Chapter 1

Produced by Sorour Imani.

Biography

Previous titles by Paul Cameron Brown include fiction, poetry, chapbooks, illustrations and broadsheets by a number of Canadian and American presses.

". . . A master at evoking mood and atmosphere" The London Free Press

". . . Beguiling writing indeed" The Canadian Author and Bookman

Credits

Many of these poems have been published in: Bogg (USA) Wyrd (USA) Germination The Antigonish Review Writers' News Manitoba Pierian Spring South Western Ontario Poetry Repository Poetic Licence Writers' Quarterly Poetry North Review (USA) Minor Offences Gut Sepia (UK) When Is A Poem (companion issue, League of Canadian Poets) Konkrete Wot Jimson Weed (USA) The Camrose Review Interior Voice The Atlanta Creative Alliance (USA) Yellow Silk (USA) Earthwise Poetry Journal (USA) Authors The Pegasus Review (USA)

Toute est dangereuse, tout est necéssaire.

COMING TO GRIPS WITH WHITE KNUCKLES By Paul Cameron Brown

TABLE OF CONTENTS

King and John Streets (For Isabella Valancy Crawford) Colette Chinatown I Toronto The Draper's Cloth Poet's Are Magic Beings Casha The Jolly Tupper Vertigo Bedroom Glass Ahoy The Poetry Pond What Became of the Sixties? Sixties Hangover Dash Into Realism: Escape Pad From The Sixties What Colour Is Love? Chain Letter Slaughterhouse Lavender The Necklace Garden Pillage Desire Preening Chance Upon Leaf Doctor Tussaud's Vulcans Dry Guillotine Mangroves Pondicherry The Clearing That Is The Trees Humboldt's Current The Gingham Dream Utterance Juniper Trees Distemper Night Winds Amherst Island Ancient of Days Constantly Deliberation The Drunken Boat

KING AND JOHN STREETS (FOR ISABELLA VACANCY CRAWFORD)

When the shadows are hungry animals on walls and theatre goers are parliamentarians engaged in a repast or feast of words. the lone house stands as a stone shard or sliver about to disengage itself from the eye.

For behind boulders of tenement walls and vines creeping to match the red brick of sumac and the parrot bill of fire escape stairs, I watch the building cylindrical in the darkness crouching thin air as if an awkward child were about to make strange for the dozenth time.

There are few things to duplicate plaster held by the bite of wind, open poverty like lesions refusing to move. neglect that festers to pop the endless seams of the mind like burning radiator caps, scalding water to lighten the lanced up eyes of vermin who lather these swollen rooms.

COLETTE

The waitress mainlines the cup under the saucer balancing it on the waistband of her arm much as a junkie might tie a tourniquet.

Wiping the glass edge of the table clear of croissant crumbs & watching the barely dry reflection of her own image going thru the emotions. the California chic pothouse & gardenia bloom effect of her work is enough to leave a dirty smear.

CHINATOWN I

And a little farther the Fu Manchu mustache curved in mock epic proportions of a scimitar un-sheaved for action, perhaps the executioner's progress his victims entombed to their skulls in rolls of quivering earth-- the parting of the ways coming as your coin drops to the rasp of his tin cup chuckle.

TORONTO

Quennelles. Lady of the Gold Horse with Diamond Eyes. A bottle of Napoleon brandy for the Count and two Persian lions carved in wood. Salads Nicoise. Dinners at Pré Catalan in the Bois, a Toronto equivalent. A girl named Chantilly burning charcoal in the forest. I drank a cocktail with the girl of the white polo coat. Or as the cynic said, my pipe is the tent, the tobacco the days of my life.

THE DRAPER'S CLOTH

I imagine stars at the dragon's tail, eyelids ringing with butter.

I want to brush palms as lightly as two sparks. take the wand of your waist in two plush hands with the pitiless gesture of a sparrow

We part the leaves in breath, arouse trees in envy. I sense colours more vivid than your tongue after wine, explosions to cap the wind.

To enter you in argument-- a bough creeking in underbrush, svelte panthers hiding.

And afterwards, sheets are open galleys, oarsmen ploughing breakers across both sea and night.

