Cleaning houseyour face fell out of the pile of old notebooks that Pisa’s on my desk.Smiling up from a passport photoyou gave me that summer we slung coffee together on Berwick Street.I was going intomy second year university.Stegosauri lumbered in the foothills.And I...

I always arrive back to the ship in a funk,  and I don’t mean the Bootsy Collins kind. On the highway at four in the morning,my high beams are twin projectors projecting the last three months ashore on the black asphalt screen ahead of me.Mentally unpacking...

In the dry seasonthe porcupines head to higher ground. Or so my cousin tells me.“There’s an expression round here,” he says,“Whereby if you see someone walking alonein the dead of night, you tell them'Come un porcospino.’”My cousin tells me lots of things.We are in...

‘Now look, your grace,’ said Sancho, ‘what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.’  Cervantes Alison tilts at wheelie bins,and wrestles with...

i. It’s here.  Two days ago it carried away one of the crew.  Now he claws the walls of a quarantine hotel room in The Canadian Soo. ii. Daily we are vetted.Our sinuses scoured.Is it manifest within us?Who’ll be next?It’s hard not to...

Never one for goodbyeshe slips away before dawns first light. His getaway, a taxicabon black roads varnished with dew. A thief in the night,  his belongings in the boot and a head full of jewels and sadness.

Some days, I’ll run around a walled city. And inside a walled city. Beside a Grand Harbourand opposite other walled cities. I’ll run beneath great walls that slope upwards to battlements and gardens where the branches of tall carobspeek out over the...

I have demons. They’re like the angry mob in old Westerns. The ones that clamour outside the sheriff’s office.  Their goats gottenby loose tonguesat the saloonand too muchcheap whiskey. I’ve just woken from a sleepthat would be a good dry run...

All his life he’s wished for streets like these,clear of crowds and vehicles, the downtown of his teenage dreams.Right angles, steps, rails, and endless grindable seams. With patchwork pavements that make his wheels sing in different keys.On sidewalk slabs troubled by...

from bridgesand the brinkof cliffs. Off of rocksand ship decks,  piers and lidos,into oceans,frigid lakes and opalescent seas, over puddlesprivet hedges,brooks and felled trees. I have leapt down throatsand subway stairs,over...

I’m a climber,I’m a clamberer.A jumperand a scrambler.I’m never late.I take the stairs two at a time. I’m a runnerI’m a skater.A brisk-walkera love or hater.I scissor-kick over fences.I climb ropes hand over hand.  I’m a scaler,a...

It might have been with Alistair and Billy.Behind the bushes on the hill at school.But I think it was with you, Chris. At the house on Whitney Avenue,with a menthol cigarette Melissa Hynes gave us.We smoked it in the garage with the chopped wood and the...

There’s more thanone way to skin a cat, and he should know. He is the Butcher’s son.He grew up with the scent of rendered flesh housedpermanently inhis olfactory nerve.Slept to the soundof the cleaver strikingthe chopping block,downstairs on the charnel floor.Now he...

Toledo, Ohio He promises not one more poem about birds.No more over-wrought high sentence or hyper-bolic phrase describing their aspect or their flight. No anthropomorphisms or verbs like swoop, soar, wheel, dive, glide, or hover....

The winter riv-er is a white page and Coyote has made a kill out on the ice. See the violent slash of red that inks the young doe‘s final progress. Watch Coyote’s haunches strain and flex and fur-row as he tears viscera from it’s skeletal housing, looking from here...

When I eat a capersome atavistic remembranceburied deep in my DNA stirs,and the back of my skull fizzeslike an Alka-Seltzerdropped in a glass of water.I think of my forebears,Ashkenazi’s and Arabs,and their long journeyaround the Mediterraneanhundreds of years...

the first chordsof the Grateful Dead’s Bertha blared.Over and over,like propaganda from loudspeakers in a communisttown square.

Who knows the miles this deck has seen?The length and breadth of the downtown core,its sidewalks and streets, cambers and crevicesare as but water beneath a small ship’s bow.Atop its begripped back I’ve sounded outthe surfaces of this cities’ roads,like they were some...

Two gay ducksswim sentinelin the slipat harbourfrontwhere I am hammering oakum into the seamsof an old schooner. Between vigorous bouts of lovemakingthey often regardmy work and enthusiasticallyquack their consent.

Ring around the burial mound,push in the soil and tramp it down,doff your caps let bugles sound,for all of our dead grandfathers. Some have one, some have moresome were killed in a war.Can the earth take anymore?It’s full of our dead grandfathers. In life we move from...