9:03 to 9:09 Discovery

Choose to craft heating a miracle an air seal install twin simple adjust any length slip space
Size
This good this can simple things really a piece of cheese that’s what’s cool
Enlightening seafood half hour north love and hate one block six other places taverna
Old man bars unimpressed come on swimming a bit more special
Most delicious into the can fourth generation his ideal canned seafood
Cockles quality tuna expand why not products available he goes
Season stops buys breads manually very carefully
No relationship stoned oysters desperate only better
Small stuff like nosebleed hundred dollar euros
Something else a bit of fat get better blend in juice little beads
Something so liberating weathered wood beer lively setting eat or don’t eat
Never repeat brothers change the world not enough
Lab and proving ground natura new direction
Not premeditated reactionary rejection everyday spongecake
Almond powder sugar make holes into the microwave yup
Goop in a cup

We have floundered and basted. Our portions have multiplied. We are sated but repenting. We are lost to our innermost rhythm. Our senses are surfeit. Our form is buffeted.

A light pulse has led us sparing. We have not sought stability. Our uncertainty has charmed us. We are as a gluttonous lover. And yet we have been wrenched. We have contorted. We atone.

Flimsy surrenderings bait us. Stubborn thickets spring to our mercy. Sabotage entices our lean baselessness. We hover fearing.

Our signal is a study in calm. Loop upon loop has cocooned. We have endeared ourselves to our other selves. Our clamour subsides. We are burgeoning.

Something defensible stands in the way. Clearly standing in the way. Clattering the way. It’s standard. It’s manifested in doubles. It tremors with solidity. With its sense of its solidity. It’s knowing itself to be right. It’s beyond questioning. It’s standing in the way. It’s a block. It’s a limit of acknowledgment. It’s the limits of lines. Dark heavy lines. Because they don’t bleed. Something is logical and true. It’s tracing its own trajectory. It knows how it got there. It could get back. It could move forward. It sees paths. It sees its own way. Something obvious is blocking the way. It’s too obvious. It’s surface and leap. It covers and smoothes. It doesn’t feel any contradictions. It doesn’t need to justify. Something implausible is coating the way. It varnishes everything. It’s easy to overlook. It’s impossible to see. It’s actually nothing out of the ordinary. It’s easy enough to choke on. It’s a fine dust. It shouldn’t even bother you. It’s not really in the way. Something overbearing obscuring the way. How do you know that’s the way? There’s no way of knowing the way. It’s taking the way. It’s not necessarily even that way. It could be any way. Do you even know there is a way? Something is taking the way.

Spotted chump in escapades, espadrilles, expirate, solidify. Spot chump among the loverly, whippeting, cradled. Stop limbs. Stop lips. Stop drawn out thankfully. Spot me new language. I’ll spin. Lay new grooves, I’ll mitigate. I want to level. Want to phosphorate. I’m gamely and gaming. Salivating. Shuddered.

I was all ho-hum about the Blowout this year, but after last night my faith has been restored. Congratulations to fS for finding such an incredible reading venue. But how uninformative for those who weren't there. Sorry. Maybe descriptions after the hangover is less.

Flawed logic

Pad crepuscular rays.

Gloaming.

The dimming reason. Fade in stray.

Patiently flaying. Seasons of discular moan.

The mournful mizzen.

The follicle scrim.

Open fire. Fall clearing. Mollifying dusk rim

opt. A civil trim. Assimilator.

Opulentor.

Home fizzing.

Load baring. Laymen foible

strop. Fob gobbling.

Homunculus. Opal.

Bundle.

Stow.

found non sequiturs:

Non-profits spark an interest.

... showing what's owing...

Buy Yourself a Bacheelor,

Thanks for served you!

Third reiteration of Chump

Chumps shore up the overflow blot water the river rimmed.

Chumps in interlocking patentless plastic. Stock chump in dollar stores, trade chump at boothed auditorium fairs, pissy underground shops.

Chump bleatingly, strange longing fumble squawk.

Limpid pooling drool at the lip of chump, grim masses foster chump. Blotted chump oils paper casts lurid patterns.

The first page of a poetry series I'm working on. Right now it's called "again and again".

