#AllMen

the time it takes to

get ready the morning, the blank

stares and climb to the back

of the work camp

bus—what length beard and

the price of peaches

all men and diapers

all men and taxes

on the movie industry

on this day he lets his lover

sleep in and checks the charts

for any let up, any hint

as to where his grandfather went

all men disappear into html

and terms of reference replace

what his outline left

a bar stool and a quick look

to access the field—poetry

and the addressee of all men

hail all men hail

amen to the rink and pitch

filled with rules to keep the small packets

of history hitched to our belts

all men carry the load, the tablet

scored with commands, the backpack

to the outback to feed the burn; all men

play the trumpet to ward off her morning light

on the examining table, the patient does not

meet the doctor’s gaze—a hand placed there

and there and he mumbles something about his

bowel movements and the doctor leans over

to take some notes, her awareness of his

discomfort adding to the slant of her script

all men deserve better, all men deserve less

control, all men serve the other men and their

hate is spilled into the reservoir 

all men are a hypoxic feedback loop

with shells pock-marked by action

films and bleached by the internet

all men believe the anchormen on the news,

all men believe in all men

a certain efficacy that all men share

when ordering food at a restaurant

all men know how to limp their wrists

all men own the pronoun’s pronoun

all men reserve the right

tense moments over the wording of the affidavit—

this monument to the precedent, to the legal jurisprudence,

to the gavel’s symbolic weight, to all the men who line the walls

not all the time was spent in dispute—the rest was

taken to fortify and change the locks

all men spill open like a cracked egg

clickbait

sure, put it out there

the first line 

cleavage, or 

lumbersexual chic

every way you 

look, you

are caught 

by the scream

the gloss of this

trenchant bottom 

line, or

family drama

surrogate, you

sure wish all

this would make

a living, or

climax, or

transition to

origins

the myth of community

So I stepped off the stoop into

culture, expecting something

there to give and receive and

weave with the weft

and left to my own origins,

the crass concepts where I reside, 

the soil I inhaled, hush, but

such was not the case

and skin and gender and

class met me at the end of the street, 

threatened my life, sent

complaints to my third employer,

whispered in jubilant webby groups,

then erased the traces, and eased

to my side to console me.

*    *     *

swirling assessments

mobility, like a drum

beat or open sourced water

experience (stunned into being)

cyclical, transformative, interactive:

all difficult, but not

all outcomes, all relations

a reflexive gaze, bobbing

sunning in the eddies and heavy

oxygenated air (and desire

is extraneous) waves made

a bit like nudity

what is necessary? an igneous

and groundwater core

(ethics?) where you live

and its disconnect from consumption,

where you are, shuddering in syntax

*  *  *

Unidling

begin start the first
the music of care and four
women saying it again
to circle and stop

the prairie nations carrying generational
the way to the start and the eighth

to circle to stop to
turn off the tap
roots rooting further

the women don’t stop
the place and their will

the fraser, the skeena nations
will stand a circle against lines
stopped up with haste

the round the drum in
hands for a turn—
to circle a stop
and a recreation story

toponym 5

the North, a medium-tall scrub

at eye level, the other layers flowing

into and out of

the poem

but for now, the moment

is this line of willows, second-growth

awareness

burned-over areas,

Labrador tea against the thigh

and a rustle of being

scrub birch, black spruce,

listening for connection

the thin tree cover wetland

buzzes away the afternoon drowse

soaks though shoes,

holds you here

toponym 4

contingencies blend and/

or collide and the root structures

                             flex with input

the political economy

of the space is a             constant

negotiation of flow

the energy of a word’s

motion across paths

of light, water,

generosity

the name of the place is

consumed: chewed and changed,

shit on the road,

washed into a gully,

reorganized

in transition moments or/

and ecotone zones the shift is

a turn and sway and knows

nothing of revolution

the needs of this area

will be met

toponym 2

maps lose us
in their          accurate
lines, boundaries of own and
out and here
there and when it was

this separation--the gap
of space and standing
             (a glance around
              for others there too
(and love         love for
you placing yourself
all your relations
defining the next
step, the next
meal          time is land

the measures are story
the place neural
           inaccuracies scrounging for survival

Blockade 4

dawn, prescient, bulldozer      |       the flow of resources go also through our mind                                           |              cardboard boxes and broken crates on fire; three white-tails further down                                  the ditch            |               first, what family’s land               | the road, the pipe, the                             terminal, the tanker, the destined port, the profit—all going away and leaving       |                              resting crouched on the ground, feet planted, listening to the sounds of small creatures,                           the air, the rich smell of hoolhghulh powering the ravine, the trickle of water everywhere,                      the place is not numbers, the place is not yours           |         a tourniquet would seem so                      enticing too                  |               enbridging v.  :   to make a leap in logic that dismisses                            all other points of view           |        “nation-building” the minister’s claim staked          |                         what else is a 1991 Civic for              |                 named Tehwehron, named MacBlo                          Brutalist in 1993              |                  this passive act of war, this bodied word