“Canada of opening and closing doors”

Predictably, the house was not there

 

Predictably, it didn’t matter because the beginning

was a farce. Predictably, he believes that narrative

can organize the filing cabinet. Predictably, he tried

to subvert in a dream and fly above himself and circle

a broken, black and stringless lyre. Predictably,

his ashes were scattered in Baghdad. Predictably, his ashes sang.

He is in search for a lost music. He is searching of the lost music

of a lost body. His circulation drums inside his veins.

He wants to destroy something or build a stone tower. 

He wants to run up a mortgage and run himself to death paying for it.

He is imbricated like a gutter tile.

 

He could invent a self to inhabit.

 

Last night, he returned to Thunder Bay.

Last night, Terry Fox was frozen like an ice-berg.

Last night, Canada switched bodies with the United States.

Last night, he droned like a swarm of bees.

Last night, he met the Indian man at Tim Hortons

who said that he was writing a book called “The Good Life.”

Last night, he was shooed away with a shoe

because he asked the man where he lived. Last night, a roof looked like a mast

for a ship-building empire. Last night, the ground beneath his feet.

Last night, his body morphed into the stranger who comes into hushed

village peddling knifes.

 

Last night, the man stamped on a bush to make sure the bush

wouldn’t light on fire. Last night, absence

was like a cleavage of tongues. Last night, the man asked him

if he was possessed by a language. Last night, a rainstorm

of bed sheets. Last night, the man thought it was demeaning to ask where

he came from. He understood the ways in which minds are under-erasure

and the good life comes to be. When trace becomes scream. He’ll tear this space

down in a couple of months and leave poetry behind once and for all.

Poetry is for poets. He wants to vanish into another relation. The current

flowed against him. At the GO station, he almost walked into the belly

of a revolving door. Every night something eats away at him until he is both

 occupied and occupier…he’s been tracing fingers in the sky.

 

[…]

 

8.

 

Walk over a mine. Explode to find the intercultural dimensions

of the metaphor.

 

9. 

 

I searched for God and arrived at my father’s door

in a foreign country I became the door for him

 

to myself. I am the hanging hinge

of your burnt down house opening to you.

 

You walk through and unscrew me.  

 

10.

 

Father crosses over. He is crossing over in his sleep.

We type a delirium. Night is nothing but night.

 

How many times do I have to repeat this before I become a fascist? 

 

11.

 

We began this narrative when he saw the last child to sit down after the national anthem,   dispersed.  When the last child left the room,             the room was peopled     he had never heard of.             

 

By songs there is a river song we could bathe our bodies.      We will make river metaphors that root and cross into this anguished sleep.

 

O Canada of hinge narratives. O Canada of opening and closing doors.

 

[here]

 

Asher Ghaffar