Each day could be a patched up shell of loss,
Plans dissolved before my eyes, over decades.
My life now alone, barely making it, is full!
Cats, birds, trees, a bricked pathway that I laid myself.
Like the birds, and how they build their nests,
I use a collage technique to make my miracles.
I love the gentle snowflakes falling
floating down from the sky like feathers
drifting, twirling, dancing, whirling and prancing
blanketing my city magical white
I was born into snow
the wind howling through the trees like banshees
city drifts and cars slipping
I arrived a snow child
I like to stroll the city streets
as magical snow changes downtown
pigeons hover on the ledges
folding their wings together
Ottawa steeped in history
the buildings are old and beautiful
gray bricked, elegant and sturdy
many homes Victorians
My city boasts of many winding trails
but nothing is more amazing than in winter
a crisp, walk among sleeping trees
oh, love hiking past a frozen stream that still ripples
I have creaking rooms in an old city building
outside my window trees in all seasons are my view
but winter snow falling on my city stirs my soul
I can hear my beloved snow calling me
come, come, come outside my love
Passing through the fields of Punjab,
sitting behind my father on a bike,
a sensation rose in me
at the call of a Ruston engine
breathing from a mud-bricked room.
Its call sounded as if from another world,
which touched my heart
and settled there forever—
one of the most unforgettable moments
of my life.
When I grew older,
I wandered from village to village
just to hear that iron nightingale
singing in the dawns of rural Punjab.
In my wanderings I discovered
that at night its echo,
deep in the quiet fields,
was like a spotted owlet
resting in the dark.
Now its music grows rare.
But whenever it reaches my ears,
the fields return—
golden crops bending in the wind,
silver canals under the sky,
and a little boy on a moving bike
holding his father
as the villages pass.
Of a foaminess hung
Rose-round, odorous
Or what, ivy-musty, a sturdy
Held up ruin pose as
No grander is one led
Nor quite as gracious
Up paths, though rough, to doors, though warped
Than neath one's bricked mass.
Sometimes I cry
and I don't know what for
every step we have taken in life
has taken us to different worlds
now you are an ally
to those to whom you were a foe
and you are using dirty traps
to win a dirty war...
But I won't play this game
you can take it call
I won't even try
to keep what I never got
the battle was uneven
I stood no chance at all
we are now on different sides
of a tall bricked wall.
Jessica
A washed-out skyscape
where mountains climb,
only to be ripped apart
by small gusts of wayward winds.
Is it that my eye is gray, or is the day
waiting to be colored?
Sky high hues
are contained in small paint pots.
Our inner artist
is looking upon its featureless soul.
That unseen picture
needs us to complete the rainbows,
fill-in the vivid and half-hidden,
to add color to drab fields,
sparkling reflections to every window
in all bricked-up cities.
To daub uniqueness onto the ordinary.
To take a different and another look
at how it is we,
that can wash in the washed out
with an ever-willing eye.
A thin-lipped nun blows her whistle.
An acre of concrete ground
stops playing, acting-out
our brief make-believe lives.
Reality is a cold wind
chewing at pale knees, gray shorts
and blue skirts.
Catholic children forget their names,
their made-up names as well.
as they march into the bricked block
where classrooms are already
shouting instructions.
Old now, we forget how it felt,
as we filed into the bare-boned halls
of a bickered religiosity.
How we had to study by rote,
like our times-tables,
how angry God would forever be
with us kids.
I was born there,
there between the grey days and ghostly nights.
I came out of the warm cave
fully encased with my mother's sadness.
The ghetto walls moved in or out
inch by crawling inch, they were a mirage,
but they remained in our eyes
as forever impenetrable.
I still dream of it, in that nightmare,
the buildings are too close together,
too full of bricked-up holes.
The narrow streets leading to no roads.
Sometimes, I find in the rubble
of a derelict building,
a tin wind-up manikin,
its painted form flaking,
yet its eyes
blink in the sunlight
as I carry it away.
Wizened elf researched the fly trappers as well as he could.
They were wreaking havoc and destruction in the deep north wood.
How do you get them to stop? He asked, looking them up at will.
Unfortunately, you have to push them out a bricked over window sill.
We don’t have those wizened elf lamented, now worried.
He heard the mice below, some of them now had scurried.
There has to be another way, he said, reaching for another book.
He has no great solution, I guess, I say, giving him a sad look.
