corned-beast-speaks

2012-01-31T22:24:00.000-08:00

Banana Bread

Once upon a time

there was a girl

who liked banana bread

and there was a baker

who made her banana bread

and she ate as much

banana bread as anyone

could ever possibly eat.

But the baker who was

an expert at banana bread

made more and more

at a greater and greater velocity

and the girl who loved banana bread

could not keep up

so made a circle of banana bread

around herself and loaf by loaf

built a golden banana bread tower.

This took some time to do

and the girl’s nut brown hair

grew longer and longer

as the tower grew taller

and when she placed the last loaf

of fruity bread on the tower’s parapet

her long hair fluttered

like a murder of crows

in the glory of the breeze

and at that moment

she looked somewhat like Rapunzel.

31.I.12.TS.>MS.

2012-01-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

Tin Rain

When the desert

first bloomed like a rose

and seagulls insect sated

became sainted

in the first

of his small rooms

with three spiders and a cot

on wheels

a small strip of utah sky

like a tiny television show

against clouds passing

Then that pink dorm room

with its parade of shadow lovers

some now dead

and its paintings its laundry line

of old tee shirts and grey socks

just about dry

Now in the city of harbours

in this final tiny room

above the domain of the lost

and somewhere beneath

a shrapnel of love like

tin rain across

my narrow train of thought

going somewhere

on these electric rails

one cyclopean eye catapults

through odyssean night.

Timothy Shay for MS -2012

2012-01-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

ALLEMANDE

for Megan Williston Shay

On the temporal plain

burnt umber bison

spread out walking, a thundercloud,

separate as raindrops

yet melded like molasses

across the vast prairie.

Sparrows, just one of Aphrodite’s

four sacred elements;

waft up in a dance,

vast choreography of community,

and who can tell which bird

is the true leader?

On wing they seamlessly shift

unanimous in a drumbeat undulation,

each individual alone, but joined

perfectly, in the allemande of all.

On the temporal plain each molecule

a brilliant singer,

Each child a swaddled and

secret Buddha, long awaited,

We know the song we search for sleeps

in all our throats.

2011-11-04T00:37:00.000-07:00

NAMELESS CITY
ts/mws 2011

In a foreign country now. You
were a foreign country then and
a surprise continent on this
big and worn newsprint
map o empty map

You appear
in poems Centre or edgy You
will attend so wear seven layers
and brace yourself There
are poems falling like ice
in the sideways wind of winter
where you thought you would
always walk More

than a shadow in the hedge
Small maps
inadequate to your Continent
its several dances And

now I am a city
Some have named and cling to
as if the neighbourhood
of my long shadow Is not subject
to liquification Now

I am a nameless city
Layers of stone steel and concrete
feet Holding
down the furled fist of forest Patient
in a place where a rumour of light dwells
with A warm desire to move upward

You are a traveler And
now You are the line on several maps
and eat shrimp pancakes You hoard
the heat and foreign ocean up
like hot red bricks for cold feet
In your future
of pending winters You drink
hot tea Your heart is a warm china cup

You the floating city You
attached to the blue sky above
like a loose carpet of balloons
A conceptual life that in the beginning
and at the end is not a foreign place Only
while floating and nameless We are the cities.

2011-10-07T22:26:00.000-07:00

DECISION

5 III 11 ts/mws

It is late winter.
I am in a ragged orchard
on the edge between
this fruitful order
and tangled forest

I hear an old language
whisper, and high up
in the sleeping canopy
hangs an uncultivated
invitation to intense light.

2011-09-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

Lovers of my beloved,
watch how my words put on her lips like clothes,
how they wear her body like a rare shawl.

Fruit is pyramided on the window-sill,
songs flutter against the disappearing wall.

-Leonard Cohen

2011-09-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

FIRE FEEDING FIRE

Performance and music by Evan Shper at the Bees Knees in Morrisville, Vermont. Lyrics from the poem, Fire Feeding Fire, (for Meg), by Timothy Shay

2011-08-23T19:28:00.000-07:00

Timothy Shay reads his poem, The Wine Dark Sea, for jds, at the 8th Annual Summer Dreams Literary Arts Festival, August 13th 2011, Lumberman's Arch, Stanley Park, Vancouver BC. Thanks to Janet Kvammen for this video.

2011-08-08T19:54:00.001-07:00

The following poem, Beside Me, is one of five published in Issue Six - Winter 2010, Horsefly Literary Magazine.

BESIDE ME
for meg

Although I failed to sleep as

you slept beside me,

my exhaustion was like a sunset

with your smooth horizon beside me

breathing and perfect

the stillness of your beauty

even in darkness beside me.

And the form of your body remained

an angel in the bedding

pressed like a wild rose petal

in some sacred text beside me

Your imperceptible breath

now missing, leaves an empty silence

suspended like a forest ghost

of a fresh blue wind in the smoke

and yawning air around me

Your eyes closed in my

night time memory, cupped

like a green garden bower

sheltering midnight bird song

Your arm the gentle slope of path

rising to the crown of heaven

you asleep are both enigma

and epiphany, vision suspended

in my blindness, a song unsung as

in silence so softly you sleep beside me

so safe you sleep beside me now.

2011-07-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

how to speak with the ocean

Why do we invoke this

naked truth

What home for wounded sailors

is on a wheaten prairie

yeasty tide of bread assumed

I sleep in the morning

This pleases the cat

Wild ball of fur and claw

Come nightfall

Heart

So my heart is a broken house

The weather enters

Dampens all the objects

Corners are filled with wind

Clumps of cat hair forget how to purr

And the November sun is as sharp as ice

Where is your hammer or your glance

Where is the suture of your embrace?

2011-07-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

THE SPIDERY ARMS

OF SHRI TARA DEVI

for Megan Shay 10VIII09TS

She arrived an agent of Maha Kali Ma

in her blue lotus projection of Tara.

Spider woman yaga shadows crowd

the close corridors like a vapour

of missing birds

where my bodhisattva walks.

She came with the prescribed tests

and trick questions;

A ventriloquy of hunting whistles

whisper her lessons.

This alphabet of footprints

where my bodhisattva walks.

She came to the fatty feast

of primordial meat.

Roasts, drippings and sauces of blood

papers and tablecloths stained with spilled sauces

shooting like stars

where my bodhisattva eats.

He answered all the trick questions

and hurled himself at the tide of tests

and now in success he is alone,

his spine a curved path

where his bodhisattva passes

She went as an agent of Maha Kali Ma

sweeping the dirty path as it disappeared behind her

so he could never follow

into that jungle where his bodhisattva’s heart

is the wrought iron gate before the first forest

She came as a detective of yaga agency

dealing the two faced cards of royal houses naturally

juggling blackholes and stars

which light my bodhisattva’s scissors

of detachment

She came disguised in smiles and left in smiles.

