The Creative Act

Tumbling, shale over flint,
With layered granite for a bed,
Set over an orbiting furnace
Stone ledges leapt into the skies,
Soaring o’er the ages,
As nothing else can fly through time,
With crags so slow and sure,
That nought deflects their course,
Excepting just the wind and rain,
Whose constant tribulations will make vain,
The highest climbing mountain peaks of earth,
They casually erode these errant bluffs,
Deferring stone to dust and girth for dearth,
Tumbling now and then into a plain,
That which has risen,
And may yet rise again.

The diamond forms from pressure,
and gleans its gleam from such,
the earth can not contort itself,
nor focus quite as much,
as such steadfast material,
it must be formed and reformed evermore,
reactionary to its core
never content to stay in place
although it roams through outerspace
a boil of activity stirs constantly earth’s scenery
the surface of our atmosphere
will dance with weather’s weary cheer
below the weather still more motion,
man pushing earth and earth the ocean,
when the ocean pushes back man rues his work,
but abandons not his quest to shape
the very world despite – perhaps despite – more apt, ‘because’
of nature’s inconsistency,
a trait at odds with human insecurities,
and getting on not all that well with the maturity,
of our peculiar species, we
that turn the land into the sea, defy imprisoning gravity, and deftly wreak our havoc with an arbitrary majesty.

How can you leave me standing,
alone in the world and so bold,
Maybe I’m just to demanding,
Maybe I learned from my father, all told,
Maybe I’m just like my mother,
She could always see through my guise,
She always did know better,
Always that look in her eyes.

Dream if you can of a future,
affected by nought except you,
Possible things are pearls upon strings,
for the taking according to what you choose,
Imagine a world without influence,
where decisions you make are all yours,
and destiny forms, so curiously,
into exactly the shape that you choose.

You know, I would cry.

The lions and
Tigers of our youth,
stalk the sordid alleys
concrete jungle that a city is
in search of prey
of play
of any word on what the point
of living is.

They leave their unintrusive selves
in black-lit pasts and background social scenes
only bring the sharpest knife
to the fight
the conflict waged in brutal words
and apathetic stares
that preen and start
in the alcoves of physical commerce.

Leaving cares and manners alike
(so alike) in the basement apartments and rundown condominium highrises,
the beat up bungalows on the borders of the burbs and the metropolis,
where society stirs in self incriminating circles
only in practice, it is just practice
for the play of words and fists,
guns and knives,
but also hugs and kisses,
on the streets of the city
in the passionate grip
of those sickly-sweet summer nights.

Breakfast seemed

Not quite a meal but more a waking dream
With bits of food that drifted through my teeth
Slowly passing
From plate to me
While my mind did so proceed
That all I thought
Was mere imaginings

My mind a fictive horse with wings
To ply the airy, surreal heights of what’s not yet
and what can’t be

In search of what amuses me

I often find myself thus lost
Before I find the muse accosting me

Sometimes with a wink
other times
With a playful pinch on the cheek

Dying Distance

Tremble, says my body to me
For pains of deprivation need
But one sole thing to stem their anxious tide

Instead they run.

› Continue reading

Memories of Winter

Winter, tell me why it is,
You come at such a price?
Your snow is nice, and winds as well,
But rain’s no match for ice. › Continue reading

A stone’s growth is inverse,
Time’s trials reverse its mass,
Revert
To smaller and smaller forms,
In this backwards trend there are no norms

The pebble all alone,
Might be the stone,
Inside your shoe,
Or a diamond in the earth,
Or a diamond set in an invulnerable alloy
To shave and mould the others of it’s kind. › Continue reading

A work in progress, inspired by an article on the BBC.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7921279.stm)

Reccomendations more than welcome…

And thusly lunged a piece of grisly rock
Across the unborn nether, black-lit all
Obliterating in its path a million, trillion
Other stones which through space fall
In all direction do they fly, but to each one
Just one path through the endless night
The lunging piece of rock had met its end
In 1904 as we count years today, exploding
into countless fragments flayed aground
And shards eviscerating deep the clay
A river bed in what we call Siberia
Was turned into a maelstrom on that day
And still contends to deconstruct the trunks
Of eighty million trees in a single grave
Who knows what beasts in countless numbers
Lie beneath the sheets of ice by the Tunguska
Animals who, startled by a noise, were immolated
Whole with all around them, in one moment
Under the shadow of a space-lost stone

One passed nearby the earth today, much closer
Than a moon’s throw away but far enough
That we won’t pay it notice or take note
Of craters when the earth of Past was smote
Our planet riddled by these daunting marks
As if some heavenly muse made it her art
Be they celestial gifts or cast off rubbish
From the heaps of garbage chaos theory
Has left lying all round the heavens, Let us hope
That we are never subject to the stare
Of a substantial object locked
In a decomposing orbit or
An errant asteroid heading for
The corner of the earth we call our home

I lived in a town in the north of Alberta.

The winters were freezing cold,

And the summers were burning hot.

But it was the place where I slept,

And I would do anything to gain back the sight,

Of seeing so far across the fields,

Of seeing so far into my self.

Folks, April is National Poetry Month.  For  those interested, check out the League of Canadian Poets website (www.poets.ca) as well as the Canadian Poets Association.  I propose  a celebratory night in April coinciding with our meeting at Cuppedia to celebrate this as well as Al Purdy Day April 21. My challenge to all is to write something to celebrate Al Purdy and read it!