I don’t write a lot of poems and almost never attempt to publish the ones I do write. That said, for those who like reading poetry, here are some for your consideration.
The Car Deck Through Our Windshield
The tailgate goes up, the stage is set
A man a woman, a cage, a pet.
As the Coastal Renaissance nudges the docks at Swartz Bay
What must be to come seems preset, hardly even a play:
Dog into cage, then all will drive away.
But soft, there are words (none from the dog),
And though they are not heard in the silence of our car
What gestures there are tell of tension,
A hardening of resolve, perhaps, a problem to be solved
Then it’s woman to the driver’s seat, while man and dog for themselves must fend
At the end of Act I, the ramp begins to descend.
The cage is unloaded from the car
The man begins to fill it up with bags and boots and coats and such,
“But where”, I think, “Will go the dog, its cage thus full?”
Is this the Theatre of the Absurd, a struggle for order in a meaningless world?
On a ferry’s deck, who would have thought to find such drama
Tail lights come on at the end of Act II, and starting engines raise their clamour.
As Act III starts, the man has made an empty space in back
Beside the now-full cage, a void that lacks only the uncaged dog
A triumph, it would seem, just as cars begin to move,
But in a nod to Beckett and Camus
The woman shakes her head, it will not do,
So to the front-right seat the man and dog both go
The tailgate closes, they drive away
And that, it seems, is how they end their play.
As epilogue, I try to synopsize the thing and share my view
My wife’s look says to me I’m overthinking things again.
We two drive off too. The end.
September 2026
The District of Saanich was having a poetry contest for residents of the CRD, so I wrote this one as something that would have a local flavour.
Parton & Curry & Fezziwig & Jorkin
Fezziwig didn’t say it in the book, you know,
Though I assumed he had until I looked,
Film’s fool.
Noel Langley, that’s who.
“It’s to preserve a way of life that one knew
And loved.”
1951 must have looked different than 1843
Something about time, Langley knew, like me
Or you.
Dickens thought change rolled on rails
Langley saw that it jets past
Little lasts.
Jorkin won and Fezziwig lost
“It’s the age of the machine and the factory.”
We inherit the cost.
And every summer now, we choke on smoke
Wildfires burn, glaciers fall
But that’s not all.
Did you know the young no longer even say “hello”
It shows the world we knew is lost, finished
To deny that would be Jorkin’s “gammon and spinach”.
So now I mourn what passes from my way of life
And it’s not just the biosphere collapsing that makes me worry
This week it was Dolly Parton and Tim Curry.
September 2026
Ever since I went looking for a quote in Dickens that turned out not to be there, I had thought about putting my disappointment into a poem, until a couple of celebrity deaths finally crystallized my thinking. This got chosen for “Vend-a-Verse”, a fun project that dispenses poetry from a gumball machine.
To Andy on his 70th, from Us Humans
Midnight, August 29th or 30th, 1956,
The fixed course of our province was upset,
Bettered by the birth of a little, fun guy.
Fungi (hello homophonophiles!) must have rejoiced
Voiced electrically through hyphae their delight
That night, sensing the arrival of a future friend.
“Send tidings,” they will have said, “To flowers, shrubs, and trees”.
Pleased, no doubt, to thus include those others,
Brothers, those biota in their stationary leaning,
Meaning no slight to us lifeforms more peripatetic.
Pathetic, however, are we, to have let full seven decades pass,
The last, perhaps, to state what mushrooms knew back when?
Today, then, let us all now give Andy his fair due,
And tell him that we humans love him too.
August 2026
Our friend Andy is a famous botanist and mycologist. If you own a guide to plants or mushrooms of British Columbia, odds are that he’s one of the co-authors. Remarkably, because he was born at midnight, his birth certificate lists him as being born on two different dates! Anyway, this was written for his 70th birthday.
To Young Karateka, Upon Receiving Shodan
When your new and shiny black belts
Are just grey and worn-out cords
And you’ve done a hundred thousand kicks,
Won medals, broken boards,
You may think back to your instructors
Who got you here today
And wonder if there’s something owed
Some debt you must repay.
An obligation does exist
The very same we owed
To our own teachers, some now gone,
Who set us on this road
Let karate help you build full lives
Lived well and without fear,
Then someday pass it on in turn, And we’ll say all debts are clear.
December 2025
The tradition of the UVic Karate Club is that all of the instructors say something about the new shodan (first degree black belt) recipients at the holiday party. As a visiting instructor, I didn’t know them well enough to be able to say anything personal about them, so I wrote this poem instead.
Tim’s 67 (with apologies to Led Zeppelin)
There’s a lady who’s sure all that’s not young is old
And she’s sad because Tim’s 67.
Now he’s got there she knows, he’ll be wearing old clothes
At the store he’ll forget what he came for
Ooh, ooh, and she’s sad because Tim’s 67.
He may seem on the ball, but she wants to be sure
Though those cognitive tests are demeaning
He still sees and reads books, hears the songbird who sings
And not all of his thoughts are misgiven
Ooh, and his mind may wander
Ooh, and it makes me wonder
Does it make him depressed to remember Adam West
Does his spirit still cry for the Beaver
In his thoughts does he see that old black and white TV
And the voices of Jerome and Rusty
Ooh, it makes me wonder
Ooh, really makes me wonder
And it’s whispered that soon we won’t quite catch the tune
Then a hearing aid just stands to reason
And we’ll want to sit down if we have to stand long
And we’ll make inappropriate laughter
Oh-oh-oh-oh-whoa
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now
He’s just sprinkling morning glory
Yes, there will be sponge baths to get clean by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the shorts you’ve worn
And it makes me wonder
Ohh, whoa
Your birthday’s coming, and it won’t go, in case you don’t know
The cake is calling you to join it
Dear lady, candles must now be blown. And did you know
Your birthday wish lies on the whispering wind?
And as we sing the birthday song
Our voices more off key than on
It’s getting late and we all know
Our early bedtimes go to show
How we’re all still growing old
Our lives were not very hard
Though it seems they’ve gone quite fast
Once we were young and had a ball
It’s a shock, though on the whole
And she’s sad because Tim’s 67.
June 2024
I hesitated about whether to include this pastiche written for someone’s birthday, but then I asked myself: what’s the rock and roll thing to do?
Yates Street, December
Globes with meagre light inside
Whose warmth is not enough to lift or rise
May yet, for those who look up from below
Show that in their path to ground
Flakes of snow do not refrain
From shining as they fall to earth
Despite the fact that all they ever know
Is winter.
December 2022
In the winter of 2021, I took a photo of snow falling past one of Victoria’s globed streetlamps, which we then used on the front of our Yule cards in 2022. I wrote this poem to go inside the cards.
