dogs of portugal



the dogs of portugal are too aloof
to sniff, fetch, lick fingers

they refuse to be called buddy,
won’t make eye contact,
have no interest
in our pockets and crotches

untethered and independent
they trot busily across cobbles
like doctors on call

so mature and serious i’m surprised,
every time i step in shit,
they haven’t picked up after themselves

UNTITLED

UNTITLED


occasionally, without majestic

refinement
I feel good,

my metronome heals itself


internalize joy with glee

splashing fits of circulation


I try to adore less
imbibe less drive

less chemical

wheels

still, madness likes to

bring me flowers


I’ve always seen

a brightness in leftovers.

FAKE OCEAN POEM

When youre brought into this world
They say youre born in sin
Well at least they gave me something
I didnt have to steal or have to win
Well they tell me that I'm wanted
Yeah I'm a wanted man
I'm colt in your stable
I'm what cain was to abel
Mister catch me if you can


Everything so blurry
Everyone's so fake
Wind juicing thin through the thorn from fast forward,
And the woman calling. The audience leaving.

And everybody's empty
And everything is so messed up
Pre-occupied without you

So make up your own ending
And let me know just how you feel


Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves rewind around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


I cannot live at all
My whole world surrounds you
I stumble and I crawl

You could be my someone
You could be my
Broken social scene
you Know that I'll protect you from all of the obscene

Im going down in a blaze of glory
Take me now but know the truth
Im going down in a blaze of glory
Lord I never drew first


But how can I protect you
I don't know your name

But I drew first blood
Im no ones son
Call me young gun
You ask about my consience
And I offer you my soul
You ask if Ill grow to be a wise man
Well I ask if Ill grow old
You ask me if I known love
And what its like to sing songs in the rain
Well,Ive seen love come
And Ive seen it shot down
Ive seen it die in vain
Shot down in a blaze of glory


Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?


Wonder what you're doing
Imagine where you are
Oceans in between

a recognized symbol of Excellence in

Can you take it all away
Can you it all away
When you shoved it in my face
This pain you gave to me
Can you take it all away
Can you take it all away
When you shoved it in my face

Everyone is changing
There's no one left that's real
'Cause I am lost without you
I cannot live at all
My whole world surrounds you
I stumble and I crawl

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as close to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


Nobody told me what to find
Nobody told me what to say
No one showed you where to turn
Told you where to run away
Nobody told you where to hide
Nobody told you what to say
No one showed you where to turn
Showed you where to run away

Can you take it all away
Can you fake it Al
When you shoved it in my face
Explain again to me
Can you take it all away

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wrestlessness,
A mania, a madness

Frail and fall

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


Can you take it all away
When you shoved it in my face
this pain you gave to me
gave to me
this pain you gave to me

Take me now but know the truth

Im the devils son
Call me young gun
Each night I go to bed
I pray the lord my soul to keep
No I aint looking for forgiveness
But before Im six foot deep
Lord,i got to ask a favour

And the woman calling.

map of edmonton (belgravia)

for doug barbour

1.

where trestle
comes up against bone

an endless spark, a promise

don’t compete
for the same word

the ground relents
& the street goes

& the rock
& the stone

& the slapdash of houses
festooned

in postwar arc


2.

if you cut every sentence
like silk

or like leaves

in his basement office

in belgravia, nights
& the virginal self

would her hands

& the olive, the olive
festooned

in new home

your turn


you rummage through
scrabble scores,
half-inked nuthatches,
riffle your small, thumbed sketchbook
like a vegas dealer,
find, then read aloud,
your wedding vows

matériel

M.,

I still shake. this cold longing and fear a fog bank. and here on the coast it’s so hot today (30 C) and still I can’t clear. can’t feel heat.

days pass. then you write three words, take it easy.  nothing more. sign, M, no x’s.   

and W.O., love is a fucking desert (war) sometimes. and I have no matériel.

