Not having any

Eating off plastic Rubbermaid lids
and drinking wine straight from the bottle,
using a cardboard box as an ironing board
and making cake pans out of tin foil,
using the one dishtowel until it refuses to absorb -
yeah, you might call it classy,
you might call it cheap
you might call it so pathetic
it makes you want to weep -
but me, I call it being a student,
I call it being a bachelor,
I call it knowing what your priorities are
when so much hangs in the balance of dollars
and nothing comes without a hefty tag -
just depends on how bad you want it,
depends on how mean you're willing to live,
depends on what you can make do and what won't do
the lines between the happy medium and the miserable few.

Is it wrong to kinda like being away from family
during the Christmas season?
It means less presents, less cooking, less pressure
to put on the show of "hey I'm getting by"
while guiltily taking gifts you know are worth
so much more than those brownies you baked the other day -
it doesn't hurt, once in a while, to be away,
to not have to say, "I'm doing OK"
or "school is great!" while knowing that they will never have it straight
what exactly you do, or are getting through.

That's alright, I'm not bitter or saying I mind
that I cringe every time I go grocery shopping -
it's honestly not that bad, I have it good, really,
look at all those who can't afford Christmas -
I just wish it would be the end of assuming
the financial plight of university students;
we're the rich ones, we're the ones who get to see
the end of a four-year's worked-off-ass degree -
while some will barely be able to scrape food off their plate
eating grain by grain the hard-earned gain of true poverty.

And I Said

So now calling on the phone is the OK thing to do
when I've barely gotten used to being happy in my skin alone
and you said that she misses me, that's right, I know she does,
and I said I miss her too, and it's true, I really do,
but what about this getting around the idea of missing
when it could be me and you trying to say the same thing too?

I liked hearing your voice, it reminded me of drinking tea at a glass table,
while pasta cooks in a metal pot large enough to fit your head,
and when it's OK to think of the future as endless doubts, end on end;
it still feels that way, I guess, but now I get to have those conversations in my head,
and try to give people the feeling that I am alright with not knowing when I go to bed.

And you told me I'd do well, as you always said I would,
I laughed at your stories - I've never said this, but you tell them well -
but, for the moment of silence that drops into the midst of familiar talk,
I was suddenly reminded of where this can - or cannot - go,
silences that, once, would be filled with "I wish I could see you" -
now a speechless hole in an already-wounded story.

I dislike liking you, I hate loving you, I wish it would stop.

Home

I wonder if those who know home
as a place will ever know the full meaning
of the word.

Houses, I've had many -
tile floors or carpets,
air conditioning or heaters,
duvets or body pillows -
all just material things shed
with each move,
which is why I've gotten so good
at ridding myself of excess.

Nothing follows me
if I don't want it to.

I came to think that home
was as changeable as seasons or years,
that the world in itself could be a home,
that anywhere is a home and will be a home
so long as I lived in it.

Now I know better;
because even without a house to call home,
homesickness, that little annoying tug
of longing on the heart
is real.

It took me awhile to know,
twenty-or-so years to see
that home is not a place.
Home is a space of feeling cared for,
loved, and smiled at,
it's the two-second warmth of hugs
and the just-so calling of your name,
it's the table where there will be a chair for you,
it's the two-minute goodbye that stretches to ten
because you just need every extra second,
and the promise that distance will not brush away
fondness or thought in the well-wished space
between people.

And so I have hoped to build homes
in the hearts of those who will give me space,
just a little room, all I ask,
where I will always be welcome.

Licorice

The roundish licorice,
blue pink purple
the ones covered in sprinkles.

Dad let me have them,
he preferred the squares.

I'm not sure why I bought the bag
when I know all I want
are the blue pink purple ones
covered in sprinkles.

No one's here
to have the squares.

I would tell Dad,
but I don't want him to know
that the squares remind me of him
way back when, so long ago.

Winter trail hike

White on white on white
and pindrops of liquid ice
pummeling gently the crimsoned cheek pillows
while breath, a mist-ical haze of dreamy perfection
rushes out in a flood of carbon dioxide and effort,
one more step, one more step, one last step.

As far as the ear can hear
the pitched whistle of mountain air
and the full stops of bubbled silence,
keeping at bay all else but the taps
of blood knocking on four-door heart
ready for cruise control:
step into footprint, footprints in footprints.

