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
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
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?
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.
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ISSUE:
S U M M E R
2012
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