Anti-social media

electronic streets

muttering tapped out words

left as a bench mark

New Post

 standing in a hole

hardpacked soil

of a long ago dig

off kiltered lien against time

Fallen among

Unposted words

farm fence wired

tangles of sedge 

decades abandoned.

Social Media Madness and

Infectious rage and grief and bewilderment

of how we ended up back here among horrors

once escaped, engulfing us again,

lost cause humanity

on the edge of oblivion or

a miracle performed by Living Word

at this point my vote as meaningless

as my last visit to a ballot box,

this mote of electronic dust

taped to the echo chamber of a blog, 

resonant with emptiness,

exiled on main stream flutter in a stilling breeze.

Silence smiles because I say so,

and line lengths grow until they don't reach apogoee

except when nudge over the lip of an ending.

Generating Trauma

 In sweltering hours

genocide victims counting

lessons never learned. 

September 8 2020 My Majesty Died

 

Her majesty the Queen, Elizabeth the Second of my entire life

reigned over me like a bow until a quarry forklift operator 

  told Kenny Jackson and Me "they're saying the Queen die."

She was my majesty, now she is Saint Elizabeth of Balmoral,

heiress to the Anglo Saxon monarchs and Saints found

in the histories of Bede’s English Speaking people:,

kings and queens with all their miracles,

created by he or not, the pantheon of his pen,  

in whose company  Elizabeth of Balmoral has now entered.

The miracles of her rule were simple goodness, the wonders of 

her dedicated service were heroic examples of grace under pressure

duties faithfully to her own ascension promise; she was a young

mother who became grandmotherly a rock for nearly

half our nation’s existence: for one third of all international peoples

in the British Commonwealth, whatever their politics and views of

monarchy many are bowing heads to honour her passing, conscious

of her strength of character, her essential goodness in hard places;

for a woman to be, to be the woman to whom elephant matriarchs in

Africa acknowledged her just before he father’s death,

trumpeters of her ascension, the reason for her return to London,

my fair lady-o.

July 20 1982

Scuttling up Yonge before dawn

the morning of my twenty-seventh birthday,

my accomplishments to date,

a filing cabinet full of manuscripts

and rejection notices.

I have driven hack and cleaned vomit

from stifling halls while King Tut's death mask

looked on with a smile,

I have parachute-panted in Voodoo's

and held court

beneath spray-painted prophecies.

I have been laid in Anglicans woods

by a woman I never met again,

I have walked streets littered with roses

scattered under after-hour crowds

on my way to booze-can dance floors

overflowing with musicians, dealers,

groupies, strippers and sundry flotsam like me.

But now with the moon hours from predawn,

clearing clouds in the tunnel of downtown

I pass the archway of stone

that stands inexplicably at the mouth of McGill,

the women's club a few row houses in:

I'd once been a guest inside with a Halloween Butterfly.

North of Wood Street, two jean-jacketed headbangers

from Scarberia wade through junk strewn about Yonge – he

in an AC/DC t-shirt and she in one claiming

'And on the 8th Day God created Led Zeppelin'

– although I can't help but doubt it.

A copy of the Plain Truth magazine sprawls

with an empty bottle of wine in a doorway.

A transvestite sits with a male, dwarf-punk prostitute

on the steps of the Country Style Donuts

eating French crullers.

In the always-open Super Duper Sub Shop

the guy with the eternally greasy ponytail is working.

"If you like Genesis you'll love Myth"

claims the poster outside the Gasworks;

'Save Daily on Supermarket Specials'

answers the ad on the Star box.

I turn off Yonge preparing myself for the way

the leaves on the trees will animate

the final play of twilight,

instead I come across two coupling cats in the gutter.

Dawn pales into rolling clouds piling up

on the distinctly planetary horizon.

My door closes behind me with a click

that no on hears but me, and Atlas,

stained glassed into the mythos of window.

Before eventual sleep, there is a call from my brother

salvaging the last vestiges of my optimism with small talk.