… they found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one of which held the other in its embrace. —Victor Hugo And my poor bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas and no food in their tummies —Theodor Seuss Geisel   I know a man who claims to have devoured every Tolstoy in half-a-day. It took me half-a-decade to get through the fucking Lorax. Hugo, he said, was just a little tougher. Spending 13 hours to down both Hunchback  and Les Mis.   By t

The times I plop the ketchup on spaghetti I do it for you. The smack of a newborn’s bottom after birth. But it doesn’t flow like blood as Catelli would. The Smucker’s upon the leaning heap of flapjacks? Ones that swell in our skillet like pregnancy? Jam is half the cost of maple syrup. I also keep in mind the thawing trees— so they can share their sap instead with the tots of nature. I know you think I’m stingy. That the reason I’m pouring water on our daily Franken Berry is

Meh  must be the most boring word in the history of boring words. Meh  is the weary lift of a turtle’s head, knowing it’s one more false alarm amid the sirens. It’s the race of slug & sloth, celery awaiting the winner in fifteen years. It’s hour number three of your college lecture, the one about the strata, earth’s early bacterium, when you wish you’d fled the room— while the professor’s back was turned, his snap of broken chalk that froze your feet.   It’s the bland,  lukew

My window is an extra eye, one that tells my brain it isn’t raining, how gusty the gales might be, that the city has sent its crew to furrow the street, that a dog is doing its business in the hedge my neighbour planted—to keep the unwanted away. My window never blinks although it can— with a placid tug-on-blinds.   And should grit get stuck on its pupil, a splash & swipe  from a Jiffy Wipe will surely put an end to that.   But this is in truth a poem about the things we cho

We haven’t walked the park in twenty years. Marriage will do that sometimes. My knees, your hips. Your shoulder, my neck. I can no longer turn my head at the sound of the finch. Your hearing’s flown the coop— oblivious to its existence. It can’t be what it was, when both our bloods were surging  under sun. Time may not regress with our feeble tread, but maybe we’ll awaken evocation— ours as well as its.   Nestle your hand in mine— the other one, my darling , which lacks a di

they would say. Your parents could not concur on much at all, but on that they spoke as one. When your father spat it out, his squint was from your supple countenance. Once, he suggested that you strum an air guitar. Your wrists are limp enough. Bestowed a sky piano. As gay as Elton John’s. Hoping you’d start a band up in the ether, get out of his fucking sight. With mother it was worse. Catching you in your sibling’s training bra. Curiosity of a child,  it was embarrassingly

You were five when you had spelled your family name—aloft with crow & owl— Fisher & Son, and you without a brother, though you’d wait for years for one, hoping he’d take the pressure off your shoulders, like Simon of Cyrene the cross of Christ; and it surely wouldn’t have been as bad as that: beatings till you swelled, thorns inside your toque, a hammer thumping nails into your wrists and not the barn.   Instead of evening chores, you lay upon the straw as if a manger—   the

It’s safe to assume you’re observant. Beyond the Sherlockian. There's a grain of sand that’s missing from the beach. Or maybe it’s neurosis. The ocean’s lost a drop since last July.   It’s not only where we vacay. You’re a savant in our own backyard:   Our maple’s bereft of a leaf. One less seed for the grandkids. An attosecond less of raking.   When I mention we don’t have offspring, you speak of eggs & sperm, the odds of forming zygotes, how living's sextillion-to-one.   We

You don’t really need to take a vow for better. Only just for worse. No one has to give an oath for richer— the jet skis, the chalets, that house on the Riviera, pouring champagne on your morning Oatie-O’s. It’s the poorer that entices you to leave; upon that shitty futon full of fleas, your stomach all a- rumble from that slice from Quickie-Mart, knowing it spun all after- noon beneath the lamp, waving to the wieners which you’ll down for lunch next day.   In health  you’ll

We need to end this nonsense about the birds. These early-morning sirens. Devoting half our petty verses to their honour. I realize I’ll be booted from the guild, seen as a bitter bard, renounced as a blasphemer, but I’ll waggle my duke at the sky like Grampa Simpson, scowling while one flits   on her merry way, flapping her gorgeous plumes, always looking forward—   never peering to the ground at our transgressions, our stepping around the tippler on the pedway, taking his e

All of us are smitten by the cute. And the shine of symmetry. The clear, un- blemished skin of stunning’s layer. I could sing each varied note of your cantata. In its proper key. Something that’s beyond my scratchy throat. My wineless inhibition. You say the sweetest intonation was from a haggard in the alley, bottle on its side beside her feet—bare, sniffed out by a rat’s consuming hunger:   Mama take me with you. Reach down with your hands, gently tickle like you did. I rem

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