I met a man yesterday who stopped
walker braked to ask me for
a cigarette and a match and thanked me
all in words I couldn’t understand
over the current of the river running
into the sound.
    He said

my face was blown off in the war,
I’m seventy-five and my wife
died four years ago in her wheelchair
and anyway no one likes to talk to me
because I can’t control the reconstructed
muscles around my mouth so they think
I’m impossible to understand

    and I understood and he
laughed and said, only needing to repeat himself twice,

I like to fish and I used to canoe
before my canoe tipped over one day
and I haven’t been in a canoe since
but I still come to the river before
sunrise and catch my dinner (though
I don’t have many teeth to
eat it with) and I’m so glad
to live in this town, and I’m so
glad to have met you, and I’m
downtown every day so please wave
if you see me around

    and he shook my hand and
leaned on his walker and released
the brakes and slowly went
on his way, taking breaks every
few metres to breathe

and I never saw him again.

There was something you told me, once,
standing beneath the tree in the park
(the tree has since fallen, crushing
the fence but no children, the thunderous crack
a warning; it was hollow and rotten
and hundreds of years old. Now
it is a stump) that I do not remember, 
tender or soft or rotten in the way
that words can be. You left your sentences
damp after the rainstorm, and they
were covered over with mildew and
the trails of slugs
     like those you befriended, once,
     in our childhood, and raced
     against mine, and cried,
     and tried to convince them 
      to crawl into old shells
      because they reminded you
      of the old man who walks 
      around downtown with a tumour
     on his nose, walking halfway
     across the city every day and
     refusing housing or surgery that some
     claim a friend of a friend 
      once offered;
and they rotted into lies like the holes
in your heart, a defect carried in
your chest since birth, less lethal than
the secrets nestled beside that pulsing muscle
under your ribcage ― the doctors say
that you’ll be fine, anyway. That’s all
you ever asked for, and I remember
everything you ever asked for, but
I don’t remember what you told me,
that day, under the tree in the park.

And anyway, it probably wasn’t important.
That’s why I remember the event,
and not the occasion.

i have been trying to write poetry lately but it’s all really bad because i suck at everything but maybe i will post some of it anyway okay ? :c

My father dressed himself
in layers. He’d wear a buttoned
shirt, plaid, or perhaps a jean
jacket. He’d wear stained slacks
that were too big for him. He looked
like a victim. He looked like hell.
His face had sunken cheeks and
his hair was thinning and you
could never tell if he was forty
or ninety. He was sixty. He was
tired and had a permanent sun-
burn from the radiation. His skin
was leathery. He coughed every
few seconds and sighed, and sighed,
“I can’t taste anything.” The sight of
him made you cry, sometimes. Other
times it made you scream. It made me
scream into my pillow at night when he
called me sexy, told me I had nice breasts,
told me he checked me out every time
he saw me. I wanted to scream. But I
never screamed at him. He looked like
a glass figurine. He looked like he’d break
if you breathed on him. Maybe he would.
I never tried. My father drowned himself
in whisky every night, until his heart decayed,
and he stopped for a week, until he got
depressed and started again. He never
stopped again. My father didn’t even
try. He didn’t go back to work. He lost the muscles
he used to pull my soccer ball out of the ice.
My father killed himself one day at a time.
I’m glad he saw us graduate. He never
graduated.

He dressed in layers. A buttoned plaid shirt
or a jean jacket on top. And underneath, every
day, no matter how yellow and cigarette-stained
they became, he wore the stupid shirts we
painted for him every year for father’s day
that had pictures of trophies and handprints
and said “Number one dad” and “My kids
love me”. Every day. I think he died
with whisky on his breath. I think he died
in one of those shirts.

I tried to slip my fingers around
the spaces between us
and name the widening gap
over which we called to one another
in increasingly inaudible voices,
but you kissed my spine,
where my neck meets my back,
and shushed me and lulled me to sleep
before I could grasp hold of
everything you were keeping from me.
I ignored the empty crevice in the mattress
that mirrored your shape
when you sneaked out every night,
and tried not to read into the cigarettes hidden
in your top drawer.
I took you at face value,
and you willingly offered your body,
leaving out all the pieces of yourself
that I would be scared to know.

When you turned into a bird and flew away one morning
(or so I assume from the feather left on your pillow),
I accepted that it was a long time coming.
I fished out one of the hidden cigarettes,
lit it tenderly,
and let it burn itself to ash between
my fingers.

She couldn’t remember how
to build herself as anything
other than a victim ― helpless
to the tide of boxes and
old letters that threatened
to engulf her. She made
passive attempts to keep
the mess at bay, but
it always seemed to
elude her, and she didn’t
care enough to chase it.
Dust quickly settled
into her hair and wrinkles,
which she covered with
dye and makeup instead of
cleaning out. She purged
her closet once a year, but
the mess somehow just
spread to the rest of the
apartment ― nothing could be
thrown away, discarded,
abandoned. Perhaps that’s
why she never managed to
control the mess ― it reminded her
too much of herself.

Guitars and train cars
vibrate, steel strings or rails or hearts
press against one another and
beg not to be forgotten. You promised
that there were two ways out
of any situation: a song
or a train ticket. Either one
could carry me away, you said,
teach me how to fly and become
someone new. You told me
that the light at the end of the tunnel
wasn’t just a metaphor, but a hidden code
sighing “there is hope” into every dreamer’s ear.
You sang to me to calm my heart
when it tried to break the sound barrier,
cooing “la la la”s between “you can make it”s
and “don’t give up”s. You said
that there was no point in killing yourself
until you had travelled every inch
of the world. You promised that
there were two ways to escape.
When you took the third option,
I grabbed your guitar and a train ticket
and left.

I could hover between moments,
caught between the worlds of caring and apathy,
wake up every hour just to remind myself
I’m asleep. I could dance,
point my toes and pretend to fall with grace
and pretend the bruises are stage makeup
and pretend not to be blinded
by the spotlight. I could open my eyes
and face a morning and accept
that my dreams aren’t reality.
Or I could close the blinds
and hover between moments
just to feel more alive.

I want to feel your skin
the way I think grapefruits grow.
Grapefruits didn’t used to be
grapefruits. They were bred naturally
from sweet oranges and pomelos.
People didn’t used to eat grapefruits,
they would just look at their delicately
flowering trees, and let the fruits fall
to the ground. I could never objectify
you like that. I could never imagine
looking without touching, without
asking you how you felt or where
you came from or what your pulp
tasted like. Grapefruits were called
the forbidden fruit, but nobody ever
told me I couldn’t have you. Well,
some people told me I couldn’t have you,
only because of the way your ovaries grew,
the way your breasts grew, like grapefruits,
round and flowering and fleshy.

Grapefruits are my favourite fruit.
That’s how I want to touch you.

It is easy to believe
that this is what monks
spent lifetimes reaching toward.

I am not this place. I am not
handshakes or white doctors
or door-handles turned down: “They
are a safety hazard.”

They will take your blood pressure
and measure your heart rhythms
and listen to the tides in your arteries
in case your heartbreak
is more serious than they thought.

“Stop crying. Show some emotion.
Empty out your head, but remember
everything and tell us about it.
All of it.

Check off yes or no.
There is no “maybe”.
What do you mean you don’t know?
Maybe you need a thermometer.
You need to quantify yourself.

My qualifications? I spent years
living in a monastery in Tibet.
No, not really. Just sign here.
We’ll make you well.”

There is a certain zen
that comes with having
no access to pens or toilet seats.
Everything is white.