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I'M HOME NOW

by Mike Donaldson


I'm home now
it's Wednesday night

I was to do a reading on April 18 in Salmon Arm
for $125

then I realized it was the day before
the Cohen concert in Vancouver

so I cancelled out
too bad about the money.

I’ll still buy an old edition of the Evergreen Review
the one with Kerouac and Ferlinghetti in it

just like you and me in a journal together
some day.

I'm over 200 pgs into Buk poems
every 10 there’s a good one. And

the message is just relax, let it flow
and value what you have inside

he did

though, I’m finished with writing
it seems such a wrong route for

me

the rejections are getting me
down

and what I see in my poems is
as opaque to the editors as

the wood on my
floor. Though

I do know that the point is to
laugh at it and just go through

the discouragement

even as I write this I feel better. It's all okay
just the way it is – I don’t have anything better

to do

and when I finish a poem that
I like it gives me

a
buzz.

I guess it's literary masturbation.

Anyway, save those tree cones
CW



THE BEGGARS ON LA RUE SAINT LAURENT

            a                               siren

                                                                  squeegees

       and lost intersections

surrounded
                                                                                by unfounded lovers


            kissing

                                                                         behind fenced-in churches

                                                                                           on brown grass
                                                                                      and dry shadows

       with no small change             for no drunkards

            in post-post-modernist pockets


                              no one is dead
                              no one is dead



YOUNG MEN

Wanna see my new car?

How about I drive out to your place tomorrow
(Sunday)?

We'll drive it into the Shushwap River if you want,
maybe we could buy a couple expensive cigars,
we'll prop up the hood and jerk-off all over the lustrous engine,
and then we'll put a sack of manure on the accelerator,
a busted hockey stick through the steering wheel,
and we'll sit back and laugh,
while smoking those expensive cigars
and drinking Koranda's Slivovice.

What do ya think?



THE DEER TIPTOE ON BY

I recently moved to a town
that lives inside
a coalminer’s cabin

where souls are kept on the mantel
above a fire place
chimney smoke snaking
through the lengths of fir boughs
the two plum trees long abandoned

wild grass now undone by autumn
construction clutter strewn
amongst empty
Lucky bottles,
cement pails, particle board, a rusted wheelbarrow
broken red bricks, tarnished ducts and an old bathtub
all hanging out on the quarter-acre lot
with a woodshed in the corner, stacked to the cobwebs

on the other side of the garden
blanketed with leafy insulation, a workshop
crammed with the pickles, the jams
the hammers, the axes, and the wine bottles
necessary for hibernation.

within this cabin, its frame measured thrice but still tilted
every night there’s soup on the stove and poetry
seeping up from the floor boards,
or a melody
for a party of hearts floating amongst the rafters
a flirty barmaid, the tired plumber, a tree-planter, a banjo, an aged dodger

for the unemployed there’s always another reason
always an alibi
that old timer’s rhyme, the fisherman’s yarn, the logger’s scar

and there’s always someone’s drunken speculation
as to why that damn draft is still seeping in
through the latest renovation to the bedroom




Mike Donaldson typically refers to Vancouver Island as his Canadian home. Nonetheless, Mike has traveled extensively both within Canada and abroad, and he is currently organizing cultural tours of the Indian Subcontinent. While his collection of short fiction remains a work in progress, his poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in JONES AV, WINDFALL, MISUNDERSTANDINGS MAGAZINE, THE SMOKING POET and PAPERPLATES.



COMMENT        HOME       BLOG


New Poetry


bone
by
Gretchen Mattox


I'M HOME NOW
by
Mike Donaldson


THE SO-CALLED MADNESS OF THE MAD MARCH HARE
by
Lucie Winborne


PATIENT BELONGINGS:
18-30/6/07
by
David Russomano


ISLAND CABIN
by
Jesse Minkert


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ISSUE:
S U M M E R
2012

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