Every time we went to his barber supply shop,
he’d ruffle my hair
and say, “hi kid, how ya doin'?”
He knew my father from Sicily.
They went to the same school together,
but after the war, my father became a barber,
and he became a mobster.
He was friendly with dad,
like childhood friends often are.
They’d joke in dialect and laugh.

It wasn’t until later
that I learned who he was,
his businesses were fronts
for covers and covers for fronts.
Anyway, what did I care. I was a kid.

And that was the rub.
Under the RICO Act
I was “guilty by association.”

At ten I turned myself in,
but I never snitched,
and I’m still serving time
in the garden of good and evil.

The day seems dead
you wake from the dream of death
and realize again it was real

I walk around the house
breathing the dead air
feeling dead inside

with every loss
the air grows thinner

A photo I can’t forget:
From the Globe and Mail,
A Muslim mother kneeling
Over her five dead children,
After the 1983 Turkish earthquake.

Grief has never been
Captured by an artist
Like the grief
This photographer
Found in her face.

The photo comes to mind
Whenever I need to feel grateful
For what I have not lost.

may depress,
but I see it as the tree of winter
shedding its last leaves.

If it’s cold,
it’s only because winter
has paused over us,
resting without a coat.

If it’s grey,
it’s only because winter
hasn’t slept in days—
his face gone ashen.

Intellectually,
I’m indifferent to vicissitudes,
but my body feels the changes—
my body is the weak point.

I compensate—
growing leaves and poems
on my limbs,
that the spirit might carry
into Spring
what the body can’t.

after Gil Scott-Heron

Living in the void, living in the gaps.
Dying in the void, dying in the gaps.
Rioting on the news, dying in the news.
Killing for the news, living through the news.
There are two ways to get where you’re going,
but you don’t have to take either.
You can be your own person.
You can’t be your own person.
Accept defeat, accept victory.
Straddle the gaps, don’t fall in.
Don’t let the sides choose you.
Don’t let them shoot you down.
Don’t carry their hatred in your heart.
You’re only dying in the gaps.
You’re only falling through the cracks.
Riots in the streets, war in the Middle East,
war in Ukraine, famine and the inhumane.
We’re living in the gaps, stranded in the gaps,
drowning in hatred and unhappiness.
Politicized puppets, lost in information gaps,
with inconclusive raps and toxic apps,
hating each other, deluding each other,
murdering one another, murdering our brothers.
You can’t hide in the gaps.
You can’t last in their death-traps.
We only just survive in the cracks.
We always get caught in their traps.
We are strategies on an economic map.
We are saps eating their scraps
that fall through the cracks
and drift down into the gaps.
We are races all in collapse,
pitted against each other in the gaps.
We’re falling into the gaps.
We breathe the bad air of their gaps.
We gasp for breath; we gasp for breath.

When I did peyote,
I heard ceremonial drums,
impossible to place,
and chanting, low and rising.
Later, I told the shaman on the reserve
about the drums, the chanting,
and he said, "The spirits liked you,
that's why the earth was drumming,
that's why the spirits were singing."
That was nice to hear.
Better, I thought, to be liked by the spirits
than by what passes for humanity.

for Juliana Marins (June 21–24, 2025)

A nun levitated above her bed
Her face in rapture
While outside the window
An old man with walker
Fell face first into sidewalk
And was devoured by ants
And across the world
A young woman slipped into a volcano
And went to sleep
Remaining beautiful
In the fires of the earth
Above or below
The mystery remains
It is levitating even now

The path through the forest
winds in and around the trees,
circling into distance—
going everywhere and nowhere.

Trails veer into singing meadows,
and here and there
a footbridge spans burbling streams
where worries flow away.

A snail migration is its own duration,
a slow unfolding measured by itself.
And the forest snakes you see
conceal what they reveal at length—
like the indigo buntings
who lie to your eye.

You breathe something greater than air
amid all this flourishing.
It’s in the breath of the forest
to be dying into so much life.

Stay longer, and the shadows
gown you in regal attire.
Bees carry a crown to your head—
I am father of the forest.

My head was full of the sun’s *****
It could give birth to anything
It could impregnate death with poems

The earth was my bed
Nature was my wife
I was the father of dreams

Green ants covered branches
I said to the flower bloom
And it bloomed with mirrors inside

In spectral graveyards
Every grave is a garden
Of grasses and moonflowers

When I stood
My head cleared the clouds
Who knew the moon
Could be touched by real poems

1
The rivers of the river were moving again.
The shattered ice glided
In one giant flow of crystal shards.
A concert, a symphony of treble sounds,
Frozen keys struck with light and music
Glittered all along the seaward shore.

2
Was it the beginning of time?
Or had the end of time begun?
The earth was locked in ice.
Darkness was upon the land.
When sunlight filtered
Through the poison gases
It struck the ice and multiplied.
The light passed through itself,
Melting and reforming,
Until the air had cleared.
Light took the shape of a fern
And ferns unfurled out of nothing.
Light moved and there was wind.
Light poured over its rim
And from ice water trickled.
When light was exhausted
The night was born.

3
Those who live by the river
Have heard the sound of light
In that staccato of shattered ice;
In the sharp tintinnabulous
Wavering myriad of chimes,
They have heard the cold
Remote music of a crystal age.

First its stillness held me captive—
A fox snake in the grass.
Then, when I nudged it,
It rattled its tail to fool me.
When it curled up
Into a striking position,
It was like copper melting,
The essence of hydraulics
Came into view,
Like a rope of water
Collapsing into itself.
Strangest of all
Was how energized
I was by the encounter,
Like I’d been envenomated
With energy venom,
Or a spirit snake
Was crawling round my spine,
And I too was seeking the sun.

How to get violence out of your head
with three easy breathing techniques,
how to lower your heart rate
by practising these gun-safety habits.
You can **** your anxiety,
bury your depression once and for all.
Anger-management: shoot whom you don’t like.
Muscle tension? Try rioting for exercise.
The herds will run straight off the cliff,
into oblivion.

Which is why we offer relaxation techniques
from one of our many violent criminals.
Guest lecture by Wim Hof, who can *******
with his Iceman ******* and genetic fat levels.
We understand you can’t love.
Private sessions with a guru sadist,
massage therapy by certified psychopaths.
We understand you can’t feel.
Psychotherapy and self-defence,
mass shooters, targeted attackers—
we can align your dominant eye.

Passing the limits of feeling at all,
you can go anywhere, without fear.

Now that they’ve taken the body,
the German women begin cleaning,
and they clean everything, walls, floors…
Why all the cleaning I wonder?
Does death leave a stain--
or shed its shadow like a viral load?
They must clean out the humors
just like in the olden days.
Cleaning is Germanic grieving.
They put their grief to work,
and the Protestant angels
who appear on the scrubbed walls
witness the rinsing of death’s last traces.

I know about dogs who are half house flies
I know too about the praying mantis
and its preoccupation with dragonfly brains
I’ve watched a leopard slug outrun eternity
I ride horses with six legs
play with ceremonial knives
if I cut myself
I bleed out a little dark energy
and move on
I’ve opened the curtains
and seen the monster give birth to a monster
I’ve opened secret doors
and stepped into the arms of the dark
forgive me father for I have sinned
for the world as it is and my idiot grin

Doesn’t just happen when sleeping and dreaming.
What stirs the leaves when there’s no wind?
What stands up the tall grasses?
Why do seeds float in timelessness?
Why can light appear like shimmering water?
Why, when we are well,
do we almost disappear into joy,
And the body sometimes feels
Like it’s floating on a cushion of air?
But maybe everything is wind—
the light, the clouds, the earth itself,
rotating in its weightless orbit.
Ah, it’s change that’s weightless. Problem solved.

Take me to the water’s edge
and scatter my ashes there.
I’ll be part of Lake Erie happily,
laughing in its waves.

Take me to the water’s edge
and hold me above its light,
like my father held me as a child
and continues to in my memory.

The sun and water—one element
in the fabric of those first sensations.
Like being born out of eternity,
I was also drowned in eternity.

Scatter me kindly when I’m gone.
Drop me in Lake Erie’s waves,
release me into that material light—
I’d rather be home than away.

I understand my obsession
my senses are worn
my heart and mind
thinned by feeling and knowing
even with such exhaustion

to the core of me
I try to make words appear

that can somehow be a solace
for those who suffer

as flowers blossom in children’s eyes
lavishly as from soil

their spirits play in empty parks
the God of light delights in their joy

I suppose
a few kindnesses
is the least I can do