The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2001, Page 38

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 56 #3
Poetry
love is a ghost slowly solidifying
by mackenzie jenkyns
love is a ghost slowly solidifying, being born again, it lived before,
it was murdered, it waits in the shadows to be (re)discovered.. it
beckons with silence, with patience., will it be seen? (wondering
and hoping and wishing) love is a prayer behind my lips that i
recite when your legs beguile my wits., in praise of a violent god
that shakes me, makes me shiver as it finds resurrection in the
slow, soft connection of our achingly (dripping down your) bodies
entwined by love, lassoed by some outlaw love, held at gunpoint
by an impatient now love that wills to wish again.
love is a wish that swims through rivers, its eyes are fish and it
feels the violent kicks, the sinking nothing, cocktail dramas erupt
and don’t you know that love wants up? it wants to possess, to be
possessed, to be the only thing that could come between us.
the dream city
the dream city, drunken and bruised, loped over its shad-
ow. whenever the shadow tried to move the sun to accommodate
its maliciously symmetrical growth, the city would slide and crush
its malignant double, the sad truth
(and i’m very sick of the word “truth”)
is that having such a dim clone is sheer insanity, the city grows
mad with jealousy, why should this shadow thing gain such an
easy existence? not when the dream city has laboured so—the
architects of trust feel ripped off, shamed, the evil twin has com-
mitted a forgery.
the malaise is the primary reason why the citizenry of the
dream city opted to make their city mobile, to keep the evil twin of
shadowy reproduction at bay, to leave no xerox trace, to be self-
sufficient, to not have the moral plague of shadow to steal its
glory.
and so, in this dream city, there is no night, caught under
the sun all day, the citizens never sleep, always they must be