Paul Cameron Brown

John Dillinger and Baby-Faced Nelson in a dream together - one shooting holes thru

A face in the mist, with rain around, clings to bare leaves frowning. A face through the mist, convulsed,

Baggage. Banal brigands, turn-coats, stiletto to dirk appraise warm flesh

Parable as metaphor - profile in hard glint of light, buckskin garb

Adua had never regarded his life as a pantomime. He wanted so much to please. As a dandelion, he thought of himself as little brother to the sun catching her yellow butter in his eyes. It came as no small surprise, then, when Adua learned of the world's misgivings toward him. Other flowers, far less nobly constructed, seemed held in such greater esteem. The first shred of evidence of this that Adua was indeed not a bountiful plant came when cattle distained his presence. Later, a smelly herbicide was used in his presence and Adua knew all was not well. Most discomforting, however, was the manner in which other flowers measured up in comparison to Adua. Even flowers that Adua considered quite ordinary seemed, tongue in cheek, to fare much more prettily. "Adua, Adua as the wind blows so do the poppies grow."

How desert islands in a cartoonist's imagination invariably are flat,

He held his hands like plastic    - his vestments the finer calling of his trade,

Image throttled in the subconscious, romantic throwback - the mind on a voyage round land's end

Iced coffee, wedge of toast - the sun poking thru

White ibis/blue crane, the arch of wings in full sail over leafy barques

Felt no pain against the water, the tea-cup sky was a turquoise colour in its wrath illuminating ambergris city in spot checks below.

In winter, you were a flash of light, tundra against

Patrician to my plebian, aristocratic leaning versus unbridled backwoods feeling    -

It's Epsom but could pass for Epping, New Forest or Dumbarton Wood. There's ivy of the thickest

The anger past as a cat arches her back a thickly rich robust anger

Crickets are a strange place, cricks of dew hemmed with hoar-frost

Perhaps it is needed to balance the planet: to provide employment for penguins, or that ice in the form of crystals calls forth tiny sleighs.

Laconic tears or Botticelli's Venus holding the years like tresses

In the ardour of an Asgard fire see adders from her

In youth, Death was a puny boy possessing but wormy hands & fleshless fingers

"The world's smallest painting ... Our Beautiful Canada was painted with a single hair and the aid of a microscope. The artist considers his price of seven million dollars not too high." The Globe and Mail, January 25, 1979. Now, it came to pass that a seasoned young diner by the name of Simon decided to revolutionize the restaurant trade. It was his firm desire to bring some chutzpah into the all too predictable and dreary cuisine on this part of the continent. From the first, Simon maintained that food and pleasure were inseparable. Moreover, since food could be a vehicle for fantasy, even more tellingly it could provide an outlet for self-expression.

How death will steal, from life, to claim us all, Happy to wrap us in barbary white, By tapping ash tight fingers, the steel laws of fate,

The man about to become a sparrow is shouting his head off wearing green trousers

Counted three white pigeons on a roof, near a gable silhouetting a barn;

The taste of an apple, the cringing of a bee as sun stops turning

If brains be gables & minds, say, the shutters in a derelict New England Mansion then intuition is in the

Giving myself permission to write    - points from Ciudad Juarez as well as the compass where

They poured hot water into people's cups in which green tea leaves were floating like algae,

Breaking up - as in the cloisson' jar you dropped. . . little regard,

My mind had almost died. It had refused a game of tag on a common with surly children and they steadfastly took revenge.

Camping out, a miraculous thing happened. The kaleidoscope of vision was focused on a precipice, caught endangered water about to fall

Rocky shale, pale voile, sun lighting the clearness of the bay;

"Nature abhors a vacuum", theorists of both philosophy and politics assure us. What's more, the phenomena is not confined to mere

Br'beuf is looking at the land that bears his namesake. He has no recollection of the horrors to come for his gaze unfolds as if in a dream. The wide expanse of blue water pleases him. Certainly the area holds potential - many hard and softwooded trees not unlike his native Brittany. In the warm glow of a July morning, he belittles his misfortunes, the present trials sapping little Ste. Marie. The kindly father dashes the recent sleep from his eyes with cold brook water. The shimmer seems to fit the haze his current thoughts pivot in. Sweet water country might yet prove both fortress for Christian souls and strength at feeding Louis' New French dream.

Chess playing Death -    no, the reverse Death sitting decked out and self-satisfied

Memory as embankment, a mudslide at High Tide with shades up...

On rue Vincingetorix, a Paris hovel in a garret of cold -

Down on your luck or, as they say, "financially embarrassed" ... with little in the way of hope,

Le voyage exotique devient parfois fantistique... Se plonger dans les pages de "Sympathetic Magic", c' est partir pour un autre monde oil Paul Cameron Brown

The ghosts are marmalade thin as rinds across toast or the Weeping Willow, whose

And I thought of things, things that come in small clutches, tiny memories,

Poltergeist activity - the sun winding like a staircase onto the pavement,

Jungle, the cave human reservoir & cistern ... . quagmire and bog, but no alpine meadow,

A child-like fawn moistened nudging & joyous breath,

Merely on edge, the wharf in bad light clinging to water's ledge -

I'm sitting in a "sixties bar." No put-on. All around old Rolling Stones music is playing. I can tell it's a sixties bar by the spiffy waiter recycling sheets for

As she's lying there in sherbet panties looking somewhat disaffected, a nez perce expression bordered by sleep,

Had I been a gambling man, eschewing the "shoe"

And a little farther the Fu Manchu mustache curved in mock epic proportions

As they are crawling up to you think of Angor Wat the sweating walls

Only marginal chances of finding a Great White in my coffee

Fury of chrysalis, or crepuscular caterpillar's roosting nest, Fidgeting cocoon dry in annoyance and the reptile caress Of empty sound.

The white pin wheel of heat turns up the grasses' edge. Some dried plant stalks shrivel, then melt openly into layers of fire.

