Need Machine

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by Andrew Faulkner


  it comes back with an inside fastball.

  By you I mean a four-door family sedan,

  crack in the sunroof where the light

  comes in. If you let something go and it

  loves you, it comes back at its shiny best.

  I’m the worst kind of fair-weather

  love letter. Hubcap of need,

  we’re all out of polish

  and spit’s not gonna work.

  FAILURE

  Dot-com speculation. Violin lessons.

  Behind your old grade school, the spotty field

  you first drank in.

  No, you’re son

  has a failure to thrive. A train jumps its tracks

  onto another, shittier set of tracks.

  The spiny, thin-ribbed ego of success

  takes a comparison to a condom personally.

  Even though you meant it as a compliment.

  And even though it’s true.

  CHERRY COLA

  Dark can, glitzy stripper

  on a victory lap, blunt smell of synthetics.

  Heartbreak, heartbreak, someone

  must have paid for this.

  Nerves light like a spool of fishing thread.

  Rodeo Clown, Drive-by Aspirations,

  please wear name tags; I can never tell

  which one has the runny nose

  and which the funereal sense of humour.

  Hold me tighter, Cherry

  Cola. Stop letting go.

  A BOY AT PINBALL

  A boy plays pinball.

  A boy grows flippers and a launch pad

  and sets into still life:

  A Flower Vase in Bar Lighting

  or A Fruit Basket Sets a New High Score.

  After school a boy leans his backpack against a wall,

  gains open-water balance, glides out

  to the shoal of himself and plays pinball.

  From the machine emerges the art of recycling,

  the vanishing magic of exchange:

  quarters into the arcing free-float

  of a silver ball in transit, his synapses’

  snaky response. Translates his body

  into points, points into proof of cause

  and effect. If he were a game show

  he would be the wheel in motion,

  would call it For Amusement Only.

  Would demonstrate with concision

  what extends from the fingertips,

  what, when tilted, complies.

  A boy is a collision

  careening through a light-up display

  that halos his plate-glass reflection,

  buoyant amid a garland of elastic bumpers.

  His quarters a coin-box splash in the concluding

  pool of transaction: wood and metal

  and the lickity-split of buzzers,

  points of contact flickering

  in the slipstream of final score.

  FOUND: PRE-ALPHA VERSION OF A BETTER SELF

  For Andrew, depreciation offers

  a range of modest savings: montage, composite image,

  speak of a sausage in a frozen field.

  The 1990s suggested Andrew’s future

  career: a country in the Eastern Bloc.

  Of course, this was a little difficult.

  Still, he dreamed and by 2001

  he lifted the grey veil of place and exposed himself

  in exhibition as a life-sized replica of the Cold War.

  Known for its sensitive contexts,

  it embodied years of time, care and thought.

  Strictly speaking, no one was interested. The L.A. Times wrote:

  ‘Rough and sketchy, Faulkner is a perfectionist

  and very slow. His show, Pre-alpha version

  of a better self, is a different sort of challenge

  and its successes are few. The inability of even art students

  to appreciate his practice is telling.

  After twenty-five years the marks left are obvious,

  the copyright a black-and-white of intention.’

  PNEUMONIA

  Lungs a tenement, swollen, easy to move into.

  Hair-clogged, bathtub a standing pool.

  The ground floor is sublet by a fevered tenant

  who wallpapers with wet newspaper and wheatpaste.

  Water slips through a valve’s loosened fist. Drip.

  A building of wood rot and mice, back alleys

  cluttered with bone, shit, small bodies.

  Lungs: welfare’s small-change jar.

  Plastic, whispery, just for now.

  HALF-HITCH

  A harbour in spring. Nice weather time.

  Love takes to the air like a gull.

  Beneath a tarpaulin sky,

  cranes unload cargo like the hand of God

  managing the world’s chequing account.

  A coroner fingers a gut’s undigested bits.

  At the stump of the dock a tourist centre

  spills out another historical re-enactment –

  this time, with feeling.

  Fog squeezes between my chest’s anvil

  and the afternoon hammering down.

  Once lodged in a body a bullet can drift for years.

  You said you’d be here. Clinically speaking,

  at least one of us is breathless.

  RORSHACH

  What’s stopping us from getting

  what we want is unclear and frustratingly

  good at what it does. A complex ecosystem

  of trauma. The blotchy What

  in What’s wrong?

  or No, really, what’s wrong?

