Hello! I am a writer and artist named Trevor Cunnington, and I'm starting this Patreon to hopefully get some kind of financial remuneration for the thousands of hours I've invested in writing. If you like words and interested in language, I think you will appreciate my poetry. My work ranges from simple to "abstruse," and "enigmatic." I have used quotations for abstruse because I look at this species of my writing not as the delivery of a message so much as a field in which the writer and reader meet and co-create meaning. I really like Billy Collins' idea of readers jet-skiing across the surface of the poem, rather than torturing it to obtain the confession of its "true meaning." Others have called my work enigmatic. I have been heavily influenced by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which was an avant-garde group of writers including Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Hannah Weiner, and Steve McCaffrey.
Something Lost
Barrett was famous in the neighbourhood for one main reason. He stole a cop’s gun, and he told those who he trusted, those that cared to listen, because Barrett was something of a loose cannon. So you have to keep in mind this story has been through the ringer at least one time. It was a hot, humid night, the kind when everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief when the sun goes down. But the body is funny. It seems to store heat so that on nights like that, you seem to sweat even more once the sun vanishes, especially if you’ve been walking around in a haze all day like Barrett had.
After having made his way around the entire
green bulk of High Park, he crossed the street at Keele and Bloor, and started
walking east towards the rail path. At the gas station/convenience store at the
corner, he saw a cop bending over to scoop ice out of the freezer. His gun hip
was pointed right at Barrett, and the cop’s torso was fully in the freezer.
Without so much as an instant’s hesitation he creeped up on the cop, keeping
the freezer door between him and his target’s line of sight, and with a lightning
jab he snatched the cop’s gun out of its holster and bolted across the
neighbouring strip plaza’s parking lot and took off down a side street.
Probably dulled by the contrast between his
air-conditioned car and the humid, soupy air, the cop responded more slowly
than usual. After he realized what had happened, he could not desert his car,
so he immediately swished into the driver’s seat, reached over for the radio
and called for backup. By the time he had revved his motor and tore out of the
parking lot to the opposite side of the street, with the gas station attendant
running out and shaking his fist at the cop, Barrett had already bolted down
another side street, running at full tilt.
There must have been a slew of cars who
ignored the cop’s blazing lights and blaring siren because when he finally
managed to make the left turn, Barrett had already reached the intersection of
a third side street, on which there was a school. The streets were quiet,
people hiding from the heat. He ducked into the school yard and hid in the
bushes, thrusting the gun into the space between his belt and his waist. His
heart beat in his ears like a jackhammer, and he briefly worried that passersby
would hear it.
Soon enough, he heard a siren, which got
louder and louder, then passed and faded. After about two minutes, he heard
another siren approach, but it too passed. He knew that patience was key in the
situation. Soon he heard three sirens zooming in and out of his hearing range.
His stomach growled and his mouth dried. After about half an hour, he heard one
of the sirens stop not too far away, close enough to hear the cops get out of
the car and ring the doorbell of the house beside the school. A man answered,
and the cops asked him if he had seen a man with a gun running through the
neighbourhood.
He said, no, he was watching Storage Wars. He asked the cops what the
man looked like, and they said that they didn’t have a description, but that he
should be alert and call them if he saw anyone suspicious.
Barrett had to restrain himself from releasing
a big, audible sigh. He waited for another half an hour, then shuffled out of
the bushes, looked towards the entrance to the school yard to make sure it was
clear, and finally walked slowly across the schoolyard. Right at the entrance,
he looked quickly left and right to make sure the coast was clear before
walking nonchalantly up the street towards Annette St. He didn’t want to stop
very long at the entrance to the school in case people were watching because
chances were the cops had already canvassed the whole area.