 

S

an opening of the plains

closes a door
& a door

how do you solve a problem
like medea

a mountain
what youve never seen

john goodman
in barton fink

the pixies
, saskatoon

that one time

you said it
you said it,

again

the air
is thick enough

w/ dust

to be afraid
of venus flytraps

Still a Banff poem

..only this really has nothing to do with naming things, but I had so much fun writing it I thought I should share.



A partial letter to Mimi in Paris, written at a jazz club during the last set

They say equations are everything. Sometimes we work them out. Mathematically speaking, the Eiffel tower owes its life to a woman. Sure, that tower is tall, but so is a mountain in Banff, an elevation of over 8,000 feet of rock that pushes up and out, getting in the way of even itself. There is the need to conquer these heights. We are much like men, I suppose. Yours included. He is watching me now you know, as I sit at this table pretending to write you a letter that you will never get, not knowing your address, or anything about you, only knowing how to address the issues I’m sure you wouldn’t want to know. They say your man is a player, but according to our mothers, we shouldn’t believe anything we hear. I prefer to think he was an instrument: a trombone I pumped, a bass where I pulled every string. If he were a drum, oh how I banged him. Even the air was filled with the half-spit tune of night, the melody of skin scraping skin, the fleshed out note held in a solo re-entering. The song was a place we climbed into, clinging to the cliffside, bass and treble meeting for the first time, plus and minus solving the problem of whose mouth goes where. And although the name he sang from the peak was yours, we straddled that summit together.

Quahog

To outlive Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth,
only to be cut in half, declared the oldest animal
that once lived. Like so many artists
gaining posthumous fame. Celebrity clam,
christened Ming—counting its rings, what clues
can scientists find to stop climate change,
or better yet, aging? The new Botox, four hundred years
of seafloor boredom injected into our foreheads.
The ancient Egyptians used Frankincense oil.
The Chinese, ginko. My friend blew $30 on eye cream,
says, we’ll see if it works in ten years. Just blink
and we’re halfway through the month, living
weekend to weekend. Deathbed haiku:
the quahog’s last words--water siphoned, spit out.
Translation: we’re all filter feeders.
Take what comes. What if
we enjoyed our bodies now
instead of mourning what no longer fits.
Jeanne Calment, who lived to be a record 122
said, “I have but one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it.”


---
I could tinker with this indefinitely, but I'm curious to see what's working and what's not.
Also, I'm a bit behind on my comments. It's been a crazy week at work, but I hope to catch up soon.

belem


last afternoon,
guidebook zipped away

warm, luscious custard tarts

lips leave cinnamon
on the mouth of the wine bottle

(This feels really sparse, even for me, but anything more seems over-written. I'm not sure if I even want the first stanza...thoughts?)

MNVGs

o M.,

waiting. last night all night the radio, the t.v., my laptop, my mobile switched on. the silence of all that noise pecking my throat, that place.  where I hold you. when you’re gone.

“We own the night”, you said, then let me try on your MNVGs.   see the green glow of your underworld.  you, your men fearless with your invisibility cloak.

but I’m afraid of night M., nights like last.  when lilacs claw my windows’ glass.  no stealth in me. it’s your invisibility that terrifies.

4 a.m., J’s email. Subject: NOT HIM. I laughed so loud I scared the dog awake. switched on Radio Batanga danced tangos in my bare feet. poured a Talisker. settled down, read on.

patrol near dawn. mud maze village. ambush. your medic. young. bright saver.

my first thought, oh no, M. now you’ll stay on. revenge for a brother.

read, next line. 

wife, two year old daughter, baby coming on.

relief, warm whiskeyed, funnelled  first to cold guilt. 

then, to empty ice.

 

S

poem for max middle's birthday

if three weeks, out a vowel, make

with it, would you have concealed

if, tried to tell her of her of her beautiful
, model & make

a space of time in which to protect yourself

, permeates hands

you said you dressed in gutturals,
pre-lingual speech

a day in an instance

run-on meeting

.
bumped into him last week tuesday man he just reeked of memories tried to breathe through my mouth you know he moved on eventually but i couldn't get the smell out of my clothes i slept poorly that night
.

