Not quite sure how that happened, but I wrote a few poems.
It’s unexpected because people have allegedly been waiting for me to post on my blog1, and I have, well, Not Written Anything for about a year2. It’s especially unexpected because the last time I wrote poetry or “poetry” was in grade school, and I failed that unit.
So why share something as personal as poems publicly? Because I can, and in an era where using irony as emotional distance is en vogue, you may as well just Ship It™.
Here goes nothing, I suppose.
(No, the spacing isn’t the “nothing” that is “going.” I’m adding paragraph breaks so I only see the first poem on my monitor first.)
in another life, I would
gaze upon
the Emergency Contact fields and
not feel
that pang of shame.
a family doctor
a therapist
a physio
they would have
your name
your number
who you are to me.
just like
taxes
and laundry
and groceries
I alone carry this one too. but
in another life, I would
have
you.
I almost scrolled past
this morning
an obituary for someone
who was loved.
beloved child,
partner,
best friend,
but also
second-year uni
the age I felt I was
just yesterday.
someone with a head of
black hair, sent off
by those with white.
a tragedy, but
I must confess
what I felt then was
not sorrow.
they had someone
who loved them, someone
to remember them by.
will I?
I don’t know these roads.
or, well, I do
just never from having
driven them.
always the one needing a ride,
always the one
riding shotgun.
but I do know these roads.
the 5
the 405
the 55;
MacArthur
Jamboree
Culver.
and when I finally drove these roads—
the tachometer
the speedometer
the bill at the pump
all of them went up.
every slip lane, every loop ramp;
every diamond, every parclo
gas past the kickdown, always.
seven thousand revs, seven thousand
middle fingers per minute
to the past that was stolen from me.
someone else’s
white Tesla
in an Irvine lot
just like home.
adorned with
Santa Ana dust,
a life well lived
but not of here.
Beautiful British Columbia;
the Purcells, a foreign mountain
‘neath Discover BC Parks.
the plate I have.
the plate
the senior year
the life
you said
I couldn’t
have.
my friends ask me
always
why I walk
so fast.
left foot
right foot
left foot
right foot
down Cordova, down Hastings
down Granville, down Seymour
suddenly I’m at
the front of the pack
the blind leading
the blind.
nine forty-nine
per kilometre
always
because they walked
a nine twenty-five
with me once—
and their ghost
I cannot
outwalk.
Not a poem, sorry.
“hyperlocal algorithmic drivel” is not really an anthology in the classic lit sense. It’s not really an anthology in any sense other than an ordered, unique collection of things that happen to be poems — a LinkedHashSet<Poem> if you will.
All poems in this anthology were written, in the order they are presented, within the span of four days, after Metric — possibly by now my favourite artist — dropped their latest studio album Romanticize The Dive. You should go listen to it.
Whatever Emily Haines did in that album, it ignited something in me. It allowed me to make substantial progress in metabolizing two specific griefs — among them, the ambient diasporic grief of being a son of first-generation immigrants.
I’m grateful for that, even if the form was unexpected.