Children have nightmares. They wake up in a sweat and cry out for their mothers. A village can have nightmares too. The villagers wake up and cry out for each other. These stories are about that nightmare.Mackenzie Phillips sat up in his bed. He needed to stay awake. All the news about the dead body in the valley had spooked Mackenzie. Maybe Mackenzie was the next on the list. Glancing out the window he watched the slow sway of the treetops. His eyes became heavy. He began to dream...

A bunch of poets got together in 1971 and agreed upon nothing. I declared at the time that I had planted my flag in Church Street and from that moment on my poems would take root there. Ted Plantos took Queen Street. Robert Priest took all the pubs on Spadina and points north and east. And other poets divided up what was left. It was the Balkanization of the Toronto poetry scene. But of course none of us respected the terms and soon all out war took place. I fled to Europe where I met Leni...

"Leaving T.O. Train shivering between the rails. Wheels and rails grinding their teeth. IMPSTONE. A book of poems keeps tapping on my eyelids. Like rain on a tin roof. A commercial from Eden in Morse Code. Clattering of train. Percolates. Miles through my spine. The photo of Susan Musgrave on the cover of IMPSTONE is not. Flattering. I know this is madness. Crossing a continent to meet a woman I don't know. Hoping she'll introduce me. To the poet. Inside her."Across a continent. Wri...

Death comes in the quiet of our thoughts. When we were looking the wrong way. At the moon being smothered by a cloud. It begins in panic. Thrashing out. We want to live. Something standing over us. Waiting for our last breath. Murder. Now and then.

"The stain on the cement stared back at me. I wanted to go home and get a pail of hot water and wash it off. Several ants were grazing on it. I looked around. Everything was the same as it had been a few days earlier. The telephone booth. The newspaper boxes. The Six Points Plaza across the street. The plaza was empty. Business was bad. Several of the stores were abandoned. The stain was the only sign that something terrible had happened."Detective Sam Kelly is in the last days of a...

Shot like a man out of a cannon. My mother almost died giving me birth. Head was too big. Doctors' thought I might need braces on my neck. Crawled through the first centuries of life. When I was twenty my hair was down my back. Orange and dusty. I felt like a god. Beautiful and outrageously vain. Standing in the Kipling Station. I could have stood there forever. When I stepped on the train I was 40 and everything picked up speed. The last decade has been like a long weekend. My eyes are wa...

I went to an all boys Catholic high school. Boys from many different backgrounds. Rich and poor. In uniforms. Controlled by a series of rules on conduct and appearance. Our English teacher introduced us to many fine poems. And then there were lively discussions. Some points of view came from left field. Others were well beyond that. But it all came to a cacophony of voices. The conflicts of the school yard focused on a class discussion. A poem in itself.

I am losing my voice. Words. Vocabulary. I am forgetting what things are called. 'Thing' is my go to word. It is not Alzheimer. It is something else. Something worse.My skin is getting looser. Sometimes I'm afraid that while I'm showering it will slip off and curl around my feet like a wet towel.My skin is disappearing in flakes. a blizzard in slow motion. There are things growing on my body. I am turning into a tree.

Someone you saw on the bus everyday. A colleague at work. The choir master. A girl in a brown coat waiting in line at the supermarket. A girl you went out with. Once. All these persons do not make up the core of your life experiences. They are bit players. Making cameos in your story. This is a book about these cameo players. But the central figure in all of these relationships is missing. There is no hero. This is the story of the crowd.Stories and illustrations of people I hardly...

A series of poems investigating the other and how we reach it. The self is a prison. Out there may be a phantasm. Outside the hive are nightmares. And darkness. We are the round stones on the shore who have eyes."pontius prophets playing plastic prayers as yndala zam exhumes a hole in her lap 'out damn's spot, out' for those of you whose profession it is to browse over this world tongue in cheek jotting your thoughts on parchment singing aquarius waiting for jesus to come out of the...

Lost souls. Orange hair. Everyone believes we are on the ledge. Of something. I turned 70 and my wife flipped some pancakes. Somewhere between joy and anxiety. I don't know how Trump survives himself. Why are some of us worried about the future and others want to trade hockey cards. These poems are snap shots. On the old Kodak. A black box with a shutter where we used to hide our memories. Now they are splashed all over the known universe. I feel like Soren Kierkegaard walking down the str...

The Black Bird concerns itself not with the baring of a soul but with the stripping down of a life. It begins with the most remote extension of the human soul, one's public image. It begins with the mythic image of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart as a celebrity. Skin after skin is stripped away. Bogart as the character Sam Spade. Bogart as an actor. Bogart as a son and husband. Bogart as a man. The soul of Bogart. Until we reached beyond death to a final unravelling back to Bogart as a boy. A boyh...