an excerpt from The Mother of Your Kind

Like hairs on a flytrap, the first tufts of green you walk on

spring everything closer to touch,

as dying fletchings of hoar frost on twigs

ring the future’s obiter dictum.

Words mortalize our valedictory toil,

and fill our ideas like p, with diminishing

pelvic solitude. Meanwhile, green exactitude

broadens its call. So the hand is at odds with its reach.

Warmth is an absurd irrational that easily evaporates.

You and I came here for the green thaw. The green Xbox

glow, slashed open like a spacetime prolapse,

from where Kryptonite avatars rise.

The green road sign that intimates some fifth dimension

prison break—numbness worth speeding through!

A green future that talks about green grip on green self.

It might sound in today’s talk willfully absurd.

Take a green sip of absinthe and feel the vertigo

start to unwind. Compost grass clippings to brood

another with Shiva armswings that parasol

the beat of your skittish jelly ska.

But green manure is the new feelgood.

A viable leptogene that’ll keep you thin, it

revolves and tools around this light….



Syncytializer of electrons, engine

to chloroplasts, as mitochondria are to endflakes,

row on row. Everything puddles to a whimper.

Ephemera, foolish angst, play with airs and aspects of the mind.

Picasso on a bull was no fascist.

The war waged by Cubism and Dada was a war on the apostles

of utilitarianism and fortified orthodoxy.

Across the land, away from

the thrown leprechauns at Murphy’s Pub,

beneath the stirrings of nucleated hyphae

in dirt, where owl’s clover’s comforts

keep the aspidistra waving, threads of

life spread their toes. Myceliated twitter.

Cree answers in beadwork. Blackfoot robes.

Centipedes and weevils, aphids and slugs, are

sacred pipes at the bellybutton of earth.

This grass at my feet knows the mother of your kind.



By Weyman Chan

weyman chan is a local writer about calgary, with a third book of poetry, entitled Hypoderm, to be released in spring, 2010.
he enjoys long walks in the sunshine and stops under trees to listen to what they have to say about us.

Also,his second book, Noise From the Laundry (Talonbooks), was nominated for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry.