Overheard on the streets on Halloween party night, "Every vampire is a f----ing Goth." Goth is the Undead. Rah!

Making my way through the crypt-white skin and deathly black lips, hair, eyes, nails and clothes of vamps combing the streets looking for treats, I look up and see clouds looking like bruised blood in the sky, with a faint purple tinge over by sunset.

Black silhouetted trees are torn of their leaves by ravaging winds,
shadowy fat leaves fly like bats over the streets.

The clouds broil and the rain comes in,
a fierce spitting snake sliding across the sky.

Ghouls unite! It's time for Gothic Romance
or Zombie Undead Heaven!

Later I walk somnambulantly through the night after my howling dog, and see a bank of dense black cloud moving under the whitest of moons, which sheds light on the upper ridge of the clouds so it's like a stripe rolling along a great skunk.

It's eerie to see the world projecting itself in animal forms.

It must be the influence of those ancient Celts and their (listen for the wail) Halloween.

___________
Really, dear Readers, every word is true! Whooo.

Tirades you sit through. It's like mumbling on the outside. Those who criticize others and defend their own positions. Placing clumbsy values that lack complexity on a person in a way that ignores one's own faults. A talent, like any other: fault-finding. Building an air-tight case. Or bitching: what enables the continuance to continue. Faults are places where there is potential rupture, perhaps it's best to keep the lid on the boiling pot slightly lifted so the steam can escape.

Or those who are paranoid about the judgements of others. Who carry self-pity around like a Lockness monster risen from the deep. But it is a form of narcissism, this continual focus on the self and on how ungreen one's grass is. And manipulative, most certainly. Who will tend to our wounds?

We should guard against excessive negativity towards others or ourselves, even if indulging feels good sometimes. Keep the teeter-totter even. Not a game of excesses but of balances.

It's the professional ones who are remarkable. No hidden motives; no judgements; fair play all round. Let's just get on with it.

The latter my preferred, but stable and perhaps not as interesting as the slightly unhinged who see the days as varying degrees of battle.

Waves curve, a
continuous rail of

Cherrywood forms
armrests and around
the back when you sit
it presses against
your spine, saltwater
stays in the right spot
to bolster you upright

Upholstered thick
expensive brocade,
designs of seaflowers
and seaweed and shells.

The conversations
that go on.

Talking, murmuring,
presentations, reflections,
decisions. Streams, waves,
floods of noted notes. Tallying
Profit/Loss. Continuous,
churning world of finance.
Accounts formed the first
written records¹ we have,
Numbers flow like riverwater,
bracken in the ocean.


______
¹pictures of goods traded
drawn on clay tablets
in 3100BCE by Sumerians
in ancient Mesopotamia
-here's a link

The purple glass of the halogen ceiling lamps, Ella singing in the background, the warmth of the day and how everyone is smiling, and the see-through patterned negligees a few stores over. I sit in a cafe at a high wood table sipping a strong and frothy and chocolate and cinnamon-sprinkled cappuccino thinking about the men in my life.

What I cannot envision. There were too many then; now there are none.

Probably they were all imaginary.

What do I want anyhow?

The reflection of the waterfall in the glass that protects the basalt-style concrete stairs. Sand melted into clear transparency and bounded by stainless steel, a continuous handrail.

I watch people walk up and down the stairs, like mirages. Or drifting over the sidewalks, catching their images in windows.

The clothes hanging loosely in the breeze waiting to be filled. Clothes imagining the people who will wear them walking up and down the stairs. Like that.

I must stop it now. All of it. My neck aches from the angle of the computer where I work. The mundanity of the days that pass without significant events anywhere in their hours. Plunging like a race in water that cleaves while you rush through.

Only, the truth, it is a season later and I am sitting in the library working at a terminal, having taken a streetcar to write during lunch.

Extrapolate the time; never mind ruminations on what wasn't. There are thin green lines with coins hanging at the ends of the scarf I'm wearing today. The lighting quivers harshly. Pages turn noisily. A librarian is retiring this afternoon; I overhear her tell a borrower that's she's not going to help him with any extraordinary means. If it works, fine; if it doesn't, I'm gone.

Not me. I work hard and never leave. I've come every day and now the system inexplicably locks me out early. I have 1 minute and 22 seconds left to write.