"The Flood Contained Electric"
walls of glass
sheathe this heart
a conservatory
for the lacking
of menagerie
the walls aren’t
bricked up
comme dans une
la orangerie
clearly seen
straight through
X-ray vision
dancing dervish
until the clouds
roll in and the
pea soup fog
mists over the view
jade is the colour
caught courting within
the flinting prisms
seen in the eyes
of jaded others
the storm's coming
warns Elektra
standing outside
the shattering
evaluation
rain like hands
clapping
hail like pebbles
thrown by the good
heavens above
turn Pollock
tomatoes crushed
hard thrown
the bleed painted
as water colour fades
pink and naked
cantoring in the mind
then, racing west
unbridled like
a white wedding
splayed onto the page
the bride stripped bare
surrenders
bricked in
l'orangerie
the flood
contained,
Elektra
turns away
(LadyLabyrinth / 2023)
canter
cantor
His voice is as fresh as the morning air,
of his existence, every bone in my body is aware.
His face is as mysterious as a book with no cover,
oh how lucky I am, to have him as my lover.
His exhilarating eyes look deep into my soul,
his voice causes shivers through my bones.
His soul is like a bottomless pit filled with care,
but his exterior is harder than a bricked well.
A stoic expression plastered across his face,
him, no-one can replace.
A warm smile strewn across his heart,
my heart aches when we're apart.
He belongs to me,
his heart is mine and so is his love.
I’d never give him up, at least not easily.
He looks after everyone with no declines.
Loving him isn't tough,
it makes me want to be alive.
She had a face like a fish fryer's basket,
All stressed and creased and lined
His like a bag of old spanners
Abused, misused, misaligned.
She jumped his place in the bar queue
One Boozy Saturday Night
Instead of taking the Hump
He loved her at first sight.
Two aging hippies
Who’d never ever bricked it
And when they met each other
Felt they’d really clicked it
They consummated their relationship
In the yard outside the bar
And once or twice more
On the back seat of his car.
They came down to earth together
Laughing at life’s little joke
Then he pulled out his baccy pouch
And rolled them both a toke.
Two ageing hippies who
Quickly grabbed the chance
To waltz their way together
Through life’s oncertain dance
They became a couple
Saw each other more and more
And when they looked at each other
It was only beauty that each saw,
With her face like a fish fryer’s basket
All stressed and creased and lined,
His like a bag of old spanners
Abused, misused, misaligned
We were always a little ash white,
the girls always a bit cleaner;
the soap always green carbolic
the toilet paper always slick and hard to scrunch,
six year old bottoms always a little sore.
The nuns who ran these grey bricked barracks
called it the: Covent of 'Saint Hilda's Sacred Tears.'
There were lots of tears but no saints.
No black kids either, though there were many
seen on the grimed streets. They looked well fed and happy.
We were different. Our parents had sinned,
had broken the golden rule and got caught
birthing the unwanted.
Back then the birch cane was an instrument of love.
From here-on I must paraphrase...
Each Sunday, The scrawny priest
would look down upon us -
speaking thusly:
"You're all sinful
fit only for cannon or factory fodder,
forever doomed to poverty."
A pause while he did the sign of the cross
while mumbling to himself in Latin.
"The righteous must
resign themselves in good grace
to their natural place,
to humbly throw themselves
upon the mercy of their betters."
Such sermons filled us all with much joy,
and we were all briefly uplifted
until the hatchet-faced nuns
led us back to our own special hell.
The House was featured on the T.V.
Celebrities put on hard hats
posed with sledge hammers.
It was said that the old structure
had ‘good bones’. What it did have
were walled-in nocturnal whispers
and a resident paranoia.
Interior decorators re-imagined rustic hues
a bohemian nest chic-est
Rooms were staged and displayed
yet beneath the contemporary
the old retold its history.
Much of the house was to be renovated
pastel and neutral colors
replaced flock and wainscots,
yet bricked-over alcoves
still dripped a dried red rust
of long held rumors.
The house concealed itself,
but its fiber and pith,
its conduits continued to throb-on
echoing an older heartbeat,
a retelling
of long unsolved crimes
thinly painted over.
households lurch
creak unmoored
hulls rocking
the twang of whip lashed rigging
as electric wires stretch
pull up clods
yards of plantings
where once roots clutched
bricked-up aluminum
long jacked-up boards
swirl and bloat
bed-springs shiver off
unwinding sheets
the dumbfounded foaming
of absconding pillows
bedrooms fall out
of plunging submarines
chests and draws
shedding a put away sundry
then the roll and billow
baffle and muddle
the face-up exposure
of everyday innards
sweeps by
riding the backbones
of the up-turned
the bowled over
hard to fathom
that a river of storm clouds
could move all this
manifold clutter
the cheesy and cherished
dumping down clumps
into wet clay models
of any new address
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