Bug

Picnicking, fat burnt-umber bugs manifest
on limbs like moles after a summer
in the sun. Bug, you insist
as the ladies tightrope walk my thigh
& upper arm. Bug, you insist, as your pincers
descend and they go
still.

(Bugs fall from your fingers like pennies
tarnished by intent just before they slip
under the surface
like raisins wet
from your open mouth.)

Head back, you discover canopy
& leave my lap to run hatless
flanked by wasps on their patrol
of the park’s brindled pelt
& sticky garbages. Your hair & skin
gleaming in the sun
a small sting.

rain day with the dead of mertola


1.
along the white-washed cemetery wall,
tombs stacked and orderly
as televisions in an electronics store

we windowshop through padlocked glass panels
for sallow plastic roses, photos,
lace-draped caskets


2.
the archeological museum squats
over layers of ancient graves –
moors rested east/west, christians criss-crossed

we translate roman numerals from tombstones,
shoes squeak the planks that edge the maze


3.
main road dug up, workers busy on their knees
under blue canopies, purpose obscured
every time we walk this slant of town

rain charges and we step into a doorway,
watch the scramble to keep tools, papers dry
and see a skeleton waking from the dirt

eleven lines of itchy sorrow

(after sharon thesen

could a lyric discontinue
after such abrasive terms

I hold you up

a moment after this
a moment after, thus

at the wrong end
of a minimum

one drink, & then
another

thousands of miles away
the fate of my right hand

All this and more

She's left again
and each time she goes
i know i'm supposed to say
a little part of me goes with her

but it doesn't
i'm all right here
one hundred per cent
me

i can't afford to give
pieces of myself
away to other
life travellers

and she is still she
wherever she goes

but if we happen
to be in the same place
we are so much more

poppy harvest

o M.,

maybe it’s the rain.  or the phone that’s gone dead.  or maybe it’s the email you didn’t send.  or maybe it’s this spring that’s so damned quiet.

J. txted  me.  said you’d taken your men out.  again. outside. the ring of razor wire. multi-nation flags. big guns.

to poppy fields. opium bellies. you once said they stink like fetid rhubarb.  you drive straight through them. mow them.  your leaguer a metal ring, knuckle duster, “we’re here you fuckers”.

and all night on hilltops, watchers watch watchers.  your cigarettes, lit laser. tag.

and today. no phone. no email. no nothing. electronic lock down. means only one thing.

who would call me if it’s you?  J?  she won't.

o M, maybe it’s the rain.  

or the phone that’s gone dead. or the poppies in my garden.  swelling to open. 

blood red.

 

 

S

 

lines from the mountains

Lawren Harris calls through spirit mountains

& here is the postcard

we might have fallen into the canyon

but we needed the perfect shot

sublime & beautiful

flatten to stage scenes

MARTIAL (MAUDLIN MIX)

by Nathaniel G. Moore

ornery boys
hacking mono
nucleosis

ornery boys
happy being nouns
happy being nouns
building shelves

ornery girls
magic marker clothes
clever being Chloe
forge youth was sewn different,
pinned-pants out on loan

avoiding any


lengthy leg-breath strolls
and with their eyes sewn
normal

so careful
so chortled
you stood odd, alone

ornery boys
happy being nouns
seeking mounds

demono dancers
geno cyanide
so lucking so locking
sod hopping

DAY SEVEN

by Nathaniel G. Moore

post-humus
breath stinking
an estimate for:

16 down
4 across

toothpaste will diagnose
work day guzzles cruel
with unsuspecting harmonies:
rare floral haunches,
peculiar glorified healers
reach earache quicker


puke in rain: trajectory accident
stain away, junk mail, telemarketers
these factions orchestrate biographies

while vile hallow maggots pace in
minutia
-squeezed rooutines, marathons
ooze oodorous oon pain cub
oorphanage
suckling mom marvelous
left to life’s poor buy-rates

