(source: “From Sundown to Silence”, 2000.)

That night we danced

in ways beyond us,

walked a starless mile

into night, talked beneath

the fountain breeze of

Queen Victoria and 

absorbed and belonged 

in friendship, as one,

we remember.

But if at all you wonder:

that sunrise, at 6 a.m.,

I slept on a city bench

complete and in love 

with everything.

(source: “London Rain”, 2001.)

Where rain drowns unfinished

sentences in a phone booth, I frame 

your voice in glass    your breathing 

a summer storm that’s just expired —

transparent and lifeless

as a staining    a disguise

of missing.

(source: “Powder”, 2001.)

Our cheap thrills,

striking out high 

in the black light

of the seventeenth 

hole, were employed

to be priceless, 

reckless on record;

adored, eyes glazed, 

when entranced by 

the proper code

of future days.

But our tradition 

as outcasts was 

powder, costumes. 

The gravity

shallow, grovelling,

where I’d trip but

not fall, at a cost.

(source: “When I Was In The Field With You”, 2003.)

The summer I 

felt in dream;

a wind swaying 

farmland miles,

the goldenrod

side by side

with our ark.

To leave you in

a crease of sky 

is waking and 

in first glance 

whirling back that 

you’ve been dead 

my whole life.

Our straw nest,

field dust —

ignored as if 

a sunburn.

Primary #3

(source: “Running Like a Saint in Exile”, 2002.)

Could the gods of old folklore

better my summer, scheming

white water clouds 

to my front door? 

I haven’t the shadow to pray

bitter through evening, waiting 

on heaven’s storm 

to bow me down. 

Through bombs of light and 

cracked shells, I’m running

reborn in cracks

of swept thunder —

a saint, not rival,

for the gutter.

(source: “Lost Names”, 2001.)

To pull this off I have sealed 

so many memories in duct tape,

retrospect — a thoughtless pit

of ponder. But Kasia I’ve forgotten —

    the couches, your pipe,

    our identical, broken 

    someday. 

The parties glaze so easily

into others, scraping tile walls

of strangers — yet Kasia? Yours is

a name I lie down unsaid.

(source: “Morning Hymn”, 2003.)

In the bedridden

blue I kiss your wrists,

mend the cuts 

of draped windows

on the fourteenth floor.

Modelled like canvas, 

no light shed.

For a knife 

in the world to cure 

dawn’s aging,

you’d crawl the tick tock

of each clockface.

Make scars, maybe sins 

of the red.

(source: “Affinity”, 2002.)

My affinity —

a lust which loves against its

own ability.

(source: “Prism”, 2001.)

All of my symbolism is trivial, sparkling

past lives in frames only I devour or

dissolve. The “winged migration” of 

airborne dust, the “sapping fluid”of 

curtain flowers; of everything hell-bent 

in the aftermath of that parking lot,

only two such motions escape emotions.

In waves of reflection, I overexposed.

Primary #2

(source: "Boomtown", 2000.)

My window sits 

whole under the wing 

of a crow. My guard

in perched position, 

all his life. We’ve 

never had to scream.

It’s around this time

I consider thin 

walls savage, 

weather predictable —

a line of options

dispatched as pressures.

It's about time

one of us

takes flight.

(source: “From Grace”, 2002.)

Is it barely dawn

or almost night?

I’m dressed to bruise,

walking out on words

like devotion, grace

that still feel mine

but stolen.

In piercing honesty,

winter’s needle through lace,

a facsimile chains 

my mornings away. 

Is sobriety death, 

someone whose wake

I missed?

(source: “Petal by Petal”, 2002.)

Passed amber trees walking

the route to your basement

apartment, my voice singing

some precious mystery. But

in the volume of desert heat, 

with empty sand-fields and 

gasoline rivers through the 

windshield, I woke to a drop.

Morning rain, wash my hands

of ash. Make a towering vase.

For every blade I cut, a petal

of September turns to stone.

(source: “Zeitgeist”, 2002.)

