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OFF THE CUFF

January 17, 2025

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.

JANUARY 17, 2025

January 17, 2025

SHADOW TAG

I am not strong.
I am breathing.
I am alive with love
in this valley
of apples, cherries, pears,
peaches, and apricots.

My sister, my brother and me
play shadow tag. The grinning
reaper lifts their skirts,
racing to play, catches
my brother, dead to last.

Today is still my brother’s birthday, though he died in March last year. He is standing next to what-used-to-be the nurses station in Killarney. Manitoba.  Today is my father-in-laws 80th  birthday in England. We didn’t go. Michelle talks to her parents every day. 

 

TODAY IS December 2, 2024 (from Eros & Thanatos) just begun

December 2, 2024

BETTER WAIT

Electric radiators have come on to my waking
Still in my night clothes Gus admires my matching
Tolerates some belly snuggles but he is all claws
Defining his boundaries and looking
down at his empty breakfast dish
that I leave empty this is a dead loss
for a poem no matter
How much I hurt these words
are empty Unless I lie,
make coffee, have a cigarette
But more importantly I need
even my my

my leg to write
So I’ll open the blinds and decide
Whether to wash before wearing
my leg or put my leg on right this
minute to make me feel whole again. 
Though the twitch in my dick meant
Happy Good morning day dreams
can start unassisted before breakfast 
Let go my leg go let go my leg go.
I don’t smoke anymore how long
how long does anymore last
as far as the professional look,
I’m clean. But I remember lovers
who brought their smokes, all of us
putting them aside for the children
we brought into our lives our desire
with a different light. 

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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.