The Concert

.
the girl on the stage looks
like a composite of me and
my sister, if we were
one person.
but there is no sister, you see
no brother,
no lover
no other.
ashes surround my
blazing burning flashing flickering
chair, incendiary
memories no longer of
any use to me.
that’s where she was sitting when...
he sat to my left the first time we saw...
i’m only here to fill
up my well, i say to the girl on the stage
and, may i borrow your words for a moment,
your rhythm your stories your songs?
i ask.
but it burns to be here and
the tears trickle tepid on my cheeks
while the fucking pictures
dance about in my eyes
to the rhythm of
her guitar and the soft incantations of
her voice.
When i close my eyes i
recall the fire that consumed me
and changed me into this grey
weightless
moth-like matter. seamlessly
i blend in with the ashes
about me
and wait for the song
to end
before making my exit.
.

training


medicine ball
heavy to the gut
teaches you to breathe
sharp through your teeth

a fist six inches
from your face:
lesson in vulnerability, evasion

skipping keeps you quick,
tall on your toes,
push-ups build
a small ridge of confidence
along your shoulders

old blood
on the canvas mat reminds:
you aren’t,
won’t ever be,
a boxer

from open (prose) body: twenty-three (incomplete) poems

neck


stills into an inconvenient nightmare.
construction comes in jars. the only way to
leave this place is to deliberately lift.

everything is gentrified. the peel of a taste
of skin over blue sky blue is a layer of dust.
the skin that would otherwise be.

I am hopelessly incomplete; I am hopeless
and this. green car passes, shakes; green car
is the key to a pardon.

today I am human; thrum on its neck.

Directions

When you see the house with the woman
standing in the yard, a newborn clasped to her chest,
crooning: Where’s your mom, huh?
Where’s your mum?
Turn right.

Go past the park where the addled sit quietly
their fingers composing a stuttering bloody morse
amidst faded daycare tunics
& handfuls of flung sand.

You should see the the sooty shadow
of the demolished heritage-house-turned-brothel
on the wall of the video store next door
the run down apartment block the vacant lot
on your right.

Pass the house where the man
in his trenchcoat sells mops & brushes
the slats of his fence reinforced by broomsticks
& hand-lettered signs. (His stubbly lilac
about to bloom.)

Turn right and left and right at cobblestoned
one-ways & carriage lanes upholstered
with pop glass & feathers
limestone dust
& four-door sedans.

If you find yourself at the intersection of rural road
& industrial corridor where the warm wet
bodies of women are dumped
you’ll know you’ve gone too far.

mosquito

o M,

 

Tnx for the snaps. I like best, the  ten mosquito men, swarmed, laptops lidded open, sucking hotspots in KAF. Now I know where finger strokes are made. Outside a shipping container, inside the wire. In shade. Emails.

2^nd best, I like the pic from the F.O.B. Your home. Outside the wire. Desert cocoon. Sand bags, machine guns and care packages.  The beef jerky, the cup-of-noodles, the red licorice I sent.  Unpacked, spread over your cot. Extra, for you to give to your men, or did you trade them? Tnx for that. Oh ya, the string of Christmas lights.  Nice touch.

You said it’s getting hot.  41 C in the shade.  But maybe that’s not all.  I read everything.  Newspapers. Blogs. Army.ca. Talks with the Taliban. They say. Is this true? Is that you in mud villages without helmet, your gun slung towards the ground?  Do you drink their tea? Or just pretend?

M., in spring I used to worry when you said you were riding motorcycle again. But I know chrome and highway is your danger food. As are desert and crunch of gravel and sweat.  As you are mine.  And I learned to love four stroke thrum. Still. Now spring has come, motorcycles are out around here. And this year. You in the desert, eight thousand kilometres from your bike. On blue sun days. They carry extra sharp bite. Each time they buzz by.

