There have been wounds—
not the kind that fade beneath the skin,
but the kind that settle deep,
unseen, unspoken,
bruises on the soul.

I have traced the edges of our history,
held it in my hands,
weighed it against the weight of my own worth.
And I can no longer be the one who bends
while you remain unshaken.

There are doors I have closed,
not in anger,
but in quiet self-preservation.
There are voices I have silenced,
not in cruelty,
but in the need for peace.

You have written your version of us,
where I am the one who changed,
where I became the problem.
But I know the truth—
that I am simply choosing myself
over the pain of being unseen.

So I will let go.
Not with bitterness,
but with finality.
Not with rage,
but with the sadness of knowing
that what we once held
has turned to dust in my hands.

Goodbye to the laughter,
the late-night confessions,
the promises we thought were unbreakable.
Goodbye to the friendship
that could not survive the weight of its own unspoken wounds.

Goodbye, not because I wanted to,
but because I had to.
Because love without respect is a hollow thing,
and I can no longer make a home in the emptiness.

I came upon the sentence
as one comes upon a mirror
unexpectedly—

I should be further by now.

Further toward what?

Who placed the mile markers
along this road?
Who decided where a life
should stand by seventy,
or what should already have been
left behind?

Perhaps the young man believed
that by this age
the books would all be written,
the invitations sen…

Read more

When you write your next poem,
can I be in there—
a shadow in the margin,
a breath between the lines,
a hush before the final rhyme?

When you tell your next story,
can I be a character—
not the hero, not the villain,
but the one who walks beside,
steady as the tide?

In your next movie,
can I have the leading role—
not on the screen,
but in the warmth that flickers
when the lights go low?

When you're talking
around the campfire
with your grandchildren,
will you tell them a tale
where my laughter
lingers in the smoke,
where my name feels like
an old song remembered?

I want to be near you,
even when I am gone.

When a familiar melody plays,
may your heart tilt
toward the memory of us.
Can I give you something—
a stone, a letter,
a worn photograph—
that speaks
without words,
that says, I’m still here?

Is there a scent
that will always
bring me back to you—
jasmine,
cedar,
or the ocean before a storm?

Thirty years from today,
when you tuck your children into bed,
may I hum in your ear
that lullaby we once knew.

And maybe—
a hundred years from now—
their children will do the same,
rocking gently
to the echo
of a name
you once whispered.

But most of all,
let me be in your story—
the one you never stop telling,
the one where love
outlives the ending.

It was not the knot of marriage,

nor the legal severing of a life;

it was older than vows,

older than signatures,

older than the names we gave our sorrow.

It was the rope around the spirit,

the quiet tether at the ankle,

the cord tied softly at first

until we forgot it was there,

until we mistook its pull

for the shape of our own walking.

Shame had a ribbon.

Hurt had a ribbon.

Unwantedness had a ribbon, too,

threaded through the ribs,

tightened by hands

that may not even remember

what they did.

And there were other bindings—

the fear of being seen,

the fear of being too late,

the fear that the gift inside us

had spoiled in the dark

because no one had called it by name.

But then came the beautiful ones,

the gentle knife-bearers,

the ones who did not rush us,

but sat beside the knots

and said,

“This one is not you.

This one was placed upon you.

This one can be loosened.”

Some brought laughter.

Some brought truth.

Some brought only their steady presence,

which was enough

to make the rope remember

it was only rope.

And strand by strand,

the old life slackened.

The cords fell from the wrists.

The tether dropped from the foot.

The cage door opened

not with thunder,

but with a small, astonishing click.

Then came the first step.

Then another.

Then the body remembered

what the soul had always known:

that it was made for fields,

for wind,

for running without permission.

Like a horse long tied to a post,

like a bird kept from the sky,

like a wild thing told for years

to be grateful for its chain,

we lifted our heads

and felt the world widen.

