Genesis

Everything Has It's Beginning.
this poem has it's genesis on a monday night
11:30
walking down the street
with just a few speeding cars
for company

i have just finished reading andrea gibson's blue blanket for maybe the 50th time
wishing that i could wave my pain into metaphors like she can
with the effortless ease that her mother's mothers
wove thread into cloth to clothe their children their husbands and then themselves

i feel the only thing i have to write about
is my own inability to feel something to write a poem about
and i think My God! am i to spend the rest of my life writing poetry about poetry?

still walking i pull out my notebook
i flip through the pages
one eye paying only half of it's attention to where i am going
the rest and the other take in these scratched out remnants of poems that never were
incomplete works i pray
do not one day
become metaphors for my life

i stop at the page dated october 7 2007
two words stand on the top of the page
"My Father"
the rest is blank
because what can you say about a man you do not know?

my father and i never talk
never share our stories and i know
this is because his father and his father's father never really talked to their sons they were too busy worrying about the farm and the mortgage and griping about the goddamn liberals in ottawa trying to mess everything up

i think
put my notebook away
the cars are still going past
and i am still quiet

my father does not have a farm
or a plow
or a mortgage
he has a a motorcycle and a backyard
and maybe that's why he was ale to hold me while i cried after my mother asked me if the reason i didn't go to church was because i thought i was gay
and tell me he loved me
and was proud
of me

i remember now that my father once wrote my mother a poem
and that it was the clearest expression of love i have read

Everything Has A Beginning
my Father was mine.

Exploding On Identity (EDITED)

Usually when one introduces themselves
they include a nugget
some very small glimpse into who this person is beyond just a name and a face
"Hello, my name is Alfred, I am a painter."
"Hello, my name is Gladys, I am a mother."
"Hello, my name is May, I am a transexual performance artist."

I find this difficult.
I'm not sure who I am anymore.
It's not that I've lost my identity
rather
I just jumped off of a cliff
and it didn't feel like following.

This point
this glorious precipice I have launched myself from
is very high
I didn't notice this before I jumped
I'm not sure what is at the bottom
or who I am
It's hard to tell
with this wall speeding away beside me the wind in my head as I plummet

So many people roads choices are still waiting
and when I happen on them
they are gone so fast
I must fall several hundred feet
further down
before I can make sense of them


I write poems as I fall
to leave some trace
some small part of my soul to record where I've been.

A thought occurs.
What if the end of my plummeting is not a happy one?

Ideas like this send a black cloud of panic that covers my eyes blocking out the wall the fall I scream STOP! but I don't and the cloud doesn't leave until
I remember
I wanted to be here
I chose to fall toward something new
I am here to find
catch
be carried and completed by this light sick feeling in my stomach like every flight of every bird there ever was is mixing around with my lunch
and waiting for the moment I scream
and explode on my future