 

 

S

Thump

Geese ankle-deep in slush
necks like slow songs & beer-slippery hands
outstretched in ugly bars
grip each other & batter
beneath trees:

thump.

Fallen wasp nests, all sweet pulp
& chitin, get caught up in sudden breezes
& roll to the tree-line
where moss furiously melts snow.

Further in, pellets scatter
amidst bleached grasses in the rounded
spaces between trees, a recollection of warmth
where deer knelt.

At the edge of the clearing, a stump
& charred trunk-stillness
where the plane touched
down:

thump.

Nearby, boys in shirtsleeves turn
backs on spring’s riffling fingers
& grit whirlwinds
flash knobby spines under fabric pulled tight
fabric snatched away.

Under the trees, ragged mushrooms
& splayed ribs emerge from ice as trains clatter by
& fat horses delicately cross tracks, hooves
striking steel:

thump.

Fall Equinox

As the nights spill a little more into morning,
I try to make peace with what I haven’t done.

Spiders cache their hours in dark corners,
I squander mine on email and Sex in the City reruns.

Inchworms line the doorjamb for warmth,
curl into accusations when I flick them out.

What rush? Where to? Birds’ yo-yo
branch to ground, call soon, soon.

Leaf miners abandon their spreadsheets
to the earthworms. Let them finish

the work left undone. Turkey vultures circle
the bride and groom, a preemptive I do.

---
I'm not sure if my editing skills are helped or hindered by red wine. This is a poem that has images I like, but I'm not sure what to keep, what to lose, where this poem needs to be pushed more. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

destination straight ahead

you, me
dog, sky
trailer

expectations
melting on the
black tar highway

day jobs
chomped up by
unending clouds

the past
exits through a
duct-taped tailpipe

exhaust-ion
left behind

widening
a hole in
the ozone

not our problem
we won't pass
this spot
again

nap



so sleep-starved,
sideways-tired,
the sight of you
on the chesterfield,
asleep in the sun
with your glasses on,
tv rattling with
beer commercials,
makes me stop
on the landing,
flap my hands
against my hips
and set free
a swarm of tears

a little poem by Fred Wah

that he read on Friday night as part of this Re: Reading the Postmodernism conference at the University of Ottawa [see my larger post on such here] from his book Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1987):

Music at the Heart of Thinking 6

SENTENCE THE TRUE MORPHOLOGY OR SHAPE OF THE mind including a complete thought forever little ridges little rhythms scoping out the total picture as a kind of automatic designing device or checklist anyone I've found in true thought goes for all solution to the end concatenates every component within the lines within the picture as a cry to represent going to it with the definite fascination of a game where the number of possibilities increases progressively with each additional bump Plato thought

mother's day

 o M,

I got drunk last night on Talisker (what a waste).  You wrote, “ Baby born. I heard.  Over SAT phone.  In the desert.”  From where you slept with your  twenty stinking brothers in the F.O.B.  “The radio guy woke me. But the link dropped out.  Didn’t know for hours if it was a he or a she.”

“Wife drove alone. Checked herself into the hospital.”  Birthed.  The third.  The one she begged for when she knew you were heading out.  Again.  “Okay, I’ll give her another kid”.  You told me. One night in my bed. (She’s such a trooper I said.)

M. you write.  From the sand. Your letters incoming. Bright, sharp tips of white phosphorus and night tracers (I’ve watched on YouTube).  What is this metal of Afghanistan?  And me?  And her?

o M., maybe I should never write again.  Never press     send 

But your metal.  Draws. Me even empty.  On mothers’ days.

S

How to name people of taste

You hike alone,
away from a stream of words,

or those wanting an ear—
past the shopping cart

abandoned, rusted metal,
the red plastic handle tilted

at an odd angle, this twisted
body a common urban animal

screaming Safeway to the raven,
to the magpie, even an elk only yards

from a stuffed Bow river
on Mother’s day, each foot forward

feeling heavier with spring’s liquid
diet. You walk after last night’s

filling of draught beer,
the intoxicating way a young man

smiled, gathered you in
to the conversation.