Oh, the ecstasy of it—

not merely escape,

but arrival;

not merely leaving the cage,

but discovering

we had wings,

we had legs,

we had a voice

that did not tremble

when it said our name.

To be free

is not to become someone else.

It is to return,

unbound,

to the self that waited

beneath the knots.

The full self.

The true self.

The one who was never lost,

only tied.

And now the ribbons fall behind us,

shame, hurt, fear, and silence,

lying useless in the dust.

Ahead, the open field.

Ahead, the widening sky.

Ahead, the beautiful terror

of choosing where to go.

Run, run, RUN!

There are always so many mysteries in life,
and often they are hidden
inside the things we are told
are plain.

The doctrines of life,
the settled sayings,
the rules that sit upright in their chairs
as though they were born before time,
are not to be questioned.

And if you ask why,
if your voice rises
even slightly above obedience,
you feel the stare
of everyone in the room.

There is a hidden objectivity,
or so they say,
a cold and polished certainty
kept behind glass,
where no one is allowed
to touch it.

There are lost answers
to questions never queried,
doors never opened,
rooms never entered,
because someone long ago
declared the hallway ended there.

They give us black and white
and call it truth,
as though no grey could ever gather
between the lines,
as though no colour could bleed through
the paper of their verdict.

Judicially, the words are set.
They are measured, stamped,
pronounced valid,
and laid upon the table
like law.

But if you dare
to lift the corner of the curtain,
even with trembling fingers,
you begin to see
the gears and the steam.

You hear the pulleys turning,
the hidden levers pulled,
the old machinery coughing
behind the thunderous voice.

And there he stands—
the little giant of a man,
pretending to be omnipotent,
throwing shadows large enough
to frighten a nation.

His words are sharp,
non-defiable,
cut and polished
to look like truth.

But now you have seen him.

You have seen the sweat
on his ordinary brow,
the fear in his command,
the weakness underneath
his sacred noise.

And once the curtain has been lifted,
even slightly,
you cannot unsee
the man.

You cannot unknow
the machinery.

You cannot return
to worshipping the voice
as though it were truth itself.

They ask me what I feel
now that my first book
has finally found its way
into the hands of others.

“You must be proud,” they say,
answering the question
before I have the chance.

But pride is not the word.

These pages were written
by a younger man,
fifty years ago,
under a different sky,
with different dreams,
different worries,
different possibilities.

Different,
and yet somehow
the same.

Read more

Now I Know Fully Why
There Is No Book of Poetry by Stephen Fry

He spoke of boys who seldom write,
as though the blush might make them die;
now I know fully why.

For poetry begins in fright,
in secret rooms, beneath the eye;
there is no book of poetry by Stephen Fry.

Embarrassment, that old dim light,
can make the boldest tongue turn shy;
now I know fully why.

He taught the feet, the stress, the bite,
the measured breath, the formal tie;
there is no book of poetry by Stephen Fry.

He laughed at those who say, “Too late,”
or, “You have missed the passing bus.”
He called such thinking hooey, fate
need not be young to speak through us.

For Hardy waited near his sixties’ gate
before his poems learned to fly;
now I know fully why.

Then came free verse, vers libre, wide
as any road beneath the sky,
where anything may pass as art,
and rules are told to step aside.

Yet freedom has its hidden chain;
the open field can terrify.
Without the wall, without the lane,
where does the frightened singer try?

Perhaps he knew too much of song,
each clever rhyme, each formal cry;
perhaps the page was never wrong,
but far too honest to deny.

For poems are not merely wit,
nor polished things to please the eye;
they ask the private heart to sit
uncovered underneath the sky.

And I, who came to print so late,
with old words lifted into light,
can understand that tender weight,
the shyness folded into sight.

So let him teach the line and beat,
the rhyme, the form, the how and why;
and let the silence be complete
where his own gathered poems lie.

Not because he could not sing,
nor lacked the wing with which to fly;
but knowing all that poems bring,
now I know fully why
there is no book of poetry by Stephen Fry.

