMAVERA
A poem is perishable and,
like it,
so much of life is spent
in intervals --
the jarring second
regaining consciousness,
a post-mortem flick
of the lank equestrian eyelid
that signals, morning's first crepuscular move.
. . . a little salad consciousness
about the tumescent room
with the sentient purr of a Cat,
her musky oils
a green verdure
lapping primordial scent
to engross a little readiness
as the day progresses
to its oedipal stage
and arrested development.
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Page 11
SANGUINE
"The clock indicates the hour but what does enternity indicate?"
Whitman
Imagine, being told cubism isn't painting. That
Beardsley didn't die at 26, unheralded as a boy genius
or Corot didn't come to Paris after all.
Imagine, The Louvre without a rooftop, the
intelligentsia sitting down to a ragged table
surrounded by sawdust intellects, Proust not being
able to write his name.
Now that's splendour -- that's in-depth "feeling".
That's emotion to pull your socks or catch the bus on
a brittle day.
It's easy. Try to "feel" the event. It's 1896. People are
perturbed (or so we are told) because the century's
getting old. Time's rushing by. There's an alarm clock
set to buzz at eternity's gate, Midnight 1900.
In probing the malaise that hit Europe circa 1881,
psychologists would have us believe the world grew
despondent. Despondent because a whole hundred
year cycle was about to elapse; despondent because
life itself was running out. Those poor Edwardians!
Poor lovers of the elegant, the late Victorians, belle
epoquers. A penny for their thoughts when
confronting a Picasso without the vantage of
hindsight.
Page 12
If Europe and its child bride, America, grew uneasy in
the declining years of the past century. How then our
era? (These same psychologists pinpoint people's
spirits rise in the opening years of a new century.)
Now we're poised for the "really big one": the
cataclysm. What a boon for the absurdists. Peaches
and cream -- not just one century dangling but the
culmination of ten.
There's even a word for it. Millenium, I'll say it again.
Better yet, a mere two millenia since Christ's
departure, we are poised again on the threshold. Half
& half. Like a party twelve pack -- six of one, half
dozen of the other.
Remember. when contemplating your ennui or
malaise (whichever word is currently most
fashionable), you can hardly figure for less. Eternity's
given to you, my peers, a singular opportunity. And
from what we know of the 20th century. it should be a
grand slam homer. Already the clean-up batter is
staged for action. The bat looms over the plate.
There's so much bad news it's enough to make an
optimist greedy. After all, with this much horror there
is caused only for danse macabre celebrations.
1985. Only 15 years left before the digital watch rolls
over. before the cannon with the flower pops out.
Those forward looking voyeurs of hundred years
back must have felt cheated when mentally reversing
their lot with the denizens of the 20th century.
Page 13
In 1885, you could only gripe about the aging process
of a single tenth of one component. In 1985, you've got
that and the Millenia. Trendy things like atmospheric
pressure, negetive ions, adverse body rhythms and a
welter of other pseudo impressive formula abound to
help out in your witchhunt.
Surprise. 1066 saw comets, omens. signs coded in
stars speeding ecross the sky -- a host of ditlurbing.
natural phenomena to boot. The vigilant saw meteors
at Caesar's, death.
The National Enquirer predicts Australia will break
into the sea. Californians will be upstaged. The
futurists will all need waterwings. The Club of Rome
hints the next years auger more chilling holocausts.
Everywhere, survival scenarios proliferate. Pro-lifers
will rearrange proverbial deck chairs on the
Titanic. Soothsayers will become all the rage as we
plot myriad escapes. A year's supply of canned goods,
anyone?
1885 has a lot to teach us. Umbrellas, a gentle ennui
like fine mist compounded by traffic in & out of the
Moulin Rouge. Perhaps a surfeit of absinthe helps just
as its equivalent does today. "Cheer up, there will
always be an England" doesn't sound so bad after all.
And there's always that one recruiting poster, "What
did you do in the Great War, daddy"?
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HAMOMLETTE
A VICTIM OF INDIGESTION OR PATRICIDE?
