i wear my bones
beneath my skin,
and my heart
beneath them still,
armored in the dark,
beating the shit out of me
like so much waste
through my sewer veins –
only to flow back again

the earth cracked open
and poured forth in blood
covering my land
til’ the flies came
and blackened the sky

so i dug and i dug
a great, deep hole;
a gaping cavern,
to catch the torrent,
and i covered it over
and forgot about it.

sometimes at night
when my head is laid out
and the wind is quiet
i can hear the river raging
beneath my leaden skull;
so i let it lull me to sleep
with dreams of Charon
waiting on coin…

you are the sun,
i think,
the great and blazing beauty
that hovers in my sky;
so unfair to lock you in my firmament
but there you are, nevertheless, shining,
and the shadows waver in a dance
to my uneven, waltzing orbit
round and about your bright,
round and about your light.

it is time, perhaps,
to live under a brighter sky
filled with both sun and moon
and encrusted with the infinite star-scape
that we might, in light, see a little more
than the present dark has allowed before
if only we would but lift our heads
and look up…

In these raw moments after the shootings in Ottawa and the previous day’s attack on soldiers in Quebec my heart hurts and I will write down my thoughts as honestly and potentially ill-advised as they may be.

My heart hurts for Canada. My heart hurts for the dead…all of the dead…my heart hurts for the days ahead and the change this will create in my country.

I cannot understand the hatred that can lead a person to do these things and I hope I never understand it. I do feel anger though. I feel a great and welling anger with nowhere to direct it and I know others are feeling this as well.

I am afraid of this most of all.

Canadians are generally slow to anger and thoughtful for the most part on where it needs to be directed. We are a peace-loving people although this has often been seen as weakness by outsiders (and some insiders) but frankly nothing could be further from the truth.

The well of the Canadian heart is very deep; the storehouse of our resolve is even deeper.

We are not warriors…we are something greater…we are the ones who end wars. We are the ones about whom it was written “Greater love has no one than this, that a person lay down their life for their friends.”

We never seek vengeance…we seek to protect those who cannot protect themselves, especially our own.

It is our heritage to sacrifice where others cannot. It is our blood that still soaks the fields of Vimy Ridge in France during WW I where The Canadian corps suffered 10,602 casualties: 3,598 killed and 7,004 wounded during a four day offensive. It is our blood that has been spilled in countless conflicts around the world as we seek to stand between the bullets as a shield for the defenseless.

We are not a violent people and we mourn now as something very un-Canadian is unfolding in our land, but it would be a terrible mistake for others to confuse our stoicism and quiet, thoughtful demeanor for cowardice.

If our history has shown anything it is that we can, when necessary, be as cold and unflinching as our winters and as hard and impassable as our mountains.

We will never start a fight…but no one is better at ending them than we are.

I mourn for my nation and the dead and I pity those who would seek to do us harm in the days ahead.

a million, million actions
sit inside me like so much

p o t e n t i a l  e n e r g y

a word, a move, a tangent
to run along from
this fixed point

but armor works both ways
in stopping the slings and arrows
from leaving as well as entering

to exist…

irreducible,

(n)ever expanding,

a vibrating string of contradiction
frozen into this life’s pond
makes the heart beat fast
while cloaked in flesh and bone
as if it never existed at all

No matter how much of it has been stolen from you, no matter how much of it has been mined out of you and how empty of it you are…you cannot steal your innocence back.

Innocence is an empty glass that gets filled over time…a void whose vacuum is stolen by one invading occupant after another…you want it back…tip it up…spill it out and start again.

pulse with the constricting throb
of a life that hugs us too damn tight
and squeezes the life from our ever-loving lungs
that it might bring us to a place
that we might be taken and swallowed whole

old men cannot dance
to the music of the modern wood nymphs
because their skin is a stone-faced sarcophagus
to the wailing world

old men cannot sing
to the sound of new love-sick crazies
tuning their throats together in chorus
because their voices are sand songs
rasped over the listening ears

old men cannot long
for the bronze and the slyly revealed
taking in the sun like dye in wool
because their hearts are empty
with the hollow haunted dreams

old men cannot touch
the pressing or the yielding hands
that reach like waves in the desert
because their time passed them by
when they weren’t looking

old men cannot live
in a life that forgot it birthed them,
haggard parent that is too used up
with little ones to keep them awake
screaming for milk to scarce to go round

so I will not get old
I simply will
then I simply won’t

for me I’m not so clever in the light
until the sun runs from the shadows
calling moon to give me different sight
keeping me cold and too alive