Tsunami (poem)

Tsunami

I have a picture of my son
taken on Christmas Eve
(cherished and very tattered now).
He is standing knee deep
in the surf

at

Phuket

Flush with joy and from
the beer he holds in mock toast
to the camera.
A small Canadian flag, on a white stick,
(why I still remember the fine details
I don’t know) waves toy-like
from his other hand
as the sun slowly sets over paradise.

***
Below mighty tectonic forces
flex their mantled muscles
as a massive crustal plate
drops 20 metres

displacing

A billion tons of seawater…

A little boy walks a sandy beach
idles,
he picks up an oddity.
Is it shell or beach glass?
Jet-lagged listless sunbathers
watch with mild curiosity
As the surf rapidly recedes below
low tide mark.

Missing persons,
frantic phone calls,
no answers,
too much
Silence.
A sick fear of not knowing.
Tears in a Father’s eyes

Then…

An e-mail

“Hey Dad caught a flight out to Laos…
I didn’t even read the rest.

mr

Religious Right on Fox

Religious Right on Fox

The Barbarian hordes lie without.
They build a wall to keep them out.
A righteous war with God on side,
the rising gap of rich and poor,
they sharpen spears and close their gates.
The Trojan Horse lies in wait.

Clothed in flag, a patriot soul
goes to cheer the New York side.
The Babel Towers topple over
they speak in tongues,
“All Hail the Chief.”
Who deflects the damage
and condemns gay marriage.

America the brave lives in hate,
burns the oil, it just can’t wait.
Religious right on Fox,
tells the world the holy truth,
“God Bless America with
Pictures at 11 in technocolour."

Why I Hate Rogers

Why I Hate Rogers

I really do not like large corporations. I especially do not like Rogers. Considering how many large corporations there are that really speaks volumes to my hatred level. I could have picked Wal-Mart, which I merely detest, for its abuse of its part time work force and union busting tactics. At one Quebec location Wal-Mart chose to close an entire store rather than allow a union to make inroads involving labour inequities, but I still picked Rogers.

Exxon qualifies for my contempt for the environmental mess it caused in the high Arctic, Enron for its greed and corruption, BRE-X for its blatant lies about non-existent gold reserves in Indonesia, IKEA because so much assembly is required, (I also hate their allen wrenches) Shell, Mobile, BP, ESSO, or any other multinational petroleum company for excessive profiteering over long weekends and enabling global warming, but I chose Rogers.

Rogers is a communications company with a near complete inability to effectively communicate with its customers. In fact I don’t even think Rogers likes most of its customers. Yesterday, it was about the middle of the month, about 2 o’clock, I was paying my Rogers through the convenience of my Bell land line. My itemized bill indicated that, for my bundle package, including my cell phones, high speed internet service and my basic cable package, I owed a grand total of $165.47. However, the customer service individual I talked to, who may or may not have been in Bangalore, India, informed me that my bill was 358.17. The pencil I was holding in my left hand snapped and flew across the room nearly putting out my wife’s eye. She doesn’t like Rogers either.

Biting my tongue, which drew blood, I asked as politely as possible why my bill showed one amount and yet I was now being told an amount that was double. “Well sir the difference is what you will owe on June 15th. Quickly I checked my calendar and noted that June 15th was an entire month away and I was therefore being billed for the month of communication services that I had not yet received or used. Quietly, and calmly I paid the lesser of the two amounts all the time thinking how much I hate Rogers.

My Rogers land line didn’t work and I had to have it disconnected because the technician had hooked it up next to my micro wave. Every time I zapped my coffee I simultaneously disconnected my wife as she talked long distance to her mother in Victoria. Now my mother-in-law does not like Rogers either.

In order to discontinue my Rogers land line service I had to return a modem to one of the convenient Rogers stores on the other side of the city. When I located such a store I was told that they couldn’t make the return because their system was down. They provide the service and their system was down, that did not instill a high level of confidence. I hate Rogers.

The next day I was able to return the modem only to receive a letter from Rogers a week later stating that I hadn’t returned the modem, implying that I had stolen it and perhaps sold it on e-bay. They further informed me that since I seemed to be of such vile and low moral character I owed them $340 for the stolen modem.