  When my quarter barricades

  a gumball machine,

  I’ll shake it for what’s owed.

  As an apparatus of joy, I do what I do.

  Midday slump, don’t you think

  it’s time you let go?

  I’m more habit than gumption.

  Once you realize change is infectious,

  you dive right in.

  On the hood of my car you swore

  you fell in love with metal.

  I’m dewy, damp with effort,

  lurking in the middle distance.

  Hold me is an interpretive response

  to a battery of stimuli.

  My thoughts are guilty as charged:

  Out There, context-free, wrangled in hazy

  half-truth’s attic light.

  HEAD

  A broken air pump

  breathed into. Shoes spit-shined,

  then scuffed. Hum and stitch,

  a retro Singer. A pop-song hook.

  Tracing paper. Practical

  hydraulics. A river robbed

  of its bed. The seventh-inning stretch.

  A fist of reason wiggled free

  like a Plinko chip.

  No, wait, that’s the heart.

  REMOTE

  What do you want me to say?

  Like a bent wire I let radio signals

  tie themselves about me.

  The hearts of larger animals

  signal intent like a high-wire act:

  what’s up there leaves us smitten

  and then leaves us. In commercials

  they always get it right the first time.

  X-rays confirm our first suspicion: there are things

  we should have done. At times I’m seized.

  Like a minor sitcom character, I appear at the edge

  of scenes. There are those who say love is a symptom

  of the middle class, leather pants a symptom

  of middle-class resentment. On the more remote

  planets our laundry loses its studio crispness.

  It’s not a matter of trying harder.

  Believe me. I’ve tried.

  THE MOON

  Clean, sharp, a knife stepping from the shower.

  A pock-faced snowglobe without the snow.

  Moon, stop peering through the su
nroof of my Volvo.

  When it humps, the moon insists you hump.

  Bump in the belly of an ex, bump of an object

  beneath your car. And when it cries out

  like a wounded raccoon, who will collect

  donations for its rehabilitation? You?

  After several costly surgeries, the moon is still hideous,

  but oh, the arc of its nightly touchdown pass.

  From the First World’s left ventricle I pump

  my fist furiously for each small victory

  while the moon circles back on itself:

  notch another one for The End of History.

  PASSENGER

  This place is compact as a small-town convenience store,

  cramped as a big city mayor’s heart, car with its

  clutch on the left and factory-leather cologne.

  It’s barely morning. A headline reads:

  Study shows space in our cities declining

  and several folks nod when a commuter train

  shudders and halts. Slack as a punctured tire

  we wait. It’s late in the morning.

  Across the Gardiner the sun walks from hood to hood.

  Here on the island of office politics, everyone’s basically

  pretty nice to your face. After lunch I tinker in Excel

  at the edges of The Great Office Poem.

  The afternoon’s light arrives like mail

  through a door’s small slot.

  To say we are equal to what we do

  is to lend a softer glow to the underground

  parking garage. And then, on the hour, cars stutter

  like a misplaced accent. We are always on our way home.

  According to the radio: from Avenue

  to the Don Valley. This little red wagon

  won’t pull itself. Sign as close as you can to the x

  or adjust your expectations. It’s deep into evening.

  In the hundred or so metres of existence

  a porchlight blinks off, then on.

  It gets later and then it stays that way.

  LIKE CANCER

  In response to a common theme, my moustache grows.

  Regarding irony, my moustache curls at its ends.

  I walk, then I walk some more. Thus my days are filled.

  It’s true what they say: if you’ve been around the block

  you know the block rather well. Billboards rise

  like stubble. After a while, the block resembles

  the middle distance in a high school art project.

  I shave and I shave. Thus my washbasin is filled.

  In response to my face, I weep and wonder.

  The lines of your face

  draw such pretty little pictures.

  Sharpen your crayons, there’s some shading to be done.

  With gears dense as headaches we chug along.

  Like cancer we’re full of ourselves and make our own fun.

  HANGOVER

  Outside is a wet cigarette. Last night is

  half ash, half scrambled porn.

  I put what where? There’s a dead rat

  in my mouth. Teeth fuzzy,

  fermented, near-victims of a flood

  hauled up sputtering and waterlogged.

  The morning crackles like the desert

  between stations on the AM dial.

