Shiftlock Posts on Amazon

Shiftlock Posts

A poetry collection I have decided to get published (it was convenient) is now on Amazon. Entitled “Shiftlock Posts,” it is basically a collection of everything I had lying around, although it contains a short series related to the title.

Art Central, here in Calgary once had an exhibit/store focused on art relating to the Alphabet. In that store, I bought the Shiftlock key from a typewriter and attached it to a lapel-pin back, then I wore it for some time before it inevitably fell off. I had one of those obtuse thoughts about a Shiftlock key wandering through this new moment and thinking it’s object-thoughts about the time it had passed from it’s days as part of one of the original mechanical typewriters. That thought eventually resulted in three poems. An excerpt from one:

shiftlock declared the name of the one who spoke,
and what was to be spoken.

shiftlock shone in the eyes of disgruntled drunks,
and said, “you’re waitin’ on nothin’.
you can see the man’s eyes:
he’s callin’ you out.”

It includes the first poem which survived the loss of older ones in a journal stolen by the driver while I was making pizzas for the slice-display at Did’s Pizza on Granville in Vancouver (he took the whole backpack – they can be like that sometimes). Spoken-word was my introduction to the fun which lives in the poetry crowd. When I lived in Vancouver, I often performed an ironically derivative piece about the hubris of writing, ‘I’m a writer, I should know,’  is the only line worth repeating. When I returned to Calgary, ‘Jiz,’ which is included in Shiftlock Posts, brought me into the ramshackle spoken-word scene which migrated through Calgary venues near the turn of the millennium:

I never wanted to come off this haunted
I jiz wanted to sing

And I don’t know what that thing makes me sing
When it winks like it thinks it knows what’s best
And I don’t care
I jiz wanted to sing

And if this whole fucking universe continues
This cold bucking you and me in adversarial venues
Picking our pockets and pointing our rockets and sockets
And calling it poetry
Forget it.

Such was my musicianly angst at the time.

About three years ago, I got a punch on the nose. My ex-girlfriend was with me at the time, and I was way too famous on Facebook. It became a metaphor for so much of my life then, that the result was a piece called ‘Status Update’:

Status update: Here’s some links to work out the kinks, but if it
were my hands…but they stick like the last few minutes of hot
water before the polyester shirt, the courteous flirt, shoes and
shins, shirts and skins…

Status update: I’m on vacation, my occupation a fading
sensation of virtue, leaving raw and sweating smiles fading to
exhaustion and a cigarette, and a question about tomorrow, and
a snarl at the encroaching weakness and the love which fuels it.

Peace, love and loss, dreams, treachery, angels, bicycles, social-networking, apocalypse, even a piece about calgary, the death of the lightbulb…who ever thought that so much can be found in a book called Shiftlock Posts? But then, why would we doubt…