A giant grew inside my heart

Call-in request

You guys are frigging hilarious! Can you play
that sound you get when you put your ear to a
logging road, the dull rhythmic history of the
world, the drone of oil wells in the jungle,
pile drivers knocking at the banks of the holy
river, ugly thuds of two-thousand-pound
Americans, nuns cracking left-handed boys
with rulers, hungry fish taking seismic exams
on the Grand Banks, left-handed boys
explaining “adults are fucked!”, poets
scratching on candlelight flickering in
haystacked caves plastered with mashed
potatoes, MCs in cages spitting over muffled
drums in padded canyons, eagles, trumpets,
and saxophones soaring above structures
(searching for god), the splat of cold tomato
soup, air guns blasting, Carmelites singing,
the animal orchestra fading, the beauty of
the drum set free in the night, young warriors
screaming through icy spruce in the face of
company yes-men (c/w da police), the “blah,
blah, blah” of wise young krakens, voices
rising up with the water, screaming for the
trees, cellos that bring da ruckus, the ugly
cry of mother grizzly out to kill a
locomotive, a language older than words
with white-throated sparrow clarity, warrior
women singing at the front, always at the
front, the shape of punk to come, hip-hop
to come, jazz, joy, colour, love, even
bittersweet blushes of hope, all sick with
that flowing fuel.

The boys went upriver for a flick

and when they came down
the Island was sold.
The lynx weren’t consulted,
the black bear, never told.

Not a single caribou made an online comment
within the thirty-five-day window.

But those dull-hearted boys should at least know
that The Country holds the Island’s soul

as she crashes against the swelling sea, and
if the wild savannas of the rock are doomed,

so then, b’ys
is We.

I’m other too

When I was ten, a giant grew inside my heart.
I found her with a map made of witch’s hair and birch paper
hiking silver moonlight to rest on her pages and wait
with the damp valley for the sun to unfold robins on our wrists.

I had a map of witch’s hair and birch paper, but the men found it.
They sent machines to cut umbilical roads vivisecting
damp solar plexus dripping robins yoke with yellow
arms swinging and clawing into God’s diesel-fouled navel.

For two shifts a day, machines vivisecting, machines hauling.
Another caribou crossing the skirt is lost in the Nakba.
Rusty arms swinging and clawing God’s diesel-fouled navel, reptilian
encephala sending bombs into hospitals and money into souls.

Lord help me rescue my mother tree in that lost valley of hope
as conks sprout from limbs hiking silver moonlight past
the bombs and trucks at war with all the beautiful others.
When I was ten, a giant grew inside my heart.