FAKE POEM 1
The last day was easy i needed to talk i needed to talk it slipped out of me like an animal out of its burrow and whipped around the tree whistling under its breath and breaking the air unseasonably with a quick turn of phrase as quick as the broken wind as it fell from the trees moaning quietly as if interrupted in its sleep uncomprehending the silence of that insane evening whenever we spoke it was as if as if went backwards from the air to the mouth from the ear to the air until that last breathless moment when at last I fell quiet, swallowing tenaciously
FAKE POEM 4
Yesterday I thought that way until I went to bed my regulated waking thinking interrupted in my dream the shadow of a man walked through the very transparent window through which I viewed my world disrupted what I had been pleased to call my chain of thought turned out to be not a hard discrete chain at all but a smooth continuous though not entirely seamless skein and thereafter a colourless stream and thereafter again an interrupted stream broke in splashes on the pavement slipped away dwindling in a rush of colours never to be redeemed again but never mind a new skin replaced the old in time and the same two feet stood again too squarely standing on the ground as always walking up the stairs and down again and up
FAKE POEM 10
You were not born alone,
& you will not die alone.
Someone will be there with you always,
even in that echoing room,
even when you don’t prefer it.
Without them you cannot be born, die,
or remain alive even into the next moment.
As soon as you have come to speech,
you can never speak yourself alone,
but always all those others, too,
those long dead ancestors, those ancient mothers,
your nearby contemporaries, those outside,
those inside,
still waiting to be born,
the multitudes of people who have never known you
and whom you’ve never known.
You are their very own ghost,
their uninvited guest,
their unmentionable sister.
They are your guides. Always present,
never any need to call them.
Without them you will surely become
irretrievably lost
In the meantime,
try to remember, then try to forget.
The memory will neither fully arrive, nor fully go away.
Soon enough you will go missing forever.
There are so many who will never guess
where you have ever gone.
FAKE POEM 11
The way that consciousness and speech are prone to drift when prone and lying lifelike laying down the letter of the law where speech is strict and ordered no thread lost or stray we go away from ourselves lose ourselves in mental play the play of words light on leaves an inner moving picture a dream one image to the next bubbles and waves arising shadows and reflections hidden in the stream the odd bright fish flickers in the shallows shows its colors
FAKE POEM 16
The way the mind works so quietly from one thing to the next, never know it’s there until it appears its not quite fullness the moon before low tide passive receptor to itself and all those unknown creakings.
The way the mind works so quietly from one thing to the next, never know it’s there until it appears its not quite fullness the moon before low tide passive receptor to itself and all those unknown creakings.
FAKE POEM 22
WHERE I’VE FOUND GRACE
Under the kitchen table with the flour and the cat dish,
in the kitchen sink with the supper dishes and the bubbles of soap.
Behind half-closed eyelids in the sunlight.
Round About Midnight in the moonlit garden.
Two steps down into the Qu’appelle Valley in April sunshine.
Called by name on the street by an unfamiliar voice on any uncertain gray day,
no-one there but strangers when you turn.
Wherever women are talking and laughing, watching their children at play.
The water that falls from the sky is always a grace.
Equally graceful, evaporation in sunlight.
The fact that the very same water is always falling again somewhere else,
and is taken up again, again condensing and falling, again taken up.
Only to know about this, to be able to think about it: impossible grace.
Surrounded by grace, inescapably, always.
Like the ordinary rain of any
ordinary day.