Being so surprised

somehow makes him seem half restored

as he squints to observe his bodhisatva

in her favoured form dancing

amid the glints of dust

hovering in a shaft of sunlight

as we grind the bones

to a dark gravy paste

and speak of the perfect application

of foreign spices.

We laugh like an old joke.

Again, his bodhisattva teaches him

it is all a punch-line arriving.

So he is almost an old man

when her eyes flag him down,

hold him up beside her highway of ambush

while yellow straw

and gophers animate the receding horizon.

2011-07-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

STARLINGS for mws

These dark boots pulverize

wet brown leaves underfoot

in the rain at nightfall and dabbling

with the mystery of my future

How like the rain my fear of the flood

constant and on the gray night edge

a fermented chorus of aggressive starlings

drag my heart like food toward

the absolute mouth of another morning

Timothy Shay

2011-07-12T01:00:00.000-07:00

The following poems, Codes, and Purgatory, are published in the Spring 2011 issue of QWERTY literary magazine from The University of New Brunswick in Fredericton.

CODES
for Megan Williston Shay

We speak to each other in a code,
our moment a recipe of cakes and crows
We sing our distant song
without black telephones and
there is no other place to go
as in the distance she needs to hew
a soft wall of fixed vision,
snow monument to
the several freedoms of slavery

She is like a cat in the trees.
She makes frozen faces and pretends
to be blind, deaf, empty…
or stands like a shadow silently,
or is simple geography
like a low carpet of wild ginger

So she cannot be seen. I never see her.
She is a cat static as a slow grown forest,
crouched like a soft green plant
below the distraction
of vaulted canopy and galloping weather

And I cook in the kitchen of my
departed grandmother... or any kitchen…
conversant with a Siamese cat
who eats shrimp sitting down
each red crustacean gripped
in one paw gracefully
nibbled on like a tiny party sandwich…

And this cat has the mannerism
of a person and the woman
who acts like a cat in the forest
and appears to be a tree
or wild carpet of lush ginger treasured
is held in a hollow of cakes and crows;
The secret patience of bread rising.
A freedom of isolation; Enough to suffer.

~March 23 2010

….

PURGATORY for meg shay

I seem to be the night-watchman of purgatory

I sing quiet old songs against the dead hills.

When you come near me with your echo

I don colourful shirts and try to remember a vital dance.

I have first class ferry tickets and yellow absolutions.

The halos are not here, the halos have never been here.

They are up in the attic with the abandoned gift wrap

of goodness, the wobbling promises of new wilderness.

I am never sad long but I record your hidden sadness,

acutely experience your forgotten hidden sadness,

as I might feel an oppressive and cloying moisture in the air

hours before the advent of an engulfing downpour.

Sorrow and waiting are the two kinds of weather here

where there is much slow green moss for sitting,

time to patiently eye the defunct pink clock and

time to click out the missing ‘tick tock’ with mouth and tongue.

I am the watchman of purgatory.

It is always deep night here and the oily coffee

tastes like old lead pencil shavings.

My friends rewrite their examinations as if they’re leaving.

2011-06-28T21:19:00.001-07:00

Burn and Burn and Burn

for Megan Williston Shay

First she was a late autumn breeze
coming through a café door
surrounded by
a phalanx of ebullient guards

Curious with her eyes wide open
glancing at the contents of the room
as if it were a ghostly pantry
of beeswax candles
and dried old mystery herbs
jars of dust preserved like patient guests
by buckets and deserted brooms

And as she left
again in the centre of an undulation of flesh
blown like orange and scarlet leaves around her
I felt the blue breath of her speechless passage
and asked and asked and asked

And as fixed winter came down
Her candle gaze of snowy attention
sparked a fire in my hibernating furnace
found in the locked basement of memory
and I could not hide
from the burning of her waking cold
or frostbite of her perfect touch
as sideways like the ghost of snow
she went and came and went again

And often I could not see her through her blizzard
but only hear her voice as it floated on
electric wave from Christmas
in the valley of sweetly frozen grape
or five blocks up the steepest street;
her words written down as wind inscribes
on banks of drifted paper snow
or tiny runes on shifted dunes of blown sand

And once she arrived large and sudden
as a wall of affronted weather
wafting some paper scraps before her
like a fallen dove’s shattered feathers
And in a sudden gust called my name
and indicated that my supposition
had offended her growing care
and slim modicum of human trust

And once calm as horse latitudes can be
her whisper seemed to say
(as it tangled my brain in a dream
of soft Sargasso sea)
I love you you will never lose me
but as a wind without edge or ropes
she moves and moves, is always there,
but like her subtle soul, always she is air

Her whispers and trick hunting whistles
tell me she wants me near but far
here not there or there not here or be with me
But you can’t hope to be
beside me when I cannot be held or hold
contained unless you’re as patient
as a canvas sail on a still lake stalled
then someday I will arrive big or small
and move you here to there and touch you
as a breeze across curved landscape
and through the stretching trees
until you start to smoulder then
leave you in the centre of that water
to smoke and sputter, wave and yearn,
leave you where I can discern
your perfect heart
burn and burn and burn.

2011-02-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

TO MY TEACHER

[song]

When you are the curtain of night
or the red clay vessel of day

I love my teacher
I love my teacher I said

Bacchante mosquitoe
feasts on my blood

I love my teacher
I love my teacher I said

When a purple mound
of phosphorescing sage
beckons like a baptism
an aromatic bed

I love my teacher
I love my teacher I said

New rain sweeps
cricket voices up
and on a dry wind
they land again
chirping at our feet

I love my teacher
I love my teacher I said

Here in a cave
of immaculate dust
by a puddle of clay
pink hands swim up

I love my teacher
I love my teacher I said

I love my teacher
I love my teacher I said

-Timothy Shay 1995

2011-01-29T12:51:00.000-08:00

2011-01-29T12:48:00.001-08:00

THE DIRTY KNEES OF PRAYER

Requiem for Jeffrey Dean Shay

“When we are born, we cry, that we are come To this great stage of fools.”

- William Shakespeare

ONE

It’s morning on Muffin Street.There goes the fat man, trundling down, shaped like an egg . He wears a bright red hat andcarries a large yellow bag. This is my breakfast I think, My breakfast haunting me. He looks up at my high windows withhis little peppercorn eyes. Treats my deep seclusion like some kind of yolk…

Apparently when I start again fresh and pink, shitting and squalling, I will be encumbered with vague memories of the unfinished mess I produced this time around. Everything without a file. Scrambled papers on the floor, a porridge offorgotten crops settled into the bottom tray of my old white Inglis refrigerator.

According to one quantum physicist I am deluded by this idea of directional movement, an intent behind the motion of time,my perception of an inextricable plodding forward as if to some goal. Apparently the billion times I repeat the phenomena of shitting and squalling helplessness, all billion are simultaneous. Even with the distracting security of the ready breast.

This physicist, (who chooses to hide in his house), claims quantum theory gave us the cd player the dvd and the computer and because they function, quantum theory pursued indicates there must be billions of versions of each of us, housed in billions of very real worlds. Each of the billions of each of us are simultaneously deciding what to do.

