Jay MillAr
Jay MillAr is a poet, editor, publisher and bookseller. He is the author of The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000), Mycological Studies (2002), False Maps for Other Creatures (2005) and the collection the small blue (2007). Recently he published a collaborative 'novel' written with Stephen Cain titled Double Helix (2006). He lives in Toronto with his wife Hazel and their two kids Reid and Cole, where he currently runs BookThug, an independent literary publisher, and Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, which specializes in the books that no one wants to buy.
LACK LYRIC V
Of broken or scarred things:
some love or other is
what we should accomplish. I
guess. And if you happen
to fall may the air
be thin or the ground
be a softer thing than
you imagine. Take this conceptual
sparkplug and close it up
for the night. Tag theory:
You're it. Now you can
chase me down some fascinating
morose umbrage dialectic on toast
mistaken for a mixed green.
Do this or that to
pressure the common fire, take
what we can and move
on through the delicate sunlight's
woven quick kick to the
solar system's dreamy gonad. I
am all that and more,
and so request your love.
Shall it lead me wondering
by the hand to the
assumptions we call home, or
upon an instance slip free
focus into a moment of
mitosis for all? Face the
facts, darling. Anything you say
is guaranteed to come back
and bite you in the ass.
Good thing I'm going to
die. Good thing you're going
to die. Then everything can
get back to normal. This
is an advertisement for a
few friends. Please drop me
a line — I feel so
lonely depressed filter remnants linger
upon my own sense of
unbelievable circuitry: yes, the circular
gates are wide but wider
still are the gutless wonders
who inhabit this town. When
will I feel I belong
with them? Or they to
me? Probably when my wicked
have been lined up and
shot by my gloomy happiness
fascists. But I suppose when
it's cooked it'll look a
little different. If life is
as existential as all that
why must I put up
with such tedious bullshit all
the time? Everywhere I turn
humans are plastic egocentric fuckers
like me — our demands are
petty, small, and extraordinarily pointless —
dry cough of the six
year old in the next
room goes on and on —
he won't drink a glass
of water to ease my
discomfort. O still thy fingers
O chalkboard of normalcy! Imagine —
there is something wrong with
poetry. I am drinking. I
am drinking. I am drinking
black coffee with withered flowers
and I tell my withered
flowers there is something wrong
with poetry. And they wither
away. So I tell my
withered flowers I have nothing
to say. If the gates
of heaven are simply closed
because they are considered cliché
the weight of my sadness
is more immense than the
efforts some conscious being made
to string words together in
a machine. So shut up
already. Shut up and fuck
me — I need something that
has a little how you
say pizzazz in it. Pretty
soon it'll be years later —
I'll be remembered as the
guy who stuck it to
the man — I'll live in
a pit on the edge of
town where it's quiet and dark
and I can finally think.
I talk with what's left
of my god and eat
meals through a straw. Each
weekend I'm visited by my
feelings. During the week I
type poems on their behalf.
Excerpt from:
Lack Lyrics
by Jay MillAr
BookThug, 2007
Used by permission
click here to puchase from BookThug
Imagine the conflictual aesthetic that might arise out of being downsized from what essentially amounts to a dead-end job you don't find particularly meaningful. One day at work you begin to e-mail yourself nasty little messages that accumulate into poems containing all sorts of things you wish you could say, but can't. The only outlet you have is the poem, and you understand how unfortunate that is, how useless it is, but that's all you have. And then one day you go into work and it's your last day, and you shake your employer's hand good-bye, and you leave. And that's it. All you have left are your poems.
ISBN 1897388071; np [40 pages]; Stapled into printed wrappers. Cover drawing by C. Millar.