On my third trip to the Rogers store I showed one of the clerks my accusatory letter and explained that I had in fact returned their merchandise and would not be paying for the modem that they lost. A quick 35 minute search of their records (they were not computerized) showed that I had in fact returned the modem. The clerk smiled and reassured me by saying that’s okay this happens to about 1 in one hundred customers. Imagine a corporation with a form letter suggesting that their customers are petty thieves.


I hate Rogers because most of the messages I get on my Rogers answering service are from Rogers complaining about my bill, which at the time of their harassing message may not be due for another month. If Rogers was a person, then judging by the frequency of their messages to me it could appear to an outsider that I am having an affair with someone named Roger.

I hate Rogers because of the inane robotic voices they use on their answering menus. “Press 5 for tech assistance from India.” I usually lose track after the sixth or seventh option. I have always hoped, but never had the patience to reach the last numerical menu choice: sentient carbon based life form.

The plot thickens…

Since my diligent, intelligent daughter, Meghan, is also a university student and is working two jobs as a nanny and a waitress, as well as volunteering in a day care, her mother and I have agreed to, amoung many other things, support her by paying her Rogers wireless bill. It is much like the federal/provincial cost sharing programs. In this situation I play the part of Ottawa and Meghan is Newfoundland or maybe Ontario.

Last month her bill was about $150; her itemized account ran into 7 pages using a 5 point font. It indicated that over a thirty day billing period she had been on the phone, not counting texting, for a total of 24 hours. Quick math, twenty-four hours, (whether you use metric or not), is still one day. The Earth will rotate once completely on it axis from west to east and Meghan would not have hung up the phone.

Meghan’s talking prowess translates to one minute out of every thirty on her Blackberry. This may not sound like anything too staggering until you factor into the thirty minutes, time for such miscellaneous activities as sleeping, eating (can be done with a cell phone) studying (usually done with a cell phone), working, entertainment, work outs and uninterrupted free thought on any topic with face to face conversations with other like minded sentient carbon based life forms.

I don’t wish to sound punitive because I have seen Meghan without a cell phone in her hand. Once. At that time she had a very vacant look on her face, her hands were trembling and she was near tears. Talking on a cell phone is much like any other cult activity. I understand cults because a drive a Subaru. There is nothing wrong with Meghan that a month of intensive deprogramming can’t fix.

I can forgive Rogers their inability to communicate, their excessively long waits for tech support, their numerous random inefficiencies, the fact that they own the Blue Jays, and have ruined Maclean’s Magazine, their unethical billing practices and their constant harassing voice messages.

All I ask is that they give me my daughter back.

I hate Rogers.


Marty Rempel

From “Monkey Mind”

After Glow

To say that my dad was quirky would be an understatement. He was also a pyromaniac. To his credit and to my knowledge, he never burnt down any sheds, barns or public buildings.

My dad had the habit of collecting the family dry and flammable garbage in the basement. He stacked boxes full of our waste paper and cardboard, (all very flammable), along one entire wall. We all knew that if the house ever caught fire we were sitting on a tinder box and we were all doomed.

I think my dad, without knowing it, was ahead of his times. He was the forerunner of sorting garbage for recycling; only no one had heard of that concept yet, and we never actually recycled a thing. When we had a cereal box, newspapers wrappings, cardboard box, grocery bag (they were made from course brown paper) we were trained to simply throw them down the basement steps for later stacking against the wall.

The “wall” also became a great place for target practice with my BB gun until “someone put an eye out.” I attached targets to some of the paper filled boxes along the wall and use them for my marksmanship practice.

That practice turned out to be short lived when to my dismay I soon discovered that at such a short range BB’s have the ability to travel through the target, the box, all the paper in the box, hit the cement wall on the other side, then ricochet madly back in the shooters general direction. Now I would remember if I, or anyone else actually put out an eye, but I did get a BB between the eyes. I took that as an omen and used the gun outside on small woodland creatures.

The point of the exercise after all was not to shoot at the boxes, but to burn them. As a family unit we had to accumulate a critical mass of fibrous product for a pyrotechnical display at the end of the month, even better, sometimes at the end of several months. This had become a popular ritual for the kids in our neighbourhood and I was frequently asked by my friends, “Is it time yet?”

At the end of the month the Rempel kids their co-conspirators and random enablers eagerly joined together to make a giant pyre at the end of the driveway. I’m certain that any passing Hindu would take serious pause and deep reflection as to our intentions. We weren’t multicultural back then and wouldn’t have cared anyway. We wanted to burn stuff!

