Becoming Our Own Ghosts
Fresh breezes luff the cedars
over & above the ticking guckiness: a beach
bursting with angry ernes, tacit terns, and hungry gulls.
Each of us hopes to cope with the poppling tide,
almost as if we have a choice.
Having found our odyssey wanting, we know the way
we’ve come, if not the anyway back.
Not enough where to keep us there, anyway.
Having opted not to disbelieve, we remake the world
in front of a world left over.
So before we’ve eventually left, we’ve arrived
where we already are.
Becoming our own ghosts, we don’t learn much
as we grow older, but we suspect a lot.
Wise enough to know far worse than this,
we still get the chance to show
our inexperience. And the whole idea
is to die as late as possible.
Meanwhile, over there, endearing beyond desire,
fear or despair, sirens decorate the beckoning rocks,
wasting their lives waiting for sailors
instead of offering swimming lessons to kids.
With dusk, their breasts will start to glow
like lanterns wishing they were fireflies.
Nightcap
Once or twice, once upon a time.
Old-fashioned if not ageless, Happy Hour
can’t last forever. Yearning for further meaning
is like learning who she used to be.
And watching mermaids drown.
A tide stretching its luminous limits.
A heart turning itself inside out to comply with rules
no one can remember. A sly wistfulness
overselling everything she just can’t trust.
As much as can be done without true love.
Essentially the same person in the same basic black,
with no sense of since. Still pretending
to measure the past by subtracting it. Leaving you
with less, it seems, than when you started.
Even then you couldn’t get a full shot at her bar.
But you can still see something you thought
you wanted once – someone you wanted without
bothering to do the human work. You forgot that.
You forgot to remind her about all the sweetness,
never let on how much you cared.
So that’s what she didn’t get. Shame on you.
Anyway, she’s learned enough to know what not
to show – that pout left over from a flush-blushed flash.
Still guessing, you guess, just in case.
Or has she any idea who you probably were?
Everything she’s missed. Including you.
If only she’d learned how to say goodbye for good
and finally mean it. If only
she could see herself in that half-empty glass
left there on her counter.
Where We Left You Off
Radio is community, yet most people listen alone.
You might live at the far end of a one-way street
but you don’t have to shout to reach us.
You get to talk to an audience of one
where a singular we becomes a plural you.
Our sets & costumes: sound, music & silence.
What matters most is what’s in front of the mic
in the first place. Your voice creates context
simply by speaking. Or choosing not to.
How little do you have to do to nail it?
People in radio plays know who they are.
That’s the illusion that makes them worth hearing.
Work it from the inside out, letting us imagine
the scene your character happens to be in.
If you envision it, so will we.
Learning to listen to the listening of others.
As if our remains could ever belong anywhere.
As if mere currents could begin to mix real choices.
Yet we keep returning to where we left you off –
our latest episode forever probing time & space
for the rest of its first audience, leaving you wanting more.
Right Down to the Studs
with Oak Floors & Bannisters
On first arriving here fifty years ago,
if you were lost, confused, or just curious,
people on the street actually cared enough
to tell you what you needed to know.
Nowadays, insatiable rich people overpay
for the neighbouring condo units, take
ten months making relentless renovations,
sucking all the grace out of the place.
If we point out it’s not at all cool to work
through every weekend, they’ll say
nobody’s told them that – as if it’s a rule
that has to be written down.
Truth is, a lot of people can’t handle living
in Toronto anymore. You have to have a head
like gyprock. And a good cluster of the rest of us
just can’t be bothered enough to move.
Zip-Top Borders
Zed is a completion: definite, distinct, final.
A solid ending. Resolution. Substance.
Zee is easily mistaken for Cee. So wispy –
it buzzes off like an underweight fly.
Bill Howell has had a literary career spanning five decades. With six poetry collections to his credit, his work appears regularly in literary journals and anthologies across Canada, in the UK, Australia, Sweden, Japan, and the U.S. Born in Liverpool, England, he grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has lived in Toronto for more than half his life. Bill was a network producer-director at CBC Radio Drama for thirty years. Ranging from the lyrical to the ironic, his poetry deploys colloquial language, deliberate narrative, and a sharp sense of the focused moment.
Bill Howell
Bill Howell, one of the original Storm Warning poets, has had a literary career spanning five decades. With five collections to his credit, his work appears regularly in journals and anthologies across Canada, in the UK, Australia, Sweden, and the United States. Born in Liverpool, England, he grew up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has lived in Toronto for more than half his life. Bill was a network producer-director at CBC Radio Drama for three decades. Ranging from the lyrical to the ironic, his poetry deploys colloquial language, deliberate narrative, and a sharp sense of the focused moment. Bill’s latest collection, “The Way Things Are at the Moment,” is scheduled to be released by Kelsay Books this June.
Here’s an example of his approach.