Elegy for Shay: RIP

 


Beautiful Girl and her machete men

(a campfire fable)


Beautiful Girl and I do ritual
she releases me on perfect young breasts
YAY US!!! we laugh together clapping hands
children again

there is a machete on my kitchen table
of course Beautiful Girl is the reason why
she is the woman in Wagamese's last novel
bush girl raised on the road by gramps and granny
too many logging camps have left
her perfect young body and soul damaged

at 34 Beautiful Girl is a New Age traveler
my  lost hippy chick from half a century ago
Beautiful Girl shows up unexpectedly on my birthdays
the only one now that I'm in my 70s
we do ritual together to celebrate
our mutual survivals

Beautiful Girl has a new boyfriend
I am 4 decades older
while her new guy is half  a decade younger
Beautiful Girl is almost guileless
so we know of each other

his PTSD is worse than mine was at his age
both living on the edge of society
me dodging the draft for the Vietnam War
living in the abandoned Eel Pie Hotel
him, hiding in the bush avoiding jail
for small town home invasions
machete always at hand in case of bears
or human invaders

Beautiful Girl notices the big knife on my table
he has the same one she innocently intones

Beautiful Girl has disappeared into the big city
looking for her lost children -
just hoping to be near them
leaving her machete men circling in this bush town
I hope we don't meet

memories of Key Biscayne

 Dear Editors Key Biscayne Magazine,

Tonight I was reminiscing about growing up on Key Biscayne and surfing websites about "The Key". I found your magazine - imagine, a whole mag dedicated to Key Biscayne! My first paid gig as a 12 year old wannabe writer was writing pieces for "The Key Biscayne Islander" for 2 cents a word circa 1960. Never did make much money as a journalist, but instead followed the foolhardy path of poetry and political exile.

As a true islomane I ended up living for 1 1/2 years in the largest hippie commune in Europe on Eel Pie Island in the middle of The Thames at Twickenham (also the home of Alexander Pope, "the wicked wasp  of Twickenham" and "The Who's" leader Pete Townshend.

Following is the first chapter of my memoir "Eel Pie Island Dharma",  originally self-published in 1990,  now available republished in a commercial edition by HIdden Brook Press in 2012.

If you're interested in more info on my writing and me, just Google away  ;  )-

peace and best wishes,

Chris (Faiers)

 

EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun -  © 1990 Chris Faiers


Chapter 1 - A Psychedelic Basho

At community college I began writing bad poetry around 1967.  When I realized that I was not cut out to be a science student, I immersed myself in arts courses and declared myself a poet.  Some poems submitted to the student magazine reminded the editor of haiku.  Having never heard of haiku, I didn't know what to make of the comment, but browsing through a literary magazine I found a classified ad offering copies of Haiku magazine from a Toronto address.

Haiku duly arrived, and I fell in love with the haiku form.  The similarity between haiku and the brief poems I had been attampting was obvious, and soon I was submitting haiku to the editor of Haiku, Dr Eric Amann.

After initial rejections.  I was thrilled when Eric Amann accepted several haiku for his magazine.  Encouraged, I began to devote myself to writing haiku.  Basho, the wandering haiku poet/priest of medieval Japan, was added to my role models.  The lonely life of a commuting college student in Florida presented a few of my early poems:

Christmas vacation
    tame ducks starving
        by the campus lake

Rain
    gray doves
        strung on a wire

Light breeze
    striding across campus         
        a thin professor

Almost from the beginning of my student days I had been fighting an appeals battle with the draft board.  Unfortunately I had registered in Georgia, just before our family moved back to Florida.  In retrospect, and after corresponding with former classmates many years later, I believe that I was an easy target for the Atlanta draft board.  Living out of the state, drafting me wouldn't stir up any local antagonisms, and the fact that I was also a resident alien (as a Canadian citizen by birth) probably didn't help my cause.  Ongoing struggles to keep my student status caused me to intensely question the Vietnam War, and I was living day-to-day with the life-and-death questions of duty to country versus participation in an unethical war.  This personal turmoil  provided a fertile ground for writing haiku poems.  Often I had insomnia, and I would think back over my life.  A family vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains provided:

Cavern pool
    tourists watching                  
        blind fish

Memories of a far off Halloween in Canada when I was five years old inspired:

Halloween
    a young boy
        in a skeleton suit              

Some days I would escape to the beach after class:

Lobster antennas
    waving from the twin caves  
        of a cement block

Blue sea
    bobbing red and white
        lobster trap buoy

Summer moonlight
    rotting on our roof
        a starfish

As I became more and more disillusioned with the Vietnam War, I began to hang around with the other radicals and longhairs on the campus.  Miami was, and is, a very reactionary city, and psychedelia, which had flowered in California in 1966, was just reaching Miami in 1968.  I was one of the first long hairs on campus, and the second guy on Key Biscayne to grow long hair.  The centre for the slowly evolving hippie community in Miami was Coconut Grove, an artistic haven located around the Dinner Key docks and the adjacent waterfront park:

Bay wind blowing
    Coconut Grove sailboats
        tinkling rigging

First green appearing
    buds on the new stake hedge
        and chameleons

The flower
    of this old tree
        a treehouse

At the peak of the Vietnam War, in June 1969, I received three draft notices in a week.  It was time to leave.  I flew from Miami to Nassau:

Mounted sailfish
    lining the walls
        of Nassau airport              

From Nassau I caught a flight to Luxembourg, and then I caught a train from Brussels to London:

Luxembourg
    black paint on pink brick      
        U.S.A.

I lived with my cousin and his wife on the outskirts of London for several months.  It wasn't a comfortable arrangement for any of us.  I continued writing my haiku, always carrying a notebook with me in a tote bag.  One of my first visits was to Piccadilly Circus, where the traffic island in the centre of the world's busiest intersection had become an international hippie rendezvous under the statue of Cupid.  The day I visited Piccadilly there was a bust for hash smoking.  A bobby was about to arrest me when he spied my London guide book, and he let me go:

Piccadilly Circus
    Cupid's fountain spraying     
          hippies

By now I had a large collections of haiku, many of them published in Haiku and numerous other small haiku journals which had sprung up in the United States.  I spent many days visiting Kew Gardens, and after one afternoon of meditation, I explored a side road on my way back to Kew Station.  I found a little printing company, and somehow got the courage to go in.

I'd like to publish a collection of my poems, I shyly told the balding, potbellied printer.  Despite my hippie appearance, my American accent tipped him that I might have money, and he got me to show him what I wanted.

When he saw my Luxembourg poem with the swastika, he wanted to know if I was a fascist.  I convinced him that I wasn't a fascist, only a poet, and he agreed to print my poetry in little booklets for £50 for 500 copies.

A week later I went back and picked up the box of my first chapbook, Cricket Formations.  I lugged the booklets down the hill to the post office in the hamlet of Kew, and spent the afternoon mailing them all over the world.



Eel Pie Dharma is protected by international copyright laws. Individuals may print off a copy of this work for personal use only to facilitate easier reading.

Eel Pie Dharma - contents   |   next chapter (2)
Eel Pie Island (words & pics)   |   history of haiku   |   Alan Watts - This Is It   |   draft resistance

 

dog bites summer

 Following is the email I sent to my friend Sylvia on June 4 documenting the attack by a neighbour's  dog at 3:30 that afternoon. I sent her the email late at night to document the attack if needed for future reference, and also to check how coherent I was mentally and emotionally after such a vicious assault.

It has been too stressful to post about the attack until now. Every time I discuss the event I relive it to some degree. I eventually found a nurse practitioner to attend to my injuries several weeks after the attack. Two months later the wounds are still open and I'm receiving regular treatment for them at the wounds out patient clinic at Peterborough Hospital. I reported the attack to the Marmora Animal Enforcement Officer.

 

June 4/23
sent 11:45 pm

Morley drove his new friend back to her retreat in Booster Park, and then drove me to Emerg in Cford. The dog attack was at 3:30 and we arrived at Campbellford Hospital  Emergency Triage at 3:30. The triage nurse was friendly and recorded my wounds and then bathed my shin wounds with saline solution. Both wounds were deep - the left leg so deep at first I thought the white stuff was bone instead of flesh. Both of the punctures were large and deep, with large skin folds. She said the gash behind my ear where I had fallen on the running board didn't look too serious, although when I had Morley look at he said it looked about 6 inches long and quite deep (can't remember if he said a 1/4 inch or more). He was sure it needed stitches.

I explained to the triage nurse it had been an unprovoked surprise attack by a large dog. I believe it's an otter terrier, perhaps a Belgian one, trained to hunt and kill otters (sort of the Canadian version of a coon dog like Hector) large and vicious with big jaws and teeth. Not a typical house pet for obvious reasons. The triage nurse said it was mandatory in dog bite cases for a report to be filed. But . . . I sat in the emerg waiting room from 4:30 to almost 9:30 without seeing a doctor. I was in mild shock and pain from being knocked over and hitting the back of my head on the metal running board of a truck while the dog savaged both my legs. I  had to call twice for the woman owner to help me. She finally came to see me, but I don't remember her helping me stand up. She asked if I  was OK, and as I was dripping (pouring) blood from at least three wounds, I said I wasn't and walked home. Neither she nor her husband came over to check on or assist me.