At Humberside, a cop passed in front of him
with its lights on but its siren off. It was an effort to not lose his cool at
this point, but he kept walking slowly. Luckily, at this exact moment, he was
between two streetlights and under a tree, so the area he walked through as the
cops passed was entirely adumbrated and hidden from light. He kept a steady,
even pace until Annette, where he turned right towards the intersection of it,
Dundas, and Dupont. There his luck held out, as no police cruisers passed
during the period he waited for the light to turn, crossed the street, walked
under the rail path, then up the stairs to the trail, where he heaved out a
sigh of relief. He considered himself in the clear now, considering how police
were generally glued to their cruisers. His arms flared out a little now with
every step, picking up a swagger he hadn’t felt for at least two weeks.
He arrived at his
town home in Pelham Place Gardens with his breath all caught up and his heart
at a regular pace. He opened the door and called to his roommate Andrew, who
was at this moment his best friend in the whole world. “Hey FAGGOT! Get down
here, I got something to show ya.”
“Is it thick, veiny, and throbbing?” Andrew
returned.
“No but it might just turn that ass into a
bloody mess.”
“I’ve heard that before, and it was
diddledy-squat.”
“Just get down here. For real this time.”
“Ok. Hold on a minute.”
Barrett waited
for the sound of Andrew’s creaky footfalls on the worn wooden stairs. Andrew,
not expecting much, stopped midway up the stairwell leaned against the drywall
balustrade, and asked “What ya got?”
Barrett reached
behind him, and pulled the gun out from his waistband. You should have seen
Andrew’s face when I showed him, Barrett later told me. Andrew, while he liked
Barrett and had the face of a genial cherub, was a strait-laced fellow whose
tolerance for deviance had grown during his residency chez Barrett, but not enough to forebear this insult to his domestic
quiet. I imagined seeing Andrew’s eyes darkening, his forehead furrowing, his
brows knitting, his mouth slightly open and its corners dragged to the
floor.
Andrew had been
my friend before Barrett, but unfortunately, Barrett’s charisma won me over and
I drifted apart from Andrew, a turn of events I now regret, especially after
the chain of events triggered by the gun theft.
Barrett told me
Andrew said he couldn’t keep the gun at the house. Of course, Barrett probably
said something like “And what are you going to do to stop me” at which point,
Andrew would get flustered and storm back upstairs. But perhaps curiosity won out, and an hour
later Andrew came back downstairs and asked him where he got the gun, and if he
could see it. In his room, I could picture him plotting to ask this question as
innocently as possible, and then snatch the gun as soon as Barrett let him hold
it, run away, and hide it in his floorboards until he could properly dispose of
it. Andrew had, after all, let me into that rarefied inner sanctum of those
that knew where he stored his identification documents and other valuables. He
was super paranoid about identity theft, but I suppose safe is better than
sorry, right? Knowing Barrett, a gun in the house would inevitably lead to disaster.
Barrett wouldn’t
let him hold the gun, though. He waved it around wantonly, its smooth black
matte metal emanating threat and danger. Barrett said that Andrew kept cringing
as he waved it around, pointing at random things in their shoebox kitchen: the
fridge, the stove, the clock. Barrett laughed cruelly. His spontaneity had an
edge that wasn’t admirable, although it was certainly compelling.
Andrew later told
me that Barrett pointed it at him, and that he didn’t speak to his roommate for
a week afterwards. I visited them the Tuesday evening after the Friday when
Barrett did his brazen deed. Andrew stayed in his room. He pulled out the gun
from his waistband (did he sleep with it there?) and shook it in front of my
face. I told him it was probably an air-gun or a well-designed toy. He grabbed
me by the hand and dragged me out the door to the back yard. Then he pointed
the gun at the dumpster behind their building and fired. Sure enough, a hot
bullet hole appeared.
“Barrett, you fucking crazy man, where did you
get it?”
A neighbor,
alarmed at the sound, opened his back door in a frenzy. Barrett didn’t even
hide the gun. The neighbor looked at Barrett, shook his head, but returned into
his living room.
“Haha! I stole it from a cop!”
“Really, Barrett. Stop fucking around. Where’d
you get it?”
“I’m serious. I snatched it right out of his
holster while he was getting ice.”
“Barrett, you’re a moron. You know that?”
“I know. But you all love me, don’t you?”