As after hours flurry along, around,
bobbing pricks of light in a caterpillar line
near the promise of chopsticked icicle fingers
warmed by miniature flames as they bring tea
to the breaking point of one hundred degrees,
while minus ten swirls thin tendrils into the door cracks,
begging to let winter in.

Battle-ready blues

Armed and ready we face one another
and hope the chinks go unnoticed.
Ticking forward into equipment lists,
backed with canteens of pre-made phrase soup,
adamant that the other should cede first.

And somewhere a grenade pin drops
out of the bottom of a sweet memory
gone cold.

For My Grandmother

She was a jiving powerhouse of smiles
and deep laughter, her hugs furnaces,
enveloping grandchildren in pure adoration,
spilling attitude over the brim of bejeweled glasses.

How little time makes of everything she was.
It chips and chafes and rubs her edge away.
She moves now with no more spring in her gait,
her smiles uncertain, her eyes searching for recognition,
and what was once a shoulder to lean on
has become one of defeated acceptance
and we struggle to hold on to as much of her as we can,
before that, too, fades away.

We love her still, and she loves us still,
and somewhere in between the fumbled memories
she grins at us still, these ever-diminishing footholds
to the future, and when she leaps it is us who will need
to catch our balance, catch our breath,
and go on loving her, living for her,
remembering her for who she was.

Idiocies of Youth

I am young with many places to go,
people to know and meet,
mistakes to make and identities to fake.
And thus I am not concerned if
any of these young others
find much in me; if they don't,
then it is likely I will not find much
in them, either.

There is no time of life more perfect
to be a blind fool as your late teens and early twenties,
forgiven the oversights of adulthood
because you're a rookie and
not pinned with the dismissal of adolescence,
you become the most ignorant important people
in the world. It's true.

I've seen that look and attitude before;
that insecurity that comes with thinking
that life needs to be mapped out early
and then carried into fruition like some
high school school project that's graded;
or that careless wear-and-tear-free mug
that comes with believing that youth keeps
everything else, including danger, at bay,
and that stupidity is a condition
that must be crashed into head-on
like bumper cars driven by irresponsible drunks,
driving the real wheel of life as carelessly as
they would the fake car in the arena.

If I ever get called on being a novice,
I can spout that nonsense about having
a very reasonable excuse for being less-than:
"I am young, what do I know? Let me off the hook
so that one day my rash pigheadedness
will somehow mature into a calm wisdom
full of grace and understanding."

We forget, sometimes, that youth
does not mean idiocy,
that inexperience does not excuse
incompetence for being decent.

Swing

Swing traipse-traipse swing

to the beat, the rhythm, chase -

stop, follow, step-step turn

and the breath, the hit, the sweet sweet dip. 

Give me a lead I can follow,

whose arms have me in tow

whose legs guide me where to go

and whose grasp of flair has me 

twirling skirts, head, hair. 

Feeling so loose in motion,

so exhilarated in the rush,

it's easy to forget that we

are just on feet and not skates

and that my partner is just that - 

a partner, for five minutes, less. 

If I could get your number, I would,

if I could take you home, I would,

but I can't get past the shortness of breath

and the hotness of skin to think - 

just what about dancing has me high

on your every fluid move and word.

First forest firs

I will find the largest tree in the park
and spread my arms wide at its base;
Let them call me a tree-hugger and stare -
I want to look up and see the emerald canopy
fade into the depth of the stormy sky
and feel closer to something that has lived, and stood witness to,
much more than I ever will in my short existence.

Perhaps there was once a time when people
took to the shade of firs on restless-weathered days,
and perhaps this tree bent over the birth of spring's first fawns,
or the muted love-language of adolescents enraptured -
their youth a foolish, overflowing torrent of quickened pulse and passion,
soon wiped clean by years of adult sobriety.

I will feel my small consequence in face of such longevity,
humbled by the weight of hundreds of years of living
and share two arms' worth of innocence in peace,
taken in, folded, layer by layer,
between skin and bark.

