Peter McEwen is a poet and visual artist living in Sugarbush Ontario. Extempore is excerpted from a work in progress.

EXTEMPORE

i.

In the village we all know each other's secrets

information abounds.

Young, cool, hip made in the east sold in the west

we know what's missing.

Sweatshop labour sniffs at Gap lingerie.

Opponents of child labour take their publicity and run.

In the street the old woman says don't give up your poetry.

It must be read.

Tell it to the editor the poet replied for my part I like the image

of the small door opening under your breast

to reveal a single red rose.

If Billy Graham met Billy Gates--perhaps they have--would

they discuss the interstices between the eternal and the virtual?

Would this summit become known as Billy Goat's Gruff?

In the absence of the poet the bull dropped dead.

Fifteen hundred pounds of bone and muscle slumped to the

summer pasture, the great body too much

for a failing sentimental heart.

A young-at-heart and in years . . . perhaps his obligation to

the herd proved too much.

He lay in the dewey grass, a massive hump of Charlois white

while the heifers and spring calves--his progeny--

wove garlands of daisy chains to hang about his neck

and danced and sang his praises.

Later the carcass would turn upon the village spit as the returned

poet--never one to miss a feast--stared into the twist of

entrails eventually to rise and speak of psychic wounds

better skirted than confronted.

The woman in the street called out remember . . . ya gotta dance

with the one that brung ya!

And so we danced until the shadow of the millennium eclipsed the

village, though many said it would never pass.

ii.

Irruption...

The village dogs understand that it's all for one, but not

necessarily for all.

Unity is the purported status quo.

Still, mutant viral infections plague the net and plans for dirty

bombs sit a mouse-click away.

Proof no longer lies in the pudding--the pudding scarfed

down by feral cats.

Poof the proofs are gone like wisps of chimney smoke puffed

into a Vatican haze.

All proofs are futile make no attempt to connect two and two,

the speed of light or the sound of a tree falling

in the forest to the absent listener.

I had a war said the poet. It seemed to disappear right at the start

which coincided with my birth.

I tried to enlist but they sent me home saying that I had to be 18

or at least look the part.

My mother was pleased and relieved that her first born wasn't off

fighting for king and country.

Nor did she harbor any illusion that my death would have guaranteed

me a heaven sent entry and her an affluence for life.

Look back, memory is endless, next year is now and our immortality assured

said the last standing veteran at the legion bar.

Image and fact exist for as long as they exist said the poet and

disappeared;

later to reappear freshly showered and wrapped in his beach towel

at the motel run by a father and son from Dubai.

The son puzzled at the poet's request of a room for an hour and the rental

of a car--shrugged, but the father pointed to a straggling line beyond

the village and replied try walking with the refugees.

It was unclear to the poet if they were seeking or leaving the village

and he said nothing makes sense a moment later:

corporations crumple to their very foundations,

a father of six is stabbed to death outside a pizzeria,

Dudley George takes a police slug to the body

and only the families are left to pick up the pieces.

The Evil One appears on a giant monitor over Nathan Philips Square

pledging not to return to cyberspace until the Oval Office

sends him a message on his decoder ring.

Nothing makes sense a moment later: Bay street executives stick plastic

Jesus fish to the doors of their washrooms and over the urinals

to hide the graffiti and telephone numbers for blow jobs.

By Peter McEwen.