One of me sees a man acting like breakfast; another eats eggs that look like the eyeballs of a surprised person; another me chokes on dry toast and falls down stairs breaking his neck; the next just suffocates on the same wad of toast and some other one of us falls asleep, face first in the plate, blowing happy bubbles in the Heinz ketchup.

The physicist says that if this is not the case then something more bizarre must be. So this physicist-version of him is very careful and stays home while I get the creeps and spend the day in my goose down quilt calling out like a loon on a Yukon lake. I figure one of us must do something like this while the others take their turns dieing. Quantum mechanics seem to allow dementia in lieu of paid holidays.

Let’s start over:

TWO

Sitting on the edge of my bed. Looking out the window. Thoughts that make me want to puke course through my head. Thoughts like ‘a river winds through everything’.

Thinking this reminds me of the health food store lineup. They have the only brand of Chai tea I like so I found myself in a lineup of the well meaning. Slow as corn syrup…sticky sweet. The proprietor and some timeless hippy woman chatter in perky tones, speak of the shifting planets, the influence of the moon, the song of birds, the impending astrological shift at3am into the darkness. “O heavens no! Not the darkness” says the proprietor. The beady hippy doesn’t miss a beat, says “ O yes, the positive darkness, the quiet darkness.” Proprietor,“Yes, positive, good, healing darkness…” Sounds like politicians making an effort to rationalize something distasteful. Sounds like death to me.

Looking out my window and an old truck shoots from the ally onto the main street. It has a yellow hood and a red body. Well past breakfast time. I saw the fat-man today, dressed as an autumnally-prepared lumberjack. He had developed a long stride to go with his red plaid shirt. Even the lamp posts looked vaguely like trees.

THREE: CRUMBS

Somewhere in the ether floats an idea. Tiny as a dust mite and just as ugly. Folded in on its beauty like a confused origami. The sweet vaulting song emerges from the throats of the slaves of G-d and somehow they seem convincingly happy as if their self imposed limitations, their cloistered inhibitions, were the source of freedom from some nagging worry, the clawing hungry, the raped and the raped again. And how this lack of belief and dedication is the alum that makes my morning smile. Expectant, humanistic, yet masking an army of teeth. Ready to gnash.

Somewhere along the line I got lost and realized I had never had a thing to say. Now I mumble to myself a lot and demand the Earless Infinite return my stolen house, Call on my dead great aunt to adjust the lottery results and help me get mystolen house and its fruit trees, its gardens, back. It is as close as I come to the dirty knees of prayer.

There is this theoretical bottom we can hit yet I continue in free fall through the wet atmosphere. There is so much time to think and though I was never issued a parachute I remember encouraging stories of World War II pilots abandoning flaming planes and falling four miles onto a little bush, which apparently was just enough to save every bone in the pilot's body. But as the wind whips by and the rain lashes my face, I know secretly that I have fallen further than four tiny miles

When I woke up on Saturday I was suspended in a mulberry tree. The monkey said, “Yer sure a lucky cat!”I never leave my house because I am alone. The world is not safe. The adventure I wanted is not in a book. The fish I dream of detests the hook. My father roasted the tongues of cattle in our oven and said this is like corned beef. He told me what was really in wieners and stole the picnic I still search for. I left my house and they stole it too.

I want it back.

I rode a bicycle along the river. I sang a song. I said, "why can’t we make it better?" With band-aids. Yesterday I saw band-aids in a store window. The design printed on them made them look like strips of bacon. I thought I would send some bacon-band-aids at Christmas to all Jews and Islamic peoples with a message encouraging Christian healing. Why do good intentions so often fail?

I had a dream not too long ago and I was very happy. My heart condition had disappeared, some fool had bought my broken van and I had lots of money which I’d found in an abandoned paper bag. Life was looking pretty good. Even my ex-wife had found someone else to focus on. My crazy prodigal daughter had become dictator of Wyoming and wanted to buy me a fast car. I could see again and felt no obligation to praise the Lord. I could chew once my teeth had been ransomed from some evil fairy. Everything was looking up and I wasn’t even worriedabout being loved…as I say, I had a dream…

And now I ride my bicycle attached to a generator which makes my TV work. It is my way of saving the world. I think of the past constantly and bake things that only my dead grandmother knew how to make. I keep thinking in a disjointedkind of way that It’s time for something new.

FOUR: CRUMBY

Today, no idea is a good one. The clouds clamour like nervous tarot cards. Everything seems to mean several things. Everything does mean several things. Simple devices refuse to cooperate. My toothbrush leaps from the shelf to toilet baptism. It is obviously not appropriate to think of the similarity between my body and an October squash abandoned in some damp field. (And once I loved the squash, its tenacity, its globular mass miraculously manifest from one tiny seed. Voluptuous, abundant, cornucopic.). Like me, then; cornucopia of sinew and energy. Now; giant mass from tiny seed. I catch sight of myself entering my funnel shaped pants and though never a good idea I think of my father in ancient times watching TV on the couch. His vast belly shiny with whatever greasy thing he’d been eating. As a teenager it was the most disgusting sight imaginable. I thought if I ever looked like that I’d kill myself. So I’ve had to reconsider. Even though there are no advantages anymore, and they’ve stolen my house, and my daughter The Dictator of Wyoming dictates the fate of nations from her dumpster office I have decided to seize the day, have no ideas, and not even think of relief, joy, ecstasy, love-making, inclusion, world peace or the inflated price of my favoured greasy pork chops.

A tennis shoe on the side of the road, mysteriously deposited, mysteriously unclaimed. The stupid drunk poet needed a ride so leapt in front of the speeding car. They say his body shot out of his shoes so quick that the shoes stood there for hours, exactly where he’d stood, as if they were waiting. Waiting. Apparently there is no need for shoes in the House of Jim Morrison. The stupid drunk poet sits there now, on a cloudy bench. He has applied for some eternal job tending the diaphanous tables of the dead. Please allow me to serve a dollop of fresh air; or this bubbling flute of nothing to speak of.

My hangover memory, My hang nail, My brother hanging, hanging fruit, hung juries, well hung daydreams. A shrug. A grunt. A snooze.

Once dreams were hopeful things, augurs, signs, omens. Now, awake and asleep I have little idea of meaning or direction. I am the type who wanders aimlessly. My day is a success if I find a penny in the traffic lane. Horns honk like trumpets. Drivers yell like peasants… my blind and alcoholic and dead grandfather drives by, whipping the ghostly horse as it pulls his demented carriage down the freeway. He is always off to the races.

My hangover and hangnail conspire against me. My brother was the Houdini of Suicide managing to hang his entire six foot four body from a beam in a six foot tall shed. The night before he died he told a Mormon Elder that he’d really like to meet Jesus as he had a few things to ask him. The hanging fruit falls wasp-ridden and rotten to the ground near my stolen house, while the world starves. The world an indecisive hung jury where passion is replaced by day dream, bug eyed andlascivious down the long staircase of chronological decomposition. I am guilty. I am sentenced. I thank G-d for my daily pills…I sometimes almost feel normal.