After sitting in the Emerg waiting room for almost five hours without being attended to, I unwound the leg bandages to inspect the wounds. As it looked like I might be stuck all night with coughing patients, many of who came long after I arrived and were then treated, I decided to leave without medical attention. I went to the admission desk outside the Emerg waiting room and the nurse told me Morley had just called to enquire about me. We had been told to expect a three hour waiting time, so Morley had gone home. It was a coincidence my patience ran out within minutes of Morley's call, so I had the nurse call Morley to pick me up and I left the hospital and waited in the cold night air for him to pick me up. I got home around 10:30.

Because a doctor never attended to me, I never had the chance to fill in the dog bite report. Morley thinks I should call the police, but you know how I feel about that  :  ) So unless I change my mind, or the neighbours develop a conscience, there's a very vicious dog lurking across the street now, waiting for the next  victim.  

I still plan to go for my afternoon Catscan appointment tomorrow. It'll be interesting to see how I feel in the morning.

I ended up including more details than initially planned to record an immediate documentation, although I'm not sure why.

A great irony is June 4th is the anniversary of Cford Emerg saving my life last year by diagnosing the tumour.

Venus retrograde July 22: essay by astrologer Michael Zizis

 

Venus retrograde July 22, 2023

Michael Zizis

·Follow

4 min read

By Mike Zizis

“You need to calm down.” — Taylor Swift

Venus begins her retrograde in the sign of {28 degrees Leo} on July 22, 2023, and stations direct on {12 degrees Leo} September 3, 2023. Venus retrogrades every 18 months, spending approximately 40 days in her descent.

For a change for now — let’s skip the drama. Venus RX is 100% natural in the rhythms of the living. The planets are not a plague or a curse sent to make us worse. Sometimes the tide is out and the fish are gone, for a while.

In myth, Persephone the beautiful 11-year-old girl was abducted and plunged into the underworld by the rapist God Pluto. The underworld that was a place of departed souls, death, jewels, precious metals, and moaning. Venus RX resembles this story. Venus direct favors being social, dinner parties, thank you cards, being attractive and attracted, and All the pretty and luxurious things. When she goes retrograde she folds into herself. Thus we can feel a little unloved and unappreciated during this transit.

…

FROM: https://foreverconscious.com/intuitive-astrology-venus-retrograde-july-september-2023

Venus Retrograde in Leo can also get us questioning the relationships in our lives and what we truly value. We may feel like certain relationships are no longer speaking to us on a heart level. We may also find our ideas around what love is changing and evolving.

The things we value may also be up for a change, and it’s possible we could find ourselves questioning what is truly important to us.

Venus Retrograde is also a deep time of heart healing, and can guide us to look over past relationship dynamics or issues around love to see what needs to be cleared.

 

There are times in the experiment of living for all of us — when one or two more straws breaks the camel’s back. You will find the easiest thing you will do is to possibly hurt those closest to you, sever the bonds of a relationship, buy stuff you don’t need, undergo the ugly truths of cosmetic surgery gone bad, get the tattoo in haste and regret it and the pain that comes with removing it, and that new or electric car that’s more trouble than it’s worth but it was pretty and the salesman was nice to you.

Let’s be clear; 100 percent of this is avoidable. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being cautious and humane. There’s nothing wrong with being prudent and careful. We can all do better. I can do better.

All the space not taken up by knowledge in our psyche will be taken up by ego. Life on this plane is one of often quick karmic returns. Saying you don’t care doesn’t change a thing except it encourages self-sabotage. After all, in the matter of self-care who wants to check the amount of gasoline in that tank, or the battery levels in their new electric car?

We are all cordially invited during this time to be thoughtful. Our collective war on adulthood does have consequences. Venus retrograde always favors, in all circumstances, a return to the five senses. Put on your favorite music, listen, sail a paper airplane across the room, listen again to the birds and the wind, let ice cream linger a little longer on your palate, actually look at the color of someone else’s eyes, breathe in the aroma of saffron or the lentils churning in the pot, actually lift up your feet and rotate your ankles, three or four times left, five or six times right, find someone who trusts you and put your hand gently in the middle of their back. You get the drill.

Many people bought Tesla vehicles a week and sometimes the day before the price dropped. Wait until Venus turns direct, and you may be pleasantly surprised. Got it?

 

AND here is THAT list:

Venus rules beauty, ideals, love, relationships, luxury, and hygiene. During Venus Retrograde:

DO

Cultivate your own company

Repair and mend anything

Listen MORE than talk

Go on silent retreats

Be fine about thoughtful apologies

Read a book

Quit an addiction

Notice the colour of a close relative’s eyes instead of obsessing on their toxic presence

Write inclusively

Speak calmly and slowly

Add a word a day to your vocabulary

Choose foods that enhance health

Allow friendships, etc. to end without misery,

Take old clothes to charities.

