Adam Dickinson Poems

make a roof for the people, and the people walk
down the street with resin for a roof, and the roof
has magnesium in it, and sulphur, and the people
walk down the street with resin in their hair, and
resins are always falling from the sky to the ground,
and the birds make a people in the sky, a people
of the resin, and the resin is composed of sky, and
it composes the sky, and the people walking down
the street are the strings of resins, and covering
their hair with their arms, with newspapers, with
umbrellas, the people are the birds of resins throwing
their landings in the air like people for whom landings
are uncommon, like people committed to the ex-
pulsion of landings, the resins coming down upon
them like people driven out of countries discovered
by resins or that have discovered resins in veins,
in the countertops of suburbs, and people walk
down the street with resins for hair, with countries
committed to colour, with the bonds between them
the birds circling, and people walking down the street
with hunched shoulders so as not to look up and
call the resins by name, call the resins in the name
of the birds, the people, circling and loosening
...

The highway rollover wore him
like a loose jacket, a wind-snapped flag,
like a rodeo bull wears a cowboy,
sanded him down until his arms
were dusted off, re-written
in fibreglass and hooked script.
We were frightened by his make-believe hands,
smooth upholstery knuckles, unflinching
beach ball smell crossed
with baked bicycle tires.
We were frightened of the fishing trip
and the lightning that welded
him to the boat.
We were frightened of those shoulders
retrofitted into clothes hangers
for broken handshakes and bear hugs,
dialled phones and signatures
packed away into boxes
for accountants or the poor.
We practiced our own substitutions,
acting out ghost stories, declaring allegiance
to phantom limbs
while playing high-kick soccer,
awarding exaggerated penalties
for handballs,
offenders chicken-winged
and forced to pirate copies
of hoof-and-mouth disease
for overseas quarantined manicurists.
We wore hand-me-down turtlenecks
and packed scavenged finger-food
for the sergeant-at-arms.
In the sawtoothed canines,
masticating above us in climax beech leaf canopies,
we saw vestigial forests
of terminal arm hair, small sod
melanin huts, knob-and-kettle country
in the vascular ridgelines.
We took flu shots to change our appearance
on the inside, planted memories
of synthetic identities, dusted for fingerprints
in unauthorized hands.
Climbing through polite conversation,
we wore nosebleeds to conceal our altitude,
fake moustaches to hide harelips we'd affected
for counterfeit phonemes, and slipped
into pairs of scissors,
hiding in roughhouses built by play-facing dogs
and the first-draft carbon crystals
of burnt-out engine blocks.
We raised branches from sticks
and trained them into tepees and log houses
for bonfires,
schooled them
in the relative humilities for dry rot.
We placed orange peels
over our eyes and groped
for light sockets,
donned dandelion manes
and crawled through switchblade grasses
with sextants certifying the sky
for seeds.
Having had our wrists slapped,
we grew polycarbonate cups
out of sight in the carpal tunnels
and drank under water tables
at night, where we'd beat snowstorms
to death with flashlights
and proclaim republics
on the accumulated evidence of road salt
and body-counted shadow puppets.
We wore intestinal flora
as a countermeasure against
the invisible hand of decompositional self-interest.
We hung out with stray dogs
who did all of our terrifying for us.
The one with three legs limped along
like a pitchfork, its tines tuned
to the hiss of escaped air
from pierced plastic balls.
Back and forth its head swung,
ripping apart a cloud
or a man's shirt.
...

None of the customs officers
can read the receipts new chemists
wave at the border.
Passports gullwing on the counter
as guards ringbill signatures
in stiff-lip service to regs
and rebar. Checkpoints
are the flagships of chalk lines
and compromised eggs.
Nucleotides full of acid rain
slick capital letters
asleep in their holsters
and mess up the paragraph
as a small arms insurgent
of epidermal composition.
A complete sentence is capable
of producing a range of plastic gloves
based on repeated
prepositions between
foreign national, conspicuous consumption,
and pre-emptive refugee.
Cities built on shock
waves of concentric booms
have eastern blocks indistinguishable
from each other,
so that a man who has been drinking
can make his way into any house
and find his children
reading hand sanitizers into the
endocrine glands of dropped calls.
Homonyms hunt in hand creams
looking for out-of-season
mammories in textiled memories
that have driven paper-coated milk cartons
from grocery store shelves.
Unelected surgeries suspend silhouettes
for target practice.
It's pointless to protect
yourself from ricochet.
...

