Québécoise Cat

Tiny feet, fiercely punching through the snow;

Amber eyes

Like owls’

Glow.

Beaver-shaped tigress, greasy piebald fur,

Plots murder

For her

Sport.

Cosy, chill apartment at black midnight;

Bristling hair

Clicks, sparks

Light

In an awe-struck gaze and lawnmower purr

Angelic

Love shows

Pure.

Mattress Factory

In the southwest end of Scarboroughtown

Behind the bar and fitness club

Where wallets empty,

Sweating in shorts, betting on sports;

You’ll find a dim-lit den of misery.

Festering residue of un-exported Industry

Hidden from passers-by.

Small wonder why,

Who wants to buy

Tired exhalations of lives fading by?

All the colours of Benetton

United by a white-picket-fence lie.

Sicily to Saigon to Colombo to Kabul;

A catalogue of victims of history.

Every few years, ruddy men in green fatigues,

Beaters in a Medieval hunt

Drive the bomb-frightened game

Into their abattoirs of aspiration.

The terror of hunger makes for docile hands,

Tremulous in gratitude,

To stitch the fabric, fry the food, scrub away the feces

Cheaply, with a Smile.

One needn’t give a warm welcome

When the guest has nowhere to return to.

Walls stained by decades of profit black,

Sewing machines hum, staple-guns click-clack.

The only windows

Sleep-craved imaginations,

The only song

The hacking of Jazz-Tex-encrusted lungs.

The Victims of History each earnestly conducting

A human sacrifice,

Seeking to bless their children

With certificates of exemption

From life as bipedal oxen.

Shudder,

Grateful I did not have to learn

How to console a heart

Too tired for dreams.

Pacific Highway

The highway snakes through the ocean of conifer trees

Through the fog-shrouded mountains, high above the sea

Where trucks and saws through the summer hum,

And fitful dreams sometimes echo with ghostly drums…

Sallow, amorphous faces

Drifted in from unknown places

Wait lonely, frost-bitten nights

Playing Russian roulette with each pair of approaching lights.

Dispossessed tenants who are their own rent

Paid through the nose

From meager accounts soon spent.

Trembling, sun-starved hands collecting unwritten bills;

The primeval stands of Douglas fir

Shading the stain of social ills…

Summer’s rude growth of reeds

Swallows, thrown from a passing van,

A black plastic bag of…old beer cans…who knows?

And a debt still owed

Contracted on the side of a Pacific road.

The Tamarack Bog

I met a man in a grease-grimed diner –
A grey, and hunched, and trout-eyed miner –
And offered a bottle if he’d regale
Stone-bored travellers with some age-steeped local tale.
An evil thirst impelled to slake,
He grinned, and twitched, and whisp’ring spake:
“Far from the City’s neon glare,
Where rise the peaks, ‘neath whose icy stare
Sourdough and coolie panned for gold,
A lake reposes, still and cold.
No mapbook marks its oozing shore,
Known but to time-dimmed Native lore;
An unclaimed stake of prairie loam,
Where the aspens quake in the breezeless gloam
At the edge of a low and level plain
Whose soil yields not fruit nor grain.
Truckers who pass the vap’rous glade
Tell of shadows that dance in black spruce’ shade;
No bird alights; no fawn does drink
From that stygian well of living ink.
The scaly birch and gall-skinned oak,
Ne’er shaking off last winter’s cloak,
Brood o’er banks, whose gummy clay and feathered reeds
Conspire to secret unhallowed deeds.
There, lone and shunned, its piles half sank
‘Mid the vines and mud, so queerly rank,
A cottage stands, whose windows leer,
Unblinking, at the lurid meer.
Hurry home, ere the red sun’s sunk and gone
And the moon ‘pon that glassy water shone,
Lest in those windows you glimpse a glow
That no fire, nor moon, nor lamp could throw.
If yet you should tarry, and gaze within the bog,
One look will see you vanish, wailing through the fog.”

. . .