"From the indigo straits to Ossian's seas, on pink and orange sands washed by the vinous sky, crystal boulevards have just arisen and crossed, immoderately inhabitedby poor young families who get their food at the green grocers. Nothing rich-the city." Arthur Rimbaud The old man sleeps with his weeping. Another old one pauses with her cats on a fire escape while nursing a sore like a precious stone. A garbage can is an herbivore grazing on stalks of ringworm. Vermin are the pool sharks of this brothel polishing off the tenements' fur lined rails. At last, the skid of tires tears a hole in the river bank. Sand-fleas and blowflies become nightriders marauding a new turf of godzilla cars. An urchin dangles his stolen wristwatch like a fish in a bottle while shoals of centipedes make a beeline in a poseidon stampede. Filthy rags are prayer cakes left over from the last sabbat and become holed coffins for those still searching for involvement.

The most appropriate comment, besides pig knuckles on racks & rabbits skewered on prongs

Unfolding gazes throw over the little reality

Pausing to see light thru chinks the corner door

Some dead undid undid their bushy jaws, and bags of blood let out their flies.. . ? Dylan Thomas

The waitress mainlines the cup under the saucer balancing it on the

A surtax on the ecosystem; so many raindrops, mists and bud breakings

... Unrestrained, imaginative writing. Brown's magic is the vibrating universe, his sympathy is his ability to receive these

...Unrestrained, imaginative writing. Brown's magic is the vibrating universe, his sympathy is his ability to receive these vibrations.

I met Bear at the 5 n' dime sipping a Cream Soda he was voluble &

The pig's head omelette - something akin to a tatoo buried squarely on the upper

Imagining the smoke burnt imprint of a tatoo with tapers flickering,

If you're going to drop the gauntlet at least put on the dress of a full warrior    -

1 Moths, if they dream dusk, sport esurient hip-flasks on their wings -

A woman is a trough hardly that    -    a river, a pond to sail a small boat thru,

There were a series of three animals - wise men I propose -

One of the cows was Belladonna, another Nightshade still a third, Witch's Butter -

My mind, rarely with me alone, parts with energy, the floor boards scuffed

For one, street argot became tougher. You had to distinguish between what you meant by calling someone a mother. The Black Panther influence, no doubt, but a rejuvenation of the

1 I won't envy the heat this August. The fall (English say autumn)

Sleep is a striking woman accosted by various men while in a dance;

Sleep is a striking woman accosted by various men while in a dance;

Little red berries are the crop of this stump tree. They are the prize stubble

At times, I thought of swizzling white rum in the tropics (not as a vocation), dropping into the club

Looking into the glassy crucifix of water. slits of rock form stigmata across creviced limestone - green pools with an occasional fish passing

"The universe is expanding". There's cause for reflection and bound to do wonders for "who am I" queries.

In my childhood, "Verdun," meant madness. Bars on the windows, cages around the intellect. Time was a poor keeper of souls, it seems, wore out all but

Ticonderoga to Lake George, the classic invasion route up the Richelieu valley

Fantasy, Capri. The edge of a pillow. Certain words - murmur, seashells. A face beckoning thru time, lacy windows with

As you enter into dream - its the unconsciousness which stifles,

The threadbare uniforms we let stare at others we would refuse ourselves.

The jungle where the meow goes in, is a forest for hoodlums. Trucking up, the empty warriors

reads like living down    - a coconut arriving with the tide,

Ants colonized it -    huge abodes littered with the dead (leaves, sticks, the occasional granulated insect

The four Equinox sisters, the one, Fox, streaked - all color, a blur

We repeat, the aim of the IRA has always been the liberation of our homeland. Any who aid or abet the enemy must fall full prey to force of arms. (The Republican Proclamation) Somewhere in the distance a dog kept at his baying. A long mournful whelping that seemed torn from the damp night's very throat. Sean could not help but hear it; so deeply did the dog's vocal cords implant sound upon human ears. He could not help but think of the provos warning nuzzled like that dog's steady cry over and over into the fabric of one's memory swift as searing iron. "Aid or abet," he murmured softly to himself, "a long distance is covered by such a comment."

raised against them hussars, cossacks, zouaves the renegade janizaries and corsairs

There's cadence a real movement to the worlds

I remember the world like a picture. The habitat of trees and sense impressions, the cover of leaves as fall spurred its way

Riel veritably in a cockpit - Gabriel Dumont with his buffalo robe peeking from behind

That Captain Kidd scribbling of rock in the fields yellowed bristle of pages back of a farm where

If flies be dragons and they may you know. In large desiccated brambles

The polar stars drip in blood . . . Orion's mythical crystal white with clarity of forest and

1 The moon has a larder and a kitchen,

White ermine/white semen, green eyes jade from the night. Eternity falls in sparrow,

I have thrust my fists up to ice in the galactic mire of lake,

The preciseness of that little moment, bowler eyes in hot, top rays effervescent through

The embankment lies as heavy edges on our lives. The shadows of the rock,

A sailor, "tatoo you," the cigarette Players with tape-deck playing

With leaves twitching the autumn air and the burnt almond

No broken visor, emptied glove abandoned cudgel, opened net - only gathering spots on spreading sand.

Lingerie, black pumps a navel creamy enough

I feel like cutting my finger, hiding upside down clinking a canteen

A cemetery overgrown such that each tombstone is a pauper fungus crowded, dark with leaves,

Green angel lights stream from the willow tree, in direct symmetrical bearing

I have stars drying in my eyes. Heavy seas, in wind. They have sealed me from the heavy

In a pleasureless world, pure pleasure exists. Particles of sunlight, exquisite with nightdrops & leaves stringent with dew,

A VICTIM OF INDIGESTION OR PATRICIDE? MAGIC PAN: CASTLE OF ELSINORE CHEF: THE MAD PRINCE OF DENMARK

When Hannibal mowed down Romans with elephants, his skill, his artistry,

I dreamed my toenails were ivory and elephants came to trade for tusks

In the dark of wedlock nightly sky, the wither of hope

Stravinsky's Firebird, Debussy's La Mer lilting arrangement like a windmill

We built bottlecaps off ship's sides (soft, cedar bough),

The moon, at most a shudder or two away. The sky, bivouaked and cloudy, is within twin sloops of a bay. The lagoon opens, spars with the greater ocean

Mariachis, almost a Spanish temperament within those stars, - a screen peppered to black, pebbles as pinholes bright in the night air.