Letters

I am used to getting bills in the mail,
asking me for money.
I expect bills -
they are a part of life.
I am used to getting notifications in the mail,
telling me what I owe the government;
the sum is always too much to comprehend
and so I set these pieces aside,
knowing they are part of my life.
Just when I think
that the only people who send me things
are those who want something from me,
I get a letter.
A letter that gives.
Letters give me voices of people I care about,
they give me words;
words that were found and written
just for me.
I settle into letters
the way you sink into a plush sofa
at the end of a long workday.
And letters have that funny quality
of being here-and-now and past-and-back-then
at the same time;
physical mementos of virtual conversations,
hugs and laughs shared on paper.
I may get tens of thousands of bills in a lifetime,
or hundreds of notifications,
but even if I could count on fingers and toes
all the letters I will get,
they are, quite singlehandedly,
the only reason I see fit
to own a mailbox.

Reasons to think of you

because the rain refuses to stop and because it is warm in my bed, because that picture haunts me every time i pull back the curtain, because it was night and i had nothing to do. because it starts with a letter and has a name, because i eat alone familiar things, because if i did not, i would not be me.  because i understand what happened, and because i don't. because i hate filling this room with words spoken at no one and because i tire of filling acquaintances with polite bypassing, because times used to be good and because memories are still too good. but most of all. because it is you, and i do not know how not to.

Eco-what?!

Ecofeminism.
Yeah, that's right.
I always thought "feminism"
was a bit of a misnomer
and misrepresentation
of what the movement
is supposed to be about.
But with the "eco"...
let me explain.

Firstly:
I agree. Women should have rights.
Rights equal to men.
But let us, for one moment,
not make everything
about how men
are oppressing women,
or how women are oppressing themselves.
"Femin"-ism. Women.
All this Focus on Women.
Women women women.
Hey wait, isn't this movement about
egalitarianism?
Oh, so why don't we call it...
"egalitarianism?"
Nah, that would just
rock the boat and
make too much sense.

Secondly:
Let us stop digging
for the inconsequential
to focus on the consequential.
Don't snap at a man
for opening a door for you.
Don't give the hairy eyeball
to someone for saying "ladies first."
Don't assume that
being a woman
makes you undeniably,
automatically,
tragically,
oppressed.
Because it's more
than just that.
Take it, for once,
to the level of the individual.
Don't say "look at how this WOMAN
was oppressed by this MAN."
Instead, say "look at how THIS woman
was oppressed by THIS man."
Because women are more than
just women.

Thirdly:
ecofeminism:
critiquing how patriarchies
categorize "women" and "nature"
under one "construct" -
can anyone say:
damned oversimplification?
I see the similarities
and I see the poetic allure
of this parallel.
But for fucking cow's sake,
I doubt that many men
think of women
as just another part
of "nature."
Please.
Please spare me.
The thought is so
ludicrous that
laughing is just as painful
as actually believing this shit.

It seems to me
that some ladies need
to stop looking at their boobs
and vaginas and that
some men need to stop
trying to honour these boobs
and vaginas.
We are individuals.
Not boobs.
Not vaginas.
Not just women.
And thus we don't need
grand overarching theories
to "fix" things.
Stop embarrassing
all of us, stop saying
that you're speaking
"for women."
Speak for yourselves.
I have my own bloody voice,
thank you very much.

Blogging

I scattered my thoughts into airspace
because it never runs out, because it
allows for a public privacy that doesn't
require me to attach voice or name.

Some I might own up to and share,
tidbits of logical thought with academic-
career drive; yes, put that out there for all
to see, comment on, smile at and set aside.

I could not bear for the others to be set aside,
or pointed at, or critiqued, or even understood,
considering they took so much passionate abandon
to produce, and so much shame to throw away.

In times when the well-adjusted, calm, composed
and determined me gets to be too much, I just
cast a line of webtext and fish for the debris
so lovingly pitched into a merciless and stinging sea.

Walls

We built walls around us and called it privacy -
but walls are thicker than we give them credit for,
I can sit here and live a world my own
while you can be two metres away in a different one -
Think of our proximity, our distance, both, simultaneously.

If you were losing faith in your room, blanketed in silence,
and I was losing love in mine, letting touch trickle to nothing,
I would never know you, your faith, your loss, your hurt,
and you never mine, my loss, my love, my hurt.