Gently you braid 

strands of mistakes —

coiled, cyclical,

a spirit mane. 

It’s a long road

we’ve fought here,

in a tight room

of clementines.

The president is 

smothered by

dish piles, reaching 

for his father.

A brand new war

folds, you smile

and cut his voice

at the root.

(source: “No Tomorrow”, 1999.)

I swear that I’m sorry —

passing by the prison 

of distant relatives.

(source: “Northern Branches”, 2002.)

Maybe your patched-up jeans

and my Zeppelin shirt

were dated. After all,

in that generation

we were dead.

But these days I look upon

like black Northern branches

against soft cloud white —

timeless

and maybe stretched.

(source: “Blood and Wine”, 2002.)

Smoke trails stride

the evergreens,    

filling our 

hideaway

with frost. 

Star clusters 

stumble

the veranda

luggage.

Will this be 

the revealing 

morning I see 

our faults as 

silhouettes,

distant upon 

the coast?

(source: “Forgetting Palmessa”, 2002.)

Let’s pretend it’s been raining

since I heard the news,

that the messenger has been shot,

that the sun is mercy,

is contagious.

Let’s forget you’ve been crying

puddles in suitcases;

the relief of hours

thinning on white coast.

Let’s face bad news, feel 

each dying pulse, cause 

truth is, Palmessa

is sinking.

(source: “Ode to the Cold”, 2003.)

Static ode, my sleepwalk

spades in the crackle

of her kitchen. When snowflakes, 

white traffic lights,

dress this un-driven strip 

in crystal, I hear no matter 

but the chimes 

of a living god.

(source: “Before the Sun”, 2003.)

Spring eyes 

the stairs of

your ribcage,

the brink of

my lower lip

and the sheet

in pearls — 

sun carolling 

up the hours.

More notes on the cull

When I stumbled upon the idea of writing erasure poems on my high school writing, I wasn’t too concerned about quality control. I figured, under the guise of National Poetry Month and my recent Material Purge 2015, this series would serve to close two unrelated challenges with ease. Eleven days into this project, however, I must say: squinting over high school notepads at 6am and composing brief retorts during breakfast hasn’t proven the best way to spend my waking hour. 

Content-wise, I expected The sulk crow cull to be a foolhardy endeavour, like getting blood from a stone, but I gave less attention to the aspect of writing and self-publishing work within a two-hour window. On most days I click “Publish” with a vague sense of dissatisfaction I would normally tend to over a few more drafts. But this is the challenge: not vindicating these early attempts at poetry, but shaping them into something useful, if merely sturdy.

Reliving my teenage years has been pretty insufferable but I’m doing what I can to poke fun, interrogate and minimize a lot of self-created baggage. Would it aid the reader to see these source materials I’m interacting with? Would their proper reproduction make my erasure revisits less of a one-way conversation? Probably, but I favour keeping my high school dramas off-screen, so to speak, and looming as though they belonged in reality, not just a sixteen year old's mind. Worries have no weight, off the shoulders. I think most of us can recall teenaged self-pity just as well without ink proof. 

With yesterday’s post I washed my hands of 1999, 2000 and 2001, save for one unfinished piece I’ll carry over into my focus on 2002 and 2003. Thanks to those of you who’ve shuddered or grinned alongside me so far. As April moves forward, it’s going to get a bit sunnier around here.

(source: “A Reason”, 1999.)

Today I turn my 

scribbled defence 

upside down and 

look through the 

stained radiance 

of wishing my 

regret had 

reason.

(source: “Beneath a Wired Sky”, 2000.)

Understand that no one

keeps my wire constant

and collect like you —

the you I pride, the you

I follow with I. Swirling

in a depressed web of

power lines, in exhales 

of smoke, tell me what

you are without balance.

(source: “Safety Net Removed”, 2001.)

In hypnotic study

of "you", the vibrant 

mid-air charms I

couldn’t describe

panning overhead,

my ferris glare

stood to distract

enigma and arena — 

the circus of 

little romance.

