A week from tonight I'm heading to Ottawa, Canada's capital, where my father once worked. I haven't been to Ottawa since the 1990s, but I love that city and I'm happy to return, happy to return to Ontario and Canada, where I once lived. I tell my children I am part Canadian because I love that country so much.

This will be the opening of this new season of Max Middle's famous A B Series of readings, and I'm fortunate to be the opener and the sole performer that even. It's an honor I'll try to live up to.

At the reading, I plan to do a few things I haven't done before. I always like change. I don't like to always be the same. I try to make poetry physical and felt (and mental and thought). So I'll have projections of poems, visually and orally.

I am adrift in the world, not an object confined to a single space, but a percipient being in flux through these layers of space we call the Earth.

What I imagine is that I am on a mission for beauty, and that beauty changes all the time. Some beauty I find at my feet or surrounding me, and I capture it so it does not disappear, so I remember how beautiful it was, so others can see its beauty.

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A few months ago now, a Slovakian magazine entitled Kloaka published an interview with me (translated into Slovak) along with a selection of about 50 of my visual poems. It was quite a production to see online. But when I received a paper copy of the magazine, it was an even bigger experience.

Maybe it is that paper is still more real to me, that (no matter how digital I am, no matter how wireless wired I am) the physical is still the most pleasurable.
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As I walk, I write in my head without ever writing down, without ever capturing what words I have there. And as I walk, I am always seeing, even if not always looking, and I take pictures as I do.

I try to capture what I see, but I sometimes capture something else.

When I try to trap blue with a lens, I sometimes capture something bluer, and sometimes I capture the bluest thing I can imagine, even though I have not even seen it before I have ensnared it.

If I fall asleep early in the evening, overtaken by a dragging tiredness, I may awake at the hour I usually retire to bed and begin to conduct the chores I had saved for the evening I had just lost to a forgotten dreaming.

If I find a faint shadow of hands on a wall and the memory of a rabbit in white chalk, I may recall that all dreaming is a kind of living where you cannot die no matter how many times you fall from the building.

I wait too long, I always wait too long, but at least I'm consistent.

For the next four days, Ugly Duckling Presse, one of the most active and imaginative poetry presses around, will be collecting donations for its followup to Emergency Index 2011. Go here and donate.

As I write this, the press is a bit shy of making it half-way to its goal of $10,000.

Last Saturday, not yesterday but eight days ago, I was working in the yard and in the alley that is but an extension of the backyard, and I was worrying about climate change.

"Worrying" is the wrong word, but I can think of nothing better. What I felt was something like the worst kind of dread, the dread you feel when you know something is happening. The dread of knowing what one's life actually was, the dread of not just oncoming, but imminent, death.
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A comma is a pause.

Even a coma is a pause, a pause from a life, if not totally from living. Sometimes we move because we have in our bodies the practice of moving. One foot after the other, and neither ever allowed to hit the same spot on the earth. Forward is a movement, but not progress.

I am pausing here, taking as my companion the comma, linking my arm with its and sitting down to think. But not to say.

For the past week, for weeks, I have been doing.
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