I laughed him off
and asked what in tarnation he planned to do with it.
“I’ll think of
something. I’ll probably just take it to high park and shoot bottles on the
bridge.”
“That won’t be suspicious, not at all.”
“Want to come with me? I think I’ll go on
Saturday.”
The smart part of
me screamed “no!” internally. Not only would I be supporting his ridiculous
behavior, but I might get in trouble for even being associated with him while
doing it. The stupid part of me revolted, charmed by Barrett’s nonchalance and
joie de vivre.
“Ok, I’ll come over at 1pm.”
“Deal. I hope I’m up by that time!”
When Saturday
rolled around, Barrett buzzed me at seven in the morning. I guess he wanted to
go when it wasn’t busy, but he neglected to tell me how early he wanted to go.
I put my pillow over my head and pretended not to hear. He buzzed again, and
yelled at my window. I hoped he went away. I got what I wanted, that time. I
rolled out of bed around 10:30 that morning, and padded down the stairs to make
myself coffee and a pancake breakfast. Then I read the paper.
At 2 in the
afternoon, I decided to go to Barrett’s place, which was just down the street
from me, to see how shooting bottles went, and to apologize for not making it.
When I knocked on the door of their main floor apartment, I heard yelling from
within. Andrew answered the door, and he looked a little pale and irascible. He
yelled into the kitchen, at the back of the house, that I was here. Barrett
walked into the foyer, and I knew something was wrong.
“What’s the matter? You look like
you’ve seen a ghost.” “I lost the gun.”
***
Barrett took the
gun out of the box he had installed on the back of his bike, and unwrapped it
from the plastic bag after he set up a line of six bottles on the bridge over
the stinky pond in the northeastern corner of high park. He closed one eye to
aim the gun at the bottles and shot. He missed everything. He shot again and
again, but didn’t hit anything until the second to last bullet, which shattered
the second bottle he had set up in a clinking mess of glass that then fell into
the pond with little bloop sounds. He cursed himself for not thinking to get
more ammunition before he did his little target practice. He left the other
bottles in place and threw the gun into his bike and left. When he got home, he
went to take the gun out of the box, but it was gone. His heart and mind froze.
The gun must have popped out when he had biked over a tree-root or something.
He returned the
park and looked frantically for the missing gun, but he found nothing.
***
Kalash’s parents
were fighting again. His father had beat him and his mother the night before in
a drunken rage, cursing his mother for imagined infidelities. His ribcage
ached, and when he looked in the mirror, a cut had opened above his left eye
and bled down his face. He cleaned it and put a band-aid on it. In the living
room, the yelling continued unabated. Kalash took his windbreaker out of his
closet and slipped it over his head. The clock said 8:04 am. He wondered if the
neighbours would call the police again, like they had a month ago. He slinked
out of his room, tiptoed past the doorway to the kitchen silently, and slipped
out the front door. In the park, the low sun split the tree branches in dappled
light.
***
On the path into
the park, he found something wrapped in a plastic bag, the kind you get when
you buy groceries at the supermarket. Unlike the occasional dog shit you find
on these paths, this had a substantial heft and shape to it. Kalash looked
around him before he bent over to pick it up; there was no one around. He
unwrapped it quickly and looked down at the cool, dark metal of a
semi-automatic pistol. He stared at it with wonder that soon turned into
gratitude, then he looked to the sky and thanked God for answering his prayers.
A smoky plan started to form in his mind, and when it cleared he saw that there
were a few different directions he could take this sublimating plan. He put the
gun’s barrel against his face and savoured its cool surface. Then he stowed it
away in the pouch of his windbreaker and kept walking.
As he walked, he
weighed his options. The birds chattered in the trees, and for a few moments he
forgot about the raised voices in his home, which bounced around the empty
threadbare rooms and lodged occasionally in the recesses of his body, to arise
only in unexpected moments at school when an unrelenting rage rose in him in
the regular soccer games that his peers played in the yard. The teachers spoke
about him in their lounge – he was a problem to them, and he knew this.
