BRONZE FROG

Category: Musings

  • Some mornings, a coffee barista reminds you of a lost love

    Some mornings, a coffee barista reminds you of a lost love

    I was, if I recall
    Then, mechanistically unromantic
    A clockwork creature
    Desperately hungry

    The world was so new,

    And though I had never been
    The city was bigger than I remembered,
    The gravity of 23+9,
    Much as I explored it
    Explored me

    I haven’t been to Pakistan
    But I recall its subtle poetry in you
    High points on cheeks
    Of drunken escapades,
    Knowing glances
    Exchanged over office sandwiches
    The world’s most interesting playground
    Can appear
    In the most curious of places

    Toronto is not yours
    Nor is it mine,
    We were indeed
    Two extraterrestrials
    Serendipitous on a foreign planet
    Learning metropolitan camouflage
    Sharing winks
    At its various absurdities…

    Playing aloof,
    I replied
    “Even permanent marker washes off”
    When you said 
    I had left a mark on you,

    But how difficult it is to predict
    How a sapling
    Will grow and age
    In your grey matter,
    A new passenger
    Hitched along for the ride

    Someone old 
    You can pick out
    In unsuspecting faces.

  • A Heap Sort,

    A Heap Sort,

    A still life that refuses to stay still.

    Sugar and brine touch tongues that shouldn’t meet. Ink stains the water while something bright flashes once and is gone. What’s gathered from the ground is braided, then fed back to fire, which remembers everything. Cloth keeps the gesture of a hand; concrete keeps the gesture of winter. A heart opens and leaks without apology.

    A wing holds light the way a screen holds itself—looped, recursive, and with slight delay. Letters appear in a font that pretends neutrality while smuggling intent; a ± that never decides whether it’s healing or harm. The image watches the image watching the image.

    Caffeine hums like a low prayer to velocity. Fish gleam like punctuation. Dust settles on paper, insisting on time.

    It’s an altar, maybe. Or a debug log. Or a spell assembled from whatever was closest when attention struck.

  • An Ode to the Snowfeeder

    An Ode to the Snowfeeder

    The streets in front of my house are underwater
    Approximating deepest winters’ depth;
    What feels like a cruelly cold expanse
    Below sea level pressures
    Entropy slows still, among other things
    And in the darkness,
    Strange creatures move in

    I know you’re not interested in me
    But I wonder
    Were we face to face,
    What might you tell me?
    What have you seen?

    Your evolution’s intention speaks poignantly
    Primordial oils power your nervous system,
    Crustaceans born immortal to lumber with
    luminous, stalked, bio-mechanical eyes,
    Urban filter-feeders fully foreordained 

    I’m only a small fish,
    But as we pass each other in the night
    In your enduring preoccupation,
    My structures sing out to you.

  • Hope? No. Is it fear?

    Hope? No. Is it fear?

    The winter water forms a dulcet froth as it churns bubbles and ice and air.

    The winter sun is setting. Or rising. Skims of golden hour sunlight make their way through the water as the waves crest, whose murky character returns as they are pulled back into the depths. The lapping waves are dense with chunks of ice, tossing them about like buoyant pebbles, smoothing them to seaglass. 

    Larger waves toss the tumulted sea ice onto the frozen banks, where you can stand to watch the waves with relative safety; the largest piece could squarely cover the palm of your hand. Brushing against their melting point, the airy-icy cobblestones, covering every surface, glisten diffusely. The stones glide easily among and across each other, scattering at the slightest disturbance. Frictionless, cold, and slowly forgetting the churn of Lake Michigan they just endured as they bake out in the frigid air.

    The frozen bank is craggy, jutting in and out, ceaselessly bracing against the churn of the water, losing and gaining parts of itself with every wind-swept watery advance. As waves crash, clouds of glittering mist are drawn up from the depths, catching every ray from the drooping sun. The air hangs cold and heavy, bearing down indifferently on the activity of the water, a highly-contested battle between stillness and noise.

    In front of you, cresting a small mound of icy bank: standing tall, a frozen, defiant pair of skinny-fit denim blue jeans.