Shane Koyczan’s “A Tomorrow”

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I am so happy to end this year’s posts with a wonderful new poem by our own Shane Koyczan:

Image: Canada Goose Icon

Night Music: Imagine

Now Where Will My Squirrels Sit?

Flash Fiction: Window of Opportunity

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Standing on the steps of the ancient Town Hall, she faced the battery of microphones that reared up at her like a porcupine’s back. “We have a window of opportunity now,” she said, turning first left and then right to ensure that as many cameras as possible caught her face as she spoke the historic words. “We have a chance to bring peace to this benighted region of earth, a chance we must grasp or lose it for another generation.”

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

A sudden breeze caught a lock of her hair and, as she tried to compose her thoughts to bring forth more statesman-like sentences, she found herself in the future, watching herself as she would appear on the six o’clock news that evening, as her hair was mussed by the wind. Her right hand moved swiftly to her forehead and dealt firmly with the straying strand.

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

“Rarely have we witnessed such cooperation from so many disparate groups. Rarely have we been privileged to see such hard won handshakes across a table.” She paused, the slightest of smiles on her face, her eyes widening as she sought out and found a favoured photographer.

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

Now, moulding her face into that stern and steely gaze that scared the most experienced diplomats, she spoke again. “But there is much serious work still be done, much more to accomplished before we can rest on our laurels. But we can be proud today.”

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

She paused, pleased with her speech so far; and even more pleased with the agreement she had forged in those ancient halls. It was an agreement she would sure would win her the nomination.

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

As she raised her arms in a triumphant wave, she caught a glimpse of an upstairs window across the square, a shadow, the slightest movement.

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

The crack of the rifle was buried beneath the sounds of the press.

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

Click. Flash. Whirrr. Click. Whirr. Flash.

Image: Cozy Apartments

Remembering Wounded Knee

On a cold morning 131 years ago today, the US cavalry massacred more than 250 disarmed Lakota men, women, and children near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. A few days earlier they had murdered the great chief Sitting Bull.

The massacre at Wounded Knee was one of the final and most vicious military acts in the government’s century-long plan of genocide against native Americans, and twenty soldiers earned the Medal of Honor for their part in the brutal affair.

We must never forget that the American’s vaunted Manifest Destiny was colonialism of the most brutal kind and meant death for millions of indigenous peoples.

Night Music: Lowdown

Image: Arrow Lake From The Leland

Poem: Driven

He
drove

her home after dinner.
They dawdled for a moment on the porch until the wind

drove

them inside where, after drinks,
their mutual passion

drove

them to seek the comforts of the bedroom, and where
her exuberant energy

drove

him mad with desire, and where
he

drove

his knifeblade deep into
her heart

 

 

He was

driven

they said, seeking to excuse
his excess,
his access to those parts of
her body which even this exhorbitantly open society doesn’t allow.

Driven

he was
they said by television violence and devil music and commercial
radio and the

drive-throughs

he was forced to eat at as a child by
his working mother.
His vanished other parent

driven

he learned to drink by
his inabilty to access the excess promised to all by the features
he sat through at the

drive-in.

His mother and father coincidentally killed in

drive-bys

he read about two continents and two decades apart.

 

 

Driven

they said by these circumstances to commit
his act
her death
they killed
him by

driving

his last of a long line of needles deep into
his arm. And then, in an unmarked car,
they

drove

his body to
his last home, just as
he had

driven

her to the first and last home
they would ever share.

Night Music: Down To Zero

In my opinion, Joan Armatrading is one of the most under-rated UK artist of the last 30 years.

Image: Screen Door

Night Music: Fairy Tale of New York

The greatest song ever recorded about Christmas Eve.

Image: Shadowbox #3

Flash Fiction: The Wind Came In From Africa

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I was lying aboard the hammock on the verandah of the Colonial Hotel just up the beach from the old town of Puerto Duquesa. I’d had a whiskey or two. OK, OK — goddam you truth-mongers! — I’d had a damn near bucketful of the stuff, and I was just resting it off as I liked to do in the late afternoons, listening to the “Blue” tape while the sun melted slowly into the sea.

There was a light breeze and then there was a bigger breeze and then there was damn near a hurricane or a typhoon or a whirlwind or something. And I sat up in the hammock to see what was going on and that wind was pushing me from side to side and turning me around and I felt sick to my stomach. And that’s when I saw them, coming out of the dust of the beach and the spray of the ocean. A dozen of them, maybe. Or eight or some. Who the hell could count straight with all that damn wind?

They were like Arabs or Saracens or those guys that Richard the Lion -Heart used to fight in those movies with Douglas Fairbanks or whoever. And they had a huge cart or stage coach or some such that was filled all up with jewel boxes and bows and arrows and swords and shields and cartons overflowing with clothes and sandals. Two or three huge Arabs were hauling this heavy-laden carriage out of the water.

There was a silence about them; a stillness within this storm. But the smells of the East washed over me like bathing in perfume: soft incenses and aromatic barks and sandalwoods and something like patchouli.

I lay there swinging in the hammock, smelling their smells, and watching them pull their cart silently across the beach until they disappeared in the swirling mist about a hundred yards away. And as they disappeared, the mist seemed to clear behind them and they were gone.

I don’t know how long I laid there watching where they had vanished, but it was dark when I wandered back to the Marina Bar in the old town and ordered a whiskey straight up. I didn’t tell the barman. I didn’t tell Pepe when he came in later. Don’t know why, just didn’t.

Night Music: History of a Boy Scout

Winter Solstice 2021

Instead of those man-made artificial holidays this time of year, this is what we should be celebrating — the turn of the year at the solstice: a natural celebration that humanity has recognized for more than 30,000 years.

Happy solstice everyone!

Image: Commercial Drive: Licorice Party

Night Music: Love’s Been Rough On Me

Poem: Creating Collage

 

we sleep together,

for sure,

but mostly we share together,

cutting out our memories

from the bark of life’s tree

 

— like pieces of collage

laid out on the floor

before an exhibition

celebrating our anniversaries –

 

unhurriedly pasting them together

 

— refocusing colors and shapes

and forms –

 

until it is late again

and again

for sure

we sleep together