Thursday, June 25, 2009

The Ghosts And You

by Helm Filipowitsch

Helm lives in central Ontario, Canada. He's retired today, but may not be tomorrow. He writes poetry and is deeply involved in photography, as well as music. Most days, his world shifts between the laptop keyboard and the Yamaha keyboard; that is when he is not traveling the world with his wife of almost forty years.

Words are condensation on the window
between the maple and my chair -

breakfast dishes form a road from the table
to the sink, moraines on the counter top.

I miss the walks we took for cigarettes,
to the corner store, for fries from the drive-in -

I miss the baby steps and the way September
shed heat, worms in rain, stories with coffee.

I regret first snowfall, leaves clicking polka
in the hedge, the way dreams migrated

south and never returned. I rue twenty thousand
rhymes grown in wine petri dishes,

knocked senseless until they became poems,
anecdotes, lies, the sounds of an accordion

played long past midnight - in immigrant time,
for breakfast, in the milk of gunshots,

dressed in the flesh of uniforms, reciting
the differences between, with falling bomb sentences.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009