Les bougies sur les tombeaux (The candles on the graves) antilles dread locks ...

1 Terrorism - left-wing nerd (twin

Angel Inn, come off a sign blown sideways

Cape aux Morts. Cape Diable, Points of Massacre

Cresta roja wine - colour of arterial blood,

Cloves on the table. (jardin parfumel are like ladyslippers

Elfin & gold bug, genie in the twilight of a cave.

There in the cosmos - white dwarfs launch a black rooftop imagistic, clean as a pantry,

The way I figure it, a number of people are out of control at any given time ... gin rummy & hockey notwithstanding.

Under a candlelit operetta of stars, the vertigo horizon trails

1 Having wilderness cracks in emotional facades

Our nights have cruel eyes And have cast us about too thinly, Fallen upon us,

On your brow, the steppes of Asia are fetched by deep set eyes A colouring distict with mystery

Clarence, the pipe stem would grow hot with rage, then become agitated over his apparent inability to stop smoking. You see, he was a misfit in more ways than one. He didn't snap firmly in place when ordered, and more importantly, he resented the appendicular attachment to a place and time not his own choosing. Clarence would stew near the pipe bowl, rife with burnt ends and hacking smoke. The pipe had a bite and it was he who enlisted its bitter end. Now Clarence had designs of escaping tobacco road. He envisaged a future free of pool hall smells and the glandular malfunctioning of his predator owner. They say the stem of a pipe pressed against one's tongue for extended periods of time will cause aggravation, perhaps "malignant growths," worse yet, cancer. To Clarence, however, it was he who was sickened by the onrush of brown saliva and halitosis as his compulsive partner pressed his bones to an opened jaw. He felt like Cain and wished he could kill this man with the jawbone of his own ass. At the very least Clarence wanted to be something more than an after dinner pipe. He wished a certain notoriety, a dance on pigeon feathers, to be a pipe of Nordic proportions - a yard's length of smoke. If he was to be engrossed in smoke, he at least wished it to arrive in exotic blends, from textures rich with the warmth of their climes. Turkish root, jabiru, all were curiously better than the stuffy domestics he had come to know.

A rail fence is more than that on a country dawn moving by lots over hill & stone; it barely pauses in the small of the field's lap,

Sitting as Buddha on a chocolate juniper - the theme of madness thirty cinnamon centres

As a matter of fact, ovens do carry a glazed stare, fireplaces are wont to parry

When the shadows are hungry animals on walls and theatre goers are

Our lives evaporating as we talk, flypaper from cosmic ceiling - We gather stardust,

Once there was a giant who lived in a kneecap, a peculiar giant at that

A well-thumbed book like a well-thumbed life, "whilst you walk this earth"

The Japanese are coming! Now there's a fresh twist and just when Pearl Harbor seemed poised to become another Asiamerindian household word amid

Too greedy hormonal levels, savouring drives and swooned walrus tusks behind the deep belly

Omens are the cloth of dreams scissors used to open sky - the future riding birds

A mind is a ray of light running to the sea; an arch of wood upon which birds rest. Minds roam the ocean's crest, sit as antlers upon a beach,

You said happiness was a bird - a hand extended could bend its perch.

And what of privileged things mur & frankinscense or sandlewood    -

These eyes of dolls seem leaden stones not canisters of the Faith but cannon-balls engraved

If anatomy were a contact sport, the stomach would be a football 'stomac, hammock

A man weeps at your ankles, climbs the stairs to peek-a-boo panties, with finger clasps,

Blue walls were grottoes, subterranean panels for covert messages, the

Mood food. In deep, deep water without the thought of water bottom, I thought of you.

Trillium breath, an ounce of feathered growth unravels in the cloves of the silent forest.

A boat sits on the very shallows of a lake in egg-cup fashion,

Malingering, increase drift of censure

In the old air by his rocker, a silent trapeze of thought

How do you survive in the mangrove swamps - amid the twitchings of foetid water

How do you survive in the mangrove swamps - amid the twitchings of fetid water

1 A thick hole in the dark from which

All the candles are passing out, one by one. They have evaporated their brightness, overpowered limpid cracks in their own flames, seized

There is a star near the hinge of planets, a barn under

The thin, feathery blue egg-shell curtains gently tossing, the tin smile

The intense focus of light but pointillism, into this juncture bits of light

Backwoods cabin, opera house from the pines awash with stars, skullduggery in place over spruce hills

The trees are forming hands to cloak the sky

She wears a cat encrusted T-shirt & panties with L*O*V*E guarding the Paradise door

The leaves on their trumpet flames Richter scale inside pulse stems - into the gorge, la gorge

A beach back of bric ' brac, wine goblet of sky ... . the horizon beginning

I can call a lake a kettle a splendid, ivory comb a snare    - tiny feet cataclysms off a mountain.

They made us sit alphabetically in rows. Green oranges are sprayed systematically in volcanic soil near pummelled surf.

I Watermelon, ears of skeleton

I evaded capture today with only a handful of dust to escape that Old Sandman Death.

All that is eternal is circular. - Aristotle Cueta and Tetuan are outposts within the Arab psyche,

The night is folly without the moon, trees blank space against a frontal sky where lattice work from a bled fish reveals

1 "Death is but a sleep" quaint rationalization

One thing about this type of education, it certainly taught an individual to be philosophical about death. He could ruminate conversably on the ultimate fate of a Greek shade or the Mesopotamian interpretation of the underworld. Even contemplate figuratively what Achilles felt was his true funeral abode.