(source: “Weakened in May”, 2001.)

“Hey headlight,

why’re you broken?”

I’m following one star

for flaws. On your truck, 

the disorientation of 

drinking to marriage vows

with your best friend,

in eleven years,

isn’t an outcome.

Yet around these sparks 

the city is frozen,

a backyard stretch 

of absence and

sympathetic fucking.

Primary #1

(source: “Village Street”, 2000.)

Gradually we expire,

shake ashamed 

from the doorstep

of friends. We won’t know

pieces of autumn

from ourselves

and the miles we love

we’ll excuse; say 

we miss this place, say

our exile won’t be 

personal. All remorse

counting away 

in a rush of leaves.

(source: "Junebugs", 2001.)

Can time not be birthright and mercury,

empire and collapse? I never turn to see

what happens to junebugs and mornings

when glorifying the angst of our late
missing. What life is soaring a kingdom
of old letters but faith, and humidity,

breathing fumes in a fatigue of trees?

(source: “The Grey Between”, 2000.)

To remember can take 

a long cut through;

alive being the shadow 

of technicolour need,

pulling the unconscious 

flash of punches that 

pass, like failure.

Now I’m not afraid

of seconds

that fall short.

(source: “Speechless”, 1999.)

The old ways hang speechless,

like your boyfriend.

That just slipped out.

Remember phone call silence,

the envious ruin

I shouldn’t screw up.

(source: “Heart”, 1999.)

The advantage of your heart

beating or pretending

I, I…

I, I…

I, I…

I, I…

I, I…

I, I...

tore 

truth in 

circles.

(source: “Rain”, 1999.)

Is “angery” as difficult,

as shitty to voice

trembling, when

in this downpour, 

“exhiliarated” feels

tame with me?

(source: “Empty”, 1999.)

Dull light, refuse

to take wallowing

for granted. Mistake

in me this future —

suicidal, full

an’ fading.

Notes on the cull

I was first drawn to poetry at the age of sixteen. Not through Plath or Cohen, although they came later. It was poetry’s elemental nature — words arranged on paper — that provided my first spark of interest; a means to channel predictable, teenage concerns into needed affirmations and defences. The results were no less predictable: pages, then whole volumes, of horrid verse. 

Writing was as much about getting to know myself as it was creating a “self”, a poet with a capital P. Although fuelled by pretensions that seemed novel at the time, writing became a not-quite secret dimension in my life. Instead of playing video games all night as I’d done before, I’d stretch over my bed, piecing together stanzas about girls. I’m grateful I developed confidence so effortlessly in this regard, given how low my self esteem was in virtually every other category, because had I known the lousy state of my writing, I would’ve stopped.

Fast forward another sixteen years and I’m faced with all of that old poetry — rough, finished and abandoned drafts of six collections. My adolescence, in about 200 poems. Handwritten in the days before I had a computer. Half-resurrected in the same storage container once stacked in my parents’ basement. I’m too paranoid to put five years of navel-gazing in the recycle bin, but just as unwilling to bury their incriminating bricks in yet another basement. It isn’t a matter of being unsentimental but rather keeping things tidy, current. 

I’d been working to self-publish a manuscript of marginalized prose-poems for National Poetry Month, but it isn’t ready. So instead I’ll undertake these journals and post an erasure poem, based solely on my teen vocabulary, for each day in April. This, too, may seem like navel-gazing on an almost meta scale, but I see these budding scraps as small commemorations to the ego, manic and unfulfilled. Overblown reflections distilled to thirty-something indifference and then, finally, released. 

For the first week, at least, I’ll cull from the period of 1999 through 2001 — the most challenging source material because I’d barely discovered imagery. This early stuff is also the most foreign, a fortuitous cheat. The idea of journeying into my younger self, as well as its “self”, brings no satisfaction. But I believe anything worth keeping for sixteen years deserves to be utilized, somehow. 

I’d walk away from this, if I were you.