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.