An iron wrought gate of turpentine force conveys little pigment, almost black parchment letters mindful of hands, arched and stroked from the very stone, until an

Orange lichens, in sun-like clusters, entomb the Rockface wall a sheer ascent from the waterline

To perforate in adumbration, as obviator, the sphincter muscle of intensity; then paint

The night cold as nuggets, dark as acorn, against your chest; snow falling like abandoned echoes releasing energy

Old Sawbones, pale as a sheet, white sand, whispering edge of the sea. II

Greet the days - greet the moon, gather the stars.. .

I should be busy with words but light distracts me makes for me, in the sowing of its waves,

These shell-queens, too, are blithely catpaws, shorn & musky acorns with

As if every living thing lived, breathed its existence explained why water took the shape

1 The night before ... sultry Martinique, a

With the smile of morning in her purse, the dark laughter of her

Staying home, I caught naughty elves watering my piano,

Fall was a tubercular cousin residing in the country sparse hair,

Perhaps the sky once was shadows, the moon lisped 'mongst April's song. Now, those warm lips ease

Scouting the sun thin clouds threadbare vests barely to cover the horizon.

The day I went to LaFayette's grave, the concierge became our tour guide amid an old

It's chess of sorts but reeks of you - the hand carved emerald rook, for one,

Popping out of the dark reddish "Merry Christmas" haze twinking blinking land of Nod (or

Loki, the Norwegian god of mischief, sends out a lithesome blonde with a slinkiness that ravishes the libido. She presses her dream-like form against the windowpane. The night is soft about the city's lights. Water cascades in the distance, while small, black crickets' shovel sounds around pricked ears. The diminished man ignores this, instead busying himself with drawing lions on a vast sheet of blank paper. There is no word for happiness in the Malawi tongue and this disturbs him. What far reaching implications for the people of Africa. He stands and downs a drink to ease his parched mouth. A moisture ring blurs one of his lions, and, again, he will lose the battle against the king of beasts tonight.

Plums and vine (as the Atlantic is green) intone the heavy church wall with errant sprigs, so Heaven sent

...wry humour. The poet revels in image and can use it well. Paul Cameron Brown is capable of interesting,

She sits within the Magic Lantern - that facsimile for pleasure, decor of wineskins where

There is an unhurried resemblance to pain, here, this Fiddler on the Roof commodity, potables, fine oaken chest for one and furs; but wait,

The skull in the box is that of Cornelius A. Burleigh, the first man to be hanged in London, Ontario, August 19, 1830. The public hanging attracted an audience of over 3,000 when the village of London numbered only a few hundred. Because the rope broke, he was hanged twice! The top of the skull was taken on a world tour by Dr. O.S. Fowler, a phrenologist. This part of the skull was presented to the Harris family. (Eldon House brochure)

Years ago, when life was too violent for any to live very old, the Spirit invented a ruse to give great age to Man. Late one fall, Ponchontas was keeping a slow fire to smoke his strips of salmon. It occurred to him that by stoking the flames gently with bits of chips, the fire would burn not only smoother, but more evenly. Ponchontas held the block firmly and brought his axe to play on the extended limb. Suddenly, his grip faltered and the blade struck flesh drawing blood. Panicky, he thrashed about the sand scattering it into the face of the fire. Quite by accident, you see, as his foot only convulsed the pain his bleeding arm felt. One by one, the blood fell in drops then trickles, rivulets until a veritable torrent seemed loosed. Ponchontas screamed till the woods listened. The spirit that governs the pulp of the wood and the sap to rise took pity on Ponchontas. It curdled the sap to thick resins in the chopped wood and the gummy resin fell to the forest floor. As it lay so glutenous, the Earth Mother was also quickened to show sympathy. This she did by touching the marrow of the hurting wood. By a thick chain of being, Ponchontas felt his skin harden. The painful throb soon began to leave the wound and the scar healed. Immediately, he was on his knees imploring the spirits. He begged what small favour he might return. The reply was instantaneous.

Chess pieces resting upon the jade mantle piece see sampans move quietly thru warm night,

Chess pieces resting upon the jade mantle piece see sampans move quietly

The sky is red and comes from Montreal - you lied to me

Spring heralds the summer with lilacs perched from that door. In snows, a swarm of bushes lie black and apparently rootless as the town's iron-gate bridge collapses under the centre part of the main road. Little enclaves of activity pass as stores, mere centrefolds across busy highway arteries this time of year.

A poem is perishable and, like it, so much of life is spent

In salt flats, idle pools bunching off the ocean,

She had a fireplace - the sexual kiln of her pyromaniac

On the night of the rains, water was oozing out from the sky's swollen stitches,

" ... A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain ... a promise that the rock of the world was founded

A magnificent Red Devil splayed out in his tracks; this tumultuous soul, baron of the backwoods

Life as green illusion - the cool fronds of the fern are deep set in firmest soil

And he told them "the universe is a ripe apple in heavenly consummation with Newtonian physics". Comparisons grew rife with planets in the cosmos measured

If the rich are different they show it with the clarity of their table

If the rich are different they show it with the clarity of their table

Petals that fall into a woodland pool are servers at a banquet. Each one dresses for the occasion

Rip, an inarticulate dog with a namesake derivative of more. Rip arrives as a pup, large, abounding with energy though somewhat clumsy in his gait. But Rip is no matter of fact bowser - the type that woofs approvingly at your presence then is content to carry himself off to a corner and deliver up his bulk with an unrelieved sigh. Nevertheless, one does suspect his nose is wet (or as shiny) as a washcloth but such familiarities are not extended to strange dogs. Rip's progress in his new home is eventful. Early in his stay, he gleefully corners a porcupine and gets a face full of quills for violating that one inescapable fact accorded to all life on this planet; introductions are always in order in untried situations. One must proceed with due caution through proper channels or suspicion will ensue. Rip nurses a bandaged nose, sees the inside of a vet's garage (replete with a scourge of animals more reminiscent of a concentration camp than an infirmary) is duly horrified, then droops off to a needle. While recovering, a kitten perches on his upper abdomen and goes to sleep. A thoughtful child covers Rip with an old rug. Rip's tongue nearly flattens the mat as it lolls from his mouth. The edge of his jaw is ringed with a black, tarry substance that grows more viscous the longer Rip is under sedation. Rip's education proceeds apace.