White rented party tents. Knights in garters, Ladies in their cups, Those who continue to marry and those who continue to look to the G-d of blood revenge for simple solace…I burned the rice pilaf. The pork chop is tough. This shrimp scampi tastes like fish! One daughter suffers burdens of real sorrow.Another daughter has tattooed lips and studies the arrangement of flowers. The third ascended to the secret crown of Wyoming. (As her court clerk I prepared a genealogy. When I demonstrated that our family tree went all the way back to mythology and here, see, your 68^th great grandmother was a Valkyrie….she said…."Finally! About time you found someone interesting.") Her train of rags raises the applause of the dust and a tintinnabulation of pebbles. She knows the forgotten martyrs of Heroin and the Pope of Pop Cans. I appeal to her for a title. She gives me a fiefdom and calls me Keeper of the Ashes of Sentimentality, Purveyor of Honey Nut Cheerios and the Queen Daddy. I am satisfied. Everything is so tragic I have learned to laugh along with the great comedy of slapstick dirty dish solitude. I mutter a lot about getting the joke..how the punch line winded me when it hit me in the gut. Most days I see stars. Real nice.

Beginning, middle, end, climax, anti climax, resolution. How is the masterpiece chained to presupposed outcome. If there’s no story there’s nothing to lie about. And can’t you see I’m telling the truth now that my brother has finally taught himself to be quiet for long enough to listen to my sonorous wisdom…my inflated rubber pontification?

-Timothy Shay

2010-12-14T19:29:00.001-08:00

RHYME for ZAKO’S DELI

Vancouver BC

And the owner a gem, Salah Saleh,

from Libya via Montreal

sells, (irony discrete),

the best kosher pickles and fresh smoked meat,

a whole continent west of the distant east.

His sandwiches compare

favourably

to the best warm love affair:

Layer upon layer of paper thin flavour

resting there on a soft bed of light rye bread,

HOT,

with fiery mustard and passionate smoke,

yet silent as a sheaf of exceptional poems

by a Montreal poet who never wrote.

And in the street outside,

commerce comes, and buses go by,

and rain falls and falls from a dark lidded sky,

cars hurtle and lurch and beggars cry

while Salah Saleh, cooks & creates

a mighty sandwich and steamy poutine

to warm the hearts of the cold & lean,

calming our days in this hurried dream,

with a perfect reason to savour and taste,

to stay our pace and slow our haste,

a warm oasis in our day, close but far away

from the rushing dance of commerce

and frenzy of business on busy Broadway.

Timothy Shay 30 . XI . 2010

2010-11-10T21:27:00.001-08:00

2010-11-10T18:31:00.000-08:00

CLIMBING BABEL

for mws

Everything escapes me here.

Is it time moving or

is it only me or is it neither,

whether cloud or clear,

there is water in the air.

Once I espoused old cabins

in rural gardens

green, and a small town,

too full of itself

an anorexic

oroboros town

in interior forest.

And now, here,

I aspire to that penthouse

and shining tower

(like a ladder)

and cling to that part

of the ship

that is last to go under

in this liquefied delta

at the wide wet mouth

of the coming quake.

-Timothy Shay

10.XI.10

2010-09-09T01:59:00.000-07:00

2010-09-09T01:43:00.000-07:00

From rough draft sequence in progress:

V
buried plunder blamed kerouac
for ms . 9.IX.10

I walk on slip rocks by the swaggle sea
For her I barnacle hop
and bend in mid july intent
on shell, mollusk’d mother of pearl
artifact of ocean’s push up and discard
at my pink feet: this mound of flotsam,
scree wave
of thoughtless plastic addiction dances
and sea green kelp whips
curl like a movie up the spit

For her I bend
and for her I pretend to breathe
sail around above the flaps
and knots of wrinkle and sag
that catch and tear against the
camoflaged outcropping of time
The sweet mahavidya epic I’ve come to accept.

And I've become idiosyncratic in this place
all dressed up for coffee in fresh plaid shirts
like kerouac’s gone forest imagination.

And she will not be with me.
In this she concurs with the sun
and the big cheese moon and the endless
footsteps of ants
and finally with the divine
intellect of patient stones. Nothing is
mine, hers, ours. Not ourselves or others.
Having nothing together
is simply our distant plunder.

-TS

2010-08-06T00:19:00.001-07:00

Two Crows

for meg

Queens and stubborn warriors meet

And crows meet crows

As witches and alchemists cast

Their shadows on the twisted stream

While crows casting shadows go

Above the waters down below

Two sleeping buddha in dharma dream

Crow on crow, on crow, on crow.

5viii10ts

2010-08-06T00:08:00.001-07:00

Elephant Mountain Press 2010.

Graphic Poem by Timothy

Shay,

"Bodhisattva of Rags"

Illustrated by Jessica

McVicker

@ Otter Books, Baker Street,

Nelson, BC.

2010-02-26T15:42:00.000-08:00

2010-02-26T15:38:00.000-08:00

THE ONLY WOMAN
For Megan A. Williston Shay

She’s the only woman who ever
really wanted me to read poems to her.
One night I read for seven hours out loud
I read Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
The biblical Song of Solomon
and the love poems
of Pablo Neruda.
I added a pinch and a dash
of Leonard Cohen and
each time I looked up
her eyes twinkled like the queen of a vast
river of incantation or the cobalt night sky
as it embraces the deserted territory
of no electric light

She could see the beauty of
an old Royal manual trtpewriter
packed down the long lake shoreline
where against the figurative blaze of
beach-wood fire, a fat pink pork chop
sputters and spits poems toward
the empty humour of tasteful desolation

She‘s the only woman
I ever desired so deeply I
could not move to touch her
and like a man, who surprised,
examines the severed ripcord,
as he falls from the sky,
a dislodged exclamation mark,
I could not find a solid grip
or a single moment
to reconsider the sudden…

The first woman who like
some sure and audacious monarch
instructed me to never be angry with her
no matter what she did…
as it would break her heart…
and then with grace she did…
and I could never be angry
but tend to burst into a rattle
of warm applause, devotee;
a courtly clatter of knuckles like loose walnuts
and for her I spy on this tiny corner
of her vast principality and report
slight movements: a mote of pink dust who
bends for one frail modicum
of warm light
and remembers the day she
seemed to taunt with a smile
her noble chin thrust out and on her lips
new red lipstick, a shade
of imperial shining styx pomegranate:
the obscured histories of apple cheeked eden.

-Timothy Shay 26 XII 09

2010-02-19T02:30:00.000-08:00

“When we are born, we cry, that we are come
To this great stage of fools.” -William Shakespeare

THE DIRTY KNEES

OF PRAYER

[requiem for jeffrey dean shay]

.I.