The sound of the
creek penetrated his ears from the left hand side, the bottom of a treecovered
hill. A couple walked passed him, holding hands, walking their pug. At the community gardens, squash hung
heavily on thin trellises, their vulgar yellow fluted flowers trumpeting into
the soft wind. Tomatoes weighed their stems down, and chives sprightly sprung
from the rich black-brown loam.
He owed his
mother nothing, he thought. The rage trickled down from his towering father to
his sharp-faced mother, who was the one who usually beat him. He despised them
both, for his inheritance was a foaming mouth, a depthless anger with no name.
He recognized his father as the source of it all somehow, but his job with the
government as a social worker made it difficult to imagine his situation
otherwise.
His hand stroked
the gun in his windbreaker. Here was his
way out. He took a path out of the park and headed towards Roncesvalles, where
there was a bank. His plan of revenge had evaporated, and his feet drew him on
with a life of their own to the bank. At the door of the bank he stopped for a
moment, noting the position of all the tellers and the three customers, one of
whom was already walking towards him to leave. He let the woman brush past him
and he entered the bank purposefully. Inside he watched the two people at the
tellers, doing their business. Behind them was the money vault, and there was
an office space off to the right where people crouched over the dull lights of
computers. He took the gun out of his pocket and established a firm position
between the office and the tellers, then he fired a shot into the ceiling.
Luckily for him, the gun had jammed during Barrett’s target practice, giving
Barrett the impression it was out of ammunition. This time it did not jam, and plaster from
the bullet hole fell to the floor.
“Everyone freeze, right now! You, you there in the office, get the FUCK
out here now! Don’t even think of pushing those buttons or you DIE!” The anger
welled up in him and exploded quite easily. The people in the bank cringed and
cowered.
“All of you, get in this FUCKING CORNER NOW!
If you’re not here in 30 seconds, I’m going to KILL YOU ALL.”
“Who
has the keys to the vault?! HUNH? WHO HAS THE FUCKING KEYS?!”
A mousey-haired
woman stepped forward. Her nametag said Isabella. He picked the one who cowered
the lowest; he knew how this game worked.
“ISABELLA! Give this fucking cunt the keys to
the vault!”
He looked towards
the door, and his luck was holding out. People were walking by, but they
weren’t coming in. Most people were sleeping in.
“Alright, open
the vault and give me all the money. Isabella! Get me a bag for the money!
NOW!”
Isabella scurried
behind the desk and came out with two branded plastic bags. The frightened man
fumbled the keys to the vault as he tried to open it frantically.
“HURRY THE FUCK
UP OR I WILL KILL ISABELLA AND THEN EAT YOU FOR BRUNCH!”
Kalash snatched
the bags from Isabella’s grip and jumped up on the counter, facing the corner
where his hostages cringed with every spittle-laced word that burst from his
mouth. He pushed the bags out at the man struggling with the vault as he
pointed the gun at his hostages. The man stuffed the money into the bag
quickly, until they were bursting at the seams.
“NOT TOO FUCKING FULL YOU IDIOT!”
Kalash grabbed
the bags, jumped up on the counter, and waved the gun in the air.
“Now YOU! YOU IN THE VAULT! Get back to that
corner, NOW!”
The man didn’t
jump on the counter like Kalash did, but shuffled around the end of it. Kalash
jumped down, still shaking the gun in the hostages’ direction.
“If I hear any police sirens in the next ten
minutes, I will shoot the next person I see, do you understand?!”
They nodded
fearfully.
“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!”
They all said
yes, timidly, not in unison. Kalash backed towards the door as quick as he
could, then at the door, he shoved the gun back in his windbreaker, and exited
the bank as calmly as he could. He walked down the street for one block, then
he hailed a cab. Kalash told the cabby to take him to the airport in a friendly
voice.
***
Kalash’s parents
had emigrated from Armenia just before he was born. He had been there with
them, once, as a child. He bought a flight to Yerevan and never looked back.
