The Quasi-Existence of Infants

Those gnats need little alarm,

As buoyant as firmly scraped olives,

Rubbed with spirits to evoke

The standard succession of cries,

Valves as vigilant as freight trains

A failing of the spine or finger

Wrapped with gasps, gone grape

Then blue, then black.

Then again, those seeming dead

Will peel back the closed lids,

Will trace the brick with questions

Mute for language

Will tilt their heads,

Parch their drinking lips

With gulps of air for want

Of mother's brandy

Sean and I livin it up at our reading NO WAY OUT

The Ossington - Opening Night

The Ossington
Originally uploaded by Vinizki26

NO WAY OUT!

In the pre-dawn chaos of Halloween, Canzine, IFOA, and what is the fall book season, The Ossington proudly presents NO WAY OUT: an hour and ten minutes of the best poetry and prose you won't find at any red carpet gala by a thankless polluted lake.

(Not that there is anything wrong with ungrateful polluted lakes, or red carpet galas going on in October in Toronto).

Back to the lecture at hand: for these writers, and the literary-crazed audience at The Ossington, there is NO WAY OUT! There will, however, be snacks, books, and beverages. Dress up and win a prize! Author bios may or may not be announced during the reading, but distinctions will be made well in advance of each reader.

Date:	Monday, October 26, 2009
Time:	8:00pm - 10:00pm
Location:	The Ossington
Street:	61 Ossinton Avenue
City/Town:	Toronto, ON

No Cover!

Featuring

Sean Stanley
Robin Richardson
Sachiko Murakami
Angela Hibbs
Stacey May Fowles
Spencer Gordon

More authors TBA ...

Hosted by Nathaniel G. Moore

for more details visit http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=143577098118&ref=mf

Second Poem of the series

Introduction to Cookery

 

Become a hunter

Twelve days, eight hours

Amongst the roots

 

How the pheasant grimaces

What it gains in the luxury of a kitchen

Cut, for instance

 

By a girl engaged in garlic paste,

Hard crusted dough

She considers your absence

 

Observes the game,

The knife detached

Skin loosened at the upper joints

 

The breastbone and wings

She wishes to secure

With pack thread

 

To her shoulder blades

To find you, the hunter

Her then the bird

 

To free her tongue

Beaked and genial

To sport your bullet

 

The tree-scraped feathers

As she is laid, mace

And onions on your plate

Read my very first review in this month's Broken Pencil 

The new CV2 link is here It has been updated and there is now an image of the issue my poem is in.

Final poem of the night. My Plasticine featured reading

The poem that won me best performance and best poem last night at James Dewar's Hot Sauced Words

The prize was two bourbons

Rude Endings

Found out the hard way…

The grapes were bad

Seeds having too much to say

Made me dizzy, made me burp

Overcooked chicken wings

Made me sing Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich

Lick my thumb, his tongue

Separating the bourbon from the burned bird skin

Leaning in, listening while I mumbled Nouvelle Vague:

No baby, not tonight

I’m too drunk to fuck

Check out my first featured reading!

Unfamiliar Guns

 

The hunter with a flask of brandy

Pines for glass, the clear outline of a windowpane

Resumes his fight, the footsteps of a bear

Partially qualified by the hailstorm

The illusions of civil law

And the severity of rabbits

Asleep, nibbling on the witch's last sentence

With altered blades, copper bullets

Built to splinter in fur

The uncharacteristically warm corpse

Still rummaging, still coming clean

Scraped by the Inuit scapula

It was important to record the weak spots

Though it all fell soft against the gun

My poem "Words Stolen from Mrs. Woolf" has been chosen for publication by CV2. It is an early found poem of mine inspired by "To the Lighthouse" I am very excited about this!

I'll be posting info on the issue when it comes out.