I sat with my granddaughter today
as she began a new work of art,
a stuffed bunny posed before her
on a sheet of waiting paper.

I set before her a kingdom of colours,
crayons and markers in every shade,
reds and blues,
greens and golds,
a whole box of possibilities.

Yet she reached for the HB pencil.

Not for an outline alone,
but for the shadows as well.
Soft greys emerged from her hand,
and the bunny took shape
in black and white.

It puzzled the elder in me.

For when we are young,
we often see the world in outlines,
certain and uncomplicated,
drawn in firm strokes
of right and wrong.

But age has taught me otherwise.

The years have filled in the colours.
They have shown me
that life is rarely black and white,
but a spectrum of hues,
each experience adding another shade
to the page.

Perhaps that is why
so many adults sit colouring these days,
carefully filling the spaces
that youth leaves bare.

I remember when our television
showed the world only in greys.
Then one day the colours arrived.

My father, wanting to do something special
for his sons,
brought home one of the first colour televisions
on our street.

On Saturday mornings
the neighbour children gathered in our living room,
wide-eyed before that glowing screen,
marvelling at a world
suddenly painted in reds and yellows and blues.

And I think now,
watching my granddaughter shade her bunny,
that life unfolds much the same way.

We begin with pencil sketches,
seeing only the outlines.

Then the years pass,
and little by little,
the colours come in.

What do you do
when you are completely gutted,

when you have given your work
every breath you possess,
every late-night hour,
every ache in the spine and shoulder,

when your fingers strike the keyboard
so long and so hard
that if the machine were human
it would beg you to stop,
to spare it the pounding
of one more desperate line.

I sat for hours
at the book expo table,

watching crowds drift past
like weather that never breaks.

A few paused politely.
A few offered smiles.
A very few looked at the poetry
as though they still remembered something
they had once loved.

And I wondered:

What happened to the people
who once believed a poem
could open a hidden door,

could send the mind traveling
beyond the walls of the ordinary world?

There was a time
when people leaned toward the bard
wanting illumination,

wanting someone
to gather sorrow and beauty
into a language they could carry home.

People once loved rhyme
because the heart could feel it coming,

that anticipated word
waiting at the edge of the next line
like the return of a familiar friend.

Now the great hunger seems elsewhere.

The tables that flourish
are filled with kingdoms,
wizards and elves,
dark romances,
beautiful assassins,
ancient magic stitched into worlds
with different histories than our own.

And perhaps
that tells us something important.

Perhaps we have become so exhausted
by the weight of the present world
that escape itself has become sacred.

Perhaps people no longer seek mirrors.
Perhaps they seek portals.

And yet—

even we poets
have never written only reality.

We take the ordinary world
and tilt it slightly toward wonder.

We gather the plain dust of living
and cover it with colour,

with metaphor,
with moonlight,
with impossible music.

Perhaps the fantasy writer
and the poet
are not standing so far apart after all.

Both are trying to rescue the human spirit
from the blunt machinery of the age.

Both are saying:

There is more than this.
There must be more than this.

And still,
despite the quiet tables,
despite the passing crowds,

I return to the keyboard again,

because somewhere
someone still waits
for the right words

to open the hidden door.

There is a key
and I did not know I was carrying it.

For years
I thought the door was the problem,
or worse,
that I was.

Words would gather behind my teeth,
polite at first,
then restless,
then gone.

In a room of conversation
I could feel them scatter,
like startled birds
lifting all at once
and leaving the sky empty.

I have known this since childhood.
The pause.
The searching.
The moment when a simple word
refuses to come forward
and stands somewhere behind me,
watching.

But give me a page—
just a page—
and something changes.

I begin to read aloud
and the voice arrives
as if it had always been waiting nearby.

Sentences walk in order.
Each word knows its place.
There is no hesitation,
no bargaining with syllables,
no reaching into the dark.

It is not effort.
It is not bravery.
It is something closer to alignment.