It’s morning on Muffin Street.

There goes the fat man, trundling down, shaped like an egg . He wears a bright red hat and carries a large yellow bag. This is my breakfast I think, My breakfast haunting me. He looks up at my high windows with his little peppercorn eyes. Treats my deep seclusion like some kind of yolk…

Apparently when I start again fresh and pink, shitting and squalling, I will be encumbered with vague memories of the unfinished mess I produced this time around. Everything without a file. Scrambled papers on the floor, a porridge of forgotten crops settled into the bottom tray of my old white Inglis refrigerator.

According to one quantum physicist I am deluded by this idea of directional movement, an intent behind the motion of time, my perception of an inextricable plodding forward as if to some goal. Apparently the billion times I repeat the phenomena of shitting and squalling helplessness, all billion are simultaneous. Even with the distracting security of the ready breast.

Let’s start over:

.II.

Sitting on the edge of my bed. Looking out the window. Thoughts that make me want to puke course through my head. Thoughts like ‘a river winds through everything’.

Thinking this reminds me of the health food store lineup. They have the only brand of Chai tea I like so I found myself in a lineup of the well meaning. Slow as corn syrup…sticky sweet. The proprieter and some timeless hippy woman chatter in perky tones, speak of the shifting planets, the influence of the moon, the song of birds, the impending astrological shift at 3am into the darkness. “O heavens no! Not the darkness” says the proprietor. The beady hippy doesn’t miss a beat, says “ O yes, the positive darkness, the quiet darkness.” Proprietor, “Yes, positive, good, healing darkness…”

Sounds like politicians making an effort to rationalize something distasteful. Sounds like death to me.

.III. CRUMBS

Somewhere in the ether floats an idea.

Tiny as a dust mite and just as ugly. Folded in on its beauty like a confused origami. The sweet vaulting song emerges from the throats of the slaves of G-d and somehow they seem convincingly happy as if their self imposed limitations, their cloistered inhibitions, were the source of freedom from some nagging worry, the clawing hungry, the raped and the raped again. And how this lack of belief and dedication is the alum that makes my morning smile. Expectant, humanistic, yet masking an army of teeth. Ready to gnash.

Somewhere along the line I got lost and realized I had never had a thing to say. Now I mumble to myself a lot and demand the Earless Infinite return my stolen house, Call on my dead great aunt to adjust the lottery results and help me get my stolen house and its fruit trees, its gardens, back. It is as close as I come to the dirty knees of prayer.

When I woke up on Saturday I was suspended in a mulberry tree. The monkey said, “Yer sure a lucky cat!”

I never leave my house because I am alone. The world is not safe. The adventure I wanted is not in a book. The fish I dream of detests the hook. My father roasted the tongues of cattle in our oven and said this is like corned beef. He told me what was really in weiners and stole the picnic I still search for. I left my house and they stole it too. I want it back.

I rode a bicycle along the river. I sang a song. I said, "why can’t we make it better?" With bandaids. Yesterday I saw bandaids in a store window. The design printed on them made them look like strips of bacon. I thought I would send some bacon-bandaids at Christmas to all Jews and Islamic peoples with a message encouraging Christian healing. Why do good intentions so often fail?

And now I ride my bicycle attached to a generator which makes my TV work. It is my way of saving the world. I think of the past constantly and bake things that only my dead grandmother new how to make. I keep thinking in a disjointed kind of way that

It’s time for something new

.IV.CRUMBS

My hangover memory, My hang nail, My brother hanging, hanging fruit, hung juries, well hung daydreams. A shrug. A grunt. A snooze. Once dreams were hopeful things, augurs, signs, omens. Now, awake and asleep I have little idea of meaning or direction. I am the type who wanders aimlessly. My day is a success if I find a penny in the traffic lane. Horns honk like trumpets. Drivers yell like peasants… my blind and alcoholic and dead grandfather drives by, whipping the ghostly horse that pulls his demented carriage down the freeway. He is always off to the races.

My hangover and hangnail conspire against me. My brother was the Houdini of Suicide managing to hang his entire six foot four body from a beam in a six foot tall shed. The night before he died he told a Mormon Elder that he’d really like to meet Jesus as he had a few things to ask him. The hanging fruit falls wasp-ridden and rotten to the ground near my stolen house, while the world starves. The world an indecisive hung jury where passion is replaced by day dream, bug eyed and lascivious down the long staircase of chronological decomposition. I am guilty. I am sentenced. I thank G-d for my daily pills…I sometimes almost feel normal.

White rented party tents. Knights in garters, Ladies in their cups, Those who continue to marry and those who continue to look to the G-d of blood revenge for simple solace…I burned the rice pilaf. The pork chop is tough. This shrimp scampi tastes like fish! One daughter suffers burdens of real sorrow. Another daughter has tattooed lips and studies the arrangement of flowers. The third ascended to the secret crown of Wyoming. (As her court clerk I prepared a genealogy. When I demonstrated that our family tree went all the way back to mythology and here, see, your 68^th great grandmother was a Valkyrie….she said…."Finally! About time you found someone interesting.") Her train of rags raises the applause of dust and a tintinnabulation of pebbles. She knows the forgotten martyrs of Heroin and the Pope of Pop Cans. I appeal to her for a title. She gives me a fiefdom and calls me Keeper of the Ashes of Sentimentality, Purveyor of Honey Nut Cheerios and the Queen Daddy. I am satisfied. Everything is so tragic I have learned to laugh along with the great comedian Poe, and the slapstick of dirty dish solitude. I mutter a lot about getting the joke..how the punch line winded me when it hit me in the gut. Most days I see stars. Real nice.

A very specific destination in no particular direction. Plot is a plot. Plot is the sound of a slow heavy rain stealing your time with its sleepy song. Plot, plot, plot, the sound of your wet shoes strolling home from walking on water. Again and again you’ve walked on water but only when the faithless are asleep. Plot is conspiracy. Beginning middle end, climax, anti climax, resolution. How is the masterpiece chained to presupposed outcome. If there’s no story there’s nothing to lie about. And can’t you see I’m telling the truth now that my brother has finally taught himself to be quiet for long enough to listen to my sonorous wisdom…my inflated rubber pontification?

-Timothy Shay

2010-02-12T23:33:00.000-08:00

Nails

Sometimes she’s as tough
as nails but hates to be,
so when potential conflict
stirs the air,
she chooses to flee,
to not be there, and
I was sure, I would hate
this strategy,
but once accepted, I clearly see
the dark roots of conflict
which grow in me.

TS/MW 12 .II. 09

2010-02-12T23:24:00.000-08:00

WUJI for Meg Williston Shay

I know less nothing

than my master.