You could have needed me to prop your soul with words,
with a joke, a story, a shared moment of each knowing the other,
and I could have needed you to bandage my heart with hugs,
with a hand, chocolate, and remind each other of human blood, skin, eyes -
meant to embrace more than empty, self or thought.

Ensconced in our walls, however, how are we supposed to hear
when the other breaks? Or see when they fall? Or feel the hurt
of all lost, all packed tight into corners, locked in drawers,
contained behind doors?
Two metres, two worlds, or maybe still only one, and another one,
fearing the day when our walls are taken away.

Book-bound

Spending hours filling silence
with the voices from books;
suddenly back in high school
suddenly back in lonely
and content, on some level,
that the emptiness of a moment
is fed with sweet words
that build casts around fractured spaces
and keep sanity from running off the margin -
the stories read are mine
the characters read are friends
and the read world the mind
leaving here, not because here has nothing left
but rather because there has so much to give.

Dusting off the reading heart,
letting stories pump their way
through eyes, lungs and toe tips
suddenly book-bound;
and like riding a bike
you never forget how.

Guidebooks

Guidebooks to being good
anythings;
they would have
rules and things
listed in order,
in easy-to-learn,
catchy,
seductive prose.

Since when
was it easy
to do anything?
As if words
on a page
could change you
forever -
some say they do
but they fail to mention
that little process
called thought
that happens between
word-reading
and meaning-making,
that little effort
called action
that happens between
meaning-making
and carry-outing.

I know a man
who took his boyfriend out, publicly,
in a homophobic society,
who wrote his own rules
and lived through the stares.
I know a part-Chinese Kiwi
who taught himself Mandarin,
left home, became a teacher
and handed the height of cool
to you without breaking
a single tenet of his faith.
I know a son
who put his life on hold
to care for the sister he loved,
no guidebook involved.
I know someones
who gambled certainty
for a little adventure,
who said 'screw that'
and did their own thing,
and who found the extraordinary
in everyday's ordinary.

In conclusion:
A guidebook to
a happy life
in three easy steps:
1. Learn that it's not easy
2. Ask yourself what 'happy' even means
3. Scrap the idea of getting a guidebook after all
Because
you can write it,
you can read it,
but you sure as hell
need to do a little more
if you're going to live it.

Calgary

Calgary, if only
leaving you was as easy
as taking off clothing;
things like places
seem so inconsequential -
after all, places are
just spaces.
But, rooted in each
memory,
is the feel of you
in the background,
colouring scenes
and warming skin,
sending hair-teasing winds
and humming with talk.

So many firsts.
So many loves.

My first underpaid,
manual labour job.
My first day
at university.
My first drunken
Halloween debacle.
My first under-the-bed
unexpected kiss.
My first best friend
turned boyfriend.
My first, coldest,
camping trip.
My first messy
roommate fallout.
My first long-awaited
bachelor's degree.
My first breakup.
My first career
decision.
My first step into
knowing what I want.

Part of me thinks
moving away
will be easy because
I have never had a home
and never will admit
to wanting one,
but if ever I had a home,
and if ever I dare to say so,
Calgary was the closest thing to it
and I miss so many somethings -
someones -
feeling like I left them
back there.

This one is for you,
Calgary;
and also for me,
for taking a piece of you
with me,
wherever I go.

In memory of a father

For my dear friend LS and in honour of the memory of his father

You told me that long ago
your dad used to take you
down to the dock
to draw ships -
and I picture you, in awe,
as your dad would sketch them
mast to mast, leaning, tipped
in the wind.

You used to have your adolescent moments,
you admitted, when your dad
would pull you sternly from parties
and chastise you
because he cared
more than he dared
to openly say.

But what I remember most
is how you said,
not too long ago,
that one day you would be your dad -
and that you hoped for it,
as you realized who he was
and how proud he was of you.

At your graduation your dad
sat poised with his video camera,
ready to capture your walk
across the stage -
and across the gap from boy
to man.
He was so excited that
he couldn't lean back in his seat,
afraid he'd miss your moment;
As each graduate crossed the stage,
he nudged me,
asking, again,
"Is it him?"