As if the path is already cleared
and I am simply following
footsteps laid down for me.

And then,
after a while,
something remarkable happens.

The door stays open.

I finish reading
but the voice remains—
not perfectly,
not permanently,
but present.

Closer.

Accessible.

As though reading
has turned on a light
in a room I could not enter before.

I have wondered
what this means.

Is it memory?
Rhythm?
A borrowing of another’s certainty?

Or is it this:

that my voice has never been lost,
only waiting
for a way in
that does not require it
to build the road
as it walks it.

So now I begin differently.

Before I speak,
I read.

Before I reach,
I follow.

And in that quiet preparation
something loosens,
something aligns,
something remembers
how to move forward.

There is a key.

It was never given to me.
It was discovered.

And it turns
not with force
but with permission.

Ever wonder what your cat is thinking,
behind that stare—so still, unblinking?
As if there’s wisdom, deep and vast…
or just a thought about breakfast past.

And then the meow—persistent, clear,
a summons ringing in your ear.
You rush to serve, with dutiful grace…
it’s just their backside in your face.

I was impressed—no, truly awed—
by th…

Read more

There is a stubborn little patch

in the middle of my back

that has declared independence.

I have tried diplomacy.

Negotiations.

Advanced shoulder maneuvers

that would impress a yoga instructor

and possibly alarm a chiropractor.

I can reach my face,

my feet,

even that one toe

that cramps just to spite me.

But this place,

this smug, unreachable republic,

sits just beyond jurisdiction.

I approach from above,

I circle from below,

I contort like a man

trying to retrieve a dropped coin

under a couch in polite company.

Nothing.

It waits.

Then, without warning,

it itches.

Not a polite itch,

not a suggestion,

but a full declaration of emergency

issued from beneath the skin.

Suddenly I am negotiating with furniture,

rubbing myself against doorframes

like a slightly dignified bear

who has lost all sense of dignity.

And still…

just out of reach.

I begin to suspect

this is not a design flaw

but a social strategy.

A quiet, biological whisper:

You are going to need someone for this.

So here I am,

a grown man,

perfectly capable in most areas of life,

brought to humility

by two square inches of skin.

Will you please scratch my back?

I waited most of my life
to say my own name.

Years folded themselves
like letters never sent,
sealed by silence
and the careful life
of a man
who did not speak
his heart aloud.

Then you arrived—
young as spring.

I remember thinking
how strange the world is
that youth could walk
into the autumn of a life
and make it blossom.

Five years
is not long in history.

But for me
it was a whole season
of truth.

I was already past sixty
when love finally
knocked on my door.

We walked through days
as if time
had suddenly become generous.

Your laughter
filled rooms
I had lived in for decades
without music.

You held my hand in public
once—

such a simple thing.

But to a man
who had hidden most of his life
it felt like stepping
into sunlight.

I sometimes think
first loves that come late
are the deepest ones.

A heart that has waited
a lifetime
does not hesitate
when it finally recognizes
its home.

And now
the years have moved on.

You will kiss other lips,
live other lives,
walk roads
I will never see.

That is the way
of the world.

But somewhere
in the quiet country of memory
there is a small house of light
where we are still walking together
in that impossible spring.

And if three thousand years pass,
if every photograph fades,
if even my name
is forgotten by the wind—

there will remain
one simple truth:

My heart knew you
the moment you appeared.

I loved you once.

And I will never
forget you

.

At Port Dalhousie
the lake pretends to be calm.

Boats rock gently in their slips,
ropes sigh against the docks,
and the pier stretches outward
like a long thought
trying to remember
why it began.

Two poets sit near the marina
where gulls patrol the sky
like critics.

One says,
“Poetry should be quiet—
like the lake on a windless morning.”

The other laughs
and skips a stone across the water.

Look.

Every word
must land somewhere.

The stone touches the surface
once—
twice—
five bright rings
spreading outward
into the afternoon.

A child points.
A fisherman pauses.
Even the gulls turn their heads.

