The Good Beaver (1996)

‘What is to be feared more than death?’

 
I remember well the Chelsea
rack and pinion agency
cross-country chuck-up
checkered flags
tabula gaza that John locked onto for

nestled in the café, vacuum-sealed
fresh from but this voice
          yes, this voice –

          I am bulgar, hear my
          refrigerator ‘girlish’ temper
          verbal icebox
          in the silty light, Muppets on ice

 
You’ve cracked
my bucket,
your stomping on

petunias
This spud’s fore
plotted

 
A gear is born
with you in mind – not
against you, with u
haul T-bone
heart-staked

for hear the service chime
for read the safety card
then scupper your willies
for accent the sloping
seniority of erections
for a manifesto
is born independent
representative
slow
pan
surd on the run in
the partying stocking
shot – too many
jurassic checkpoints induced
industrialization by foreign capital bumpy
on the fingers when money
feels normal on the road
‘again’ to the strawberry social
body dangerously close to
historical consciousness – reclassified:
Ford pickup ad’s transcending lyric

          I remember well
          the song ‘Zip to my dong’
          for givens forgive not
          thy ‘thee’, Quimquim

is a taloned context
ideology temperate
loading zone, page or disk sector – a chip off
blocked agency
‘multinational problem’ bone in
caption reads Ray – instead of Ron – Charles
reporting for CBC TV

Syntax, all hail.

 
‘Owing to inclement weather, the social revolution occurred in poetry’

– resonances
resin
or residence (travel-section readers, take note)
in our ears?

 
Sorry, wrong private sphere.

 
‘Recolonize the signifier!’
Movement in self blossoming
swill, a turd elect
are off their bowls
(need word ‘heliotrope’ in here, shit
for brains let the Muzak in
hand, the man
Gail Lee:
‘I speak as spaghetti to you, meatball,
Of plate tectonics and geography,
Cruise missiles in ’83, and prairie
Silos ’stroyed in ’95!’
Oh take me back
alive, with the band, in hand
of the man, Gail Lee!

 
In this scenario it is
nothing
it is nothing
while the economy declines, morale
disintegrates, investment evaporates, society
polarizes

experiencing
victory in your life
ringside.

 
Advance to harm level.

 
June frog, July bug,
August retrospective. Light to call your own
moth. Death watch, bosun’s tweet,
afterdinner cigar.

 
‘I was taxed to behave.

“That” way

lies the body shop
unctuating performatives

 
Did you say Pass me the ketchup – or – Pass me, or catch up, but don’t something

 
“Disillusion.”

Up here we beat ourselves every morning with a stout stick of maple, crying out ritual apologies in a Show Trial for the Fabian betterment of humankind – well before taking our cuppa, stretching the cat, sorting and neatening closets and cupboards, and sitting down for a half-hour in a stiff-backed chair with a brisk dramatic poem in iambic tetrameter and rhyming couplets and characters with faintly exoticized dialects. Then, we get on with what we call the day’s business – whittling sticks.

Yours, Earle