POETS ARE MAGIC BEINGS

She sits within the Magic Lantern --that facsimile for pleasure, decor of wineskins where at $2.50 a garment extravagance comes extra; skin like rosy flames the whisk of smoke at hearthside sunlight about her face.

Cherubs arise from those lips and battle lines are drawn about the sweet curvature of her breasts. A tight cashmere sweater rides comfortably two of the finest King's deer headstrong thru Sherwood Forest.

And, Merry Man, firmly planted in Lincoln Green, the plodding turf growing at odds within my soul-- give this brief to the Sheriff at Buckingham; I cool my heels, the soft doe lies prostrate at my feet.

She's loveliness, hair drawn as curtains signalling the clouds, eyes that beckon twin doves to flight, in swift passage, like the arrows.

CASHA

A child-like fawn moistened nudging & joyous breath, an allowance for leave as her gentle hand budges my sibling cupping.

And walking in a field of gardens --our Jardin des Plantes-- a molecule in depth flowery pennons near Picardy wet.

Casha tendrils here pinion the eye, little Annabel Lee with the sunshine wet in her parting hand that all the birds in grace sigh at Saint Francis breathless.

THE JOLLY TUPPER

Sun on the eiderdown breaks tiny corners off the bedspread, declares green plants its bidding before summoning Fragonard's maiden off her swing--so richly dressed in picture from the sunlit wall.

Expensive tabac from an imported humidor etches tiny leaves their stems as faces against the glass, rich aroma, trèsor, like the Jolly Tupper print preparing his bowl, drawing on the clay stem as if from a height watching ships come in.

Smoke cold as blue fungus over outside buildings follows horses with hooves to split cobblestones stuck in the city's eye, more than mountains around the stone filled ravines of the rich man's heart.

VERTIGO

We're travelling down a carnival road, are met at intersections by varying faces: poets as eyes in collapsed black holes, even the universe as extension of the stellar poet. Then, they are transformed, become worm-pickers, masons, longshoremen who subsidize their poetry with the real task at hand: making waste, laying trestles instead of women to prove a point.

This is necessary. I'm defending it, find it both believable and interesting. Meanwhile, troubadours and wandering minstrels eke out a living on storybook memories, join Marco Polo if he ever lived. Seek out the Great Khan in a box of cookies or within a magnum of champagne depending on circumstances.

The Grand Lunar is watching. Her pallor commands true poets to roll over, gaze at silver buttocks make a commitment to the art beyond spray painting, ghost watching, navel gazing.

The sky is the final home of the soul, the Sage himself a wanderer announced.

It was a warm spring evening. Lilac bounded from antler brown twigs only recently inert. Everything dissolved at once into crying. The world itself became a tear.

BEDROOM GLASS

Counted three white pigeons on a roof, near a gable silhouetting a barn; as an afterthought killed as many nervy bluebottles on the bedroom glass as warnings to myself, perhaps, or the elements pelting the window with ice beads, tiny crystalline versions of those distant elephantine birds.

AHOY

Image throttled in the subconscious, romantic throwback-- the mind on a voyage round land's end to eclipse pyramidal fires set as beacons along rock strewn shores-- her skeletal inhabitants on ice flows wrapped in bearskins with dirks between their teeth slapping one another to keep warm.

Then, alpine ranges carrying the plight of the Andes in their mouth; a dull, white sail propped against ship's bow with a noise like an anvil coming loose in the brain.

More frightening, sailors mutiny on a diet of bread as sallow maggots march in a quarter horse sized trot across the floorboards. Such men in the bellows of one's mind break out rubber dinghies in quickening escape thru the maw of an Arctic sea.

Expiry. Dry rot. Sunken astrolobe and an armada of feelings drifting alone.

THE POETRY POND

Everyone is a poet, or so the philosopher said. The world teems with poetry in much the sense the universe teems with life. A poet or two is squirrelled away in every major office. Boiler rooms hum with the tooth and nail, robust imagery of working class poets. The neurological desire to express oneself transcends even social barriers. Be creative, like a brain surgeon. My scalpel runneth over amongst all those cerebral ganglia.

