Bill Howell Poetry

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.