Paul Cameron Brown

    Seen the whores in doorsteps,
    slack, crouched as packing crates
    behind their quiet wardrobe lamps,
    inset like a skeleton's crown
    there to bend our will,
    provide passageways to power and suggestion;
    the winding entrance to rouged
    light flickering with powdered flesh
    yellow of gold,
    then black to ivory
    a frightful circus in a palace of turn
    within the grate of execution.

    Six owlets sitting in a tree,
    six cats in effigy,
    six of both in a boat
    the leeward lives in Innisfree.

    Six women marching
    through a park,
    six lanterns at rest
    six cauldrons to
    six walking abreast.

    In the still of the morning
    I'd hazard a guess
    there's a little less.

    "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 sixt...

    Her emerald top
    phosphorescent candy glow
    stick candy,
    sno' cane -
    floss like
    the mane revealed beneath,
    spun hair matted/woven into
    icicle lengths & pubis mink.

    Her presence as a monk sliding
    under a cowl, jet-black velvet
    or midnight eye-liner shadow
    knotting strands of dark.

    She comes on waves -
    candelabra is a name
    deft movement of finger
    caressing storm, bare legs
    shining wet street lamps
    decantered ambered wine.

    Cigarette floating between lips,
    uncharted voyage of the smile
    where puffs of smoke
    are parrots' wings,
    incandescent show-girls
    in novelty across the flame.

    Sheldrake, a magician
    - the mandrake
    a mythic plant whose shriek
    drove listeners wild....
    this lake, Sheldrake
    and its windsong-heartswoon
    counterpart, Skootematta
    with Shabomeka &
    a whiff of Buckshot Lake to boot,
    waves lapping the
    prayerful stones -
    water's edge
    the earth's bones....
    Lakes an art-form
    hardscrabble scribble
    shorthand on a blessed land.

    The mysticism of basic shadows,
    occult shapes of ourselves.

    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.
    Ev...

In fury, come the Heavens,
the days, our horsebells
upon a crystal sleigh.
Up slowly until,
the horse carriage wet
and coming up the evening
walk pauses; then snow
before a vanished world.

    When I was very young
    onto school,
    a slick of water curled
    under a behemoth, silver poplar tree ...
    there, white underbacks
    of leaves waved in showy pride the
    dead underbellies of bass ...
    as tall boys,
    big with rakish, probing, anthracite eyes,
    stooped in the creek
    their red, exposed flesh
    colour of school brick.

A snowy morning
unfolding
I smear my eyes
the crimson details
from my life.

    A small fish,
    its colors
    embers
    amid the swirling water;
    reminiscent of a
    café in darkness -
    the smokestack tablecloth fluttering
    in the matchbox breeze.

I noticed a bust of Shakespeare, an effigy in stone with
latticing to mirror the ages. In the same cathedral a
notation commented John Harvard was baptized here.

Outside, rain fell on tombstones scarcely readable,
their letters frail imitations of what each man
considered important in life.

The church itself breathed renewal. We learn John
Gower, epic poet to the court of Richard II,
worshipped here. I thought of translucence, then muir
and gems the wise men brought the Infant Christ.
Prayer candles glowed and fell into a lap of pyre. The
crypt held Edmund, brother to the Bard.

A handsome altar betrayed sentiments Gray used in
his elegy to another courtyard. My thoughts
continued onto nearby Tower Bridge, steel and energy
dynamos before steps of t...

    Buying up egg rolls at 50¢ a kick,
    they royally entered our bloodstream
    - a riot of sensation
    akin to dynamite caps
    kicked off in the brain.

    Later, sitting in the booth
    a chocolate brown wall
    to aid the digestion;
    a frumpy waitress
    plunks water down
    to complete the feast.

    Taken back, the surcharge
    at such festivities exorbitant,
    we squander in exact change
    the full price to do it again.

    Invitingly, the sea shines her stars,
    captive flames within an impatient heart
    as darkness loads the pleasent isles with coarseness,
    slow sparks rise over a roaring fire.

    And strolling beaches near dawn
    when the sand fleas & crabs are seen to flee,
    one catches upon the imperfect stillness
    a song of one - wind with sea
    drawning near
    inward, such stars turn
    as bonds at last
    worked free.

    She was fading -
    into the stone
    into rifled shadows heavy
    with fallen light,
    rippled boughs
    of splitting fruit &
    droopy leaves
    to a sallow body under clumsy years
    that ripped the tunic of her coat
    while bleating the dismal age
    with each petal fall
    of a stockinged foot.

    No open barge
    crowded with nameless waifs
    or junks in a teeming harbour
    - just odours spilling from
    a back alley,
    stair wells littered with cheap saki
    bottles, one propped
    to rifle the door.

"And the day is a wounded boy." Garcia Lorca

Two is a fonder number gracing the clock than one - a relief from monogamy, a rightful place to start. Three is too midway, cantankerous in its sound, still four is drab and stony and the sun lies too low in the sky for any truthful expression of real afternoon. Five is somewhat better, the sky is pressuring evening and, by six, is big with shadows that foresee the coming dark.

With seven, ambers and misty wraps are charged in pastel tones celebrating the arrival of eight. At nine, all pretense is dropped that its still daylight and colours lie bludgeoned - extinguished in the dark. Ten through near dawn is blissful and quiet, no confusing escapades of shifting light. Only the hour before dawn promises a summer respite any different than the cue sung at midnight.

    The leaves lie hidden as spades about their home.
    Brief movement of a kitten, then silence
    till the car's engine drones.
    Close by, a pioneer cemetery sits near a secondary wood.

    Queer is the effect of sun on a tinted roof;
    bluebells with poppies,
    cowslip and tiny brook
    back of
    fields redden and
    given to wheat.

    A house is a machine
    processing the water of living
    a replenished cistern,
    birds paying a call, a minor animal
    brushing past
    an ivy-railed fence.

    Some lives have themes.
    Goldfish that stubbornly die;
    compatability only with distant lovers
    - flowers (but no sweet-breads)
    that wilt to the touch.

    Waiting. Charcoal-grey cat
    agreeably on a green linoleum table
    with light basking in....
    a tad playful,
    paws up,
    (classic boxer stance)
    but no one notices.
    Others oblique in their transparency,
    are unmindful of even the empty closet
    and greeting cards that smile hello.

    In the dark
    this room shimmers below
    life-raft status;
    chairs are buoys
    bobbing under waves
    of congealed fright.
    In the morning
    the first pigeons
    rifle over rooftops,
    mad flutterings like your eyes