He knows

so much more nothing

than I and

He instructs me to relax

When I shrug and then

I think of you;

Your eyes floating

in the nothing

of dark February

at the place

where something and nothing

sometimes meet

Timothy Shay 9.XI.09

2010-02-04T19:31:00.001-08:00

2010-02-04T19:21:00.000-08:00

EROTIC POETRY OPEN MIKE

THE VIENNA

NELSON BC

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 13 2010
730PM - NO COVER

HOST - TIMOTHY SHAY

2010-01-30T23:32:00.001-08:00

HOW CROW MAGIC WAS SAVED TWICE

for Megan Williston

A TRUE FABLE by Timothy Shay

Illustration by Jessica McVicker

“…and I take the one who finds me

back to where it all began” –Leonard Cohen

Let’s say these were their names, although we do not really

know their names, or a specific location. There was no date.

Just us and the people we were part of. Old Uncle, Crow Boy

and Buffalo Alone.

Old Uncle knew more than anyone. He knew the seasons and

the songs the seasons sang. He knew the language of grasses

and leaves and he consulted with the stones, (notorious for

their very slow talking). Old Uncle knew Medicine and Medicine

loved Old Uncle..

Crow Boy was learning from his Old Uncle. He understood the

medicine of feathers and had learned the intricate rhymes of

flowers. He could read the maps that crows purposefully traced

in the sky so he was never completely lost, even though his

natural temperament leaned toward rapt distraction. Crow Boy

knew some crow magic. He knew why to hop. He knew about

the value of glittery things and so looked down and sideways a

lot. Because he was learning to be Night he could sometimes

see much better when Coyote was crying for the Creator.

Crow Boy and Buffalo Alone played together, daily. Buffalo

Alone was really only alone in her thoughts. Always moving,

her forearms and shoulders were delicate yet powerful in the

same moment, and her legs were strong and looked like they

wanted to jump. Her eyes were vessels for the magic of the

continent; they changed colour like the smooth submerged

stones in a rushing creek, at one moment jasper, then

obsidian, then jade or hazel wood smoke or morning or

evening or…it was her eyes and her burden of care and heart,

deep in the well of those eyes, that Crow Boy would never

forget and would always search for.

In a village circle Buffalo Alone appeared to be the dream

while the others appeared to be the dreamers. She was always

separate even when in a gathering. Crow Boy and Buffalo

Alone met daily and walked and talked. There was a place by a

stream where they would eat and the water there was made of

ten drummers. When they listened carefully the voices of the

moss sounded like singers with too much food in their mouths.

Sometimes Bear would join them and gift a story to them for a

gift from the meal. They often laughed. At night Buffalo Alone

always crept closest in the circle to the Grandmothers and

Grandfathers when they told their stories by the fire.

One afternoon, a secret prayer the crows used, to make

themselves be everywhere at once, hopped into Crow Boy’s

head. That evening he was seen in two places at once by

reliable witnesses and when Old Uncle sent out Buffalo Alone

to find him, Crow Boy saw her coming and became a tree for a

few minutes until he got uncomfortable with standing still and

wiggled as if there was a wind when the wind was already

gone for the day. Buffalo Alone said, “Crow Boy if that’s you,

your Old Uncle wants you to come to his lodge”..

Crow Boy expected to be scolded. Instead Old Uncle made a

little feast of meat and ash cakes and all three ate. After

awhile Old Uncle told a story about a time he saw when Crow

magic might be lost and without it the smoke of the world

would choke and kill the light. Crow would not be able to find

enough bits of light to replace the dark of night with new light

at dawn. So all parts of crow magic would have to be saved

and sent there on a journey. A bundle with pipe, sumac, red

willow bark, sage and cedar, feathers, food and several excited

pebbles in it was assembled by Old Uncle and handed to Crow

Boy who had become uncharacteristically silent.

Buffalo Alone was so silent she became a doorway in the lodge

wall where there had not been a doorway. Old Uncle pointed to

the new doorway and Crow Boy walked through and into the

night woods where there is no path.

In the morning Crow Boy found himself walking across a long

meadow. He ate some berries and a bit of dry meat and then

an Otter walked up to him and said here is medicine for the

journey and took his own shiny skull out of his head and

handed it to Crow Boy who thanked him with a little gift of

cedar smoke to help him renew himself.. Then an Eagle flew

past and screamed some wisdom at him and he is still

thinking about it. The day continued until all the grasses in the

meadow started chattering at once and leaned one way

pointing until the chattering became a chant to ‘sleep there,

sleep there’. In the little cave he slept as if he was suspended

under water. The Otter skull told him how to do this without

drowning. He thanked his medicine.

When he woke up, there was the sound of a baby crying in the

blankets. He thought for a moment he heard himself calling

for Buffalo Alone in a frightened voice just like when he was

very little and got lost because of an important daydream.

Someone was talking and saying they had seen an ugly baby, a

baby that was too long, too skinny and had barbaric looking

black hair past his shoulders. They laughed and said the baby’s

mother had denied it was hers. It looked like a monkey they

said.

When he was very little there were familiar eyes floating in his

bedroom at night. He wondered whose they were. One morning

he asked his father about the eyes. His father told him they

were the boogeyman’s eyes and that the boogeyman would

get him. He spent the remainder of his childhood securely

wrapped like an egyptian mummy in blankets with only a tiny

breathing hole for his mouth, wondering where the eyes of the

boogeyman where in the room at each moment.

Then he was a young man and had just received a camera

from his family for Christmas. He went for a walk to the edge

of the prairie town. He could see across fields of snow to the

Rocky Mountains a hundred miles distant. A tiny black speck

began to grow inside the field of this vision and grew and grew

until a shiny young crow landed on his right knee. He

attempted to feed her a Dad’s oatmeal cookie but she wasn’t

interested. She just looked him up and down and directly

into his eye. She hopped to his left knee. He removed the

camera’s lens cap, put it by the crow’s feet and snapped a

couple of pictures. The first two photos on the new camera.

The crow looked at him quizzically and he heard “work with

me” inside his head. The crow turned and flew away in the

same direction she had come from, toward the mountains, and

slowly became a speck again, disappearing finally intro the

prairie’s vast panorama.

For years after, interchanges with crows increased, he learned,

found ancient places, had dreams, received valid warnings,

danced for the crows deep in the forest, was led to a cave and

drummed himself small until the river made him see a sacred

song. He felt included, at the center, aware of Creator and

Grandmother and crow and then he met someone he called

the Old Uncle, first in a campfire, then in dream after dream.

Soon he felt that he was almost always in Old Uncle’s dream

lodge…and he understood he was now a cave filled with nearly

forgotten energies.

But he worried…he had family, he had a job, he had social

obligations and a good safe circle of friends. The more he

dreamed and listened to Old Uncle the more he felt himself

walking toward the deepest forest. A forest without paths. So

he stopped dreaming. He stopped visiting the cave. He called

crows “crows” rather than brother and sister. He chose

fattening meals, political arguments and social pleasantries.

