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May 31, 2024

TODAY IS TODAY

Noon to midnight and day bright until 9:00 p.m.
Sunday my father worked hard ad ministering
the work of God free of complaint keeping doubt
for his wastebasket where he spit sunflower seed
shells carefully, as meticulous as his thoughts leaving
doubt for his secret notebook the one he kept

locked in his mind room scarce, even Canada
could haunt his thinking his hiatus hernia came
pinching, but compared to the mold country
rotting away for centuries he could bare pain
seemed small price to pay for his children
not to follow him into the verily verily church

where he said “Today is the day
the Lord hath made, be glad in it for God’s
sake remember we are called the silent in the land
Do not ride water and snow machines, not on a day like today
better the world be seen in its glory quietly
in the sun, in the wind in the rain just one day, today.
– revision written by Victor Enns
– May 31, 2024, in the presence of Gus.

 

 

TETHER BALLS

I am not yet at peace with my medication.
Some days I feel like I play tether ball,
my selves anticipate the approaching danger
balls

swinging toward me but I can not see them
until I am smashed in the face,
mid-Jagger swagger,
lose my balance, and fall to my knees.

I cover my head with my hands.
Not even Julio on the schoolyard.
The ball bounces against the pole, slows
to a final click and the screen goes dark.

 

OFF THE CUFF

SPHINX
(for Gus)

Stinks.

QUAINT

Ain’t

L.OST

Cost

LAND LINE
 
I will have nothing to do with the land. I will have nothing to do with the land the land I will have nothing to do with the land you hear me nothing nothing at all. My hands are dirty enough.
 

CONFESSIONS (For performance, I guess)

LET ME BEGIN
Hear me hear me hear me!
Believe me believe me believe me!
Bam bam! bam!

I think
because I can
Bam bam bam!

My brother’s dead
he caught the shoulder
not mine
Bam bam bam

Tumbling tumbling
tumbleweed
Bam bam bam

I cry
Because I can
Bam bam bam

I write
Because I can
Bam bam bam.

Listen.

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I listen to music, read, write poetry and prose, and make videocasts, usually in collaboration with visual and media artist Murray Toews. I am a writer with disabilities, or a disabled writer, or a neurodivergent crip writer. You choose the point of entry for your reading;  there are no border guards.  The welcome mat is out. Stomp your feet and leave your shoes on. 

Love & Surgery (Radiant 2019) is my most recent collection of words about love and loss, including my below-the-left- knee amputation, my most visible disability. "Lousy cartilage genetics,"  the surgeon's note. Lucky for me no phantom leg pain. Disappearing cartilage makes for severe osteoarthritis. Real pain is now an everyday companion, but usually held back enough with meds and meditation, to allow for making poems, stories, jokes, aphorisms all true enough, remembering narrators are unreliable and writers make shit up. 

Afghanistan Confessions, poems in the voice of Canadian soldiers, was published in 2014, boy in 2012. Lucky Man (2005) was nominated for the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year award.