37. Stories Affirming Your

Stories affirming your death were greatly exaggerated, now get back to affability and your Ming vases! Honesty turn out to be unreliable – experience what the stories don’t say.

Stories affirming your propensity for satire, your sartorial elegance, are not sentences. Skill with the alphabet are spreading. Throughout the society pages, your cooperation will be duly noted. Paranoia are written in invisible manhood. Divinity are fictional.

Stories affirming your identity create personality dissonance. Death are great exaggerated Mr. Twain. Worst case scenarios are not disappeared ‘affirmative action figures’ ™ marketing are was not Russian.

Stories affirming your gangrenous lust are looping in inspired minds. What’s your alibi? Or should we say who? Position should be peer reviewed.

Stories affirming your place in the world here. And you cried and you laughed and you died flying caterpillars. Snow monsters park funny.

Miekal And, Brian Bartlett, Nick Treanor, Gary Barwin, Catherin Heard, Maria Damon, Amanda Earl, Linda Steer, Kateri Lanthier, Andréa Ledding, Roger Hanna, Warren Dean Fulton, Jamie Reid

38. Untenable Position And

untenable position: head in ass

unattainable possibility: a flimsy negligee

a Tai Chi drop-to-boot: pretendable unbidden

unmentionable unquenchable unbendable: opposition

terrible imprecation: riot gear worn against the osmosis of dissent

shifting indefensible strategic actions: make for good urge

a fidgety agitated population: mix with ignorance and a hunger for disorder

positionable tendons: flex me like Gumby

we fall down: such is life

ten able positrons and ions and neutrons: still my zerg will rush you

a regrettable tattoo: viewed from an untenable position

unnineable: time

desperately seeking tenure: not an ideal and yet it still is our position


Jamie Reid, Leah Murray, Catherine Heard, Brian Bartlett, Roland Prevost, Andrew Topel, Gary Barwin, Warren Dean Fulton, Amanda Earl, Andréa Ledding, Jennifer Shone-Tribley, Joseph Brown, Jim Andrews, Andrew Waldie Porteus, Nicolas Béaud

38 – Twisted, Infected, Co-opted

Vote for Sarah Palin for President.

Done.

Op-ed, feckless, wistful

I finally admit I am

op-ed feted, whispered, read

I am distinctly uncomfortable in this.

Connect the clubs

from one to the next,

loved like never before:

right hand red,

left elbow blue.

Twister cold.

Tavern torn, fettered, unhinged, re-wrote, re-born

stylish as a mop-head.

Glenn Beck is malaria speaking as a mophead

nauseated and reeling

into laughter.

Miekal And, Vanessa Place, Gary Barwin, Carmen Racovitza, Pearl Pirie, Catherine Heard, Athena Madan, Kateri Lanthier, Warren Dean Fulton, Amanda Earl, Priscilla Brett, Brian Bartlett, Andrew Waldie Porteus, Kristen Peterson

39 – I Became Them

I became they

and they barely noticed

their eyes were my eyes,

their arms helped me reach

a most unbecoming manner.

By absorbing their radiant text

mimicking the soaking reflex of

a hard-wired copyright network,

ask them to write poems that I put my name on (they all became me,

my own lost, they all took the name of

my body, their minds, our authorships,

palindromes of a hard-wire)

I became them and soon they me.

And so, the cycle complete, I returned to the veil,

snickering as devils do in the instant they became me,

all sixteen personalities.

As I scanned hundreds and hundreds of them,

tried to become I, an entry should be

and would be everywhere at once, a song,

the verses sound, right.

By sharing my DNA

and giving birth

and loving more and more and more

and I watched my eyes glittering

in their eyes’ bright reflection.

The first time that I said

‘because I said so’

mutating by nuclear testing

waged against us.

Is it plagiarism

to copy what your kids say?

Identities dented from little elbow

room overcrowding

personalities, dissociative from the

too many within me

and weren’t we all satisfied?

Nick Treanor, Jacob Wren, Alison Starkey, Andrew Topel, Terry Trowbridge, Priscilla Brett, Brian Bartlett, Catherine Heard, Andrew Waldie Porteus, Laurie Anne Fuhr, James Yeary, James Dewar, Kathleen Betts, Nadine Flagel, Ted Betts, Warren Dean Fulton, Amanda Earl

40 – Shaped My Voice

Shaped my melon baller love with a gurgle of blood like circling a square into origami cranes. In the sacred harp fasolah scale the English grammar is a penny whistle crossbred with a baritone sax spherically like a sledge hammer driving a square peg into perfect harmony. Into the patted fronds of a flute, Catherine stole my answer. My friend about to have surgery to remove one of her vocal chords may have something to do with shaping the ooohs and ahhhs watching spectacular fireworks displays around a telephone pole.

Paul Vermeersch, Joseph Brown, Warren Dean Fulton, Catherine Heard, Andrew Waldie Porteus, Brian Bartlett, Eric Richards, Kathleen Betts, Lesley Ball, Nicole Collins, Susan Shone, Warren Dean Fulton, Neil Hennessy, Tom Cull

41 – To Get Read

chapter and verse rehearsed flat

to get read you must stop writing

poetry animation must be

something said before

your body must be ee

ae, adverse, head, aa

a badge, an erasure, no name

go gaga, repeat

the classics, something drastic

be dead

do anything but read

give away chocolate

upload your head

collaborate with group narcissism

go treated

get banned, censored, cross the line,

subversive challenge

go into advertising

post your words, leave your words

get published

be the weakest and most fearful point

give away all your other colours

read

liberate libraries within

on tv in tongues

in words

one letter at a time

read, read at, constrain to,

simple things

beg, edit to write

hit on google

get read, get read

with 1000 monkeys

and take care to spell correctly

Pearl Pirie, derek beaulieu, Gary Barwin, Carmel Purkis, Garry Thomas Morse, Jacob Wren, Brian Bartlett, Miekal And, Alison Starkey, Warren Dean Fulton, Sharon Honywill-Haddow, Natalee Caple, Amanda Earl, Kemeny Babineau, Catherine Heard, Priscilla Brett, Kathleen Betts, Susan Shone, Joseph Brown, Carmen Racovitza