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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,
Will deaden our faces, wrapping our feelings from earthly sight.

The man about to become a sparrow
is shouting his head off
wearing green trousers
with red eyes framing mustier tweed,
he lambasts the lad
for not conducting
his person properly...

Counted three white pigeons
on a roof, near a gable
silhouetting a barn;
as an afterthought
killed as many nervy bluebottles
on the bedroom glass as
warnings to myself, perhaps,...

The taste of an apple,
the cringing of a bee
as sun stops turning
a ladle over their skins;
the fire gold stains
on apple's skin,
the honey yellow, black bits
a hornet wrinkles in.

If brains be gables & minds, say, the shutters
in a derelict New England Mansion
then intuition is in the
eaves & casements
the well-springs seeping into turrets & cupolas
of all other nether spaces....

Giving myself permission to write -
points from Ciudad Juarez
as well as the compass where
taboos complete bayonet-sized memories
a tadpole of doubt gleaned from
shallow Canadian upbringing...

They poured hot water into people's cups
in which green tea leaves were floating
like algae,
or into red-painted spittoons
placed on the floor
which the travellers made frequent use of......

Breaking up -
as in the cloisson' jar you dropped. . .
little regard,
a few brittle pieces scattered about the floor.
Let's call it "shedding feelings". Expensive?...

My mind had almost died.

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

My fate like Blondin's walk across Niagara
saw cataracts looming large,...

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

Rocky shale, pale voile,
sun lighting the
clearness of the bay;
come Moccasin Flower or Grass Pink
unto Painted Cup -
big with primula eye, these septs off wild
and inland seas.
...

"Nature abhors a vacuum", theorists of both philosophy and
politics assure us.

What's more, the phenomena is not confined to mere
physical science given the nature of human opportunism....

Chess playing Death
- no, the reverse
Death sitting decked out and self-satisfied
in black no mandatory top hat but a shroud
shouldering a cowl.

There stereotypes end -...

Memory as embankment,
a mudslide at High Tide
with shades up...
my avocado green brethren
pleasures the soil.

Memory as enchantment
a Belle at a Soiree,
pureed, Gaston at a Dinner Party....

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.
...

On rue Vincingetorix,
a Paris hovel
in a garret of cold -
Gauguin enchanted
serpentine colours, the medium of
a brushstroke from
a paltry primitivism.

Rue Vincingetorix,
cloudy haze...

Down on your luck
or, as they say, "financially embarrassed" ...
with little in the way of hope,
less palaver -
drifting in & out of theme parks not unlike
El Paso, Prairie Junction...

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
envoute par les mots et les images.

The ghosts are marmalade
thin as rinds across toast
or the Weeping Willow, whose
green beard leans,
crane-like, into a child's
backyard.

A Morning Cloak butterfly,...

If flies be dragons
and they may you know.
In large desiccated brambles
where wasps go
involuntary blue-green coelacanths
these Devil's Darning Needles
wedge in Flying Circuses...