Adam Dickinson: Two Poems

CIGAR? TOSS IT IN A CAN. IT IS SO TRAGIC

 

For all intensive purposes, the fire distinguishers

are pigments of the imagination. Unparalyzed

in the history of this great country, our enemies

are holding us hostile. It bottles the mind to think

that we take for granite the apples and organs

hanging on tender hooks as a pose to bearing the blunt

of the escape goat gone awry with the crutch of the matter.

Needles to say, at the pentacle of patriarticle politics

we cannot phantom the depths to which

battering eyelids skewer the results to make ends meat.

We shutter to think that a seizure salad

made of fall foilage mine as well be one foul swoop

of poison ivory. In the same vain, we are in sink

with the insinnuendos and internally grateful

for the poultrygeist performing the Heineken remover

on a nation long stricken with the chicken pops.

It is perhaps a blessing in the skies that the hewn cries

sound like flaws in the ointment as we cease the day,

udderly disappointed by the ludicrust bowl in a china shop

and its new leash on life.

 

 

HOARDING

 

Rightly or wrongly, certain essentials

will soon be in short supply.

If the open-ended questions can be believed,

many of us have been deceiving ourselves

 

with the headroom and clean living,

loosely chronicled in appendices

ready to burst all over the philharmonic

snare traps of the bargain hunter

 

or sentimental lone wolf.

Squirrelled shopping circulars

beaverdam doorjams

loaded with playbooks

 

and fastidious ham-fists.

All exists are corrugated with fatigue

after fatigue, cannibalizing camouflage

beneath unbalanced ceiling fans

 

quilting their filibuster winds.

Just try unpacking

some punch into this!

The trouble with idealism

 

is every so often

you have to dig up the bodies

and move them.

That plastic patch in the Pacific

 

stealing all our shit.

 

Adam Dickinson’s poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and internationally. His collection Kingdom, Phylum was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He teaches at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.