Enunciation of the fervor. A blip in the cosmos. Drip of syrup tipples from fork edge. Times fodder. Food loosens, grips down the gullet. Shot a pierce. An arrow pierces air and finds comfort. Lines betray. Try deep breathing into belly. Spill over your thighs and sink. Meet three folds of body. What thrills through which body when words like circumspect slot into their places. Putting letters through their paces. Letting.

Just got back from mailing my Alberta Foundation for the Arts writing project grant application, in itself a huge accomplishment for me. I've been thinking about applying for writing grants for years (or at least for the few years in the past many years that I haven't been disqualified by attending university full-time), but I've never been able to conceive and describe a coherent writing project. I tend to write without any preconceptions, and then look back at what I've written to see if any themes/similarities/ convergences can be teased out through editing. So I've found it difficult to propose a project before writing and even more difficult to explain why a project should be funded.

The project I applied for is probably a long shot. I think most funding organizations evaluate applications with a certain mindset that includes certain buzzwords, and I have no idea what the AFA's buzzwords are. I tried to focus on themes that are very particular to Alberta, and even moreso to Calgary - hell, I even mentioned the prairies a couple of times - but I'm not really sure if that's what they want. Oh well, I'm just glad I actually tried, for once.

Here's one of the poems my application depends on:

Is this Desire?

Claw’s manic retraction means a long fall, tumbling and rafting, borne aloft and lilt. The chump weighs heft, tittles a thrust, a glisten of spittle signals excitable sheen. Chump pockets knives, rusted bolts, flat cans – roadside ravages glimmer sure salvages the chump thumbs hungrily.

Summer notebook series 6

The frame of page, mind, picture, capture. Stunned longing. Strung longingly, along a stuccoed wall struck lofty nails at rippled interval. This frame of mind sticks rigid to foursquare, flaccid to rapt mouth gape stare.

A whole city elates in gentle decay. The city without the city clusters support, rain-streaked paper bleeds sympathies, lead to laminated signs of comfort, the smallest capitalist gestures are heartfelt, and warranted. The city without the city sprung up hill, up vine and upknotted root rash in flower and flowering, flowered. Trees split wide for electrical wires in the city without the city skyline is a boon and value.

Steep bridge to sea spreads a sundry bay. Steamers and freighters slick wavering intention daily and nightly churning dark leagues. Sole agent strings a thin line and winds in arrays of sea species. Shell fragments slice up sand packs, seaweed clings and rots, the sky is best when glowering, mountain line shot, grey cloud glowering, grey sea slopping, beach a wasting line.

Summer notebook series 5 (dregs)

Frame of door, window, city light, speech.
Sod blossom, petal blossom, roof wide garden teem.

Hot wet weather curls down chirrup crash clank skew frame of city sounds drenched, subdued by drench.

Signs of clamoring maddening gargantuan span.

Spirals unwinding raucous snap fast gathers mossy cost analysis split stone ledgers from boulders and splinters from masts.

Earth-tone city, ripples whip through grass, sandstone city, blinding glass.

Summer notebook series 4

Split fine mist. Spilt times drips. Drops milk down deep well of forced phrase. Mind on track on chugging. I hate to be this hunching cliche. Hate to stare down the distance fraught with meaning, stop start stagnate, radiate work and effort.

So this is the new state of my discourse, straight up and bland. damn. Not with a bang but a whimper.

This city feels patched together, thin like a showhome, showy like culture strained through a weak grasp of the concept. These words are not spackle. I'm a shoddy woodframe, I'm crumbling.

Summer notebook series 3

Hop-head chopped up board to square his air conditioner. Sawed off silvery platters his FEDDERS. Roof gravelled, wire hung, rusty cage-capped. Ash can the sap. Fiesta flickers, hovers over dust-dry potted stalks.

Big sky means flat land. Big sky means bent light, long shot, long drags slung low.

Truck squeals ten stories sharp, draws applause, saws a scraping limp along 12th avenue, brake squawl to brake squawl a god-awful strip off metal.

Tiny white-stripe spider caught on my toe, hops off into squirrel stance, rigid jitters.

Summer notebook series 2

Men can be (like) frightened woodland creatures and take coaxing. Words are fragile things, the flow of words can easily halt.

