by Jeff Latosik
Copyright © 2018 by Jeff Latosik
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Latosik, Jeff, author
Dreampad / Jeff Latosik.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7710-7311-3 (softcover).—ISBN 978-0-7710-7312-0 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8623.A788D74 2018 C811′.6 C2017-904778-7
C2017-904779-5
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada, a Penguin Random House Company
Library of Congress Control Number is available upon request
ISBN 9780771073113
Ebook ISBN 9780771073120
Cover design: Rachel Cooper
Text design: Sean Tai and Rachel Cooper
Cover art: © Shutterstock, texture © Dreamstime.com
McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.2
a
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Disclaimer
1.
Dreampad
Permanent Indefinite
Holes
There Is a Delivery Specialist
The Internet
Komatsu Floodlight
Cats
Trans-Neptunian
Red Giant
The Home Checklist
Sky Pool
A Mile from the Bay of Biscay on Tour with Oneohtrix Point Never
The Eastern Massasaugas
2.
Troubleshoot
Centaur
Clearance Sales Are Adulthood
Swimmer
Spacetime
Silverado
The 3D Tour
The Fortune You Seek Is in Another Cookie
Life in the PhotoStream
And Missing Stephanie Stewart
The Bright Note
School
And I Looked Up into the Blue and Green of Nobody’s Fields
Letter to Kyle Bobby Dunn
3.
I’ve Been Baron Munchausen
Growth
Cubewano
The Natural
Pop Rocks
Clear Giant
The Replay Review
Hidden Pockets in Parkas
The Good
The Connectome
The Surface Fuss
On Finding a Discarded Blind Cord Weight on the Street
The Adjunct
Osgood-Schlatter
Akasha
Pack
4.
Phone Booth Man
I Don’t Want to Kill It, I Just Want It to Live
On the General Being of Lostness
Dream of Dee
Dryzmala’s Wagon
Dear Listener
Platypus
Guitarist
The Joeys at Kangaroo Creek Farm
Only an Avenue
Oath of an Unaffiliated Boy Scout
The Great Illusion
Two Cells Made All of This
The Fly
Dreampad
Notes on the Poems
Acknowledgements
This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:
and not as in peaches. Things go so fast sometimes they can't be caught.
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1.
DREAMPAD
It’s this calendar I’ve dislodged and am playing
like a simple music grid controller.
It’s the past, plus all I’ve sleep-talked
and confused with what took place
and it starts out with a pulse of light click-tracking
across time and space. I gather up some days
and make a living beat to layer over. Then the grid
populates as memory, which has reverb
and you best believe it has attack. Myself, age eight,
coming back from a vacation that my mother
and stepfather had themselves dreamed up
heading in the same direction for the last time
and I’ve got a salamander hidden in my hand.
I want to make a commune for the part-pond things
but when I look again it’s just a smear of red
like I’ve wrenched down a nebula.
My stepfather looking out onto the highway
must have felt the same thing when he understood
my mother would be leaving—some general lack
over which the world comes tumbling again.
Hence, a trick I like to do. I make all that isn’t
come to in a half-life of being dreamed and as I do the days
patch through in a way that’s hard to damp and fade.
Strange, though, my remixing’s not my stepfather getting clean,
or my mother finally getting to live beside the Atlantic.
I feel it in my hand sometimes, like a rubber band
has tightened in my wrist, but I play better than I once did
the older that I do. I missed something that made my life.
PERMANENT INDEFINITE
Mike, who lives in Paris now, tells me his work
has given him this designation,
PI for short. As if to bring up
some of the fine print that underwrites
even a synonym for always.
Our table in Nonna’s Coffee doesn’t have to be a table.
A salt shaker can show me where his workplace is
in relation to his apartment packet by Tuileries
and where the shooters came and tripped
the wire that let down a terrible nothing like a balloon drop.
It can also be how I tell him I’m still close by
to that St. George campus belfry where we did our masters,
where the art gallery’s going now
and where I walk my part-lab part-something—
we’re not sure because the kit broke in the mail.
I want to show him where they’re putting
the boutique cubes set like aquariums on single
storeys so a passerby’s seeing fills
the empty half of someone’s life
so I put a finger down and say, Here.
It’s always more common than I think—
intending one thing but with some possibles
floating there, scattered disc of all the essences
a meaning isn’t but still needs.
I know some years will begin to rearrange us
as if they’re explaining
something difficult to each other.
Mike’s a father now, too. No getting around
the knack or need for clarity to drop
down on its chopping block,
so I put a finger down again and say, No, here.
HOLES
A playground fight some years ago
years that haven’t passed so much as they’ve stepped aside
and I came out the other end
with a hole in my trapezius.
Not like someone put it there, more like a space
was pushed aside and it appeared.
I learned to hide it. Walked with a hunch.
Whoever saw it did this little dance
of walking backwards and then defecting.
The doctor wouldn’t remove it
because you can’t subtract what isn’t the case.
Fill it in and it remains.
Someone with a heap of Tag Heuer on his wrist
sits in his office and reaches deep
into the Cayman Islands. Meanwhile,
on the coastlines of Miami, Porsches sit
flooded to their dashboards. A hole is what your mind
falls into when a thing’s hard to explain.
Sometimes I think of that rube Wile E.
falling through a bridge because the Road Runner
set one of those portable holes down on it.
How he threw it there exactly, none of us Wile E.s know.