Yucatan Fantasy
A distant recipe handed out
With lime, salt and Chile
Down from the generations
Cave wells and prayers to local gods
Down from time immemorial
Focal points lightning rods
The piles of sand, tens of feet high
Arboreal snakes drip down
To slither on shifting sands found
Only in the remotest outposts
Orioles in the branches, fly into
windows
The dull thud that makes the porch
wiggle
For but a second, neck-broke with
visual riddles I reckon that’s the way physical Existences extend
themselves.
Or don’t.
unicorn legend
There is whalebone where
the deer roam – a carcass, stranded and blanched where it landed from a sea, no
longer is the wind getting stronger?
The leaves break it up and
the sky fills with floating fluff from the cottonwood trees making today seem
like a dream.
You called, a fossil
from the past where nothing seems to last; dead is as dead does not sleep where
the ants crawl and the willows weep.
Sometimes I can hear
acorns fall; I tried to find something to say but my mind was empty where it
lay; we traded a memory to save the merciful day: that time you took an emery
board to file your wooden birds smooth as glass; I think you couldn’t think
fast enough to shake the silence, on our words baked the way we parted last
with a scowl and a huff; outside an owl hoooos, fast broken with a mouse
stuffed
in its claws, held fast.
Try though I might, I
can’t articulate the way your name hangs in the air when it’s said; I can’t say
why your absence hurts why your presence deserts mine in this my hour of need,
aware of the need to invert life as lived as usual.
Our priorities in place, fruitful;
I want to overcome the inertia
I want to overcome the
hamartia I want to become the full root the part-truth, the quelled cheroot,
Pan’s flute, muted in the glistening dawn; to not know the difference between
right and wrong to sing songs, and after feel the need to invent. The pawn in
the process of the castle becomes an open question.
I became of my vanity, a
vassal and worn, perched in the bastion of civilized dismay, seeking
remembrance across the ages leaking from the soars caused by the pages
on which these oars
paddle with grace and rages against the pores through which pours the light of
the universe blowing back into our faces; switch between what ails you, quilt
by looped stitch.
The garlic pungency to
ward the plagues during which the magus draws in the hot pitch a bowl of glass
luminescent, pearlescent, and iridescent, twirling and twirling in a hot liquid
managing the quiddities of scent trailing in streams in the wind – squid eating
their prey, with bird beaks and with the ink that comes and squeaks through the
depths.
This whale road is now a
forest; I opened through my thoughts of you, the best part of my life without
rest, without adieu.
***
What happened to you?
in
your eyes i see
an orchard, whose fruit lies
fallow on the ground worm-eaten and brown where no animals live to spread the
seeds;
what happened to you that
renewing fire can’t burn out the moldy
cosmos of your wet inner world and the
deer when they smell you don’t spook?
is it rust on the gears that
turn your heart towards love, that box of chocolates left in your mailbox for a
forgotten kindness?
i’ve waited too long to ask, and
i’m not sure i remember how to speak.
***
Haunted
The sun has set my dear and the loons put the haunt into the landscape from their water holes.
Why
do you tell
me to go?
Could it be that it’s what I want, but that I’m afraid.
The trees shiver and the house,
built of former trees, creak.
And
what would you do?
Probably get on with your life. As if I have ever been anything Approaching necessary. The light on the boat house casts a shimmering beacon on the ripples of the lake.
We’re approaching the quincunx of our tryst, and I’m not sure what to make of it all.
Change is the daunting air we breathe, and it sears me, tears my lungs.
I open the door, enter the night and walk along the edge of the lake.
The
crickets and frogs
continue their sonic lunacy as I
sit amongst the reeds, alone again.
***
some words for a stalker
waffles in the toaster honey in a handbasket hot sand (to be) between toes
your words in my ear urgent, plangent waning beneath a waxen bough
slip-sauce to come drip drip, the candles dwindle hairs crinkle to the flame
I'm sorry you had to go but you spoke the wrong words and the evidence must be burned
in a halo of light, the sun's distant cousin – an amber residue
gone with the wind's breath through the windows
the night goes, the day comes I'm on my toes until you come
no
more.