As he ran away he fell repeatedly onto the dropt weapons of

the many other frightened runners. He got very sick. His heart

tried to die. He lost all balance and slept, dreamless, day in

and day out. All that was alive became ugly and distant. He

wrote poems to death, wills, codicils and funereal lists, and he

thought the Creator couldn’t be alive anymore. He began to

despise joy. His train seemed to be leaving the station.

In the small town he often saw a young woman who drew his

attention with something mysteriously more attractive than

sexuality or even heart love. She would enter rooms and his

head would turn toward her of its own accord as if he’d heard a

call. She seemed to experience a similar recognition. They did

not speak to each other more than once or twice and only to

say polite hellos. He did not know her name but he wondered

about her. This went on for two years. He knew she had some

sort of work associated with the hospital as he’d seen her

there wearing a light green work outfit while he was waiting for

one of his endless tests.

One evening she attended a poetry reading. He was there and

when she moved to leave at the end of the evening he made

sure he was near the door and gave her a pamphlet of some of

his poems and learned her name. They had coffee a few days

later in a cafe. He talked and talked. He felt better and better.

He felt he had found his way home. He knew he loved her

disproportionately to this recent experience with her and

naturally this seemed to frighten her. Energy began to flow

through him like a sapphire blue flame. He had forgotten

the intensity of real goodness so went quickly to his Doctor to

make sure he was not just experiencing some new kind of

ecstatic death throe.

He showed her some ancient artefacts and his old photo of

Crow and each time they spoke or wrote he knew he would

someday remember her because he must have known her so

well before. Her presence was a gift and he felt delight again. It

was her eyes and the wild wind driven hair. It was her calm and

silence. It was her apparent secret sorrow. All his crows woke

up cawing and hopping whenever he saw her. Poetry and

sacred incantation were suddenly restored like the

sky is by sunrise.

Buffalo Alone turned then, and said to him, “I wish I had a

bedtime story..... I wish you could tell me one, just a short one,

maybe a story with a picnic in the plot? Or a bear.”.. so he

began again and that is how crow magic was saved twice.

2010-01-27T19:42:00.000-08:00

In Concert
PAULINE LAMB
with a solo performance of her original music
plus the presentation of a suite of poems by
TIMOTHY SHAY
accompanied by
PAULINE LAMB
FRIDAY JAN 29 2010
@ THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
DOORS 8PM COVER $10

2010-01-15T20:23:00.000-08:00

2010-01-15T20:12:00.000-08:00

TWO COW POEMS

for megan shay

COWS I

She sees three eagles around a dead dog
And pours out her sorrow to the stunned ears
Of chewing cows
Shallow bovine empathy and the soft cud
Of big brown eyes blink
A logic of speechless inclusion

These at least will not interpret
Translate or judge her baffled soliloquy
But let it rise slowly like an old yellow moon
Staring across blank winter fields.

COWS II

Three eagles a dead dog
And several opportunistic birds

If she is one eagle
The one who fails to carry
the canine corpse away

Who are the other two eagles
Who is the dead dog?

And what of this restrained crowd
Of cows. What do they know?

Timothy Shay

2010-01-14T19:42:00.000-08:00

2010-01-14T19:33:00.000-08:00

THE SPIDERY ARMS

OF SHRI TARA DEVI

for Megan Shay 10VIII09TS

She arrived an agent of Maha Kali Ma

in her blue lotus projection of Tara.

Spider woman yaga shadows crowd

the close corridors like a vapour

of missing birds

where my bodhisattva walks.

She came with the prescribed tests

and trick questions;

A ventriloquy of hunting whistles

whisper her lessons.

This alphabet of footprints

where my bodhisattva walks.

She came to the fatty feast

of primordial meat.

Roasts, drippings and sauces of blood

papers and tablecloths stained with spilled sauces

shooting like stars

where my bodhisattva eats.

He answered all the trick questions

and hurled himself at the tide of tests

and now in success he is alone,

his spine a curved path

where his bodhisattva passes

She went as an agent of Maha Kali Ma

sweeping the dirty path as it disappeared behind her

so he could never follow

into that jungle where his bodhisattva’s heart

is the wrought iron gate before the forest of eden

She came as a detective of yaga agency

dealing the two faced cards of royal houses naturally

juggling blackholes and stars

which light my bodhisattva’s scissors

of detachment

She came disguised in smiles and left in smiles.

Being so surprised

somehow makes him seem half restored

as he squints to observe his bodhisatva

in her favoured form dancing

amid the glints of dust

hovering in a shaft of sunlight

as we grind the bones

to a dark gravy paste

and speak of the perfect application

of foreign spices.

We laugh like an old joke.

Again, his bodhisattva teaches him

it is all a punch-line arriving.

So he is almost an old man

when her eyes flag him down.

Hold him up beside her highway of ambush

while yellow straw

and gophers animate the receding horizon.

-Timothy Shay

2010-01-14T09:27:00.000-08:00

2010-01-14T01:31:00.001-08:00

PANDORA’S

GINGERBREAD

for Megan Williston Shay

“Its big stone jar of evil habits

Has smashed in a million pieces.” -kabir

Pinatas are usually pleasing

paper images of happy donkeys

and jubilant wagging dogs

stuffed with candy

which they deliver

in a beneficent shower

once the object of beauty

which contains them

is sufficiently beaten

by blind people with sticks,

torn and broken wide open,

ruptured membrane of tiny blessing,

sugary internal organs scattered

like a casting of seed.

The idea of reward emanated

from the destruction of festive beauty

might be relieved if piñatas

adopted designs

like “Hitler’s yelling head”

but then, why would candy

blow out his mouth

if not to lure

more gingerbread children

to the vaulting ovens of memory.

Timothy Shay 13 XI 09

2010-01-13T19:53:00.000-08:00

2010-01-13T19:29:00.000-08:00

BODHISATTVA OF RAGS

For Megan A Williston Shay

She is a bodhisattva of rags

walking as a scarecrow appears to walk

on the horizon of lead trajectories

and barbed fence lines

the river ice breaking up into lifeboats

moving inexorably

to a warm southern ocean

She wonders how to turn away

from her old vow as if it were the lost iron anchors

of a sunken fleet forgotten in sand and seaweed

in tidal dance like

a windy green forest for Dungeness crabs

orange as taxis in ultra marine night

Her sorrow is all encompassing

like a martyr who flings her body

on the blazing crematory flame

in a disciplined display of clenched detachment

she recalls the surrender

of a passing history of weather

blowing like smoke rings or halos

across the bent fields of sad memory

She lifts up ghosts and heals them

hides notes under fieldstone

to mislead the generations

hefts the karma of isolated families

like a basket of wizened apples

in the marketplace

She weighs the sense

of their belonging nowhere

drowned grains of black tea

gathered by the frail fingers of slaves

She juggles trance and circumstance

huddles in the arms of blue northern winter

and her icicle fingers gather

dry hollow sorrow

like stale yellow corn cakes

She makes them edible

with a thin syrup of golden hope

She is the bodisattva who collects

the tatters and rags of destiny

calls out from her wooden wagon

creaking across the flatland of her isolation:

“rags and bones and sometimes string

rags and bones and sometime spring

feathers and songs with a semblance of joy”

She dances with whisky

in a hollow leather shoe.

