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the living and the deadI lie on the floor, I cannot bear
the bed, the sheets, so sweet smelling
soft. I lie on the floor like it is the deck of a ship
before a storm.

the things I used to tell you
no one knows,
the nightmares followed us home, but I like
to think you have learned the secret -

where to begin the forgetting. I
put you in a room like a moth
in a jar, listen for your last breath, open
the door, but you are gone

the scent of burning
hair, the animal fear, the way your
knees brush each other like leaves,
soundless

I lie on the floor, my hipbone falling
between beams, dirty laundry under my cheek,
I fall asleep watching the rise and fal

12.Jan.10Leaving the bus stop, alone at twilight, I want to wave farewell to the backs of the strangers heading home. A failed date today, a rumbling muffler chokes - white breath, a young couple hurries past to catch the night train.

I commiserate with my cell phone's inbox; (three new messages, all junk) and watch a mother pull two children from the faces they are drawing on a parked car's windshield. Warm fingers leave behind two jaunty smiles in the frost. On the sidewalk stretching home, a sweet smell drifts from far away, and a man stubs out his cigarette, stone cold in an instant.

words clutter fogged panes
a passing sleeve erases

For the Encounters I Never HadI released my regrets like a million balloons
chasing the sky with their bright round bodies --
wingless martyrs caught each tiny breath of air
and soared,

a moment of epiphany
when your rubbery skin punctures
and the soul escapes.

There is no element light enough to lift me away,
no instrument to sever the strings that earth
my tiny anklets --

I sway with the seasons
as if I am surrounded by an ocean,
unable to tread water fast enough to run,
nor find the reach to break the surface

where those regrets float momentarily,
winking in the sunlight before they coast away,
waiting for my realisation --

they pollute my conscience

Five's a CrowdA Saskatoon year is not symmetrical:
it has five seasons

familiar four—
stumbling into one another
awkward gropes
toasting timeless acquaintance

the interloper
is grey and tan
   a folded old woman
   a stalk of straw in her gravel teeth.
Limping, smiling and wet
from between Winter’s supermodel thighs
she stains white legs
     damp cigarette butts and chokecherries
     knotted in her grove of hair.

Yet we smile

snow-blind,
    we only feel
    her forehead warmth
    her

dalikrab daya holiday for nothing.
celebrate it yesterday if you want to
and make tomorrow its 50th anniversary.

wear a mustache
on your hind quarters
and speak only in sexual gestures.
have a translator present.

every dalikrab day
needs what every other
dalikrab day was missing.
to make this easy on you
i will tell you that every
dalikrab day so far has
been missing everything.

light incense made from cow manure
and filter your water with the
leftovers.

put that in your pipe that is not a pipe and smoke it.

draw from imagery that has nothing
to do with you. like nudity.

leave the house for once but remain
under the same umbrella.

the future is for gypsieswe are all twenty three point five degrees shy
of even, a people off-kilter and invariably prodigal, timid
as our buffalo. you have a hometown, i say out loud
while driving in it, and you murmur something about murder,
the dusky war over your head. you say those birds don't
even know about the obliquity of the ecliptic, and here
they are, trying to change it with all their weight in the sky.
twenty three point five, you repeat, your mouth around it
gingerly as a psalm, as a lioness with cubs, and we keep driving.
there are sights: a stripped-wire cherry tree, its fragile arms tipped
with ravens, their children unstrung and clinging

churchlord you spun me out
of morning rays and mexican
china, out of paper elephants
and camomile flowers. you took
the tongue
and ears away from a deaf
mute and gave them to me
so i could hear the others
say speak the word of jesus
wide-eyed like children, so that
i could say my name is emily,
my name is emily but i can't
remember who
i am.

lord you gave me green
whisky when all i needed
was a glass of water in
the middle of the
night and arms instead
of a parting knife.
you wrote me a poem and
put it inside me and
the words smelled like sex
and tea leaves, carrot-flowers that
will emerge from the dirt
someday
smiling an

Red RuinsIt's 1964 or 65 or 95 or 2005. Dates don't matter anyway. What matters is what happened and why it happened and how it is now.

I can't remember the date but I'm wearing a red sundress and I'm in love with the way it flows. Maybe that was my problem. Maybe I was always in love with the idea of things or the idea of people instead of actual things or actual people.

So I'm wearing my red sundress and I'm six years old. I'm six years old but I feel like I'm forty and I'm having tea with my mother. 'How are you?' She says and this is where I learned how to lie. 'I love you.' She says and this is where I learned how other people lie. I watched he

...27...                She wore barbed wire necklaces so that every time she laughed, it hurt.

                Little Freckles Frankie was the first to make her laugh so hard she bled. He was ten, she was eleven. I don’t think he has found anything funny since.  It was too bad really, baby blue eyes tend to twinkle when they laugh.

  I caught her countin

II collect herbs on the Hansel and Gretel path to make a potion to drink and find the Baba Yaga within.

I jeep a million miles a week to celebrate one secret from one child that hints at the power they carry blithely.

