The Most Reverent "the Bish" Elizabeth "Emily" Bishop.

As I sit here, seemingly intellectually, with the daily edition of The Nova Scotia Times, I warn people not to read my poytree-- it's hard work.

I take the old coffee-maker from the stove
and spill it on my book like a careless child.
It's a mess and I ask grandmother,
she says to put it out the back of the house
to dry. The coffee drips like sweetened tears
in the full moon, as predicted in the almanac.

Most places I visit are full of nothing and I take solace from that. What childishness is it ... to see the mouldiest places, with the strongest possibilities for aquatic imagery, the other way around?

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.

"Look Lizzy, he sez to me, everyone you used to know is dead or in prison. And I've nothing but this black aul knife, the blade of which is almost worn away.

"Be careful with that match lighting up that cigarette," he warns me. I smoke on one side of the road, where the hedge is, because that's where it appears everyone smokes. On my last drag I watch the Lucky Strike logo smolder away to just Lucky in a semi-circle.

"So, I hear you're a lesbo now."

I cough out the now second-hand tobacco smoke (that seriously harms you and others around you) in surprise as the old man says this.

"Eh, so? so? so?" I say to him.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
I can see my glass of beer
behind the wooden two-by-four
in the corner of the barnyard floor.

My rhyme is in my poetry:
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry.
I use it to describe
that from which I cannot hide.
I also use it to isolate lines away from the others in quite a clever way.

I read the National Geographic and think of my Latin American girlfriend. Her tits are SO much nicer than the droopy ones in this publication, Eeeew. The yellow frame around the cover, the yellow frame around the cover... I scream. I awake sitting quietly in my room with Pascal banging his head against the wall looking for an exit. Quite a sight, you say? Always, always delightful.

The clever almanac falls from the wall and it splatters like an egg on fire (as I laugh uncontrollably in class).

"Time to plant tears," says Arfurr from beyond the grave in Westminster Abbey. I fished a fish in Florida but never forgot him. He hung a grunting weight but it was no concern of mine for obviously reasons. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper stuck with glass-smooth dung as if it were a transmutation of fire.

The themes are epi-shite but the rhyme is just right. But, I did warn them. It's hard work.