“That,” the poet says,
“is the whole idea.”

You write the line,
release it,

and if the lake is listening
the poet makes
a great splash.

The Poet Makes a Splash

At Port Dalhousie
the lake looks calm enough
to believe in silence.

Boats drift in their slips,
masts tapping lightly together,
the marina breathing
in the slow language of water.

A poet walks the pier
holding a single line.

It does not look like much—
no louder than a small stone
resting in the palm.

But poems, like stones,
are meant to be released.

Out over the water
the line is thrown.

It lands quietly
almost politely—

yet the lake cannot help itself.

A circle widens.
Then another.

The docks notice.
The gulls turn once in the air.
Someone farther down the pier
looks up from their thoughts.

By evening
the water is calm again.

But somewhere beyond the harbor
those widening rings
are still moving.

That is how it happens.

A poet writes a line
and the world, slowly,

makes room
for the splash

.

My granddaughter stands on a chair
reaching for the table,
declaring with fierce certainty,
“I do it myself.”

Small fingers wrestle with a spoon,
milk sloshes over the rim of a cup,
peas scatter like green marbles
across the floor.

No one mourns the mess.
Freedom has just begun.

Years later
I sat across from my father
watching his hands pause
between the plate and the fork.

The journey from plate to mouth
had grown unexpectedly long.

So I brought him
a dignity cup
with two handles
and a plate with a rising edge
to gather the food
where the fork could find it.

He turned the cup in his hands
like a small invention
and smiled.

“Well,” he said softly,
“that makes things easier.”

And it did.

I did not feed him.
He still lifted each bite himself.

A toddler reaches forward
toward independence.

A father holds gently
to the last small pieces of it.

The toddler laughs
at the spilling milk.

The father smiles too,
though he knows
what the toddler cannot yet see:

that freedom
arrives like morning,

and slowly, quietly,
slips away
with the evening light.

The Silver Maple

Standing beneath it
I look up through the branches.

The school is gone now.
The playground too.

Where there was children’s laughter in Paris Ontario.

A small house stands
where the classrooms once were.

The people who live here
do not know a school once stood in this place.

But the maple remembers.

It rises year by year,
its limbs spreading wide
above the roof that replaced the past.

I think of the boy
who planted it.

That same boy
had begun a small book of poems.

He believed he was starting something then—
a beginning.

He did not yet know
how many chapters life would write
before he returned
to the first page.

The boy who planted the tree
never left.

He learned new chapters,
but he stayed.

And now I stand again
beneath the branches
of the tree we planted.

The book has opened once more
in these later pages of life,

where the ending
leans back toward the beginning

and the first chapter
finally begins to make sense.

Fodder From My Father

My father spoke in sideways truths.
Not lies—
just phrases that landed crooked
in the ears of boys.

We’d answer him with that shared look:
one eyebrow lifting,
heads tipped like birds
trying to hear the weather in a wire.

He carried old sayings in his pockets,
loose change from his parents,
and theirs before them.
Coins worn smooth by mouths.

“Never speak ill of the dead,” he’d say—
and we believed him,
as if death were a clean eraser,
as if some lives did not leave
mud on the page.

Walking beside him on the sidewalk,
we tiptoed over cracks,
afraid of breaking our mother’s back—
as though it were not already bent
by baskets of wet denim,
the wringer’s grip,
four boys and one man’s worth of dirt
lifted into clean.

On Saturdays he went to market,
came home with vegetables
and riddles.
“Female bacon,” he’d announce,
and we stared at the plate,
trying to imagine the difference.

It took me years to learn
he meant peameal—
how the ear of a child
mishears the world,
and builds a small mythology from it.

So many of his words were meant
to keep us fed,
or fenced in,
or laughing in the wrong direction
long enough to grow safer.

Like a farmer scattering feed,
he threw language at our wildness—
some of it nourishment,
some of it noise,
all of it shaping the way
we learned to listen.