Did time on the Hegelian spirit, Freudian id, the totemic response to

Fate is a mahout astride a large elephant, impersonal as dark sun with winds raging across a desert. Fate is the old bones of dead Indians being resurrected as

The Squirrel, a corsair, rides the wind black arm of a pressing sea,

So much time has passed & time is a hooligan run wild littering the streets,

I see children rowing with crayons across a park lagoon. They are sagging,

Picturesque Tituba, steeped in Obeah, in a hairball swoon leads a harangue about witches with

A gypsy sits in a taverna joking with a sailor who has left

"The clock indicates the hour but what does enternity indicate?" Whitman Imagine, being told cubism isn't painting. That

In the crypt with Columbus in the crypt with Giovanni of Genoa, the diaspora driven Jew;

The reef was inviting, her languid coral nudging the breakers as they returned from sea. From the instep of the dingy, the fisherman in his broken English was advising the seated men of dangers indigenous to these waters. "None of that hostile marine life business, Steve - keep it simple - use words he's familiar with," the man with a razor lip, Cliff, muttered to his companion. The other was busy going through the motions in heavily accented Spanish broadly emphasizing common words that lead to nods and ballyhoo, those expected currencies of behavior. "I'm getting through," came the reply. "Seems beyond the reef, dolphins and the occasional shark gather. Good fishing, though - red snappers and groupers with anemones along the bottom - the Mexicans eat those you know - call'em seaeggs."

I see many thoughts from a window. Seagulls in the fashion of summer and leaves as they quit the year.

Whirl of patterned images, deep seascape painting hovering,

In Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream, eyes are grouped as discs ? almost rotund arches, much as suns breaking over an eclipsed wall.

A youthful bandit this forest - faltering eyelids in mud troughs

A green flotilla, verdant armada stone hand encased

More fragment of tree than serpent clothed in wet

Is there anything prettier than that - to stare into your manifold spaces toward the hook & vine

These kettle bells. Is it the axe-murderer, with green garbage bag

It's snowing and all I can think of are leaves to wrap your memory, leaves pungent as tea,

Seen the whores in doorsteps, slack, crouched as packing crates behind their quiet wardrobe lamps,

Six owlets sitting in a tree, six cats in effigy, six of both in a boat

"We have all been here before. almost cut my hair;" the refrain from Crosby, Stills. Nash & Young

Her emerald top phosphorescent candy glow stick candy,

Sheldrake, a magician - the mandrake a mythic plant whose shriek

You're the aggressor and your passion exceeds mine but we're in this slaughterhouse together

In fury, come the Heavens, the days, our horsebells upon a crystal sleigh.

When I was very young onto school, a slick of water curled

A snowy morning unfolding I smear my eyes

A small fish, its colors embers

I noticed a bust of Shakespeare, an effigy in stone with latticing to mirror the ages. In the same cathedral a notation commented John Harvard was baptized here.

Buying up egg rolls at 50' a kick, they royally entered our bloodstream - a riot of sensation

Invitingly, the sea shines her stars, captive flames within an impatient heart as darkness loads the pleasent isles with coarseness,

She was fading - into the stone into rifled shadows heavy

No open barge crowded with nameless waifs or junks in a teeming harbour

"And the day is a wounded boy." Garcia Lorca Two is a fonder number gracing the clock than one - a relief from monogamy, a rightful place to start. Three is too midway, cantankerous in its sound, still four is drab and stony and the sun lies too low in the sky for any truthful expression of real afternoon. Five is somewhat better, the sky is pressuring evening and, by six, is big with shadows that foresee the coming dark. With seven, ambers and misty wraps are charged in pastel tones celebrating the arrival of eight. At nine, all pretense is dropped that its still daylight and colours lie bludgeoned - extinguished in the dark. Ten through near dawn is blissful and quiet, no confusing escapades of shifting light. Only the hour before dawn promises a summer respite any different than the cue sung at midnight.

The leaves lie hidden as spades about their home. Brief movement of a kitten, then silence till the car's engine drones.

Some lives have themes. Goldfish that stubbornly die; compatability only with distant lovers

Artists (astrologers never lie) are birthed when Venus is rising -

I was playing sonatas on your skin - no beauty & the beast scenario though the Tower pulchritude was intact

He was Popeye the Sailor Man - at least in Picture book and poem the mind falling from a drooping ledge,

"Everybody in the world is frightened of getting cut." Charles Manson I

When snow falls, there lives the shrill cries that leaves are not alone.

Many devils are in woods, in waters, in wilderness and in dark, pooly places ready to hurt. . . people, some are also in thick, black clouds. ? Martin Luther

The sea is a requisitioned article in my possession. Above, in fat circles of conformity, glide turkey vultures, their combs

The dangling of bells ...amid faint tingling, the inspirational nature of their lies

A story about tears that became minnows and sobs large fishes in their place. Once, when the sky was young and the spirits were expressing their wishes, peals of light and thunder damaged the heavens until they were swollen and purple. Rain fell like leaves as the victors banished the fallen from the clouds. The vanquished were ordered to supply the empty lakes with forms fitting their previous ways. Swimming in oblivion, they only stopped to rest in reed beds on August days when the Great Spirit smothered his anger. The evil ones assumed the course of large blood fish scraping the silt bottoms in reminder of their reduced state. All sorts of creatures - the catfish with his whiskers to remind the new creature man of his pre-human state and the eel and lamprey with their sharp eyes to disclose to the world the inherent baseness of their rebellious nature. The giant of the deep - the sturgeon - had a sucker form mouth. Every time man lifted him across the keel of a boat he would see his obsequious face panting to the sky.

