Brian Brett, poet, fiction writer, critic, journalist, is the author of 11 books of poetry, fiction, and memoir including: The Colour of Bones In A Stream, Tanganyika, The Fungus Garden, Coyote, Uproar’s Your Only Music, and the prize-winning best seller, Trauma Farm. As part of the Salt Spring Collective, he has also completed a CD of his “Talking Songs” called Night Directions for the Lost, produced and arranged by Ramesh Meyers at Allowed Sound Studios, and released by Tongue & Groove Records. He lives with his family on his farm on Salt Spring Island.

What’s The Poem?

It’s the weirdo in his nightgown,
trimming the wick
of an old-fashioned beeswax candle
and lighting a joint with a blowtorch.
It’s the shy girl straightening her hair
on the ironing board, with an iron.
It’s the guy in the suit with a career plan.
It erupts everywhere.

It’s standing on the stage,
your feet slightly apart,
your weight centered on your solar plexus,
your chakra,
your little pot belly....
whatever in hell’s name you want to call it –
but it’s centered.
And the voice comes out of the gut and it’s a voice
of power,
rising,
rising,
rising.
Quiet power,
controlled
and uncontrolled power,
loud sometimes,
though not often.

Silence is much louder than a shout.

And sound came before the song.

The beat,
the terrible beat of bones
and hands
and drums
and rocks
and power –
the power
of rhythm.

Start in a cave,
solo in a skyscraper.
Grunt and flex and live and watch your lover die.

Crash the cliff
and kiss the demon.
Demean yourself, but not your friends.

Sing
sing
sing
sing
and then sing again,
until you’re ready to get it written.

Then you can form the first words,
give the codes weight and symbols and substance.
Rhyme everything and then forget rhyme.

When you come out of the cave
you will squeak a little bit,
maybe croak like a frog,
but you will find your voice,
standing on the stage,
legs apart,
centered,
the sound rolling out
of your mighty chest
full breasted or breastless – that doesn’t matter in the end –
only the voice like syrup and silence and birds greeting the morning

Sing like the butterfly’s wing,
the shark,
the shy entrepreneur,
the slutty big-toothed land developer,
the annoyed secretary,
the pompous professor.
Sing like the fencepost in a flood.
Sing like the virgin at the orgy.

Kill adverbs and adjectives,
and then revive them with a kiss.
Know a good noun when you see it
and the verb that needs no modifier.
And then ignore all advice
except the one that demands
THESE WORDS
IN THIS PLACE!

Now you are ready to write the singing codes
some call poems,
poems of desire
that will be meaningless to most of us
but grab the hearts of a few like an Aztec priest
in the magic of sacrifice.

It’s easy.
Just do everything.
And then do it again,
only better,