Now I gather those old phrases
from the fields of memory,
thank him for the grain,
for the chaff,
for the beautiful misunderstanding
that still feeds my work.

Why hand a masterwork

to someone who needs toilet paper?

Why unroll a painting

for a wipe-and-flush goodbye?

I’ve offered whole galaxies of thought,

constellations I carried in my chest,

only to hear the click-click of a machine gun

mounted on the grin of a WWI ace,

and before my words finished landing,

I was already smoke.

Already fire.

Already falling out of the sky.

The Bible said it plain

before microphones were invented:

don’t throw pearls to pigs.

They don’t polish them.

They swallow them with slop.

They chew beauty into noise.

This isn’t about worthiness.

This isn’t about who deserves light.

This is about eyesight.

This is about appetite.

Some mouths are built for drive-through truth,

two bites, no chewing,

sauce dripping down the timeline,

next! next! next!

Some rooms are built for slow food.

Sit-down listening.

Menus written in patience.

Tables that hold silence

between courses.

This world is trained for scrolling,

trained to brush past cathedrals of thought

like they’re speed bumps.

No reverence.

No pause.

No shoes removed at the door of beauty.

You build Queen Anne inside your chest,

turrets of meaning,

arched windows of wonder,

and they answer you with Brutalist concrete.

Cold.

Functional.

No ornament for the soul.

So yes,

learn restraint.

Not silence.

Discernment.

Not shrinking.

Aiming.

Before you serve your heart on fine china,

check the table.

Before you pour your best wine,

check the cup.

Before you break open what is precious,

slow down,

feel the room,

feel the hunger,

feel whether the listener came to dine

or just to chew and go.

Your pearls are not arrogance.

Your care is not cruelty.

Your choosing is not judgment

,

it’s stewardship.

Feed those who taste.

Offer water to those who thirst.

And let the engines starve

on their own noise.

What a scandal
to be the leftover love.
The secret passion.
The whispered name.

The marriage lived on paper.
Rings were only décor.
The years, a trophy.
The home, a shelf.

My heart is a tomb
of broken promises.
I wear the hand-me-downs—
cloth borrowed from another bed.

I am to lower my eyes,
swallow my voice.
Never answer an echo.
Only wait for the rebound.

Your promises taste sweet.
Your touch tightens my chest.
Your heart keeps a melody
that follows me into sleep.

Like most leftovers,
I am kept cold.
Never the main dish.
Always a paper plate.

So what do I reach for now—
the same familiar platter?

No.

I leave the table.
I do not scrape myself away.
I set down what was never mine
to keep,

and carry my hunger
somewhere
it might finally be fed

.

I am a late bloomer.
There were many times I held back,
wanting to shout the colour
my world should be—
but I let others choose the palette.

Life was lived
for the preservation of others.
I learned to tend their feelings,
their needs.
It was not a sacrifice.
I was no martyr.
It was simply
what was expected.

I reached a place
where I no longer knew who I was,
where my own preferences
had gone unnamed.
It took fifty years
to allow this flower
to unfurl.
Had I done it sooner,
I might have startled
too many sensitivities.

It is like walking through a garden
and seeing a bud,
its head tilted toward the sky—
and pulling back the green
to force the red bloom.
Petal after petal
peeled open too soon,
until the flower,
finally revealed,
is misshapen,
never reaching
the fullness of its design.

Once altered,
it cannot become
what it was meant to be.
So we must not grieve
the time it took us to arrive.
Sometimes,
time is the preparation.

The past is not gone—
it has simply been waiting.
The colours we chose in youth
are still vibrant in age.
The flavours we once loved
have grown richer.
We unfurl.
We bloom.
And the soul
remembers its name.

Awakening now,
claiming oneself.
Emerging.
Stepping forward.
The spotlight shifts,
and your face
is finally lit.

Late bloomer—
no less radiant.
The flowers are vivid still.
The dreams remain
bright and possible.
Step into the light.
Be
the authentic you

.