Keep it if you catch it

The poet dies.

Buk suggests killing the fish,
by first removing it's eyes,
and then it's fins
(for precaution, in case
it should attempt to swim).
Dear Buk,
the fish was dead when I removed it
from the water.
I would prefer one by one then,
to kill it's soul by removing it's scales,
but wouldn't that take long,
aren't there too many pieces?
A fish cannot have less than
three thousand scales.
Oh, but kill it, Buk said.
What if I prefer to let it free
without any record of ever having
held it in my hands?

How many eyes does your heart have?

He asks her:
How many eyes does your heart have?

She answers: One.
But what she really means is:
My heart has as many eyes
as the oldest birch
in the forest.

And sometimes, when other trees
get tangled at my roots and grow
against my heart's life,
My heart grows many more eyes.

He asks her:
How many eyes does your heart have?

She answers: One.

He, on her poetry decides

she,

on poetry decides
birch - tree - fires

(her pages don't look
quite like birch
enough).


she,

on poetry decides
peel - back - bark

(her skin doesn't feel
quite like birch
enough).


she,

on poetry decides
skin - white - eyed

(her skin doesn't feel
quite like paper).

Maybe we should start with what we're afraid to write...

- Sandra McPherson

Crush

Give me back my ornament, she says.
He picks at her like straw hearts and black stones
And she eyes him like he’s a studio shoot for Valentine’s Day.
He doesn’t know she wrote the script.
He scribbles out the word love,
The word that is the loudest,
And hands it to her and tells her to read:
Red wheels, cock bone.
Her eye skirts around the blacked out word.
She trades him wallets for tickets to her sold out show.
He tells her she looks like an arrow that’s been shot
Down a cement highway and has skidded into the ground.
He tells her she’ll have less luck learning to sing,
Than finding any pink in the corn field.
She watches as her heart turns into a beetle,
First he picks the black stones and rearranges them to be the beetle’s eyes
And all of its arms,
And then he takes the straw and rolls it into a circle
To be the beetle’s body. She says,
How dare you take my parts off here?
He blushes slightly, his knees quiver, he waivers as though there is a strong wind,
And then he sings a song:
Red wheels, cock bone.
She feels the bricks underneath her collide as she stumbles home,
Whispering good night to the orange moon and purple sky,
Listening to the crushed as it whispers, goodbye.

Quiet

Dear quiet,
you are so soon come,
not long ago were you filled
with pockets of heartbeats
and cheekbones.
Dear stillness,
I see peacocks and pants,
and patterns,
in the sky you offer me.
I do not question why you are here,
I am thankful for thee.

Dear birdcry,
Dear Nature's battles, how you
frighten me,
return me to my convinced thoughts
that your battles
are from an outside world you
cannot conquer.
Dear skycry,
you move me to think that the
quiet is not alone,
that still there is a buzz of
noise and feeling
and that quiet is not so still.

A Piece of Pure Sugar

wind flies through coloured paper
and I take this world
and make it real.
so, the colours float on book covers,
on small lumps of sugar and sand
from my eyes to the air.
you've built a mountain where you're sitting
but only if the red brick rolls.
this is wrong because he would say
you were fucking the dog.
the wind fucks the eyes,
the heart, the mind.
dogs never smelt like sugar, candy
wind-licks before.
we don't own a dog, my heart cries.
the wild flowers pamper themselves
with small pursings,
the wind blows their scent over
to the deck
where the coloured books and patterns,
paper, thoughts, and
crayons full of sugar, wait
to unleash back into the sky.

Twinkle-tear

other than my addictions,
I'm elated.
she sees it,
tells me it.
she always said I had to give them up
and hit my all-time lows,
or I would never reach my high.
I'm on a high.
she sees it, she knows it,
she is grateful for it,
this small piece of the outside world,
this one last anchor.
right now I'm smoking king-size,
b&h
and my eyes sparkle.
she knows it, and it makes her smile,
even though she cannot connect
me to our chain of ancestors
anymore
than the other four hundred and fifty days before.

Don't Look for the Sky

i want a pen, that's all i want
something to scratch onto paper,
besides my skin,
in place for my brain
since it cannot be removed
from my head.

there are things to be said
that i want to be read
but my hand is just dead
with no pen.

Fowl

For The Mews

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by yearning
Thin over-greedy self-conscious
Strutting through campus streets at dawn showing off
The proof of their opportunity
Status symbol-minded posers burning for green eyes
Wasting space in the jog of their minds
Who targeted and embellished and dumb eyed and bored spend time
Sedating creativity with intoxicated waters and flashes
Wasting desire on imitating idols
Who without any capacity to know why they buy or
On any plain night why the world cries is full of lies
What their ignorance and greed press further away
Who pass through their libraries and parks filled with trees
Without any true sense of what the world needs or the potential
Their glory may feed

Involuntarily Injected

Yesterday you told her
that she had every right
to fight for control of her body.
Yesterday you told her
that she would not be silenced
when she told you of the violation
that society and the people inside
it imposed.

Ecstacy Eyes and Adolescent-Hearted Lies

Gets your skull a-rolling,
Gets your thighs a-rolling,
Gets your hips a-rolling,
Gets your heart a-rolling,
Gets your brain a-rolling,
Gets your thoughts a-rolling from the ground,
From somewhere sound.
Puts you behind windows,
Makes you look through windows,
Makes you think your eyes are windows,
Makes you close the windows when the air conditioning is on,
Makes you stand in front of windows,
Makes you contort your bod in front of windows,
Makes you follow people around houses with windows
Turning off the lights
(At night – in the day the windows give light
And you can’t turn off windows).
Makes you feel hot when the sun reaches through those windows
Into that hall where you’ve been locked behind those windows,
Makes you reach your mind through those windows,
Your eyes through those windows,
And reach your hands through those windows.
Makes you forget who lives outside those windows
Which have become your eyes,
Which have become your lies,
Makes you forget who brought you those windows,
Makes you forget who made you those windows.
Makes you forget what you see out of those windows,
Makes you see nothing out of those windows,
Makes you forget that everything is outside those windows.
Makes you see that glass cannot be penetrated with the bare eye,
Or the bare mind,
Or the bare hand,
Or the bare time (the bare time,
The bare time),
You barely had the time (of the sky,
of your mind, or of your tall glass climbs).

what do you have to do these days,
to get a poem off the ground?