In January of 2007, songwriter Sarah Kenvyn and I agreed to a daily swap: I'd write a poem and she'd write a song. I held up my end, though she quickly skimped on hers saying songs were much harder to write than poems. To troll her, one day I wrote a song. These are the best of what I came up with.
17 years later I did this again, with poet Wren Jones.
01 January 2007
Found as a stray –
my youth’s been stolen –
foiled by an old man’s sin.
I’ll get away –
sharp and broken –
a bone escaping skin.
06 January 2007
I float, limp from the swim, one eye closed to the sun, the other turned to watch her on the shore.
A different sunlight finds her and I flush with nostalgia for days of unbelievable optimism and so many ways of being naked.
08 January 2007
The bedroom smells of sex and sugar donuts.
I see her naked in the kitchen prepping breakfast.
I’ve loved enough; she’s the one.
The toaster pops — “Butter?”
I feel the air behind me for a chair.
08 January 2007
I find her in fiction
between Duras and Durrell.
She wears the kind of dress
in the kind of way
that makes a grown man
notice for the first time
how beautiful yellow is.
11 January 2007
He writes my hair black. He writes me four inches taller than I am. He writes me right handed, funny, and near-sighted. He writes me hot, small-breasted. He writes that we woke, spooning, after exhausting each other to sleep.
He never writes about my insecurities or neuroses, though he does write about those things with his other girls. Always the gentleman, he disguises their identities by writing them like me.
17 January 2007
Temple hauls in smoke, asks: “Do you think I have too much cunt?”
“No,” I tell her. “Just the right amount.”
“I once dated a guy who treated it like a pistachio without a seam.”
“Dated?” I ask. She holds up two fingers. “I’m surprised you let him go the second round.”
“It was cold out. Snow up to here. I mean, I like mystery. I like awe. But I also like –”
“Research?”
She grins, waves me closer. I cross the room.
“Anyone ever tell you you fuck like a prince?”
“You,” I answer, and sink into her.
She whispers: “If I ever leave you, never forgive me.”
“I won’t,” I tell her, and haven’t.
19 January 2007
Ashamed of what I’ve done,
let me be lost against you,
a blush in the night
pressed close
against your saffron-colored hair.
22 January 2007
For my birthday, I ask him to
fuck me with his fists and tongue.
He complies, briefly
giving me over to God. At least
that’s how it seems.
Sleeping, his embalmed hands twine
my glutted body.
Funk drifts,
rousing me with detailed
flashes of the night.
For breakfast, we steal chekos from Kohinoor
and eat them in the alley,
skin and all.
It is June, 1998, &
I am thirty.
23 January 2007
Young lady on King Street
hair cut like Seberg’s in ‘60
I only asked for directions because
I was afraid to ask for everything else.
24 January 2007
The only song I ever wrote. My friend Sarah sings and wrote the music.
25 January 2007
I spent most of my 20s
inside Jenny,
moving & roving, swinging & swinging.
She loved every minute of it,
sliding & thrusting, pushing & pulling.
Now that I’m in my 30s
my late 30s
there’s not much to swing anymore,
or so it seems,
outside of my first real love.
But hey, what’s your name
again?
27 January 2007
She doesn’t believe in reincarnation,
just energy returning
everywhere — parts of us
portioned out
to bumblebees & birch trees,
prairie dogs &
dirt that will one day make its way to the
riverbank.
My thoughts bloom
at what unknown ancestors
anticipate, witnessing
our backyard lovemaking
as they cross over
in the smoke of
a neighbour’s burning
leaves.