where the accused are cousins of the reeve.
No poem captures grief like the night
we heard about a sister’s stiffened corpse.
She had tried crossing, without shoes or clothing,
frozen fields to the offices of Public Works.
About her, in shop class, we said it wasn’t
quite rape, per se, but more a property crime.
A pimp-drug-dealer had traded her in
for a wide-tank hog in need of new paint.
Every girl knows about the warming shack
beside the hockey rink, the hunting camp
with tourist dollars – where no sex offence
ends in charges. This latest rape, forget it.
No level of policing will care one bit.
Our teacher said the girl blacked out by the pond,
when two bros she’d hung with since she was a kid
told her, ‘Lift your shirt, let us feel those tits.’
Swig-men, c. the 13th Rank of the Canting Crew, carrying small Habberdashery-Wares about, pretending to sell them, to colour their Roguery.
Advent
I’ll follow you
to the heat-lamp diner.
Follow you
to the fruitfly barstool.
Follow you
over wailing overpasses.
Follow you
to bedbug theatres.
Follow you
down warehouse elevators.
Follow you
into communal gardens.
Follow you
to where, with disinterest,
we can wallow
amid the gristle
of food-court cynics.
Follow you
to visit a keen-eyed Inuk
under a crumbling icebridge
where we can kiss.
We’re nine grandmothers
removed from nomads,
with nine beautiful sisters
to teach us numbers.
I’ll follow you.
Aphorisms of a Visored Paladin
At some point you’ll finally feel the old show’s double entendre dull
in a hyper-sexualized world.
When the greenery was haranguing you into joining it for spring,
shouldn’t you have plied a trade?
If your eyes past midnight bled with metaphor and effort,
good.
The cat you passed up forever tingled behind
like a war vet’s ghost limb.
Why didn’t you, Steven, Bank Manager, friend, say life was a roll
of receipts tallying from first credit card to below the grass?
Those molten burps bursting in your throat never heralded
the brouhaha before the heart attack.
She was a Cree scoutress, quiet through wood, ear to ground,
and I lost her trail.
You know you raved too hard those two years in a row the Best Cheddar in the British Empire
went to Bothwell.
So you didn’t make the NHL – weren’t you a foot-hockey champion, who pounded home
a frozen tennis ball at the backstop mesh when high up slot?
You know the man of eighty-something highlighting his Bible beside you
was you.
The hoebag devouring pomegranates in the nightshower was you.
Since he was one serious imam, you were one serious Orangeman when you were drunk.
The mucked-up world, when a high school English teacher informed
the only people reading it are poets.
An acid-wash jean jacket with Anarchy felt-markered black
on the back is not that bad after all.
Rejoice for all the years Astrology.com sent you a birthday card.
Thank God you pulled out when your diet fell to hell,
Cantonese and creatine by the bellyful.
Hemmed in the indigo gloam of a basement bedroom, more like a bordello
of velvet black drapes, us trinity of Goth kids, so far gone into Dungeons and Dragons,
rolled out our fates on twenty-sided die, and you, Steven, Bank Manager, friend,
were always the DM.
Sister Aspires to Destress
Sister got sloppy on Oxycontin.
It really set our broken home into motion.
Her basement teen-den decompressed one afternoon
Sister and her bestie rolled a Shoppers.
I didn’t agree with Mom enrolling me in martial arts
when she was overcome with unspeakable woe
and signed me on for classes in tae kwon do.
I didn’t want to live, so what the hell:
I wanted to go and beat someone down.
I wanted to be someone beaten down.
Dad hated me for not writing to him in jail. I hated
him for not escaping to kill Stepdad. Alphonse!
Sister got floppy on Oxycontin
and I was gifted a white belt and crackling white gi.
All credit to me, I snuck from the school library
a dog-eared tome on Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee
and spent hours each night throwing daggers
at a backyard tree. To prep for the Tuesday I’d arrive
at the dojo on my blue ten-speed Raleigh.
Street-fighting, Master said, was the class’s emphasis.
Striking pressure points, gouging eyes, kneeing groins
was the best defence, and in twenty minutes
my ribs cracked holding pads for the Master’s son.
He beat me to tears in the sparring session.
I yearned for a hole to fill up inside me,
unlike Sister. She aspired to empty.
Night Caprice
The blend of humour
and humiliation,