The years pulled you together
despite the distance
between Calgary and Thunder Bay -
and every time you spoke of him
I could hear the love, the pride
and the infinite hope
you held for your dad,
and there was nothing, it seemed,
that you did not tell him about.

And then just recently you told me
that your dad had passed
and you being you,
the news was practical and factual,
and your voice never wavered,
never broke,
even though I know your heart must have,
a hundred times over.

I wish I knew him better, your dad.
He was always so good to me,
so warm, so friendly.
For all the love I bear you,
I could not make it better,
I never could,
and I don't think
you expect me to.

And although I know these words
are not much,
I send them into being
to fill a tiny corner here
in the memory
of your dad,
hoping that you feel my love
and know that it is because
I know how much he meant to you.

Perhaps one day
you can take your son
and draw ships
at the dock
together.

Last time

Last time I vowed that
the next time I see you,
it won't be a big deal,
it'll be OK and I'll smile -

But I forgot that seeing you
is more than just looking;
it's hearing a voice I grew fond of,
it's watching you move and smile,
it's having to say something
that doesn't crack down the middle
when I offer it up and feel it leave my lips -

And it's feeling the ache
of wanting to touch you but knowing
I can't go there
it's the fullness of remembering
everything that went before
and trying to make up for the gap
in small, timid steps;
it's wanting warmth but pining heat
and fearing being burnt;
it's loneliness with the antidote
standing in front of me
but locked, simultaneously, away.

If you were to ask me
how I am -
so many answers come to mind,
too many, too late, too lost.
I can, and probably will,
say "I'm good"
but that explains nothing,
gives me nothing,
gives you nothing,
and shrivels like some desiccated flower,
then trampled, then forgotten.

I want all the time
to sit and be where we were before
knowing that now is not the time
to be wishing such things.

I can wish myself luck,
and you happiness,
and both of us grace,
but I can't wish away
that past fact of us together
feeling so tenderly happy
and now so sharply hurt.

Just slightly

I tell myself
Slightly
I might miss you slightly
and it's only a little bit
awkward
when we met by chance
and I couldn't tell
if the sting in my eyes
was because I didn't know
where to look
or because I missed you

But that,
I tell myself,
doesn't matter.

I shouldn't much care
even slightly
if missing is just something
I do,
even if you don't.

And I shouldn't
in the least
give a second thought
about times gone
because I claimed
to turn a proverbial page
and erase you away.

Beset, however,
by tides of fierce pain
rooted in happiness past,
I begin to think
that 'should' matters very little
and 'could' matters more.

I don't think
it was the shoulds of it all
that drove us
to where we are;
perhaps, though,
the fear of coulds
had slightly something
to do with it.

No, I should not miss you.
Yet I do.
We could have been,
maybe.
Just perhaps.
Just slightly.

Had said

That watery promise made
so long ago
has trickled, spread, and dried
and all I have left
is this blurred outline
of a notion fervently agreed to
once, before.

Yes, I had said something
and yes, you had said yes,
and despite the need to forget
and hold dear
it seems no longer applicable
to even acknowledge
the yes on either end.

So let me, for one moment,
give us the escape of forgetting
promises had been made
at all.
Nothing good comes of holding on
to past water spilt;
the best we can do
is to remember
that it did, in fact,
fall.

Poetry of a black soul

The quintessential emo poem
Would sla
sh
Its li
nes
and let words
b
  l
e e
  d
down its
BOLDENED
blackened
page,
covered s
                l
                  a
                    n
                      t
                        w
                          a
                            y
                              s
by strands of wispy,
pretentious artlessness.

DEATH

Finding Percy

(To my dear friend RQ: I stole your expression! Full credit to you for Percy; and in return, this one's for you)
Finding a person who can just be
A person
When they are with you
is not easy -
Someone who spills sauce on their shirt
At dinner, someone who drops
Their keys and a text in the clumsy spaces
And corners of silence, or loneliness;
The someone who wears their identity
On their sleeve, proud to be
Themselves.
Finding these persons
Is not always easy;
Weeks may go by,
Or months -
Before you can find a someone
Happy to just to be.
I find
It's easier to find a someone true
When you are truly a someone
Too. 

write.say.

three shredded letters later and i forget what i wanted to write. or perhaps say. writing and saying is the same these days. and with each penstroke, each crossed.out afterthought, the press behind sore eyes dims into vapour and mists its way out, gentle as summer dew, warm as noon sand. and yes, all i wanted to write, or say, was that i miss you.

