Poem by my friend Kathy Lee

Sadness summons saviors

and strangers alike.

They seek surrender

and salvage of your soul.

Solace and silence

still the source

of all that slays you.

Two women and a balcony

Two women sat out on a balcony.

The wind took the trees and tossed aside their branches

like warlords skewering babies on sticks

to roast this evening for dinner.

Dark clouds rode the sky like hobbled horsemen

cantering to their doom.

One of the women on the balcony was a bit fat around the middle

and she smelled a little of pee

and when she smiled she looked determined

and she came out on the balcony in her underwear sometimes.

She lived alone and was frightened.

But right now she wasn’t alone.

Right now she was with this other woman

and the two women sat out on the balcony together

with their glasses of wine glittering in the light

whenever the sun appeared beneath the clouds

as it made its relentless decent.

The two women looked at the view.

The view was some trees

with birds in them.

Noisesome by turns

Transformative. Stuttering. Flourishing. Then, just suddenly ending. But the whole time, I just want to go home. Each note on each of the ridiculous stringed instruments an insult to everything I’ve ever stood for.

A guy just going around his house

…moving from room to room…stopping in the kitchen…sampling some gravy he’s been simmering for two weeks…adding this or that…hoping one day to get just the right flavour…stopping in the bathroom to pee…

The oldest story in the book

I was a child

upon the river

Wide, compared to other things.

The very thing I didn’t need I sat near the smell of.

I smelled it.

I couldn’t cross it.

I couldn’t go back.

I couldn’t stay.

I was scared

to leave.

Serial library passage Jul 26

Everything seemed to pull me

further from some destination

I’d set for myself,

a destination I’d sworn lived in the music,

and every miniscule space between notes was like a settling of accounts,

till I knew for certain that getting home required the cessation of every sound,

musical or not,

and every resurrection of sound,

the music,

the voice of the waitress,

even the clink of glass at the bar,

served only to prepare me

for the terrible silence

of my return.