***
Overkill
Gustav spent the summer catching mosquitoes, thousands of them. In his lab, his black and chrome microscope stood stolidly on a low table, rising to a height slightly lower than his eye level. It was bolted there by stainless steel, zinc, and tin. His stature required him to stoop in order to look into the eyepiece and pierce the circle of light rising through slide, substrate, and subject. Mentally, he reminded himself yet again to put plates under the microscope so he would no longer have to stoop.
After his first day of gathering mosquitoes, he let several bite him. Then he squeezed blood out of the tiny hole in his skin, put it on a slide, and put it under the microscope. Gustav was an amateur scientist; he worked as a lab assistant. As such he didn't know yet that the anti-coagulant compound in mosquito saliva would require a much more powerful microscope to identify, a scanning electron microscope. He saw the red and white blood cells jostling like bumper cars at a theme park. Nothing else, though. Not a single hint of his object. The next day, he approached the lab director about using the scanning electron microscope for a personal project. The director agreed without prodding him about the project, surely an oversight, but a fortuitous one for Gustav.
That weekend, he let mosquitoes bite him again and looked at the blood under the stronger microscope. A panoply of hidden structure appeared to him. The barely visible line of the cell walls under the weaker microscope gained dimension as two-compound layers of phosphorus and lipids. The hazy barrier became sharp as he slowly adjusted the resolution and focus. Around the edges, he saw the effect that the air had on blood of slowing the cells movement and thickening the plasma into a scabrous crust. Then he saw it, a marauding compound that prevented this process from spreading through the blood. He printed the screen with the compound to study its chemical structure.
The next weekend, in addition to collecting mosquitoes in the dense woodlot at the edge of town, full of stagnant, algae covered ponds and water-full ditches, Gustav pored over chemistry textbooks to learn how to draw out this compound from the body of thousands, and, if needed, millions of mosquitoes. Once he learned how to do this he gassed all of the mosquitoes, ground them up in a mortar and pestle, and put them in solution. He evaporated the solution to leave behind a fine pale powder of the desired anti-coagulant compound, about 50 milligrams worth.
The next phase of his plan involved getting his boss alone at work on the weekend. A sudden influx of blood tests after lent had to be processed, and Gustav volunteered to come into the lab on the impending long weekend to get them finished on time. No one else wanted to come in, having made holiday plans. Grumbling, his boss Brad said he would join him because it was against company policy to have employees work alone in the laboratory. Safety first, after all.
The sun rose over the horizon that morning in a blaze of orange and pink glory. A flock of starlings rioted in a neighbour's tree as Gustav locked his front door and entered his car, which smelled of air freshener, stale sweat, and a denouement of armour all. The taste of coffee lingered on his morning breath, which he had tried to annihilate with winter-fresh toothpaste, but it invariably returned. He put two pieces of gum in his mouth, and considered plausible reasons for carrying a scalpel around work.
As he walked to the front door of the lab to put his hand into the bio-metric punch clock, he noticed a blue balloon, rising into the air over the building, an escapee into the great nothing above.
At lunch, as part of his daily work routine, Bradley
conveniently went to the bathroom before he ate. Gustav opened Bradley’s thermos
and emptied the packet of anticoagulant into his thermos. Gustav could not
think of an adequate pretext for carrying around a scalpel, so instead, he
planned to “accidentally” break a vial of the blood they were examining and use
that instead. Soon after lunch he did this as Bradley leaned against a wall and
examined paperwork beside the garbage can. Bradley looked over in his direction
and warned him to be more careful. Gustav walked towards the garbage, pretended
to trip on the leg of a stray chair, and fell into Bradley with the jagged
shaft of glass, which he drove with the force of his fall into Bradley's
throat. The wound was not too significant, but he bled out quickly because of
the anti-coagulant Bradley administered. The police took Gustav's report, and
he pretended devastation at the loss of his co-worker in the most odious of
accidents. They found his report consistent with the evidence, the most
important of which was culled from the lab's closed-circuit cameras, and the
medical examiner agreed.