Timothy Shay 9 XII 09

2009-08-09T16:13:00.001-07:00

"Maybe you should just do it tonight so you can sit in a box all day tomorrow."

2009-05-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

Burn and Burn and Burn

for Megan Shay

First she was a late autumn breeze
coming through a café door
surrounded by
a phalanx of ebullient guards

Curious with her eyes wide open
glancing at the contents of the room
as if it were a ghostly pantry
of beeswax candles
and dried old mystery herbs
jars of dust preserved like patient guests
by buckets and deserted brooms

And as she left
again in the centre of an undulation of flesh
blown like orange and scarlet leaves around her
I felt the blue breath of her speechless passage
and asked and asked and asked

And as fixed winter came down
Her candle gaze of snowy attention
sparked a fire in my hibernating furnace
found in the locked basement of memory
and I could not hide
from the burning of her waking cold
or frostbite of her perfect touch
as sideways like the ghost of snow
she went and came and went again

And often I could not see her through her blizzard
but only hear her voice as it floated on
electric wave from Christmas
in the valley of sweetly frozen grape
or five blocks up the steepest street;
her words written down as wind inscribes
on banks of drifted paper snow
or tiny runes on shifted dunes of blown sand

And once she arrived large and sudden
as a wall of affronted weather
wafting some paper scraps before her
like a fallen dove’s shattered feathers
And in a sudden gust called my name
and indicated that my supposition
had offended her growing care
and slim modicum of human trust

And once calm as horse latitudes can be
her whisper seemed to say
(as it tangled my brain in a dream
of soft Sargasso sea)
I love you you will never lose me
but as a wind without edge or ropes
she moves and moves, is always there,
but like her subtle soul, always she is air

Her whispers and trick hunting whistles
tell me she wants me near but far
here not there or there not here or be with me
But you can’t hope to be
beside me when I cannot be held or hold
contained unless you’re as patient
as a canvas sail on a still lake stalled
then someday I will arrive big or small
and move you here to there and touch you
as a breeze across curved landscape
and through the stretching trees
until you start to smoulder then
leave you in the centre of that water
to smoke and sputter, wave and yearn,
leave you where I can discern
your perfect heart
burn and burn and burn.

2009-04-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

2009-03-10T12:20:00.001-07:00

ANGEL OF BLIGHT

Song Lyric

for Megan Shay with love and invariable respect Timothy Shay

"Maybe you should just do it tonight so you can sit in a box all day tomorrow."

While the world ended

in florescence and phony white

some chose to clutch thin candles

at the fall of interminable night

Some chose the bleak announcement

of rattling party horns

to pronounce their tiny crumbs of joy,

brief sunshine in a storm

Some fucked like no tomorrow

and some didn’t fuck at all

while they waited for the orders

and cowered within their walls

And while the world ended

one sat in a room alone

dreaming of bridal veils

the soft song of a groom

A groom and his celebration

a bride in her flight of veils

circled the sky as black birds

tossed like ships with sails

And while the world ended

all danced and danced again,

some sang like dirty angels

in a choir of the pained

Their voices of cardboard and ribbon

sputtered to false dawn

and the Angel of Blight directed there

with the hook on his baton

While the world ended

some still bowed to their ancient dreams

and begged their gods for the magic

of some forgotten former scene

And while the world ended

one spoke on a dead telephone

calling for bridal veils

in the sweet voice of a groom

Sad groom and his calculations

cold bride in her flight of veils

circled the sky as black birds

tossed like ships with sails

And outside in the corridor,

way down a deadened hall,

someone took their hardon

and beat a heart to hell.

7.III.09 Timothy Shay

2009-02-06T01:14:00.000-08:00

LOVE POETRY & EROTIC POETRY

READINGS

VALENTINE'S DAY SATURDAY NIGHT OPEN MIC

FEBRUARY 14 2009 730PM-10PM

THE VIENNA

NELSON BC

HOST - TIMOTHY SHAY

READERS & LISTENERS WELCOME

THIS EVENT HAS NO COVER

AND ENDS AT APPROX.

10PM. WARM UP HERE

AND CONTINUE WITH

THE MANY LATER EVENTS

IN TOWN... AFTERWARDS

2009-01-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

READINGS

SATURDAY

January 17th 2009

730PM

THE VIENNA

2008-09-23T23:29:00.001-07:00

POETS/WRITERS

CALL

FOR SUBMISSIONS

HORSEFLY

LITERARY

MAGAZINE

is accepting submissions until December 2008
of poetry, (5 poems max.), and prose, (5000 words
max.). Submit by snail mail to:

HORSEFLY LITERARY MAGAZINE
c/o #308-507 Baker Street
NELSON BC V1L 4J2

or by email or word doc. to:

horsefly@netidea.com

No handwritten mss. Attach SASE for ms. return.

2008-09-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

THE REDFISH GRILL

I saw a man who looked like he carried

death the weapon

he was standing inside a café window

and looked at me like a cia poster

I saw a man who may have found me

vulnerable, well studied

by some masterful predecessor.

So if you find me murdered tomorrow

it was the man with very large eyes

inside the window of

the redfish grill

10.IX.08ts

2008-08-02T01:10:00.001-07:00

JUST OFF SHORE

I cannot yet bring myself to

gather bread crumbs

retreat to the mainstreet bench

most recently occupied

by old Ernie the suicide

(remembered with

his halo of frantic pigeons

riot of dust and feather

demanding manna)

So instead

I sometimes sit alone

on a bench by the river

along the waterfront pathway

as it grows dark

and watch the slow river run by

in the last dribble of daylight

as darkness supersedes sight

A small trout breaks surface

then another and another

until myriad small trout

leap and fall like raindrops

A clan of duck swim by

dragging a remnant of light

like a thin satin ribbon

across the water behind them

and now it is almost night

Another small creature

surfaces just off shore

submerges again and

resurfaces swims slowly along

I think it must be a beaver

so shift my weight

cough and listen for

the sharp slap of its tail

-Timothy Shay. July 30 2008

2008-08-02T01:08:00.000-07:00

RESOLUTIONS

A new chapbook of poems by
Timothy Shay
available from
Chameleon Fire Editions
Box 151 New Denver BC V0G 1S0
www.chameleonfire.ca
25 pages - $12
& shipping

2008-03-10T22:19:00.000-07:00

all abject in corned quartet

We were so lovely then

all abject like a

force of morning light

And eagles are so

far up they vanish

in and out of cloudy

sight and you abject do not

hear the cheering teams

of surrendered fools

gold sparkles

on the surface gravel

Iron pyrite eyes look up

glazed with an eon of running

water over them:

subject.. yet watchful

We were so lovely then

all abject…a force

of morning light.

Timothy Shay 10.III.08