The breath of candles, hot and murky, on the still air.

He sat with no more compunction than an eel fish big-faced, bloated,

The sun is a burning magnet on the water. Durable, our boat is a sizable pretzel in the arms of the bay. Warmth with contortion, the clash of passions

The Haitian effect of stars grinds the blue firmament like a cable car by night.

As a child, all common sense decreed pirates wore dear teeth    - enamel white, with tusks to rout an elephant

"They know they are going to the filth of numbers and laws, to the games anyone can play, and the work without fruit." Lorca

"She gallops night by night through lovers' brains...." I see grindstones in the sky, pots of tulips overturned

I imagine stars at the dragon's tail, eyelids ringing with butter. I want to brush palms as

We can survive a nuclear War. It's scarcely credible, I know, but listen. The human race has great resilience. We've come back

The Elysian fields gained commensurate with ability quiet and shimmering in the sun;

Today surprised me like a red fox blurting out of an October thicket -

1 And like a cobbler at a bench I return to my musings

Gourd was taken to task when she understood the limitations the garden patch had placed upon her people. It was early fall and the dancers of the vegetable kingdom paraded their charms in bright, full regalia. Across the earth in splotches of colour, the tomatoes scented a good fall. So, too, the kingly husks of corn and the melons, spinach and cucumber in turn eyed the approaching season in growing faith. Each had a succulent function and dangled their inviting flesh to the beholder. But, alas, what did gourd promise? She was deeply conscious of lacking the forward brightness of tomato and pumpkin. She lacked leafy greens so evidently prized and when her fellow vegetables covered the brown soil in preparation for the fine day they would bask across a kitchen table, it was almost too much for the sensitive gourd to stomach. Why even squash, which she felt closest to, had more of a function than she. So versatile did the big neighbour seem in comparison to herself, the ugly dwarf.

The gathering of dead wood - driven, pinched in faces between the strain of Van Gogh's setting -

As I watch the clouds assemble, steam-ship fashion, with funnels to alert passersby, I realize the Romanovs tore silk & riches from every bazaar leaving the bright spot of this evening studded with emerald marks.

In slow sutures of pale white - dabbed in growing spume & mud dried earth, a glowworm is obliterated by warm, soft light

"Corn's high this year," chirped the old woman, almost with a cackle. "All's the better for them to hide in," the old woman was continuing, her face a brazen mixture of distain and contempt. "These come to the house, late model cars, too, and just wait. Lord if I knows what for," her voice trailing off, reedy, almost water besotted much as the likeness of an old boot, the colour of her wrinkled skin. Old Meg was an authority of sorts in these parts. Seems she had had her share of the strange and eventful in her time.

And I, cooing in my saddle, with lost time. His weapons and horses the finest. Beloved of God, engendered fiercely

The colouring of spacious flowers rove delicious to the eye. The road above the harbour fickle, carousing in its tendency to pull too gray by sky enamelled water. The tropical foliage, still and languorous, to my touch.

Sun on the eiderdown breaks tiny corners off the bedspread, declares green plants its bidding before summoning Fragonard's maiden

The keeper of the jewel. I file it down, keep it smooth.

She wanted her beauty too soon and must now forfeit it for the moment. One day, when the Earth was a glorious garden and ruled by a brilliant sun flower towering above the plants of her domain, Monarch butterfly, not yet her familiar orange, complained she wished to be large as a bird with petal wings translucent to the sun, folding with the rain. Sunflower, taken back by this unusual demand, sought to humble Monarch. "Henceforth for your imprudence, each one of your race must toil for your wings. No more shall you enjoy fruits without labour. By daring to be mighty you will begin existence as a pale, green egg hardly distinguishable from the lowliest leaf. Moreover, as a reminder of your insolence, you must pass through four purgatorial stages. The bitterest bane of your people will be the bread of the milkweed."

For my part, I spied red berries on a currant bush lush in August;

Like a wail in the back of an inflammed throat came that protracted noise once again. Interminably, the rhythmic pitch of pounding grew louder as if several loose stones had swished themselves against the larger cylinder of his room. Already, the steady rap of a hammer's edge oozed from night's blackness disparate as a voice muffled in protest against an exhausting load. Again, the unyielding barricade of sound renewed itself much as a headlight might fall against the path of a dazed woodland animal. The same enervating crust of unreality accompanied this sound as must, he imagined, light that focused itself upon a stunned rabbit at a roadside clearing. Steady now, it peaked again after a small hiatus interrupted only by the staccato bumping of his own heart within thin visceral walls. Catching the bed-sheets in his hand and moving to switch the nightlamp on as his feet touched floor, Durfield let his eyes grow accustomed to the bright light now filtering across the room. Same turmoil as with the ruddy animal immobilized in its tracks, he thought, excepting now the darkness coiled in wait instead of that speeding car. Same fate, he pondered, nearly aloud. No, not really, because I have a vestige of control here, he reassured himself. The lamp-switch allows me, of course, to commandeer the ignition keys to this vehicular room. I have mastery of my environment, however limited. The fawn or hare has no more free will in that regard than a stone spinning upon itself through orbital space. The animal freezing in its tracks is but a by-product of its own misshapen destiny - a projection of inward fear itself. Instinct knows only one route when threatened, he theorized. I, at least, have that avenue of self-preservation plus the dimension of reason. That and that alone separates me from the splattered remnants of a deer against the highway. Its over-specialization dooms or pre-dates its response. So very predictable, he mused fingering the face of his big, green lettered clock. I'm different, he began reassuring himself adjusting his eyes to the flooding light a little less nervously. I have the calling card of reason plus an instinctual nature. The two should compliment one another. Why, take that accursed noise. I can attempt its categorization in hope of dispelling the fear of the unknown. What's more, I can move to lessen its impact or remove it altogether. In effect, I can take the edge off its annoyance altogether and sleep peacefully for the rest of the evening. If only I could identify its source!