The mind washed clean, scrubbed down. Words burn holes on the paper. Firemen disguised as poets douse the heroic flames. Sherpas tightly drawn amidst depths of a Himalayan winter weather a torrent of words. Groggy, I search for breath, am given oxygen but see writing materials.

In the future, everyone will be famous for five minutes. We have been promised this by Andy Warhol. In the present, a day in the life of the poet is within reach of each of you, my peers.

Barnum and Bailey's fresh from the publishing scene comes to town, will train talent or so the sign read. But the Big Top can't accommodate all the poets. Word jugglers sneak under the tent to court the ringmaster's favour.

Poetry is a religion, said the neophyte before downing its meagre fare. A window on life confounding reality, fingering experience. Feast for the intellect, grace and passion abiding as one. Yet, with poetry becoming as all things to all men and with every man doing as right in his own eyes, privateers and other assorted scaliwags, eager to toss in their lot with the real Empress, lay ransom to this queen of arts.

Somewhere, every person alive has written a book of poems. Bushel and a peck, common as gravestones.

My mind was a tabla rosa and the poets could not pick it clean. And me within reach of this uncontrolled mitosis, arspoetica. I dread "have a nice day," is already a populist poem. Think my grade 13 biology is hazy but not my ability to count the poets.

I am holding hands with the poets lest we foam too perilously at the crest.

Sentenced in absentia to torturing words, pulling wings off proverbial flies, attacking motherhood.

Worse, performing illegal abortions on the craft.

WHAT BECAME OF THE SIXTIES?

The "Haight," in Ashbury lived up to its name. Sexual pioneers became commonplace. Agribusiness consolidated the back to the land movement. Joni Mitchell remortgaged all the tree museums. Flower power became a snivelling joke. Groovy and way out once again were associated with corduroy pants & fire exits. Fascism was taken over and made respectable by Ronald Reagan. Jewish mothers and landladies outguessed the War on Poverty. Strobe lights were said to cause cultural myopia. The Just Society lost another Vietnam. Rock music recycled itself in "meaningful dialogue." Innocence learned a lot from experience. Contemplation of one's navel was resurrected by phenomena of the eager and job hunting corporate executive. Long hair became a symbol of displacement. Au pair girls received a new lease on life. Tofu and herbal teas survived even the commune experience. Primal scream, therapy, in the crunch, outdistanced everything else.

SIXTIES HANGOVER

"We have all been here before. almost cut my hair;" the refrain from Crosby, Stills. Nash & Young reading more like a law firm letterhead than any invocation for real social change. Respectability, that first casualty of the eighties. What, exactly, was a true child of the sixties?

Here's a few safe bets: Valedictorians were few and difficult to find for their "irrelevant," high school peers. Are you listening Paul and Paula? Cutoffs. Hitchhiking to California? All is beautiful. Laid back. Beads. The sixties were a jukebox that came of age. Ponderosa shirts were destined to outlive their owners. Thirty-three is perilously close to being afraid. Elvis Presley, a blimp at forty, missed the sixties or rather failed to live them down. The hullabaloo of freedom was taken for granted, then shelved. Amid a crescendo of killing only a year and one half of the present decade duplicates the assassinations of the "violent sixties." Even the cop troupe withered, crooned Eric Burton at Monterrey. I think not.

DASH INTO REALISM: ESCAPE PAD FROM THE SIXTIES

For one, street argot became tougher. You had to distinguish between what you meant by calling someone a mother. The Black Panther influence, no doubt, but a rejuvenation of the language. Street fighting man. Butchery at My Lai. House arrest for Lieutenant Calley so strangely appropriate for the times. So middle class and a tribute to "doing one's own thing": Rampant, militant individualism, the hallmarks of expression. Sit-ins, love-ins, peace-ins. The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, anyone? The sixties were the highwater meritocracy from the foremost "me decade". Getting right on target for the narcissism of the seventies. Or so it was rumoured. What's next in the social roller derby? Cutbacks, retrenchments, accountability. Even uglier, this new argot of the eighties.

WHAT COLOUR IS LOVE?