I think all I’ve learned is that a hole’s
not really there. That’s how it grows.
THERE IS A DELIVERY SPECIALIST
We were standing on the outside of what was coming.
Trouble is, so was what was coming.
Conveniences gushed in until they were unintelligible.
As if we’d tried to avoid drowning by flailing
into deeper water. It used to be you could go a generation
and still know where your music was kept.
Now, my music seems to spy on me
and hide every time I turn around.
Car makers wanted to win each of us
by leaving nobody’s wants unmet.
TV makers desired a papaya you could pick
right from the screen. Pen makers wanted
a pen you could twist so many times
you couldn’t then find your way out of it.
One twist and this kind of heaven opens.
Some call it heaven. I call it a waiting room made of spares.
Still, the salesman’s sometimes right:
it’s nice to have your lights dim for thirty seconds
to give you a head start walking in the dark.
As if you needed it. Please, when it all goes out,
as in the trees, the sky, the house,
please
THE INTERNET
I first heard about it in a Burger King.
Its aims seemed as elusive as the stock ticker
or why some people stayed in marriages.
The future was flying cars, phone screens, and MiniDiscs.
I bussed tables with a cloth that mucked the laminate sheen
and, just that spring, an annular eclipse ringed the sky
like we were suddenly looking down a cabled conduit.
Then, as if an indigenous strain moving beyond a range map,
people started getting it, birdsong calling up from basements,
the pink noise, hiss, and crackle of a connection made.
And somebody already had some pictures: the body,
pixelated, bare, with the feeling you were overseeing it,
moving along the conveyer belt of banner ads.
Weeks disappeared as if dragged into a bin.
Somewhere, fibres tethered us to a warehouse or a factory,
but for then the feed seemed as ephemeral as a thought.
The search bar a mail slot you could lift
just enough to see inside somebody else’s space.
It wasn’t a place, but you could go there.
At night, blinds down, but windows open, flags of light
were quietly raised from main floors up into our rooms.
KOMATSU FLOODLIGHT
This floodlight is capable of illuminating large areas, even in the dark.
—Product label
Even in complete pitch-dark, otherwise known as me attempting
“Helpless”
on ukulele made worse if others are there to hear it.
Even in regular darkness, which I confusingly think of as medium light.
Even in performance-enhancing dark, otherwise known as a Black
Russian.
Even in that early evening dark we all must, eventually, sit down in.
Even in starlit dark, which makes, as Maxwell said, any person you’re
standing near somebody you love.
Even the dark of the matter I picture passing through me so weakly it
could be my own half-educated imagining.
Even in city dark when what’s passing now or whenever for God
turns a tilt wand and everything five feet above you, up to a distance
called the world, is illuminated.
Even the metaphorical dark I was in when I defended the group Ice
Cream for Christians.
Even the dark when the deeper and more difficult day remains; after
hours go slack and faces and paper stop raining in offices.
Even in the daydark! As that Riesling you held up in mid-afternoon in
Chautauqua, New York, and said, Look, a reverse lamp.
Even in that sort of sociopathic, literal dark. Tiny reverse lamps for all.
CATS
That night I received a text from someone
I didn’t know looking for Melinda and then—
I’d had the phone for four years at that point—
asking about her left breast’s nipple
and whether or not it was tender still.
Tender. Such a word for a missive lobbed,
buzzer-beater faithful, into the black,
the way I imagine sending money out to a bookie
or a hothouse banking on a novel to cover their losses
and then my phone lit up with Gil’s final message,
Are you still here? My thumb went still above
an autofill of No; a position can pixelate, too.
I imagined a doctor on the other end
in front of a chart or perhaps a concerned
but lascivious friend who’d gone off the grid
when, through a window, I felt the first true breeze of the season.
I noticed, then, no whiff of the abattoir
remembered it had closed down in September
all because of porcine diarrhea and condo developers,
two things that wouldn’t have otherwise
explained each other, but in this case they did.
So, a brick-quiet building was what it was now
other than the cats, unknown numbers living in colonies
and eating the cat food some other unknown left.
And would they relocate or be freeze-dried in bins
or did they make do just finding food in a puddle?
You’d walk by and see cats shift in the branches
as if lynchpins in the leaves had come loose,
and some calico energy would quicken the day.
I’d gotten stuck here and couldn’t uncramp,
so I closed the window and returned to the room
which was darker now, but it was that kind of darkness
that helps you see colour and, briefly, detail.
I laid down and listened as I often did, to the vents
as they exhaled endlessly. My phone was jettisoned
but still my thumb hovered over air, I think it was, air.
TRANS-NEPTUNIAN
Have you ever heard somebody read
their own poem on a podcast?
&n
bsp; Every now and then it seems
they switch a word or phrase
to another that’s not better,
but equal in all the ways you’d want to look.
So “If” becomes “I also like”
and “To deal with sensational loss”
becomes “When I get very high or low”
and so on—*
These subtle shifts of emphasis
almost seem to say the written one’s
got somewhere that it has to be
and might not stay. But the read one
collapses back against centripetal force
and the poem goes on as a kind of quiet storm
bringing something into view:
greens you didn’t think you knew
and blues that are no longer blue
as soon as you can point to them.
This remainder then: that it’s as if
all this unravelling was as natural as saying, too.
And stopping there on a word, the read poem,
almost—and I should say enjoyably—
seems to skipper off to its own end.
Or maybe it just swerves when it was said,