Jigsaw

I passed you yesterday
walking the other way
I was in line behind you
laden with milk, cheese and eggs
You told me the price
of that white chocolate chai
I love so well
and you sang on the radio
and said sorry for last time.

I smiled at you on the train
for letting me sit
I saw your car parked
outside the Safeway down the road
I gave you a hand
taking your baggage off the carousel
and I cheered you on
at the concert last night.

You don't see me much
and I don't see you much either
but bits and pieces of you and me
are sought in others
as they walk through landscapes
sketched in a clumsy hand,
building our jigsaws,
hoping to piece together
something as good as what we knew.

Today

Today waits for tomorrow
and hopes that yesterday will remember
the shared hopes of last year
and the promises for next year;

And as today tumbles into tomorrow,
begging pardon for yesterday's burden,
tomorrow yields, as it always does,
and forgives yesterday its stoic constancy.

Yet sometimes yesterday softens
and offers today the hope
that tomorrow's memory of yesterday
will bring with it loved syllables of story.

Winterspring

Hail stones from sapphire skies
and the mind tickled in fine wine
as green tips break their way through tree fingers;
soon the strawberries will be in their prime
and the river will run full-flow
the heat will beat down
and bring with it spring.

But for now watching snow curtains
and feeling hot breath evaporate into icicle air
tries even the most patient,
as winter's last kiss
freezes on the lips of windowpanes
aching for sun.

days like this

what to do on days like this, days when you are reminded that you are but flesh and blood and bone, that you can feel the slow pitch of sick stomach and the dull thrash of sicker heart, days of grey snow skies and the chill beneath thin skin, while the world waits for you to pick yourself up, impatiently, as it doles out the weight of another day onto defeated shoulders.

crinoline creased pleated under flowers of black and blue; nothing reminds me more of how summer is short than the brief hours spent in sunlight, dancing, spinning and losing myself in the heat and the blue...and perhaps the droop of the flowers, black and also blue, their petals falling groundward with the loss of summer sun, summer rain, to keep them on.

Bow-side

Sitting Bow-side
all seems slower smoother calmer
and looking far to building-tops
soothes eyes tired of close walls
and as people pass time moves visibly
in steps breaths and words
it's good to just sit
and let it go by.

I thought I could write
in this moment and write well
but I'm afraid that writing
is not feeling
and that feeling
escapes writing about
except to say that it hurts
without knowing how to qualify,
quantify, or justify, it just does.

New ends

It seems time goes
without so much as goodbye
without so much as a note
of change, an official end
to periods, and without
warning of beginning
something new.

Perhaps not just time;
perhaps also us,
and what I miss has ended
perhaps long before
I knew:
where are the unsolicited
nights over,
the goodnight messages,
the inclusion in things -
being the center of things
was nice.

I just wish I had warning -
I just wish I knew -
standing here one moment
too long, one hurt lip
too many, one downcast eye
too low - no,
I didn't know.
I didn't sign off
on this turn
and I slip sometimes
between the cracks of sense
into nonsense, gibberish,
none-of-that.

I will wish time goodnight,
and childhood goodbye,
but for all other counts
I will keep on
and hope.

Isn't it just fine
living in North America:
I have my daily bread
my education debts
and my so-called
hellish assignments
and later a gruelling job
and later maybe a house
and later still a family -

but I am a first-world person
who can become a third-world problem;
if everyone lived like me,
there wouldn't be much leftover
for slum-bound masses
and their children, thin, raggedy,
begging on street corners
while their youth dies
on parched lips
and empty stomachs.

My later is their never,
my constant their lack;
and still, even though
I well know
my self-preservation
keeps me from breaking
routine and giving my life
to others,

there is nothing quite like
the selfishness of living.

Being a professor

I can imagine
being a professor
must be hard.

It must be;
otherwise I don't get
the uncombed hairdos,
the mismatched outfits,
the mis-stapled handout
and the bare-bones PPT.

It must be tough,
all that research for a living -
it's gotta be -
it must explain
how some papers disappear
for weeks on end;
it must be the cause
for the fourth cup of coffee
at ten in the morning;
it must be the reason
for the spaced-out looks
they sometimes wear
walking through the halls.

