I don’t note an ocean  in the seashell that I’m pressing to my ear but a puddle. It’s clear but laced with silt. The streetlamp will be rippling in its sheen. Some creeping sort of bugs will flit within, as though a stagnant pond. If I were nano- scopic, I’d coast along its arc in a catamaran. A person has been running for their life— the shell, discernibly perturbed— squirming in my hand as if a baby armadillo. In 3.14 seconds, a shoe will splash this entire shallow world up

The adage goes the beholder will determine what is glorious. The line of shine/penumbra on our evening’s ghostly orb; how the craters take on depth we never notice in the day. Everyone else is focused on the stop of coagulated red. Your eyes are never more lovely as when they’re fastened. Spirited, stirring worlds   beneath your lids while you are dreaming. I tell the tour guide that Rodin was overrated. The rock had been the master throughout his chiselling of The Kiss. Jus

And today an earthquake will level the suburbs of greater LA. No one will be slain since thoughts & prayers will work for the very first time. And today the bosom of ICE will thaw in piercing sleet, the needle in 99 trillion sheaves at last pinpointed. Mexicans will be assembled to share a cake, provided reparations for 1848. And today no soldiers will be needed. Either in plastic or in flesh. Hasbro will give its profit to grieving widows. In every single country on the plan

A baby never chooses to be born. That much I can tell you. If presented with the option, I would have turned & climbed up the birth canal— if I’d seen  the copious dolor which awaited, fanning out its talons, seducing like a salesman, ever- willing to beguile, with the lie of love and life,   how much sorrow you can take,   that you’ll bounce right back like the balls in every lottery there is,   the one you’ll never win,   like a worm that arises to the surface,   failing to

There’s a call centre where all the expired years are phoning people, demanding that they return what isn’t theirs. 1991 called and wants its mullet back.  It was a haircut gone awry, my barber wearing the specs his grandma must have donned in ‘49. When 2005 had phoned, it wanted the reason you still need to burn CDs, lamenting laptops of today no longer house that primitive feature. I’m the kettle to your pot—spooling cassettes with the end of a pencil. ’86 will ring about

—a small flake of soot or other dirt Oxford English Dictionary To say my brand- new book of poems is just a magnet for the dust is an egregious understatement. It’s the maid in fishnet stockings, feathers in her hand, bending over with a twerk, whenever I enter the office. It’s the Swiffer that’s ascending to the ceiling (comprised of teasing glass)—   dander thudding upon its clarity like a lark.   It’s the Dirt Devil drafted into service— like the cavalry on horseback, fire

When you called me a pea brain it was the most colossal laud you could have given. Peas are Einsteins in a shell, wise enough to swell within a pod, knowing together  they’ll survive, waving to the turnips as they ascend their soaring trellis; a height that even the cauliflower—our cerebrum’s doppelgänger— cannot fathom.   The Theravada monks are quite astonished at their savvy— their gift of rolling off a spoon no matter how mindful they may be   and they should know—   chan

Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. —Ruth 1:17 There are not enough words for love.  Maybe in other languages but certainly not in English— which is obviously the case since we’ve co-opted every variant of amour. Fervour  and enchantment? Riffed from Latin class. Eros  from the god of Acropolis. A thesaurus isn’t needed when you mean it. Hear it in the patience of another diaper change. I wipe although we’ve never had a baby.   Jacob waited 14 years for Rac

You say I should hang up my quill. Everyone’s grandma & her dog are posting poems. It’s not the grandmothers I’m concerned about, their odes to larks & scones— it’s these drooling sons-of-bitches; their ghazals, villanelles—to a flea-filled water dish; the couplets on their human's forlorn crocs, laced with bites & upchuck since he passed; the plop of meat from a can, its rings from tin chiselled in its jelly, like some avant piece of shit at the Guggenheim. Competition from

… 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

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

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

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

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans —Claude Shannon Dr. Chandra, will I dream? —2010: The Year We Make...

It's a Jane or Johnny-come-lately, the solitary rose in my garden, a harvest holdover or belated bloom that's risen when the others have...

With your hands wrist-deep in the black of loamy soil, you tell me your infant daughter died at break of dawn, on a day our star had benignly risen,   without  a hindering cloud; and you mused that early morning, as you sadly went and found her, stiff as a Hasbro  doll, her unblinking eyes locked upon the ceiling, that to call it “sun” is a misnomer, for it’s connected to Mother  Earth, and either “u” or “o”, it says the same masculine thing. It's the female   that reproduces

The flowers in my house are a fraud, marigolds that never wither, forsythia forever fake with vibrant yellow that doesn’t fade, daisies...