My Amazing Poetry Week

   Kind of an amazing week!
   I spent last weekend working on this year's entry in the "2 Day Poem Contest", sponsored by Contemporary Verse 2, a Canadian literary magazine published out of Winnipeg. This is a contest wherein you are given 48 hours to write a poem which must be 48 lines or less. Seems easy? Well, here's the tricky part...they also provide you with ten words of their own choosing which you then must use in your poem. The words are all random and dis-connected and fairly straightforward. The contest organizers do, however, take some sadistic glee in tossing in two or three words you quite likely have never heard of! 
   As strange as this may seem, it is part of the great attraction of this contest. Here are this year's words!

   The words "carapace", "octothorpe", and "peristeronic" required looking up. If you're not sure what they are, then please feel free to look them up yourself, no reason why you shouldn't be doing some of the work here....
   Anyway, it's always one of my favourite weekends of the year. You receive the words via e-mail at midnight CDT time, when Friday turns into Saturday. You then have forty-eight hours. Unfortunately, midnight CDT time is 1:00 a.m. in Ontario so it feels like we need to stay up later but then it also feels like we get an extra hour at the end. Mind games.
   My normal procedure (this is my fourth or fifth year doing this) is to take a look at the words when they come in, look them up if necessary (it always has been), write them out, and then head for bed with the words swimming about. Then, the following day, I get started.
   There always seems to be a word or two which provide you with some grain of inspiration and then the job becomes getting the rest of them to fall in line somehow. Sometimes, this happens miraculously. Sometimes, it is an ignoble failure. The words all do get used, one way or the other though, so it is no small feat when that poem gets sent off.
   In past years, I have been happy with pretty well all the poems I've entered, feeling they were sure winners. The fact that you have never heard me talk about this contest before is, however, indicative if the success I've had with it.
   But here's the thing---for that forty-eight hours, you are totally immersed in one of the things you love the most and that thing is writing poetry. The reason and the inspiration for writing the poem may have arrived at your doorstep as a strange, almost-uninvited house-guest that you possibly wish you could send on their way but once you have invited them in, fed them and made them comfortable, you are then regaled with all the new and strange places they take you. 
   This is what last weekend was like for me, trying to make strained connections with absurdly incongruous words. It was wonderful!
   My crazy week then continued!
   A couple of months ago, I entered a poetry contest run by Poetry London (London, Ontario, Canada for those of you perhaps less familiar with me). The aim of Poetry London is to try and provide an outlet for local poets to share, enjoy and work at their craft. They do this by hosting regular readings and workshops here in the city. This was their annual contest where you get to send in one poem on any theme and in any style. This was a new contest for me so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I picked a poem I'd written recently, sent it off, and then forgot about it. I try and do this with any contest or submission I get involved with, it's just easier to send things off and then forget about them, the same way the whole "boiling pot" thing works.

   So, as it happened, this past Tuesday morning rolls around and I have to get up before anyone else and head to work. I turn on my phone to see what's new in the world and find there's an e-mail for me from David Barrick of Poetry London saying that Lucas Crawford, the contest judge, had picked my poem for first prize! Amazing and totally unexpected, all at the same time! Please feel free to head on over to Poetry London's website right here and read not only my poem but the other two winners' poems as well. There is nothing more subjective than "judging" poetry and you could very well find yourselves enjoying the other poems just as much (or more!)
   Yes, a crazy week for me. Apart from the odd poetry contest giving me some incentive to write lately, I have not really fully immersed myself in the poetry world for the last thirty years. I am, however, now feeling rejuvenated, almost like everything is a poem again!
   

   

The "Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues" And My Left Arm

   This is where I tell you a little bit about my mother and a little bit about something I had done to my left arm.
   My mother passed away on April 6, 1973. She did this as a result of having ingested a couple of weeks worth of anti-depressants and painkillers all at once. Hard to know, with several years of mental health issues and a growing proclivity toward alcohol abuse, whether this had been something she had planned or whether it was merely an accident. It was not the first time she had overdosed, it was simply the last.
   What she left behind was a house full of dysfunctional  males who then were tasked with going on without her, and all that entailed. I could write a long post about that but for the moment I am taking the long way around toward what happened to my left arm. 
   After she passed, my mum was cremated and we had a memorial service. Things returned to a newer version of normal and for the next almost thirty years I had this funny little idea that my mum's cremated remains were tucked away in some kind of a receptacle in a building in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery here in London, Ontario. I drove past this building pretty constantly and I would always glance over at it and it and think to myself "yup, my mum's in there somewhere."
   Then one day, about thirty years later, I happened to be in the cemetery office with a friend, who was looking for the grave site of someone we both knew. On a whim, I asked the lady in the office for information on the whereabouts of my mum's remains 
   She checked her records and told me that my mum's ashes had been buried in common ground. She was able to show me on a map where common ground was and, with a few specific directions, I was able to locate where in that section they were. 
   This new knowledge completely altered everything I thought I had known about the disposition of my mother's remains and, as significantly, laid bare my own grotesque dis-function---how can you go for thirty years and not really know where your mum's buried?
   This preyed on me for some time. 
   I found that it pre-occupied me the most when I was driving and able to have time to myself. I am a bit of a poet by nature and, after awhile, all the questions and observations I had about this discovery slowly took the form of a poem and the poem then slowly took the form of a song. It came out of me in a slightly irreverent, bluesy sort of way and, for the lack of a better title, I called it "The Buried-In-Common-Ground Blues". 
   Not that anyone has heard it.
   No-one has heard it, unless perhaps they were paying very close attention to a song I was quietly singing while I was washing the dishes the odd time. And it could be that no-one will hear it except that, now that I've told everyone about it, maybe someone should hear it...
   Anyway, about my left arm.
   I have tattoos on both arms. My right arm has sports-related tats and my left arm has literary tats. I don't think I really planned it this way, it just kinda morphed like that. My left arm was due for a tat and I had been pondering what to put on there. I had been leaning toward quotes from people I admired (this arm already has a pic of Leonard Cohen on it and one of my favourite quotes of his) but then the idea of putting something of my own on there took hold.
   Subsequently, I remembered the song I'd written about my mum.
   I found that the more I thought about it, the more it felt like it was the thing I wanted to do. I knew I didn't have room for the whole song on my arm so I picked the last few lines of the final verse---they tie pretty well everything together and, as importantly, they throw in a connection between my mother and the grandchildren she never had the opportunity to meet and love.
   Most of my tattoo work has been done by Anthony Veilleux of True Love Tattoo, here in London. I happened to be there one evening, picking up a gift card, and talked to him about this idea. I then talked to the receptionist about setting an appointment. She got on the computer and shortly after came up with a random date---February 26. My mother's birthday! I got chills up my spine, the good kind, when you know something was meant to be!
   I met with Anthony on that day and we talked about fonts and placement and punctuation and then he started to work. Tattoos are not always the most fun thing to do to your body---they are, after all, a needle penetrating your skin an untold number of times. As I mentioned, I am not a stranger to tattoos but this one hurt much more than any of the others. Maybe just one more thing that was meant to be.

The tattoo, as it stands at the moment. The plan is to add a whirling nebula on the other side of the arm, tendrils of which will hopefully creep up into the verse.

 

   

   
   

Out-Of-Pocket

   car keys
   apartment fob
   tickets
   map
   It has been an interesting summer. On a variety of occasions, I have had to deal with a host of at least temporary emotional traumas related to the insecurity around having thought that valuable items were safely ensconced in one of my pockets, only to discover that, indeed, they were not.
   Pockets seem so safe. They never leave you, they are not detachable, they don't slowly come loose over time and then drop off when you least expect it. When I want something to be both safe and accessible, I stick it in my pocket. I am now starting to re-think this....
   It all started a little earlier on in the summer when my oldest son, Bryant, left me the key fob to his building, so that I could get in there to feed his cats while he was off on one of his many European vacays. I was out and about carrying the fob in my pocket one day when a semi-homeless person asked me if I had any loose change, for coffee. Generally I say "no" to such requests but as I've mellowed (muddled) with age, I occasionally acquiesce. In the process of digging out some loose change, I remember feeling the fob and attempting to switch pockets with it. After this transaction I headed home where I discovered that I no longer had the fob! I went back and re-traced my steps but no fob to be found. I eventually was able to borrow a fob from one of Bry's friends and, at that point, guarded it with my life. Stupid pockets!
 

These things had wings this summer!!

 A few weeks ago I was in the middle of a forest, hiking a section  of the Avon Trail. I was carrying a map of the trail, in a plastic ziplock bag, in my front pocket. and had been periodically checking it. At one point, though, when I reached down to check it, it was gone! Fortunately, I had just recently looked at it so I knew it likely wasn't too far away and, in short order, about half a kilometer away, I found it, nestled by the trail. Whew!
   On that same hiking trip, I randomly decided to check my pockets for my car keys, the ones with my son's now-borrowed apartment fob attached. Not there. Extreme panic. I was about ten kilometers away from a car I was going to have to walk to and then not be able to drive when I got there. On top of all this, I was about sixty kilometers away from home. Throwing up seemed like an option. When I forced my panic to subside just a  little, I did find the keys in a totally different pocket than the one I thought I'd left them in. Another huge whew!
   A couple of months ago, Doralyn and I went downtown to see a comedy show at the Grand Theater. I stuck the tickets for this in my back pocket and covered them with my shirt. We walked about six blocks to get to the theater and as we entered I went to my back pocket, only to find them gone! Some cursing went on in the theater lobby and the two of us immediately started retracing our steps. Right away we came across a street person who was meandering our way with our tickets in his hand! I immediately started digging through my wallet to reward this man and handed him a twenty. We turned and started to walk away at which point he requested an extra $10 ("for the bus"). Doralyn handed him a fiver and we were on our way.
   There we have it---way too many sad tales to do with pockets and the things that magically fly out of them!