A good professor, though,
is gold and worth it all:
the papers you cried over at 2 a.m.,
the tuition fees that empty your accounts,
the jostling in a fifty-year-old elevator
that might stop mid-ascent
as you try to get to their lecture.

But yes; I suppose it must
be quite the life.

On the way to Atwood

February 14th, the plan was to see
Margaret Atwood speak.
We ate dinner and
I donned my literary garb
and all the way driving to campus
I sported a heroin-grin
in anticipation of what I call
"a Canadian literary icon."

"It's going to be big,"
I said, and he just chuckled
at my saucer eyes
and reverence.

We parked, walked,
and he said,
"I don't even know what she wrote,
Margaret Laurence."
I chide him: AT-WOOD
NOT LAU-RENCE
and he laughs sheepishly
while I observe
that Laurence is dead
and that a talk by her
would be disconcerting
as I'd imagine her body
would be in some stage of rot.

In Mac Hall there's a crowd,
but the gates are closed
and, while confused,
an usher regretfully informs
"We are at capacity"
because if a fire were to start -
which I half-wish it had
(for it would bring Atwood out!) -
the audience would potentially die
burning, an oh-not-quite-so-poetic
death.

We stand there with the news,
I with the weight of it,
he uncomprehending why this
Atwood event can't be attended
by a standing audience
like they do in concerts.

He disappears and I try to find
consolation in talking to others
who have also been rejected.
A few minutes later,
he comes back says he sneaked in
but that they kicked him out:
"How bad do you want to get in?"
"Not bad enough to create
civil disturbance."

And there it was,
the whole evening,
as we turned our backs
and headed home,
he to play clarinet,
while I sit in the sofa corner
reading and trying to swallow
bitter disappointment.

But it was the 14th,
so the night ended
with us sandwiched
watching the horse show
off CBC online,
drinking tea,
and I felt luckier
than those who got in
and saw Margaret Atwood.

Chili

First, cut the onion and garlic
and fry them until fragrant
then, add the vegetables,
multicolored, one by one,
stir and toss and stir
then add beans,
black red white
and top off
with spices.

The recipe sounds simple
but the flavor in chili
comes from kitchen-play:
from-behind-hugs
and shared tasting
off little spoons,
the warmth of company
as the stew bubbles,
thickens, and entices
taste buds to try.

At the dinner table,
nothing beats two steaming bowls
sprinkled with parmesan
eaten in appreciative murmurs
of the heat on the tongue
while snow falls freshly
to the ground.

Looking Educated

University students
spend their most scholarly hours
dressed in rags, sitting bum-sweating
in front of a computer screen,
or lying on a bed strewn
with review sheets;
these are the critical hours
that are graded later
by profs equally disheveled ,
crouched at haphazardly adorned desks
scrunching brows in utter befuddlement
at a student's use of the word "tangentially"
(as, tangentially, that essay was about
Ernest Hemingway's tendency
to "tangentially" stitch
short stories together as if they were a whole...)
but no, the point is: scholarship is not glamorous,
it's not somehow funky, suave or eye-catching,
it's tedium and lots of it to get through,
and I wonder, sitting here at my desk
half-dressed in old T-shirt and underwear,
if I can look down at myself and pronounce,
"Why, don't I look educated today."

Questions of substance

If I ask myself "why"
I often find no answer
or none, at least, that makes sense -
so "why" is discarded among
the balled-up paper fists
and the skins of onions rotting
in the garbage.

So might, instead, "how"
be a good substitute?
But still, if there is no
origin of process,
no blank slate,
no square one, then
"how" trickles off
into the shower drain,
thick with dirty suds
and matted hair.

Then maybe "what"
is all that is left, and
what is left is
a thing
that chokes
and wounds
and cannot be touched
or seen or smelt or heard
only felt,
like the slow sinking
of stomach into
pelvic bones and
the chest-ache
of breath caught
too thinly.

Pesto

If I had a mortar and pestle
I'd crush it all -
nuts and all -
and derive satisfaction
from the physical pounding
on the helpless lifeless
foodstuff
in the bowl.

