regret for error, forward facing

is fear

both burn

with ambition

and will not abandon me

where are you Paul, the May has struggled to its feet

it’s turned its face toward me

it’s about to speak

YOU CAN’T GO BACK

The glass factory doesn’t control the batch material fed

though its dog door, that it processes according to its design

just as our own apparatus admits raw phenomena, constituents

rough and refined, for consistency some of the broken old stuff, and water

because everything is. Along a sequence of chutes, conveyors, scales,

it proceeds with decibels of the world’s nerves jangling.

On Medicine Hat’s industrial verge, Dominion Glass released at intervals

balloons of black smoke with fire inside, like ideas

off the top of its head, that like ideas were more impressive

after dark. Never did it not answer the question posed by its existence.

Those nitrogen and sulphur oxides erupting like personality

into the environment heralded the birth of something useful.

Indecision had no business there. Unlike uncertainty, and the so-called

acts of God haunting even the glass factory’s most utilitarian

products; unlike second thought’s intuitive logic,

which has undoubtedly saved the ass of more than one glass factory

as was the case for United Glass of Edinburgh when Archie Young

crawled through its bowel with a rope around his waist.

When I learned, as a child, the Medicine Hat factory operated

around the clock, lest molten glass harden in its veins, in a heart

whose capacity for heat was limited only by its physical structure —

I feared for it. Hesitation could mean the vital machinery

would be made worthless. As the nuns said of us, good for nothing.

Rough men cried in ’67 when United Glass received its closure notice

despite the apparent health of its enterprise, no one could understand it.

Rumours of a clerical mistake that spared a factory in England

at United’s expense trickled down from management, but error

had long since crystallized in the system, and it was too late.

STINGING NETTLE APPRECIATION

Would that you had only seen what was not catnip, was not mint!

Sui generis, you crashed its congregation, and now will attend

to your inattention, will heed this understory plant

who knows where its strength lies —

in histamine, serotonin, acetylcholine delivered

by the single cells of its stinging hairs. The absence of doubt in its mind

is felt by you as the burning numbness of an encounter with naturalism

that advice makes worse.

Soaked or cooked, it soothes the pain it causes. You could just do the work.

A nutritional as well as metaphorical powerhouse,

it kept the northern hermits alive another day

to flog themselves with it.

Above and belowground parts differ in pharmacological properties.

Verify your ailment before you approach. Should the previously indicated

be contraindicated, all the world’s vitamins A and C,

all the protein and iron in the world won’t help you.