Poem’s Dwelling

"The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell."
--Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought

where and where a conjunction
occurs, Poem’s home is
in a thrumming arc of self
effacement and unraveling
scene traced back to the eye

a point, a punct of filiation;
knowing in time spent not
knowledge but a strange sense
of self-friction, thigh on thigh or
night’s finger on ethics; it seems

a rhythmic disassociation, Poem’s
body out-doing itself in a physics
of resingularization; he props
himself on the precipice of
an eyelid, shifting, sees static

walls lined with tricky
contradictions: unrecorded music,
overdo lessons, scientific discoveries;
Poem’s place curls in his belly,
a pang of loss, and unfurls

Poem the Spiritual

Poem trips over the word
that isn’t there. The stumble
puts food on the table, accrues
interest. Praise is bestowed
for not looking back, closer,
and Poem soon forgets
to watch where he is
going.

Back in the day, it wasn’t
even a question; the speeches
moved Poem’s parents (now
disavowed, but still recorded
in the court registry) like
the weather or comedy. The gut
they called it—Poem was
using his gut. The food was
from a long
way away.

The first ulcer came. Poem
misheard it as “Ulster” from the history
books colliding and the old country’s
ferocious hunger
became his own.

The second ulcer wasn’t one but was
related. It hung on Poem’s
free-wheeling pace and gradually
slowed his progress. The visual
icon held his gaze on his death-
bed, smoldered over his shoulder, held
his attention rapt, clasped it when he should have
been busy watching
his footing.

The writing carpet, by Ken Belford

Poetry is everywhere and language is going
too fast. Repressed for thousands of years,
poetry is in the in-between now but much of it is
still kept on the shelf to help academics understand
the world. Before I was born, the breaks
were called theory but now poetry has filled
the chaos gap and I go around saying
what I just said. I write catastrophe models
with a low frequency variance called contact.

You can’t do anything very well
if you’re in denial about the existence
of poetry. Most of my poems are full of chaos
but some call it life, or love. Sometimes I think
there’s a need to cancel all the poetry classes
for two or three generations and then start over.
Even the President is saying the Gross
National Product is threatened because
the people are no good at poetry.

Poetry is like walking. It’s easy but it’s hard
to tell someone how to walk. Most just watch
and by imitation, learn how to do it.
When there is no poetic knowledge,
there can be no evolution, and when there is
dissonance, there is an illness called war.

Poem Cracked the Liberty Bell

He didn’t mean it: the plan, the body,

the shape of semantics, the visceral signals
cried out for disruption. Poem wrings
his hands. Indecisive art.

Freedom was the name
of the security guard at the door.

Form is never more. Philadelphia
folds around the absent sound.

Is it new mythologies Poem seeks,
dodging tourist lines and
palmed-bill allusions?

Poem’s research is a re-
calibration of intent.

No, fashion isn’t Poem’s strong suit.

A rhythm of activity presides.
Besides, the bell wasn’t really
there to be broken. Poem
resides in it; Poem,
alive again, takes the job
of tour guide. Misleads.
Breaks again.

Poem vs. Spam

The streets are awash
with chalk outlines, Poem
walks with care
for the invisible.

The commercial district
lands on his head, his server staggers.

Automoton is a structure
of feeling falsely secure
and shoves Poem
into the overdone store. Poem admits
the others, the lost,
line upon line of the interred. This space
haunts him, skews lines of vision.
He chews a few votive
labels, reads the ingredients,
hums a counter point tune but
he is meant to die here.

The store (afloat in the mouth
of the Automoton) stutters to
a halt. Poem lies
spread-eagle on the checkout counter.
He sings in a high falsetto:

"Take me, my dear dumb crawler
give me that golden drawl here.
Crown that fist and kiss me
shove stocks through me for free.
Spam my head full and clear
claw and fill me up my dear."

The total rings up in
plastic bags of inbox urgency. Poem
excuses himself, apologizes
to the other shoppers, the nervous
security guard,

and with the sound of broken glass and
ungrammatical sentences,
logs out.

Poem’s Fear of Travel

The history’s there, layered
in arrivals, stonework, a global subject writing
ignorance as mastery and caught
in the traffic between difference.

He is mistaken, a mistranslation.
Random buses and a bad compass.

