How does a poem begin
new weather expected, sixty per cent, at least two trends converging / morning sky is so full of wildfire ash and sickly-sweet particulate i can’t open the windows and i creep around like a fly trapped in a jar / i’ve become accustomed to hobnobbing with confused days wandering in and out of my room, unsure who they are, where they came from, or where they’re supposed to be / i want to write a poem, sound the utter strangeness of life in this particular timeline, but how to begin /how can i write a Poem when i’m just an anonymous character in a Chaucer tale, bumping along in a wagon over unmapped lands / my thoughts grow out of the delirium of daily life / a late-stage sun briefs me on all the merch i can purchase before i can brush my teeth / the foothills are criss-crossed in seismic profiles, layer upon layer of money laid bare, pristine died long before my time / though you may hear some ghostly hammers striking steel, the billions come from feeding eyeball crops to investors / downtown at the Stadium, the Brutalists play non-stop hockey, the game never ends, the players are under contract until they die /while i was in the kitchen unpacking groceries, a gang of tariffs burst through the door / a mad king continues bloviating through my coffee-maker even as ancient weather breaks out of the bottle, drunkenly rolling all the dice at once / of course the internet is awash in words, words that swell and call, twist like tiny fish in slurry, they hiss conspiracy theories, raise welts on my skin, enter my bloodstream / i need to resist, transmute the confused vernacular of my lifetime, create a place where i can live for a while / poems are a messy business with letters, words, stanzas, pauses, surges, retreats, tides flowing in from all directions / right now my words have no fixed identity but dwell in a realm of eternal possibility / it seems to me everyone is contending with boundary shifts, hallucinations and artifacts no one can name or place / see, this is what I’m up against, an uncanny multiform, ever-shifting reality / my road has vanished, a passing bus becomes a lilac bush, a dog becomes a clump of sagebrush and a couple walking together suddenly take root and sprout branches / leaving me in a world of illusory marshes, ships without hulls, ancient lakes sheltering cryptids / i row across the page, wayward storms flickering along the ley lines /still thousands of miles from the Cape of Good Hope / must continue, surely my words will eventually roll into the poem i know is living at the edge of the world, surrounded by dragons / or maybe they won’t
Lesley Battler’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including, most recently, Canadian Literature, Poetics for the More Than Human World, Energy Humanities, Poetry Daily and The Rough Poets. Her debut book of poetry, Endangered Hydrocarbons, was published by Book*hug (BookThug) in 2015. Her work can be found on the Internet Archive. She is currently living in Edmonton.