The cowboy's overriding presence in North America's mythology is not difficult to understand. Perhaps the great lone land ethos of endurance, stamina, self-resourcefulness and "a man's got to do what a man's got to do," John Wayne brand of thoroughness, still endures more so than once admitted. Talking in these terms usually elicits a responsive chord. Everyone has felt that, at one time or the other, only his carabine (wits) stood between him and the fate accorded to the Sundance Kid. As life increases in complexity, in all probability there will be a tendency to create myths or revive tales from the past to help blaze trails. The westerner personifies close shaves with danger. So, too, surviving in the corporate jungle implies a similar fixation in manufacturing responsive heroes to see us through. In one scenario, the setting of a gruelling contest at the managerial level becomes "highnoon," for the Earp brothers. The plug uglies in the vein of the Claytons are the bush-wackers waiting to play upon any opening. The board room assumes the air of OK Corral with old Doc Halliday leaning on the fence or a tombstone, if the exchange goes dismally.

Everyone is a poet, or so the philosopher said. The world teems with poetry in much the sense the universe teems with life. A poet or two is squirrelled away in every major office.

The potato eaters - grim, weathered souls wrenching a meal

I borrow De Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater, the aforementioned an account of that singular

People with money but no fortune or stomach for the life of an albatross, watch him soar on self-made wings,

Bertrand had been surprised by the recoil of his father's rifle. He had not prepared for the sight of the weasel pasted against the barn door, a dozen pellets alone penetrating its upper neck and mid-thorax region. A mass of blood and fur seemed to have been twisted onto the vicinity of the latch then held in place as if from afar by many bullet-like prongs. Surely, the calibre of the shotgun was too strong for his choice of game. Bertrand had a tendency for overkill. Possessing a temperament and a super-charged imagination that demanded structure even when little existed naturally, his mania for organization had presented itself on innumerable occasions about the homestead. There had been the case of his clearing a brood of starlings from the drive house. A messy business, if you let it but from one Bertrand would not flinch. A half dozen squawking, flightless birds coiled above the door in the attic were disposed of. After all, it was his job to end the clatter and they were an obscene, noxious bird what with laying their eggs in songbirds' nests and crowding out more desirable species. Moreover, their very presence constituted an eyesore and that, coupled with their grating noise, concluded their fate. They were pests, simple and unadulterated, and on a farm any such nuisance had to be wrenched aside. Still, he had not drowned them like unwanted kittens or burned them out like that nest of yellow jackets in the currant bush. A simple twist of their neck either between the fingers of his leathered gloves (he disliked the feel of flesh on feather so this necessitated hunting for a thick pair of mittens), or placing the head of the screaming nestling under one's boot did the business. Almost effortlessly, but again nothing about tending land was done entirely without deliberation or exertion. Structure and foresight held things together. It was the nature of the beast. And so it was with Bertrand's decision to hunt bees. The best method to oust any hive from its perch, so talk ran, was to wrap an old cloth about a stick and daub it with flammable pitch. Once lit, it made an impressive torch and could be brandished against pests of any description. As a kid, Bertrand recalled killing bumblebees in the old woodshed with a fly swatter. Now that was some kind of action which allowed the adversary manoeuvrability above and beyond that of skulking bees with a flame or killing baby birds. The enraged swarm would charge out from paper lairs encircled about the inner walls of a shed through whatever chinks or holes led to their tormentors. A little smoke applied judiciously, moreover, would send dozens piling out the holes in threesomes so that only a good, well balanced swat could hope to silence several existing at once. At times, the bees would threaten to get the upper hand and Bertrand and a friend would get panicky, think of the Alamo or just about any heroic last stand made possible by sheer courage.

I touch your face - where strands of whispery hair dangle your thoughtful gaze through mine.

"He was always the one to figure things," remarked Humboldt. "Always the smart ass type, big jawed lazy bones - couldn't make a good farmer out of that sort. Didn't want to do much of anything 'cept run. All his money went on his car. Drinking in the Richelieu most every night. I suspect that's where he were coming from when it happened." Humboldt leaned back against the store front. Twice weekly he'd take a cab into town to fetch sundry articles as he said - one day went for shopping t'other for visitin'. Retirement had given him the necessary time to concentrate almost exclusively on the latter. This was the first trip in this week and already the day was abuzz with talk of the recent mishap. "Now let me get this straight," Russell was interjecting. "According to what Humboldt says, the car just plain left the highway and crashed through the barrier where seven meets the Bath road."

...The poetry is fine... rewarding reading... Almost every poem in Sympathetic Magic boasts an admirable image or two.

Bare bones future Medical schools may be facing a bare bones future, thanks to a shortage of skeletons. According to an article

Rich ornamental procession enough wealth to dazzle a Prester John, Sheba's queen, even the fawning

"We think by feeling. What else is there to know." Theodore Roethke "I can live an adventuresome life vicariously through my characters. It's inexpensive and a dandy form of ready made self-expression. The perfect sort of sublimation exists after all. For years I wore myself out trying to amass enough experience to commence serious writing. You know the having to see all and do all syndrome. I realize the pursuit of that plateaus sheer idiocy as it remains ever distant as one grows older." Wenceslaus at that point placed his pen down and turned to open a glossy picture print of a ship under full sail, a clipper mail packet on the China run over a century ago.