MAGIC PAN: CASTLE OF ELSINORE
CHEF: THE MAD PRINCE OF DENMARK
INGREDIENTS: THE TRAGEDY OF THE
HUMAN CONDITION,
SENSELESS FORCES THAT
RAGE AND DESTROY A MAN
COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: SIMMER SLOWLY
A PERFECT SOUFFLE - ALAS POOR YORICK
I KNEW HIM WELL...
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Page 15
THE EAST IS RED
We can survive a nuclear War. It's scarcely credible, I
know, but listen.
The human race has great resilience. We've come back
before -- all those plagues, the Black Death,
despoliations, scorched earth policies "prove" it.
We're proliferate and we love the sex act. It won't be
hard; human fecundity is a count-on. There are so
many of us, see.
People have overestimated the alleged horror. After
all, (Khruschev pounding a UN table with his shoes).
somebody walked away from firebombing at Dresden.
Look at at all the escapees in Hiroshima. Get the drift?
A Bomb's a Bomb. Really. The really big one (to take
Ed Sullivan'a phrase out of context) is just more of the
same. Try to absorb that logic. Ergo, Ignorance must
be, in toto strength.
Enraged by the impropriety of it all? Anyone who
disagrees with this is coarse and vulgar.
Of course there would have to be "preparations". (If
you have "to prepare" to be a hairdresser, it stands to
reason you would have to ready yourself for this.)
Confronting, facts you can die only once. After that,
the mushroom cloud is anticlimactic. Remember the
Magic Mushroom -- the cult that centred its teachings
around Christianlty's debt to hallucegenic drugs?
Some said preposterous -- Christ a magician doping
his followers and using the Cross as a stage prop.
Amazing. In this world anything is possible. We have
finally created a mutant of people who eccept
anything. And God just another man, albeit a tricky
devil at that. Imagine fooling everyone for 2,000
years!
Next, we'll be told we're actually dead. I know some of
you have already suspected this but it will be
Page 16
"confirmed". Our leaders will troopse out impressive
sounding "flow charts" and backup statistics. There
will even be a special chamber to experience what it
was like before you knew you were dead with
carefully monitored "response signals" to give the
audience a "sensasound" aura just like living through
an earthquake, only fake. Just remember Monty
Python and "possibility".
Meanwhile, in ensuing preparations for war, no
aspect of the psychological preparedness should be
overlooked. We don't have to be told there is no
substitute for victory.
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience
of a King." Hamlet knew. So does The Kremlin. The
KGB can "prove" a nuclear scenario is winnable.
According to the most painstaking calculations, a
conventional war of any duration "swings" into a pre-nuclear
stage. That's when the nuclear option
becomes "viable". That's when Gorbachev and the
boys calculate "target readiness" and plummet the
depths of the human spirit.
The East is Red and ready. The Chinese have been told
by Mao 300 million or their number cremated is a
small price for global supremacy. A human dung hill
is being set in motion for another generation of
poppies. Marx lends credibility to this, but with a
different opiate for the masses. The
lumpenproletariat can hack it. Such clever playing
with facts, now I understand genius.
For a young physicist, a 100 megaton blast is the
culmination of the creative spirit. Certainly
irrefutable evidence, this quintessential "spirit".
I read Toronto would be "messy" in the event of a
nuclear strike. Half-baked and eviscerated thinking
Or just inescaspable?
Chin up. We'll survive or at least part of us will. We
really are "malleable". It will be a "transitional stage",
Page17
a step upwards on the evolutionary ladder.
Radioactivity and genetics are at work with one
another.
When the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic device,
the pilot was later to go mad.
Maybe this has already happened to the world and
there's no one to discern the difference.
Maybe a forest of "maybes" has already sprouted and
left a forest of dust clouding the collective vision.
Maybe it's all too terrifying to be taken seriously and
disbelief is the escape hatch. Like the pilot's lapse into
comforting drugs for reassurance or the dervishes
with their Magic Mushroom.
Maybe it's closer to what Harry Truman announced
after "deploying" the first "device" or exercising the
nuclear option in the jargon of the strategists.
They started it. We prepared to end it. No regrets.
Turned over on his deathbed and went to sleep
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happy happy
happy happy
trigger
happy happy
happy happy
t
happy happy
happy happy
trigger
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