A Letter from Hammertown to Robert Dunsmuir

Screw you
Scrooge McDuck,
Born near Kilmarnock,
You built Craigdarroch
but preferred a Hammock...

...how else


given the militarization of one's home space
but to reply in kind &

tactically, to return
smug valuation with superiority

& punch for punch,
till over each great crime is grown

a grove of alder
till over each great crime

grows a shade-spreading lime
that on a brown bench curled

I can sleep beneath until
two years after 2012 when it'll have been

a century since the bunch of us
last addressed our masters thus

in tones of such insolent rue
that their empire bled black & blue &

was forced to re-colonize
in forms a voortrekker

would recognize:
towns until then

bereft of a copper's tread
now patrolled by one of meathead

Bowser's "specials"
dredged up & barged over from Vancouver

pointed Maxim Guns to & fro
(to derision & innuendo)

but when you're in that corner trapped,
squared by someone else's map & no one

downhill to pass it along to anymore
& beyond that only Pasta, Saskatcha.

or Chimera, Alaska
that string of smoking islands

where Vico's giants
have dug condos into the sandstone

or a street in Honolulu
named for a nurse

from where Dick the mines inspector
& Farquhar his deep-pocketed admiral

return richer via Surrey's
crosswords & curries, their ship-in-a-bottle

aesthetic still operative
among the locals today

subject to arbitrary poking,
driving hummingbirds into the house

of your head, driving out
religion & solidarity

picnics on Shell Beach
on the islands off Shell Beach.