Lunch boxes and lipstick
are our mothers.
We live in formative melodies
composed by the organs
it takes to be awakened
to emollients and parabens.
As great as the meaning of fertilizer
to our victory over the animals,
so great is also its meaning
for a motif of flight risk.
We watch the elevator
fight the escalator
as a rite of passage in the arbitrary
arboretum of the shopping mall.
Food courts organize appetites
for deforestations weeping with shelf lives.
The cost of building a bridge
to the physical world
is vinyl siding
and butcher paper inclined to a life
of unidentifiable juice.
Archetypes fatten
until the fleshy parts are autopilots
reuniting red-eyes with runways
and kept-up appearances.
It'll always be easier to culture mediums
than to think autonomous
products of the unconscious.
The wind informs the wing
and the coffee mug the hand.
Goodbye and thank you for having me.
...

Rumour has it the out-of-towners drove straight up through the heart of Dixie, then north to the future, to the Grand Canyon in its natural state. The golden constitution claims to be the first to celebrate and discover sunshine. All of this makes a Pacific wonderland of aloha, peached to the famous potatoes in their amber waves of grain and big sky dairyland. Given the state of corn, the unbridled spirit is a sportsman's paradise of 10,000 lakes lost in flight over wheat, where iodine is the empire of native America. It's been said in the land of Lincoln that you've got a friend in beef. The flute player sounds good to me in vacationland while I drive carefully through Great Lakes splendour buoyed by hospitality that means show-me-the silver statutes already glistening in enchanted gardens of democratic keystones. The greatest snow on earth is a wild and wonderful lone star stating in full colour, before the ocean, the green mountains, and the evergreens, that the great face of the birthplace of aviation lives free or dies, while cars mate methodically in lots according to mudflapped theories illustrated with unrinsed plates.
...

Group A Streptococcus
We are in the throat now.
Necks

are the hardest animal
parts to scale.

We are in the throat,
disingenuous

with the night-time sleeping
arrangements for ulcers.

We are in the throat
now as the caterpillar

and butterfly parent
completely partitioned worlds.

We prick light
on a throat

culture
of entitlement, remarkable

for its moth-eaten,
tonsillar birthright.

Hospitals are being infected
by their inhabitants'

throats.
We are in the throat

trying
to make a difference

to our sporadic communities.
Insurrection

is metabolism practiced
with spit.

We are in the throat now
sharing the same spoon.
...

The line-up is good
for us.
It privatizes patience,
demarcates the vector
of progress,
organizes the rest into
Canadians,
a photographer will
capture your place
as you tributary
gently downhill in a
plastic blue rain
slicker,
understanding that
appreciation requires
a parade,
that Niagara Falls is
the molecular
concourse
of one lake changing
into another,
and one culture eating
another's
failed burlesque. It
looks like
your shirt has shifted
and here
is the line like this.
...

Hello from inside
the albatross
with a windproof lighter
and Japanese police tape.
Hello from staghorn
coral beds
waving at the beaked whale's
mistake,
all six square metres
of fertilizer bags.
Hello from can-opened
delta gators,
taxidermied
with twenty-five grocery sacks
and a Halloween Hulk mask.
Hello from the zipped-up
leatherback
who shat bits of rope for a month.
Hello from bacteria
making their germinal way
to the poles in the pockets
of packing foam.
Hello from low-density
polyethylene dropstones
glacially tilled
by desiccated,
bowel-obstructed camels.
Hello from six-pack rings
and chokeholds,
from breast milk
and cord blood,
from microfibres
rinsed through yoga pants
and polyester fleece,
biomagnifying predators
strafing the treatment plants.
Hello from acrylics
in G.I. Joe.
Hello from washed up
fishnet thigh highs
and frog suits
and egg cups
and sperm.
Hello.
...