If I don't write I might go crazy. That's the way it is. She has greying pink hair and black fingernails and her clothes are large and black and animated. Look, I wrote in my book, on those days, in those places. June, August perhaps. In the plunging of time. And it was just like that. Certainly there were stories that I didn't tell under the purple halogen lights with Ella playing. But how are you to know that from the writing, which curves without revealing whereabouts.

During the height of a lunar and solar tide I fell into the watery moon. The time of the decreasing declination of the lunar gravitational pull. My inertia held me.

You are angry at me and I don't know who you are, or why. No, I'm not waiting for an answer.

Somebody knifed people a few blocks up, stabbing two women's faces, a man in the back, someone's hands, at downtown street corners, or boarding a streetcar, randomly; no-one knew him.

Answers are meaningless during these flood currents when the bays and estuaries are swollen.

Sometimes the water rushes in a few kilometers an hour. Then you must run, the roaring. Do beware of the perigean tides, when emotion floods us.

You wouldn't know from the cool, clear, serene day with that clarity in the sunlight.

The current full moon, located on the nearside of the ellipse, the biggest and brightest this year.

I don't know if language hovers between my nerve endings and the world, or if language is my skin itself.

Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.

This weekend is ARM's Maternal Health and Well-Being conference, which is being held in a hotel in downtown Toronto. I went last night for the launch of Andrea O'Reilly's massive 846 page tome, Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, and the equally wide-ranging book Rishma Dunlop has edited, White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood. Most impressive. I love this group of women.

I'm presenting Saturday, a chapter I wrote for my thesis on the maternal body that I didn't complete. The chapter was the 'grounding in the body' and is about the process of conception. It took months to write, if I recall, between medical accuracy and writing it as a love poem of what happens deep within our bodies when we create new life. After finishing it, I intended to continue on with the 9 months of pregnancy, but it seemed such a daunting project I didn't get started. And a more difficult task - for me to humanize pregnancy by bringing the poetry back into the medical view would mean writing it from my vantage and my pregnancies were, of course, different to the experiences of any other woman's and I foresaw problems with issues of essentialism were I to embark on writing it.

Like lavender, or dark plum mixed with titanium white by a wet brush on the palette because of the faint grey tinge in the tone. On a ceiling many stories high.

A cream coloured maze over the pale purple, reminiscent of ancient Greek motifs, that's upraised, embossed.

My attention on the groups of five squares in the upper configuration, one on each side. Their borders are fine gold lines. The interior is vibrant turquoise, what I lust after in jewelry of the semi-precious stone, or the colour of the Caribbean ocean, where I always want to be. The turquoise in contrast to the staid cream marble of the rest of the foyer.

In the centre of the turquoise squares, gold suns. The ten stars radiate out from central gleaming circles like crystal balls in twelve rays tapering to points. Fairy tales can come true under such a ceiling of shining stars.

Did the interior decorators go wild way above? Who looks up, gazes?

Before me letters are carved into the marble, large and elegant with serifs, inlaid with gold, they are perfect, curved, crisp. Once I thought that language was a symbolic representation of objects and actions. But look at that wall. Language carves and shapes reality, creating the world as we know it. It collects our memories and forges our future, shaping us as it shines through us.

Under the light-echoes from the stars I see you. An empire builder. There's substance behind it; resources to enable sustenance in abundance.

The muted dark veins of the cream marble race over the huge walls like maps of territories.

My ex has been nominated for Canada's largest and most prestigious literary prize for his latest book of poetry, Nerve Language, and I'm proud of him and hope he wins. It's his best book so far. That he's up against people like Margaret Atwood and Dennis Lee... they've already won the prize in past incarnations.

This is the recognition he has wanted all his life, the one he dreamed of when we were together so long ago. It's really great news.

Governor General's Literary Awards finalists

Margaret Atwood, Toronto, for The Door: Poems (McClelland & Stewart)

Don Domanski, Halifax, for All Our Wonder Unavenged (Brick Books)

**Brian Henderson, Kitchener, for Nerve Language (Pedlar Press)**

Dennis Lee, Toronto, for Yesno: Poems (House of Anansi Press)

Rob Winger, Ottawa, for Muybridge's Horse: A Poem in Three Phases (Nightwood Editions)