  The stock market is one thing,

  an op-ed on abolishing the penny another.

  There’s a recession lurking somewhere.

  I’m out of Advil. I can’t think of what to give up first.

  AMEN

  What’s there can fit in a hand. Take, for example,

  the lines in a hand that years have called forth.

  You can’t be around nothing, thank God. On an ocean

  liner, people cling to one another. On an ocean liner,

  people turn away. At the heart of the matter

  a slow heart beats. I’m frothing at the bit.

  Dear computer, please live one more year.

  Minister of Loping Through One’s Twenties

  Like a Three-Legged Dog, I’d like to make a deposition:

  I’ve slept in the tall grass while someone mowed

  the lawn. Some days I wake up less, wake up missing,

  knotted or stripped to the wire. Tell me anything

  in your best foghorn voice and I’ll believe you.

  INCIDENTAL

  I was a stranger in a dream. From a high window,

  I looked down. A bass line with legs to its tits

  and tits to its chin took a long walk out of town.

  I was as lonely as the first Jew in America,

  as the last dollar in a wallet.

  Some nights I could drown in fun.

  This is about the economy adrift as a kid

  in his dad’s suit. It’s a wide-open continent

  and the Kool-Aid here’s the best.

  This is about what just happened.

  This is about what’s next.

  WALK HOME, EARLY MORNING

  The air, leaned on.

  An unfinished pillar,

  a suburban basement

  hungry for plumbing.

  Sleep a lazy hook

  winching you forward.

  Chain-link fences cut cookies

  from a doughy sky.

  The moon rattles along,

  a fat child with a stick

  and a blooming appetite.

  A radio with a bent antenna

  tracks light crossing state lines.

  A bottle, pissed in,

  is a movement toward

  clarity – like you, reclined

  against a brick wall,

  trying not to spill.

  And the day kicks it over,

  sunny and dumb. An AM station’s

  call sign circles the vandal

  like a squad car.

  Hello, caller, and welcome

  to the show.

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Some of these poems have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House/The Emergency Response Unit, 2010), The Fiddlehead, ­Ottawater, The Puritan, This Magazine, The Week Shall Inherit the Verse, Toronto Poetry Vendors, Wascana Review, and the Windsor Review, as well as the chapbooks Useful Knots and How to Tie Them (The Emergency Response Unit, 2008) and Mean Matt and Other Shitty People (Ferno House, 2012). Thanks to all who produced these publications.

  Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for their generous support.

  ‘That’s what she said’ is for Leigh Nash.

  ‘This time with feeling’ and ‘Big sighs’ owe a debt to Christian Hawkey’s poem ‘Up here in the rafters everything is clear’ (The Book of Funnels, Verse Press, 2004).

  ‘Found: The smell of gas’ is a cento of lines taken from a number of Canadian poets.

  ‘Notes on a theme’ is after a line by the band The Hold Steady.

  All the text in ‘Found: Pre-alpha version of a better self’ appeared in various forms on andrewfaulkner.com and the now-defunct andrewfaulkner.net and andrewfaulkner.co.uk.

  ‘Head’ is after a poem by Jeramy Dodds.

  High fives to everyone at Coach House for their endless big-hearted work. Big hugs to family for their support, especially Jean, Steve and Ben.

  Thanks to Spencer Gordon, Mat Laporte, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Jeff Latosik, Aaron Tucker and Nicholas Lea for comments and advice on earlier drafts of the manuscript. And thanks to Dionne Brand, Karen Solie and my classmates and faculty for thoughtful readings of my work throughout my time in the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

  Thanks to Kevin Connolly for early edits and encouragement. Thanks to Jeramy Dodds for his sharp and tireless eye, and unerring insight.

  Last but biggest thanks to Leigh, my first and best reader, for her love, large brain and unwavering attention to detail.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANDREW FAU
LKNER co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. His poems have been published in The Best Canadian ­Poetry in English 2011, and his chapbook Useful Knots and How To Tie Them was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

  The print version of this book was typeset in Aragon and Aragon Sans, from Canada Type.

  Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Edited by Jeramy Dodds

  Designed by Alana Wilcox

  Cover art by Masahiro Sato

  Coach House Books

  80 bpNichol Lane

  Toronto ON M5S 3J4

  Canada

  416 979 2217

  800 367 6360

  [email protected]

  www.chbooks.com

 

 

 


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