Time is a Slut

 

Gone mad at Sea I followed the clock,

The smug exposed ankle of age

We snuggled, courted the martyrs of our bed time stories

It wasn’t the quiet sway, nor the oysters, torn in half

That drove me

It was the clock, bloody despot

Mad-eyed, she fought, dragged backwards 

The bitch kicked, winced and was frayed like a belt

Gnawed through

I used her

Monster

To stave off boredom

For an hour or so, or a year

It isn’t easy letting stained skin down gently

She tore her clothes (she had no clothes)

And choked

The tip of her tongue a lovely baby blue

She licked my ear

Like Claudius 

And would not let me go.

I have had a poem accepted by Jim Johnstone's Misunderstandings Magazine for this fall. I will be posting info on how and where it can be purchased when it comes out. I also just purchased his book of poems The Velocity if Escape a wonderful collection!

From and old friend...

This is my comment on your mislexia blog, specifically the Ted Hughes Relic post: Cenotaph. Great word. Had to look it up; it was worth it. Monument to the resting place of the scattered. This script's a beaut. - A peerless ponderification of splendiforous introspection swimming through a sea of indigestion, Don King might say. I'm guessing Robin was walking around for days thinking about how time in the sea is eating its own tail. I must say your blog has great pics, some of which are pencillated rather than pixellated, and poems beatified by the proximity of said pencil. Some of these dittys are yours - it hardly seems to matter, as an exquisite taste for the beautiful, (Robin is the aesthete with the best teeth who befriends those with less teeth.) combined with a strong grip on the kung fu of feng shui, means that everything is well placed and related - choreographed chaos orchestrated by a book-stacking maestro. The blog is, as it should be - a giant experimental painting...I pity the fool who doesn't get to see your art, and in a perfect world they would all get to soak in some of the R-rays and share some enscriptillated pixellations. Maybe do it the best way -  greeting the artist as she sits, white-wool hatted and stirring a grasshopper on a crowded-yet-lonely patio. It seems like only yesterday, I was living exclusively outside the cyber world. Look at me now. Typing. How are you finding it, oh former princess of luddites?

My first published poem is now in print! Please visit TTQ for details

My Feature in Canada Poetry Planet

How Gods Are Made

 

What was left between the teeth:

Crushed pearl, the many coloured glass splints

Made it difficult to speak

 

The two girls, still alive

Bobbed up and down

Splitting rock,

Moving further inland

 

The town would be a simple matter

Being too strong to shake hands

They’d wave

Mounted on horses, their tattoos showing

Through veils, still scabbing

 

Further proof that they were human

 

Though sugarcane became them

And the hardened girth of dirt

Made them pass like water over death

My Office as featured at Sitting Pretty

Licking Wrist Wounds 

 

We were shaken by the bridge

Our open-ended wagon stark

With charcoal dust,

The old distinction of a path

 

You pierced your ears

Fought with cherry teeth against my wrists

The first time I snagged the steel wheel

Stained my cuffs

 

You would not let me drip

 

When the sky-coloured monuments

Followed us with their eyes, a single blow

Against the wind, we won

 

Hardened by the roads: linear and frank

We could have wrapped them like twine around the map

But didn’t

 

You grew weak, begged to taste each bee-sting

 

While our horses lazy grazed on ropes

And anchored corpses to the shore

 

Hey everyone.

I will be selling chapbooks filled with poetry and art at this years Toronto Small Press Book Fair on Saturday June 13 at the Toronto Reference Library. Please stop by!

Or buy a copy online at

http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=23482293

Looting Arms Collapsed 

 

Halfway between order and the authority of survival

You fought: loaded with small engagements,

The reinforcement of a name

 

Regarded looting with an arm collapsed

By weight of silver and apprehension

 

You learned to read the black teeth,

Voodoo stomach sweat of schoolboys

With chants and fancy Bic-Pen symbolism

 

You were the voice: open and remote

In envious obscenity, yammering physics,

The constant conjured flux of singing stone

 

Brick by bloody brick to build you home

But still you slept in tents

The guiltless cock-eyed invader

Of weather-vanes and second sight