Sixties idols were built to last. A 70's idol is shoddy and throwaway by comparison. Whatever became of Carnaby Street or bell bottoms? The mentality is alive and well (another dreadful anachronism) in smart up-town boutiques. The proprietors, though, don't sell little bells to freaks anymore. Luxurious Persian rugs, instead, are all the vogue. And bail money for vendors hawking copies of Guerrilla on the streets of Toronto or Black Panther leaflets in US cities isn't needed anymore. Who was Bobby Seale? Who remembers?

The first generation in history, a new consciousness... Remember the Greening of America? Escape From Freedom? The futuristic think tankers? consciousness III? Bombers turning into butterflies? Today's B-52's are punk rockers.

I like my memories, retreat-like, hazy in myopic seclusion. I suspect social historians for the pleasant dribble they write about the age. The age, like it spanned a thousand years, opened new epochs. More like Adolf's remark about his millennial Reich. Some doubt the authenticity of the Holocaust. I doubt the sixties. It, too, lasted what seemed twelve years.

CHAIN LETTER

I'm sitting in a "sixties bar." No put-on. All around old Rolling Stones music is playing. I can tell it's a sixties bar by the spiffy waiter recycling sheets for tablecloths. The sixties was "into," environment. It's the eighties now as Heineken was unobtainable in 1969. Someone reminds me in order to run a tab a credit card is needed. This seems logical but very out of sorts with the people power complex I'm nurturing. Even the jokes above the bar are old hat. This confirms with certainty that Madcaps is Nostalgia. It's too built up for Sha-Na-Na, fintails or Nancy Sinatra's, These Boots Are Made For Walking. In my sensible decade that tune is considered sadistic. Obviously, the effect is too sophisticated to imagine I'm even a temporary time traveller. Still, poetry is a communicable disease invented in the 1920's by a snooty degenerate named Pound.

I bide my time. It's an oasis for waiting. Old time experiences seem strangely current in this campy pub. Occasionally, someone in a zoot suit comes in but realizes he's missed the last act of Grease. Old Blue Eyes might make it here if he looked like Bogart in drag. Like them, Presley was by-passed by the theme of this decade.

There's a fleshy table and chairs with a knock out chick that looks like my Bridge Over Troubled Waters. The waiter scowls like vintage Ben Casey. Beehive hairdos mingle casually with early "Mod." Rockers wishing Cherry Reds are served drinks instead. Comfortable sleaze.

The window is up on the future now and New Wave is out to spray paint graffiti artists all the way.

"Either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem." Now there's a sixties homily that still delivers. Nice to think the social history of three decades is indistinguishable and that silence comes as its own reward.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

You're the aggressor and your passion exceeds mine but we're in this slaughterhouse together and it's near closing.

Vats of prickly ointment destined to repattern animal skin and tubs of steaming formaldehyde rest casually with the more antiseptic thrill of green sawdust.

Blood is a chameleon, here, changing colours en route to sausage and Pram but my hotdogs and donuts are holding better to the cuttlefish in this unnatural forest.

The stars are a jangle of planets in a world where wood became noise; each ceiling beam, incidentally, is the wrenched out spine of a Longhorn steer, doorknobs pig knuckles bound for Octoberfest fear. Even the kindly attendant is an ogre spying out porkers' throats; will sit under a bridge then capsize crates of young chickens knife ready at hand.

The squeal of this bovine camp is recycled on 40 watt amps through more than decibels of rage; is a fishly contest designed to trade off gruel for fresher prospects.

One armed forklift drivers, for instance, with realistic Captain Hook hands jab instructions to lifeless walls where underlings the colour of grey slate form a human paste.

Sound is the monetary exchange, rabbit dung the troll's own currency-- each scrawl of the pen confirmed by the work order upends living things bent over in pain.

LAVENDER

A mind is a ray of light running to the sea; an arch of wood upon which birds rest.

Minds roam the ocean's crest, sit as antlers upon a beach, watch eddies of water trap themselves in the sand.

And minds are in anything but a state of rest--they violate physics, make mockery of other bodies not in ready motion.

I have seen a mind enclosed above fresh air and sunshine, frolicking on its own strength, the elasticity of its thought lassoing all the stars assembled.

Golden points of light caught in this sand with an oval sun marching blue legions across the sky bring more harmony than all the stars assembled.

Admiral. Fakir. Harem. They are all here as is batik, geisha, sarong, teak and gingham. I have seen them in quiet pools near the atolls.

