for many days, weeks I
have been still. I
have not done
useful things,
accomplished tasks,
checked things
off a list. on the
outside I
have not moved. I
am crawling around
inside myself, with
my eyes
closed, my hands over
my ears and my lips
sealed. This
is how I explore
the dark. I
have found nothing, I
sought nothing
and so I continue
blindly, looking
for something I
cannot see, or
taste, or
hear, or
touch. And when I
find it, I
will not speak.
Tag Archives: poetry
story by gaslight

self portrait
you know how
you tell stories
like they’re just
stories
and not really you
like the one where you
were gutted.
that’s just a story
you tell
about a man
you opened to
over and over
until he gutted you, saying
he was just like that, toxic.
just like that, but
still
he couldn’t
lose you.
so you tell a new story
you come back,
again and again
until you tell
your story
by gaslight.
thoughts of a Canadian living in America today
It was a very long night, and this morning is not looking much better.
I’m oscillating between Debra and Maya Angelou; between Fuck absolutely everything and Oriah Mountain Dreamer; between running home to Canada, and staying here to fight for what I believe at my core is the right thing to do.
Hey, I never said I was perfect. Zen Bitch, remember?
Still I Rise
Maya Angelou, 1928 – 2014You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
The Invitation
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
Oh Canada, I love you and I miss you, but there is more work to do where I am.
And I wouldn’t be a yoga teacher if I didn’t tell you to breathe. Slowly and Deeply. Repeat.
faith and a full moon

Daffodils
Poems are much smaller than blogs and much more difficult to write.
I used to write quite a lot of them. I’m lazy now, too much instant gratification on Facebook, or perhaps I have simply lost the part of me that could write with precision and grace.
Tonight is March’s full moon. Tonight I am almost through a dark month, a month where I have questioned everything, where my thoughts went to other places even as the earth was waking from a long dark winter. “…sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness ..” Sometimes we forget this completely.
“…The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;”
– GALWAY KINNELL
I used to write about the moon, and my friend Marco wrote this for me (and you wonder why I keep coming back to Latino men, and Irishmen – see below). I read it when I want to remember things about myself I easily forget.
Laguna de Luna Llena
Suspiros soplan sobre la Luna
luminada laguna
-Luna llena-
-Luna lejos-
-Luna blanca-
-Luna sola-
Hablemos esta noche
De los secretos
Escritos en tu cara;
Las manchas del ayer
Que hoy
Unduladamente son reflectadas
En estas aguas
Cuántos golpes sufriste mi amor
Que todavia sigues luminando
Sobre tierra y nubes
Cuántos amores olbidos
Te han penetrado
Que todavia esperas otro.
Eres terreno sagrado
Donde se sacrifica lagrimas
Y sangre por probar
La vida concentrada;
La angustia deliciosa.
Tu me inspiras…
Tu me inspiras
A cruzar las aguas de la vida;
De la luna llena laguna,
Con suspiros
Y esperanzas
Por amor sincero.
Faith is complicated for me. Part of my proud, stubborn arrogant heritage perhaps, but I reflexively reject things I’m told I must believe. I reject black and white, good and evil as the only options. My world is many shades of grey. Still, I do have faith, somewhere, and it is as complicated and nuanced as the rest of me.
Faith
I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.— David Whyte
I wrote this ten years ago, much has changed, but during dark times I get smaller, I sleep more or want to sleep more, and as always I cry in verse.
alive for one week
I am small
I wonder
hear my pulse
see broken glass
want only sleep
I am alive
pretend happiness
feel pain
touch deformity
worry in dreams
I cry in verse
curling within
understanding little
say less
I dream in reds
I try
I hope
I am alive.
odd bits with an occasional rhyme