But this awareness is a release,
a pull-tab on a life-vest tossed at
36 000 ft into the library of
not knowing. Water shimmers below.

The foray takes many
litres of fuel, emissions a trail
over Greenland, the line
and imperial tracing of mobility
a second modernity, two
sunrises a doleful symbol, and
Poem lands, thankful for coffee.

The retrospect is writing—“I
should not have gone.” The earth convulses,
reinvents itself as quantum physics, a psychic
thrust of its own. Unowned. Not the coffee but
the coffee bean and
the dirt it is.

Development: the stuttered, halting end
to a fantastical harmony that never existed.

Please ensure your serving trays are
in an upright position and fasten
your poetics securely around your waist.

Poem with No Credit

for rob mclennan

Before he begins, Poem
observes the scene—who
has been here before
& why not again/still.

Long coat tasting the soup &
side salad bar slouch w/ poetry
up his sleeve, Poem
comes to town to read.

He’s single, fast
w/ a come back, heckles
the other poet’s reading, strokes
his moustache to better
see the audience.

The improbable harlequin w/
no place for capital, the plane
car bus a text testing
the air a desk.

This time, he strolls onstage
more assured, a vagrant
who knows his place—the words
a rhythm of longing
for the old days, poets
w/ poets’ grace or flair, the madness
hovering like the next stanza—

He knows them, the old guard
floats over his shoulder,
a subtext between the uneven
breaks in thought/breath and

then he begins, an homage
and Poem’s poem carries
us here—home.

The crusher, by Ken Belford

I will think of your road when the open pit is flooded
and the immediate receiving water is authorized,
and habitat destruction and the flow losses begin
in the final version of the plan. I can say it now,
I can say goodbye Amazay, the crush disposed
under your natural body of living water. And
I don’t have much to add except to say always
these proposed strategies to compensate for
whole lake destruction are lies. I would love to
go back to T’am Uumxsit one day because I was
ageless in Sakxwhi Tax and here you are
needle face, in the crushing café circles of
Seattle, where the wheel of fate is red.

There is a net loss when options fail, when
transplants like me, in the combination
of boulders and woody debris, can’t adhere
to the drainages like a Dolly in another
watershed or lake or upstream passage, here
in the upper Ingenika, when the like for like
transplant men remove the barriers and
mix sacrificial samplings into streams.

They are creek robbers,
and in the spring
they will be lifting gravels and lifting fishes
where slides run out across the channel.
The mainstem reaches
and dewatered Chuckachida
slides in the cascade
along the valley bottom
to an isolated lake downstream.
Still, the bedrock falls
and the function of the passages
angled from the confluence
might destabilize the structure,
so I count rays along the shoreline
while the channel is hammered out.

Form controls and Amazay is powerless
against these men who cannot keep their hands off.
Every second year during the stable summer flows,
they will lace their boots and return
to dominate the waters. Amazay was nature’s body.
This dead body of water was never an idea
and the acts done to the reproductive systems
have everything to do with fragmented bodies,
spawning beds and making money off women.

I can’t imagine compensation lakes.
The littoral truth of the shore zone keeps
Amazay’s structures and cascades in place.
Sediments extend across the bed, across
the gravel, the sand, the silt and clay.
Beneath, the ground water flows
across the inflow and outflow barriers
they plan to blow. But the passage
structure inhibits the over-story
and they say the barriers will be removed
and the classes within the system
will fin their way to the two-way,
to the small lakes at the end.
If transplanted fish squirt over the divide,
and cross over in the headwaters reach
and the flow path length is extended
to the glacial headwater lake,
then poison will seep over the area
and the pure water above the barriers
will be within the system no more.

Photo of Crow

A gurgle ruffled from a morning
fog hunkered over the park, black
spruce float the sound higher
a sharp click and chuckle.

Lack of definition circles
the tallest evergreen, barks a tattoo
against the white air.

Myth a luminous absence—
the corrosive text, its toxic
sentence flowing out.

Poised here, an intersection of opportunity,
garbage, vantage, and disinterest, the possibility
of flight caught in a thick cracked beak and
a penultimate purple.

Poetry is dead, a photo
not taken, a scavenged plot
adapting itself to the wastelands.