I paint abstract road signs with the three colors plus dawn and twilight to find the night spot to dance the kundalini cha-cha.

I sit on a throne of thorns and watch through the dispelling inner fog as my body torques into imitations of a rose blooming.

I pour a river of skin into the ocean of his morning and feel the tsunami swell through a worldwide heartbeat.

I suck the colors and light and darkness from my inner psychede

StemListen:
the song
of a river
unweaving.

i.

A tongue of fog
flutters by the windowsill;
hushed still by dawn,
the moon spells lovers' dreams
in the morning light.

ii.

Fireflies swarm by the window
to dip their wings
and fly away;
my shadow swims
along the windowpanes.

iii.

Chalk-white waves of moonlight
shimmer down the vales
with the eloquence
of thunder;

in some soot-swept alley
where mother prayed
for a stillborn,
a stream of light rushes
through a man like a train.

Listen:
the song
of rivers unweaving,
poinsettia in my hands
and the taste of rain
in your Summer lips.

iv.

The worms come out at night
for t

On DisappointmentI.

Out on the porch, my mother sat in an Adirondack chair, smoking
her first cigarette in ten years. The air was hazy and discolored.
Her wedding ring spun on the table, gathering fallen ashes.

I was on the floor, knees tucked up under my chin, poking sticks
down the cracks. She spoke of lies and imagined bliss.
She tucked her hair behind her ear and sighed.

I listened as my mother explained the complexity of love.

II.

Last night he drove just over the state border. I sat in the car,
feet up on the dashboard, singing with the radio. He looked at me
like he had a secret. He was the sage and I was the fool.

So there we were, lying

things i have buriedbatches of badly folded letters from my grandmother's
apartment, all tightly scrawled russian, smudged ink.
the luna moth my brother caught when i was seven,
its wings becoming a chartreuse stain on his palms.

the mark of every song that has ever made me feel,
each differently shaped and stitched together
to form the patchwork of resilience that is my heart.
sepia photographs, antiquated polaroids,
with nothing written in the white spaces
where stories of moments should be.

narrow granada streets, their uneven cobblestones
turned hazy with august's heavy heat;
the familiar taste of tears etched into frown lines
that i am too

to my former self -i.

in a dim and exhausted new york subway train - i
surrender my fingerprints over to dirty railings and
start over.

ii.

my body stretches like a mayan temple over his landscape.
my sun drags itself across his skies to his brutal moon
prowling the outskirts of our madness. he says

bend yourself to these sights, love.
recognize, but never accept.
i want your filthy and bruised hope
on my table. he was

saturating space, says - how much
do you love your world. eyes screaming
alive over and over again. you can do better

he says, but you want to do worse.

iii.

a giraffe crawls out of my dead skin and is silent,
but stares with fa

Notes on AnatomyComparative Osteology:

The next time I have chicken, I will make a wish by snapping the joined clavicles with someone I love. I now know where to shoot livestock to cause minimal suffering, should that be required, and I will not tell a farmer to first palpate the nuchal crest of his doomed animal before aiming his gun. I ran my hands along what used to be an elephant, what used to be a giraffe, what used to be a cat nine lives ago. I put my face against a horse's skull and tried to whisper requests - to see if it could whisper back and tell me of the great lush pastures on the other side.

I was always told that cane toads make a fantastic

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When we left medicine behindby `PinkyMcCoversong

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Submitted on: November 30, 2008
File Size: 2.0 KB

Views: 4,478
Favourites: 140 (who?)
Comments: 28
Downloads: 118

Daily Deviation

Given 2010-03-31

When we left medicine behind by `PinkyMcCoversong ( Featured by `StJoan )

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~J-Goth Mar 31, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

This is really good.

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~schriftsteller Mar 31, 2010 Writer

Also-- this is my new favourite poem.

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~schriftsteller Mar 31, 2010 Writer

God. I'm at a loss for words-- all of it is so stunning.

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~A-Real-Shame Mar 31, 2010

so epic i can't think of ways to say how epic. really. seriously.

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~KokoPuffChan Mar 31, 2010 Writer

_{a DD with only 19 comments...

this is so lovely, it brings so many images and feelings and thoughts. lit like this really makes my days. <3}

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~Empress-Eerian-Sadow Mar 31, 2010 Hobbyist Writer

congrats on your Daily Deviation! (it's how i found this!)

this is positively amazing! there is depth to it that i can't explain, but it's delightfully thought provoking and i love it.

may i archive it in the gallery at the #FanaticWritersGuild?

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!forestsofazure Mar 31, 2010

very strange.i like it

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Mood: Love

~pibis Mar 31, 2010

Excellent piece. I cannot help but admire.

Also, on some level, be it the surface only, or some deeper nostalgia as well, it brings to my mind "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury.

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~Synthetic-MilkMan Mar 31, 2010 Student Writer

I thought this too but I think it's only because that's the best thing every written about Mars. As decent as this is, it's no Bradbury.

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~pibis Apr 6, 2010

Aye, it ain't no Bradbury. It's a different sorta thing.

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