 

DON’T:

Get a tattoo

Have cosmetic surgery

Buy pretty and expensive things

Blame a partner for your own shortcomings

Experiment with non-traditional or polyamorous sex and sexual partners

Join the why-not club of self-sabotage

Join a cult

Use the word, ‘But’

Start a negative addiction.

Astrology

Love

Relationships

Psychology

Myths And Legends

--

 

When I Buy Your Book

 
I was also the artist
who ate no meat
unfortunately I had no stipend
or wealthy friends
fame is coming
too late
sesame seeds and honey
were no longer enough
I had to do hard labour to survive

The first bite of meat
gagged me
the artist in me
almost choked to death
when I rejoined mankind

 

Chris Faiers

 

This was the lead poem in the 1983 White Wall Review, the annual literary
publication of the former Ryerson College. I was about to donate this copy
to the local small library by the Marmora dam when I decided to
take a final peek at the contents and decided to share this memory.

Who's Causing Record Canadian Wildfires

 

Chris,
You have most likely witnessed destructive wildfires ravaging forests across Canada. You may have even breathed toxic fire smoke, and seen the sky turn grey or orange. It’s scary. And yet, it’s our reality.
 
As the planet is warming, fires are starting earlier, and burning longer. This year, Canada is set to break the record for the country’s worst-ever wildfire season. [1] And while politicians are telling us to close our windows and wear masks, they are not addressing the real cause of this crisis.
 
Fossil fuels are the main drivers of climate change.  Huge companies are knowingly inflaming climate disasters, and have been aggravating wildfires in North-America for decades. [2] They’re profiting off the destruction of lives, livelihoods, ecosystems, and ultimately the planet.
 
It is time we hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the damages they are causing.

You can raise your voice now  to demand Canada’s big polluters pay for the climate disasters they are fuelling.  

Sign the petition
 

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Add your voice now
 

As I’m writing this, authorities are forecasting a particularly severe fire summer, with the potential for wildfire smoke to affect us for weeks to come. [5] Indigenous and rural communities are on the frontlines of these wildfires and the smoke is disproportionately impacting populations with preexisting health conditions, outdoor workers, people experiencing homelessness, and marginalized communities. [6]

The situation may still get worse. With wildfires historically peaking in July and August, it’s time we take action for accountability and justice. [7]

[Name], we need to send a clear message: polluters need to be held accountable for fuelling climate change, aggravating extreme weather, and worsening wildfires, which are impacting people here and beyond.

Take action now
Thank you for joining the fight for climate justice and a just world for all.
 
Salomé Sané
Climate Campaigner, Greenpeace Canada
 

 

Sources:
 

[1] Canada wildfire season is now the worst on record
[2] The fossil fuels behind forest fires
[3] COP27 reaches breakthrough agreement on new “loss and damage” fund for vulnerable countries
[4] These oilsands companies raked in $35B last year. Now, they’re asking for public money to help fight climate change
[5] Canada’s wildfire season may impact the US all summer. Here’s why.
[6] Inequitable health impacts from wildfire smoke increased by danger season
[7] Canadian wildfire smoke reaches Europe as Canada reports its worst fire season on record
This email was sent to: zenriver@sympatico.ca. You are receiving this email because you have signed up for the Greenpeace Canada mailing list.

Vietnam War resister Michael Zizis interview on CBC Radio and TV

 
This is just a little heads-up to let you know i'll have my seven minutes of fame tomorrow Sunday on CBC radio's cross country check-up. The topic will be the immigrant experience in Canada. The website search is CBC Radio One - then go to cross country check up.

If you are interested here are the details;

"Our host Will be Ismaila Alfa at 4:20 pm ET this Sunday, July 2nd. The interview will last 5 - 7 minutes and be on both audio and video over Zoom. The audio will air on CBC Radio One and the video will be on CBC News Network (television) Facebook LIVE and on CBC Gem. We're asking callers 'When did Canada become your new home? How did that move change you?' We'll be speaking to you specifically about your own experience coming to Canada."

Cheers!

Michael

 

from the bio note in Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in the Vietnam War Era (Seraphim Editions, 2008)
edited by Allan Briesmaster and Michael Berzensky

Michael Zizis was born in Pittsburgh in 1949. He arrived in Canada in 1969. He came to Canada the day he was to report for boot camp. A friend commented he shouldn't get in the car because it was a jinx. The car hit a deer near Erie, Pennsylvania and was towed back. In Canada he taught creative writing at Humber College  and established INTRINSIC: a magazine of poetry  &  poetics. He published two books of poetry, each well received by many readers. But the more successful he was in the literary world, "the darker my spirit became." Zizis has worked for 30 years to  become a full time Astrologer, "a helping and healing profession." He had abandoned "his literary life after three decades of struggle." He is now writing again.