I could hear the crunch
of pulverized almonds
the squelch of sticky garlic
and watch the bruising
of delicate basil leaves;

then the action becomes
socially acceptable
and the fury becomes
an exerted manifestation
of aggression towards
lifeless plant matter.

Mortar-less,
pestle-less,
and restless,
I settle
for the expediency
of a food processor
whining and grinding
its way against
the fibers of my nerves.

Rush

Rush everything
rush
the bus the cars
the walking people
deadlined essays
catching the crosswalk
elevator doors
two-at-a-time stairs
up down through doors
through halls
through rooms

and save the last
breath
for the next hurried rush
always the next
and never for now

Boxers

I don't mean the sweaty men
who throw punches
at each other across
a jeered-at arena.

I mean the little bit of fabric
that covers male buttocks,
male hips, male thighs,
male nuts and bolts
and whatever else is
down there.

Women's panties
are made to make women
look sexy;
Men's boxers
are made to -
to what?

They don't hold anything in place,
they don't serve aesthetic purpose,
they don't entice flocks
of excited vixens ready
to rip their sexy, heart-patterned,
dick-slitted, cushy cottoned,
elastic-banded, un-form-fitting
piece of loincloth from men's crotches.

And yet boys flaunted them
in high school,
red-yellow-pink
above too-baggy trousers,
ghetto belts and
Converse sneakers
as if to say:
make way, baby,
my manhood is here
to stay.

Twins

They called us twins:
we had the same kind of haircut,
the same long, thin torso,
the toothy grins.
To us it didn't matter
that I was much younger,
she my aunt,
I half-this-half-that,
she half-here-half-there.

It lasted maybe
a couple years.

Then my figure rounded
while hers thinned,
my hair grew longer
while hers fell out,
I developed breasts
whereas she had one -
the other the culprit
of her sleepless nights
and chemoed cells.

No one called us twins
anymore,
it seemed inaccurate,
wrong,
when I was just
beginning living
she was just
beginning leaving.

I miss who she was
and I know she missed
who she used to be
and now that I am older
I know why she missed
the girl who would ride,
carefree, on the back
of her boyfriend's motorcycle
so long ago
in San Francisco.

At 24 I have had
more than she ever had
and feel guilty, a little,
that I could not take
my twin with me
through the sensations,
experiences,
youth
and all that makes this
worth living for.

They called us twins
and I wish it had lasted longer -
I wish it would last still.

Indo

He was blue-eyed
and I, brown,
but his skin a shade more
chocolate than my honey,
and I tried to find
common ground;
but there were none,
save one.

His story begins with escape
from Java, all the way
to Holland,
and the embracing of a culture
that accepted his family
more than their own:
Indonesia, he said,
was just a bad memory;
a something to put
behind him, a something to
relinquish, as the Dutch
did Jakarta.

Mine begins with the transgression
of an upper class daughter
of an Indonesian ambassador -
and her relations with
a Caucasian Canadian man;
my mother said her parents
were not pleased,
at first, not until I -
and particularly my brother -
came along, he the sole male heir
of my grandfather's blood.

He grew up half-and-half,
knowing nothing of Indonesia
save the stories his parents told him,
He grew up speaking Dutch,
living Dutch,
taking Dutch with him
as his badge of identity;
but for his burnished skin,
none would know any different.

I grew up half-and-half,
six years in Indonesian curriculum,
ten years in hot, muggy weather.
I grew up speaking Bahasa,
living as a bule,
taking my hybridity with me,
"Indonesian" here in Canada,
"Canadian" there in Indonesia.

What do we have in common?
We are "Indo," we could be "bule,"
but the label matters little,
if at all,
for that night, when we met,
there was nothing cultural
we could share
about Indonesia;
so we made do
with the fact that
we both spoke English
and had human stories
to tell.

Untitled

If the last was not enough,
well, here is another,
And if the other was too rough
well, at least we have each other
still, for a friend carries a price
most with hearts are willing to pay
even if that friend entice
your lust and make you fray
at the edges-like, unravelling slowly
finding yourself in a predicament
where without that friend life feels lonelier
and worthy, somehow, of lament.

This one is for you, in all my confusion
I feel as if I ought to like you,
Or at least live in that delusion
just in case you feel it too.