An abandoned house - dark salved to eclectic; crinkly, black pigment of old pine boards

Barely annoying the woods, his cabin like our woodpile home now for chipmunks and birds,

The long finger of blackness is holding its head for us. Dingy bue is its shade, comatose in movement, hazarding a slow swiftness,

* "...the fourth state of water in its plasmic state ... elements as plasmic water have programmed goals which

It was a red letter day and all within a decade, the sixties. Psychadelic and all because the Electric Circus opened up Walking Yonge Street in the December cold, aging

I began to see old lanterns, books opening/folding within your eyes; a pale light running as silver

To create dream - the pearl thru wine effect, oil and vinegar viscidity

"I wouldn't try a crossing in weather like this," warned the old man. "It's a bad time of year, what with the wind and all. Worse still, the lake water is lethal by November. That means if you capsize it will be the chill that does you in." The old man stopped short, conscious of the look of defiance in the youth's eyes. Young fool biting the nose to spite his face, he thought. The marina was closed for the season, but the island's residents made contact with the mainland one way or the other. Until mid-winter there was a ferry service, but that assumed a fair bit of discipline from a resident. He had to go and come when the province obliged. Young bloods off to escape the monotony of Wolfe Island were only marginally willing to conform their Saturday festivities with an arbitrary ruling. No, it was too easy to keep a boat in tow at a friend's landing. Keep a bottle to ward off the night's chill. A bottle for tonic against the elements and a buttress against authority. The old man knew if he did not avail this one a boat - a safe one at that - he would put his hands on a craft of some sort. Accountability, he thought. They mustn't care about their own lives. Still, there was a living to be made and it was a marina, albeit a closed one. He would still get a boat one way or the other, he mused again as he watched the light fade in the evening sky. He pulled his collar sharply. Yellow leaves were beginning to form a mat on the wooden stairs leading to the shed. He could just make out land's end against a funnel gray sky. Better to advise the young man of the dangers, suggest a daytime crossing. Perhaps even try a little reverse psychology.

To sit arrayed and task consumed by the edge of a window,

Quennelles. Lady of the Gold Horse with Diamond Eyes. A bottle of Napoleon brandy for the Count and two Persian lions carved in wood.

In Toronto, trendy bars absolutely must have a theme or at least end in "S". It's an unspoken rule. In-spots (notice the "S" again) recall the Lost Generation:

I would imagine the eyelids fail, fall closed, shut,

I would watch him lifting another drink from the fridge, joke about the connection

My mind a buzz saw, wood chips in decapitated thought soil chilblained hands

The walls don't lack sincerity, here, or be accused of "ordinary," what with the bleached remains

Sitting in the spendthrift dark lilting pennies away, deciphering fate ... .

In the wax museum with Attila and Genghis and Tamerlane all so close in spirit with our century. At Madame Tussaud's in London: Neill Cream. Burke and Hare. It's

We all end up badly and it's not the season nor the salt rather, I suspect but type of gherkin used.

On twin tails of a comet penguin men polka dot the night -    -    -

My tongue undulates, a wave to shore, knocks a vigorous reef, then slides to sea once more.

Orchestrating violins thru whisky sky clouds slide like billiard balls a Jackie Gleason-Fats Domino

They sit in silence. In camera, around the table. Terrifyingly stern, stares that grew antlers in my eyes. It was as if thunder or bolts with electricity were being decreed. The self-important, the pompous, well-fed and self-assured.

Upon the rocks where the baubles of broken blue glass wink at the sun and gather strands of rusted wire with the occasional bloodroot wildflower, a man is unbending in his efforts to construct a stone rail fence. Specks of mica in the rock are like lizards basking in the heat of a mid-day or a man's thumb placed squarely about these noisome stones clattering as one more of their number comes to rest and home. The line of cherokee rocks bends first up, then downward in movement across the meadow much like a labouring oar listing but finally brought into play. The glitter of turquoise water with jewels of light on her passing wave - like wings entrances much as does this fence moving smartly into the space of green and earth. The man, a stooped farmer, has toiled for days to clear this land for tillage. His impact seems negligible to efforts given yet gradually he surmises a scant return is being paid. He picks a wildflower nudging its face through calloused stone and watches the juice break onto forward skin. An old saying reminds him insect bites will lessen should he smear the liquid onto exposed limbs. He is perspiring now and the rocks shove face-like projections into the consciousness of forest and that periphery area, his clearing.

We're travelling down a carnival road, are met at intersections by varying faces: poets as eyes in collapsed black holes, even the universe as extension of the stellar poet. Then, they are transformed,

The sky was a ringed net of honeyed light, (colours from peeled apples)

Dodder capitulates on his bum, skulks under fence posts a twitch of Timothy weed prying

The mystique of the sea, where waves act as snares, hang boughs over wet

Adder toothed flowers snake the broken ground where molten tongues cremated

Who administers to my needs? Is it the dandelion, so ant-encrusted, that yellow pollen dangles from a shiny abdomen

Taken as metaphor ... Ophelia's funeral oration, derogatory snout

Shopping in their heads - a man a pair of shoes right colour (tan, off-white) shape -

The "Haight," in Ashbury lived up to its name. Sexual pioneers became commonplace. Agribusiness consolidated the back to the land movement.

Sixties idols were built to last. A 70's idol is shoddy and throwaway by comparison. Whatever became of Carnaby Street or bell bottoms?

When I was a much younger man, my spiritual homeland was a scrub-mile of bush with thicket leaves the size of your palms.

Perhaps one is in prison    - fidgeting as time draws to a close    -

A dark, shadow grey moth rests along the grim hue of brick, its spattered orange cream underwings scream a Halloween defiance

I like'em ragged round the rim, rough drawn at dawn panting at the edge,

Suppose and this is just supposing, though it is a supposition of the highest order, I were to die tomorrow

1 The moon hummed like a refrigerator, light thru shadows

You could have driven a pick-up truck thru spokes of that moon, so big and radiant

Clayton brothers at the corral, its Earp City today tumbleweed junction for numerous lives,

You can't go back, to Love, a home. memories of Pearl Bailey

Photos along a soft-centred wall like assorted chocolates with prized centres,

There are two images, a moon within reach yet trapped under snow -

I saw Bear shopping with Santa Claus at the North of 7 Plaza

Two Chinese fellows approached me in a London suburb. They were eager for talk. "Karl Marx's tomb," they implored, "directions to the tomb,

With that lime green hairnet commonly used by butterfly dispatchers - something your aunt might have commandeered