There is no caution in you
as you escape to the river’s other side,

that century old hotel, an elegance
of concrete and cars, the moneyed

line-up of language
spilling like wine into your glass.

The frozen arrangement of mountains
is neatly positioned out the window,

chairs strategically paired
beside the view, and all those people

stream along, inside
out, their flow flooding

with a wonder that melts you
faster than you can say defrost.

cacela velha


easter morning
everyone in town
wears black and drab,
stands outside the church
chatting in rapid portuguese
or leaning on the stone wall,
tipping up their chins
to blow smoke at the sun

except tourists,
locked out of language, custom,
who waft along the beach
to voices of the choir,
taking photos of blue paint
peeling from a wooden boat

Prairie Girl

My cheeks caressed
by the blossom-filled breeze
On fresh-cut grass, prickly
green blades beneath my feet
The smell of the sun
drizzling down on my face
Consoling my essence
in a soothing embrace.

Soon it will be summer
on the prairies, my home
And I will dance naked
beneath bright angry storms
The wheat will dance also -
frolicking, sweeping, it
will serenade swallows
and finches and crows.

I will 4-W through poplars and fir
in search of my own private pool
The muskrats have theirs
in the river nearby where
bullfrogs and spittlebugs
spawn silent wars.
The monarchs search out
new-built goldenrods For Lease

in the marshy rural ditches
where a young girl once played
with snakes and wild daisies
seeking & hiding & seeking, again.
.

a map of the obscure

one of those rains that blink until dawn
with the eyes behind them
— Fanny Howe


a rain over her shoulder, shoulder

a permissible tryst

a bedouin of shoes

a cloud-maker; a memory made of skin

a topographical bore

a harvest obscured by days

a dead animal by the river

a dead horse or dog

a dead house

a scratch-path

a common marker among many

a grasp of the soft places

a redolent hilt

a wrongly said speech

a gone station

a flurry of painted leaves, interleafed

a double-edged syntax; a travel through thin

an unpretentious pilgrim; never
a mercy of divinations

a clandestine abrasion; a myth out of seeking

a three-ton root

a bleeding

a synchophant of bulbs

a poem worth hiding

a name with no meaning

a fire

a river of empty

an envelope of everything

a builder of sheds

a shred of past truth

a dance we forgot we invented

a lie we were hoping

a condescending air; a breath that became you

an admission of sorts

a most painful torpor

an insight smell

a slaughter-site recital

a measure of fringes

a prone irish tick

a studhorse hydrangea; a deaf rattling cupid

a plum pit on the counter
a handwritten note

a successful cheekbone

a person might mention

a detroit local paper

a last report for the coroner

a survivor of what

a strange photo of the question

a form stuck to his shoes

a tattoo emerged

a lottery time; a paragraph notion

a question of country; a nothing

a letter dated january 4, 1991

a presumption cut in half

a semaphoric lilt

a coincidence of panama

a dedication hat

a phone number disaster

a video tremor

an intuitive punch; an announcement spawned

a death commercial; a drive

an alphabetical mushroom

a chronological vagina

a rise; a stick; a stone
a gag janice hears

a blue glass of free

a drag of lake manitoba ice

a sand dune she crawls

a pelvic intent

a dry mask bone

a lighter fluid air; a song sweetly

a lyric drone

a long way to term

a held winning hand

a losing

a whole lot of stone

a specific economy

a comfort of trees

a tether

a small opening of cloves

a protection arts

a personal yearbook

an assistant feminist

a dissertation verse

a minimal

a precious semi

an arc compiled
a how; a letter why

a clearly alive

a second centre conflict

a race

an evolution of

a front to front

an endsheet; endgame

a cover trunk

a lorca model

an ink-coverage

an outside discriminate

a happen

a bigger actually

a quick