Entering a coffeeshop (where else would I enact such staleness?) prompts difficult decisions. Shall I list factors? Crowd, music or its absence, music and its acceptability, noise of customers, noise of machines, of the street, of staff conversing, the comfort of seats, size of tables, so forth. Why list factors? We all live the same lives, we all know. But we want to know our petty trials in endlessly recounting petty trials recounted. Still, why list factors? Better to embellish. This prosaic approach won't start any sparks, no great shakes, it's miles away from frissons of the new that frankly I lay in wait for, unexpectant and consistently deriding.

Who are these men in linen suits, badly matched suits, so drenched with suburb and salesmanship? This city is ridiculous. There's art on the walls here, rough wood tables, tired gestures at hip. What brings them here? Non-threatening quasi-rock. Insistent licks, wah-wahing and looping to end thought. No chance at rhythm, no hint at sex as the rest of the world can imagine it. Incremental, lush, flowering. Heady.

Summer notebook series 1

My fear of the blank page is also fear of cliches like blank page like fear. The city wafts cotton spores, the city glints. Cotton eddies each car's wake. Cotton coats each catching surface, limp cotton coagulates in puddles and mud. My sense of losing accelerates, each day makes its regrets. My belongings are being wrenched away from me and I have shallowly to mourn.

Some citizens drift light as cotton, some lope, some clump, all primary coloured and buoyed. Melancholy catalogue clashing with bright patter, light shimmering carscape, crass citizens busying. It's a peculiarly unproductive concentration of effort I put into this, slow like carbon crushing into diamonds, random as sea scraping pebbles.

Often I gather sentences to see if they'll organize themselves into some kind of poem, but these ones aren't cooperating, so I'm releasing them back into the wild...

Has your dad ever not got his crop off in the fall? *

How are my wife and I supposed to understand Elfish?

What would tourists think of a habitat of denuded trees with desperate, starving koalas roaming the damaged landscape?

What can't you do with a law degree?!

In BC, you can't deal with beavers like in Alberta.

You'd get laid if you were a rodeo clown.

Your aesthetics won't help you now.

* I love this sentence so much, especially given the context I heard it in: Picture the varnished wood and conservative artwork of a 26th-floor boardroom filled with drilling engineers discussing the effect of heavy rains on the soil in Saskatchewan... Seriously, poetry is everywhere.

...when frog pond plop
is forged at my feet

a block and a half
from words to wet frog...

One day in Japan a few years ago, I was reading either bp nichol's versions of basho or maybe some of derek's poems that eventually went into frogments from the frag pool. In any case, I went out with frog pond plop in my head, for a walk along the narrow roads surrounded by rice fields. The rice was low, so the fields were like swamps, about two feet of warm, sludgy water. There were dozens of different types of frogs in all sizes that would jump in and out of the water and across the road. Each type of frog had a different tone of ribbit. Some were high and quick, while some were quite disturbingly low and loud. I'd walked about a block when there was a small movement at my feet. In the three seconds it took my brain to register what I was seeing, I saw a frog, I saw a pond, I saw a plop. I've never felt a more satisfying convergence of words and world.

Today I have read that the family is a crisis the justice system is failing that the federation is fragile but bound in doctrines that the dust kicked up is falling in fanciful curlicues across shafts of light. I would like to be wounded by words but itch more like touched nerves or sweat glands.

Today I have bathed in light only I haven't today I stood in spring rain to smoke today I have lazed and sternly scolded my habits and affected nothing. Today I have not resisted closure and not resisted angst. For these my art is not an art but typing "I don't understand this censure."

Try to belie the imagination. Try to imagine a wrinkle, a bruise, a point of convergence.

Eliminate all memory. Proliferate scathing.
Engender sound.

Sound as though touched. Rake nerve for encumbrance. Rail against and in favour and inconsistent strain.

Last, at long last, as the long last light fades, a curtain raised, a half-mast circumstance.

Indeed the abstract flails and whimpers. Indeed the words are pocked.

To get at turn away. To touch here and touch there so slowly a vein awakes. In the long light somber and the glare light brutal, in the hazing day, tactile nuance forms a soft fog.

A soft fog is a fidgety slip into the limber touch, the tongue lisping through the typing.
Here the silence sounds blinking a grasp in tumult, slowly lapping so lapse.