newfoundpoems

I like when I find a poem that I'd forgotten writing. Like the one that follows -- I wrote it for the "Heart of the Poet" filming at the Avenue Diner. I needed a good burger poem and thought the one Maureen requested I write was too obscure. So I wrote a new one.


BECAUSE ONE THING BUMPED INTO ANOTHER

I was just a young hamburger, a hamburger
wandering from bun to bun, I did not care,
reading Proust and Beckett and Eluard,
dreaming of a tiny apartment in Paris,

while the other burgers played football and
fought in the alleys with switchblades, spilling
their condiments in their reckless wake.
At night, I nestled beneath a bed

of sautéed onions and shivered,
an orphan of ground flesh whose
visceral nightmares made sleep a world
of terror. Someone once told me

of a thing called love, and also
a thing called lightning, and I
watched the skies for both,
peered longingly through the frail wisps

of cloud that drifted amidst
the airplanes. I was a young hamburger,
and Paris was just a page in a book
that was wrenched from my grasp

by a dark-suited man with a red necktie
who said that the world had changed.



I'm reading this weekend in Vancouver at the West Coast Poetry Festival, so I'll bring this one along, as I like reading poems I've rarely read before.

Over and out.