Dad:
Here is a poem I wrote you a in the mid 1980’s.
Did I ever give it to you?
God in his dad costume
playing the music of the spheres
on a rusty mouth organ
rags of vulnerability
on his back
leaning on
my box car
mind.
Dad
April 4th
Happy thirty-nine
so fine
sublime
the double helix
of spiroid time
turning
vertiginous
so thirty-nine
(if you tip it over
on its back) becomes
a wave; denominator to
a sleeping baby
(or on its belly)
a stemless m over
tad-pole
rising fresh from winter
into a seagull’s embrace
Thirty-nine, the magic peak,
The summit of slippery
slope and valiant
youthful ignorance
But your thirty-nine
is different..... It plays,
spiralling backwards on
the wisdom of a thousand
memories. It tickles grey
with the taunt of colour
and taunts colour with
ash white wit
Your thirty-nine
is in the cheek of tongue
An eyelash in the
stew of immortality
a brazen pair of digits
You could never be
a better thirty-nine
without the clamoring
variety of all the other
ages to choose from
Nope...
your thirty-nine
is truly picked
a matter of deliberation
and distinction....
For in that thirty-nine
are all the multiples
of a thousand thousand
trinities
the cube of three - our white house
the fallout shelter, the solid prism of family
and the three times nine intricacies of love.
Dad
How Weyburn to
poise yourself
on the suns
inclination
letting the
rarefied air
drag those Cyclops
thinkers in your wake
How Weyburn
to spell Tuesday
with the e before
the u - predicting
European Economic tendencies
long before their time
How very Weyburn
to let the rivulets
of thought the wee burns
trickle across the
minds of those who love you
Sparklings of inspiration
clarity for the parched,
Irrigating hearts to
the significance of
synthesis and
the magnificence of
laughter.
How Weyburn to drill
peep holes in the
change room of cognitive
theories revealing the bloomers
bums and bunions of mind
so secret, so tantalizing
A promiscuity of disciplines
commingling into
fertile eco-complexity
melting fear, discombobulating
boundaries like wind, like rain,
like the delighted shrieks of changers
How Weyburn to pee on
your handkerchief - golden gas mask
for the dandruff of the earth
How Weyburn to know the seedy truck
salesman would steal
the money on Tuesday or is it Teusday
With clairvoyance you
beat him to the punch
He should have known
Seen the sparkle in your eye
Ha ha .... How Weyburn to
thumb your nose at your commanding officer who
thought a few stripes earned him respect...
you scuppered his ego
and I bet he thanked you for teaching him humility
or maybe not
How Weyburn to keep the granaries
full for your family transmuting the
prairie dust into bread
Nobodies gonna go hungry
cause daddy says so!
That's a good feeling
And to know that if anyone
knocks our hats off
Dad will "knock their
teeeeeeeth so far down their
throats they’ll come shooting
out their ass holes
like bloody stars"
And finally to know that life’s poetic dance can be visceral
That’s pretty Weyburn
can be fancy shmancy tender sincere boldly provocative in the gutter refined and resonant ......... Very Weyburn indeed
And Pop, the Dad of Dadhood, The Lord of singing synthesis.
Where would I be without you?
Maybe just a tumble weed
a horse's manicure
a piece of plankton
caught between the teeth
of a whale
Shining Star of Dad
Pop
intricate like tree branches
you dance the iterative
while snow dreams
collide with planets
Never abandoning the roots
of care and love you
fly
and down below
we catch the odd
feather and
with tape and construction
paper fashion
some appendages of
our own.....
We wave to you
from the lower reaches
of the stratosphere
but
you are space borne
Intriguing the
unfathomable
Lighting the way
Sometimes from
your wings
I see the blossoming changes
whispered in the deep deep
trance of thought
and affection
Dr. Pop
birthing stars
from the bellies of
volcanoes
Pop the Prospector
pulling golden nuggets of commitment
from frozen waters
alchemizing silver dollars into
wedding bands
Sir Pop
knocking their teeth through
crimson tunnels and esophagi to
spray out bullies bums
in hails of vengeance
Pop the Psychic
leaving lustre on
every gift
because it is
intuited
Pop the Dad
You make me glad
and if the child
really is the father of
the man as
Wordsworth said
my legacy is
commensurate
with spiral stairs of
exquisite
brilliance
You ‘da man
Pop!!!!!! D A D D N A
some people’s fathers for e and k
creeping up the stair
in the back
of my mind
your trail of
slime
left acid marks
there
that I roll marbles
down
Your bigness
entered my
whole concept
took root
and snipped
the branches off
the wind of
your own rage
howling in
vertices.
treacle wounds
and blue
skies filled
with dogwood
sap of another
part oozing
from ?
who the hell
is loving
now
particular
weren’t you
father
pogo sticks
flanges flames
and ice
ontology on the
precipice
was it the time
of the reptiles
i love.
Father Talk
Father Talk
The tale of the twelve swans has never seemed
as clear. The girl with her
swollen fingers. She’s
trying to save her brothers
by weaving shirts out of
nettles under an oath of
silence because her
father in his weakness
marries a witch who
casts a spell over the
siblings........ Father ~~~~ fucks up
the curse
she can’t speak of course
- the king’s son finds her and
enchanted himself takes her
off to his territory
mystified by her grief and
calling for the nettles to make
her happy. She weaves
but the people are wierded
out - they decide She’s a
witch so they're going to burn
her. On the pile of faggots
she stands weaving and her
brothers fly down - they had been
turned into twelve wild swans.
She throws the nettle shirts
on them and they are transformed -
exonerating her. She gets
her voice back.
Fuck dad ! Fucking Idiot !
The faggots turn to roses
The youngest brother still has
one white wing.