***
St. (bp)Nichol(as)
Adore, no:
A
door, no:
A
dore, hooked:
“Do,”
stuck between “a” and “re:”
Are we what we do or what we are? For what it's worth, I adore you.
I
do.
Taken from the water, flipping
and flopping, lip pierced, wearing trauma about our necks like albatrosses,
Why
do we do this to ourselves?
Why
are we (y)our s,elves?
“I
contain multitudes.”
Thermo-dynamic law: matter (at
term) cannot be created or destroyed.
I can be toyed with, drizzled
with treacle, mollified.
Inside
I smoulder;
I
figure it all out eventually.
Quickly. Para-sight para-graph
graphomania para-gone Rags on one, on all come ragnarok paragon-ads
Headline: pair of gonads takes
recourse in meiosis.
Noetic no exit, ethically emic.
***
Remembering You
The vast
symbology of city-swirl curls the fingernails of corner-swappers, its manic
noise bleeding across media, mass
mutual brain washing and filthing; the cordiality of bench, marks on the
hubcaps grating against curbs; neuro-linguistic programming,
market hivemind;
and in some words to my father: I too
hate bay leaves, whose texture ruins a meal, the sound of a dripping faucet in
the quiet of home, say this, say that.
Salad forks and a crisp loss,
those gustables come too late to the
party; gents:
please drop the motivation
speculation.
Crawl the streets, howl in abeyance,
I eat this city whole.
It’s easy to get lost in the web of
meaning, meaning Ariadne’s thread gets
lost as tassled helicopters buzz in the salad days of summer.
Headline:
Inside out, corrugated sentences leap
and ply the fickle dance of breath willing in the wistful elision.
Mr. meta-modernism standing on his
head and all you got is headway and the hyperreal?!
(eating the incredulity
grilled cheese sandwich);
we’ll take our
fuel of the day with vinegar.
Compulsive, parroting inversion – a goat no longer got. (tlieb) Terrafrost
Liebniz.
A bath in the
corrosive salts of allegiance; he speaks under the tartan and I listen, think
of him now in bed, wondering, winnowing the chaff of the day for lost goods, a
bill of sale, a liberal slaver
giving bilious tributes to the tabernacle;
we dance by candlelight and exist only
as silhouettes of each other.
The dill which I would use to sweep
away the dust, were that idea not absolutely absurd, collects the pollen of
stars drifting wanly from space In a wanton borealis.
Oh, the varicose thyme has done its
number and caterpilloried the sunlight, having become space over and over
again, crimson and clover in a spendthrift store daze of dazzling dalliance to
twinkle clean the pots and the plight of light in a kitchen.
Soap bubbles in the sink and a
deserved reversal.
If life is a
stage, why does this dress rehearsal never seem to end?
Dear Joyce: your
harsh word for Shakespeare – part of your attempt to carve out your space in
the pantheon of immortals and pen the anthem of a generational hiccup – a tabula rasa of timbre, mind, and beatific
indifference, it settles under the crates where we store the history of our
middle-meetings, our funereal marches, our votaries to the unspeakable coterie.
In the marshlands
of our epiphanies you come hither as a carnivorous plant.
Done in by the negative gesture,
we reach for the disquieted solace.
Must meaning too obey the law (lossy
format) of entropy?
You are that and more, an entertainer
of youth unencumbered by the wearisome cares of the world, tarry not with Dante
on his journey,
or wake a political prisoner without
the recognized status of one. You have brought forth good and been a teacher, a
mentor, a friend, hoister, bulwark of a falling beam, lying to the kind side of
things. You won’t understand this, but who am I to . . . that?
I am your son and this is a brute fact
of my existence.
You are my father and for that, a
grateful bow, a tip of the hat, a firm handshake, a warm hug, and more than a
moment’s thought
always and forever.
Thanks for offering a platform to learn about amazing writers like Trevor. I enjoyed reading some of his work.
ReplyDeleteThanks for highlighting this writer, his work sounds really interesting and it's great he has set up a Patreon.
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