Rapture is a word to be eaten with persimmon and pears.

The closed wood. Copse and fragrant bush. White mare alone in a green-studded pasture aback groves and groves of pleasant trees. Bright insects making a curry of the forest floor with leaves as trinkets bartered to the wind.

And the endless sky overturned like a bowl across the horizon. Water and air, the two chief elements in a brisk compound with earth and fire.

The land itself nursing a presence by the sea as a lizard might devour a fly on a bough above a tree.

Then there are the granaries of this empire, the washed up logs darting into footprints from the inlets. A white sand making its presence felt like a tireless magician. Green strands of the cucumber bush big with melon, a mother with expectant child hushed and sitting by a clearing.

"The waters of the stream please me more than the sea," coconut groves with hand-me-down messages for the ages. Strands among weeds, wine bottles as ferrymen ready for circumnavigation around islands crisscrossing bucolic charts.

And everywhere reefs and coral and sugarbush fish darting between the sieve of land breaking bread with sea; exchanging colours from many coloured coats.

Kangaroo, koala, tepee, bayou hula, lei. Sights which gallop against the senses, act as brigands to mature reason. Faraway in the mountain fastness of the mind, alpine meadows look out upon further marvels, exchange cocoa for quinine, adjust the mind as a stirrup before a long, night ride.

The shaman with a hammock in his catamaran dolefully accepts the waves as the skin must a tatoo.

The lovely collision of sound with twilight on fragrant sea-grape, the hush of storm clouds preparing to administer their own bromide of fire before the appearance of a band-aid patch of lightning streaks against the divide.

Perhaps lavender is a language here, the juxtaposition of mind with energy coming to a halt from a brisk canter, then proceeding to nibble a currant from my hand.

THE NECKLACE GARDEN

For my part, I spied red berries on a currant bush lush in August; the canopy of leaves a nesting place for hornets clocking one hundred in & out of their ice-castle hive. Birds had fled in horror, there was a pallor around the sun and nearby a Hubbard squash grew like Topsy already several baskets in size.

I threatened suicide in this herbivorous garden amid wild canaries and butternuts; my jangled nerves a lobster colour only calmed by more grievously afflicted tobacco hornworms, their skins pierced by the radar alum of wasps.

Transformed into insect angels strumming away the afterlife, they arrived as ghosts to comfort me.

Fresh, spring potatoes grew like serendipity under a pleasant summer sky. The smell of good earth revived above the saltpetre muddle of the humanoid puzzle.

Later, the night became a lavender cloak, her folds sweet orifices of a pleasure bound woman.

PILLAGE

It's chess of sorts but reeks of you-- the hand carved emerald rook, for one, and so many Black & White squares that tiptoe like many a patio stone between our warring minds.

I think of rollaway mats lepers use to beg on, habitually to die on or marked cards that outside castle walls dicers' oaths must originate from.

I am having trouble keeping the pieces straight.

I mean, you're White & concluded the beginning of the end with first move; still, I'm prepared for nothing short of winning.

Should we discuss this growing stalemate near the Bishop's mitre and exploding gun or against hungry faces of expendable pawns raging, as they say, across Seas of Galilee on that first night of Storms?

And, when pressed during attack, is it proper logistics to prepare the drawbridge, fondle another dart for a King's crossbow, then advance at parapets with scalding liquid, the oily spillage of our tongues?

DESIRE

Sleep is a striking woman accosted by various men while in a dance; the warring desires thus present themselves as on a battlefield-- hunger comes arrayed with red plumes to befit his appetites, sensuality somewhat decked out as a dandy in a mauve waistcoat and, of course, there is Fear, the most thwarted of the suitors, bejewelled with a flashing sabre, rattling it from the tail of his skinny stick horse, the pale charger riding to intercept the beautiful courtesan Sleep bestowing her favours illicitly wherein she would but choose.

PREENING

The sky is red and comes from Montreal-- you lied to me the hemlock of the wind is not this January's but is ringed with steel laughter of another winter.

I saw you wringing sweat from the eyes of the road, lie down take the season's wetness in your mouth, push apart moist dampness 'til one cavity was felled and another opened.

CHANCE UPON