Excerpt from Sonnet XXVII by William Shakespeare
I used to think I’d organize my writing into a little book or some such thing, but that seems way too left-brained for today, so here are some scatterings in no particular order, some recent, some older (the sonnet, that one’s old, and I’m still not up to writing another).
August
As a lover, August is patient with her passions
she has none of April’s insecurity or
February’s forged sentimentality
nor will she endure
June’s vanity and boasting.
August bestows her heady scent
in velvet touches –
trailing from her finger tips, you can sense
the summit of summer’s heat
the promise of glorious autumn breezes
all at once upon on your flesh.
Her rudbeckia hued hair feels like a mane of
soft thick silk as lays across
your chest and navel.
You may think she is tamable, she is not.
she is proud and loyal
and most of all – passionate
she might be tamed, but
only by one who suits her.
Within her radiates a heart with the sun’s intensity
once embraced within its fire
you can always know its touch
even during December’s cold indecency.
She would never leave you, but
every year she is abandoned
for brightly coloured leaves
so she has learned to live alone
and hold her passions
deep inside her earth,
till it is her time to briefly love
bones
far away
I am this night
as blackness swallows day
sweet, my grief
rests in the folding
black from bloodless red
lay my bones
my lonely love
lay my bones
and heart of clay
coals
softly walking,
the white coals
my falling cloak
aflame
myself, behind me now
in shadow’s
yesterday
swirled by wind,
my ashes
sail away.
wordless
no words drift
between us,
our air
speechless,
embraced in single
blended breath.
breath not for
spoken thoughts; a
tongue moves within
my mouth –
all my poetry is inhaled
then released –
floating down, tangling
my hair,
spilling into your eyes,
where I watch myself,
exposed.
words without voice
caress us
in this space.
alive for one week
I am small
I wonder
hear my pulse
see broken glass
want only sleep
I am alive
pretend happiness
feel pain
touch deformity
worry in dreams
I cry in verse
curling within
understanding little
say less
I dream in reds
I try
I hope
I am alive
and just in case, you thought maybe I only wrote free verse or horribly depressing poetry I present one of my very few, mostly acceptable sonnets
and now for sonnet completely different
Oh damn! I scram, eat ham, spread jam, but Am
Incredibly not in love with Spam.
Nor can I abide a sorry sonnet;
Rather would I suck a festered garget
Then expel an iambic shoe deform’d,
My tongue fen-suck’d to a verse airiform’d.
Cinquain, senyru, haiku – will do, strained brain
Arcane, insane – I shall feign migraine,
Eat a tub a wrathful rotted puttucks,
Or have a flounder damp flog my buttocks;
Instead, may I up fill my toque with puke,
Then spew last two caked lines gobbledygook?
I could pretend, I meant not these words to offend,
And love the form, but tis too late – The End.
want
I want you
to miss me
I want you
to think of me
before you sleep
and when you wake up,
when you’re driving
and when you’re doing
nothing at all,
miss me
when you’re flying,
and when your garden blooms
this spring.
I want you
to pick up your phone
10 times, 20 times a day
to send me a funny story
and then stop.
I want you
to be moody and sad
when that movie
we were going to see comes out
and for you to go alone
and miss holding my hand.
I want you
to read every poem that
I gave you for your birthday.
I want you
to miss my wild hair
my ass
my smile
my skin on your skin.
I want you
to get
the job
the life
the love you want
I want you
to miss me
for a while, and then
I want you
to be happy.
Dear you
Dear you,
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Over and over and over and over again.
That’s been me about you.
I can’t anymore.
I should never have, but I thought if I tried hard enough that I could change the way you felt (see insanity definition) about me. I know. Insane.
There’s no fool like an old fool. Or perhaps the older you are the more ridiculous you feel when you make an idiot of yourself over someone. I don’t suppose there is an age where people ‘know better’. I think we just keep making fools of ourselves over the wrong people, or we let the right people go (likely after making fools of ourselves), or we never open up and then what may have been the right person leaves anyway, or we stay with the wrong people because the thought of leaving is just too damn frightening.
I think we all are just making this shit up as we go.
I also know you and I, we simply don’t feel the same way about each other. Right one, wrong one, it doesn’t matter. I’ve made a fool of myself again.
I should know better by now (see no fool like an old fool), but I don’t, or maybe I do now. Maybe I will find the gumption to really walk away this time. Maybe.
You won’t come after me.
I like to imagine that you do. That you arrive with your intense eyes, your focused gaze and claim me as your own.
You would never do this.
I know this, which is why I keep myself so shamefully available. I have to stop.
I’m like the petulant child who runs away from home and just goes around the block. I run away, and circle back. I make stupid reasons to contact you.
This doodle didn’t start out as a heart, and it certainly wasn’t for Valentine’s Day, but that’s how it turned out. I didn’t start out like this, but this is how I’ve turned out.
I have to go.
I have to go.
I have to go. If I am going to salvage any self respect and dignity.
I can’t do this. I thought I could. I can’ t. I can’t. I cannot.
I try so hard. I do, but I suck at this (see old fool). I mean really suck at this.
That’s okay. I’m good at other things (writing non self pitying drivel would not be one of those things tonight).
I’m okay, or I will be. I just have to go.
I love you, and I have to go.
love,
me