I think my dad was of the opinion and lived by the motto,” if you burn it, they will come” because we always had a crowd of exuberant kids and disgusted adults. These were the type of disgruntled adults who often appeared in early horror movies carrying pitch forks attempting to run the monster out of the village and ironically quite eager to burn down the castle in the process. It was a rough neighbourhood.

Our driveway and property, by the way, were not situated on some isolated country acreage. Our short drive led on to a very busy street and was on a bus route. None of this seemed to faze my father as we continued to heap the cardboard boxes immediately under the hydro lines that ran about 20 feet above the driveway.

Next to Christmas, as far as festive occasion goes, this was even better than Easter. It was more of a pagan ritual probably stemming from pre-Christian times. As kids we had also played a game in which we dressed up as “savages” from the equatorial rain forest, or more precisely we envisioned ourselves as some sort of Greco/Roman/Amazonian hybrid.

We made spears and shields from garbage can lids and took our sisters and other girls in the neighbourhood as hostages for sacrifice to the Gods of the orchards. We lived in the Niagara Fruit Belt and felt human sacrifice was a prerequisite to a good harvest. We were a more suburban version of the children of the corn. We always thought the fire ritual would be a perfect setting to sacrifice a young virgin, but to our collective disappointment my father was quite strict on this point.

However, I believe a few cats went missing during the burning, but I think this was just a vicious rumour started by some of the local missionaries. To my knowledge no animal or virgin, was ever harmed in the making or burning of our pyres.

For some unexplained reason, as a child, I never understood why my mother never joined in on the fire ritual. She chose to look out; quite nervously it seemed, from the living room window. With the reflection of the flames on the window my mom at times looked quite surreal. I could see her hands go to her face as the flames leaped and tickled the hydro wires above the driveway. I never really got the connection between those wires and the necessities of life, such as watching Saturday morning cartoons and Captain Kangaroo.

After doing some major yard work involving cutting down some willow trees and pruning some of our plum trees we had a veritable arsenal of fuel for the “Rambo” of all fires. I sensed great anticipation in the neighbourhood as the combustibles began to mount in the vacant lot next to our house. Even the local virgins appeared to grow restless as the night of the great and inevitable fire approached. The evening had a genuine Lord of the Flies feel to it, and the momentum was mounting.

Off course it was all anticlimactic because no sooner did the flames reach the requisite 20 foot mark and the neighbours house seemed threatened, as was our own; the fire department showed up, dosed the flames, spoiled the fun and gave my dad a very stern warning and I suffered the angst of another missed opportunity at sacrificing a virgin, little realizing what a virgin was, or that I was one.

As an adult I have since returned to my childhood neighbourhood. If I look very carefully and get down on my hands and knees I can still make out the black ash remains of fires long spent and when I close my eyes I can clearly detect the acrid smell of smoke in the air.

Albino Python

Revel to the rare and exotic sound of spoken English,

turban,

fedora,

capri

burka,

Avoid eye contact, don't cross the yellow line,

stay in the DWA.

Descending stairs to the north bound trains

an array of Rochart ink blots done in gum,

a desperate need for a high pressure hose,

a rush of warm stagnant air,

the train is approaching,

squeeze in, the rush for seats,

darkness to light and back again,

the metaphor of urban life.

A view of shoes and a need to wash my hands,

psychotic episode or just a cell phone?

Print ad for Pardon Services,

“Don't let your past limit your future.”

What demographics am I riding with?

Stale air.

Snake through the tunnels my back to the

forward motion, disorientation sets in.

I move a water bottle to sit down.

Moments later,

“You moved my water bottle

I don't think that's right”

Immediate apology!

I did move the bottle!

“Israel will over come its enemies,”

spoken by a black woman to a middle eastern man

a twist on ethnic profiling.

Muskoka cottage starting at $185 000.

Demographics?

“Danger stay off tracks”

Do we have to be told?

Young girl in a long pale blue dress

dragging the floor, black T-shirt with blue hair

she has a dog in a baby stroller.

Next to her a man with bag of groceries and a set of golf clubs,

orange glow in tunnels between stations

an ad for the Spanish Center,

swaying motion,

St Clair,

Summerhill,

Rosedale (no graffiti here)

Bloor,

Wellesley

and

off at College.

Tile colour changes with each station

through the turnstile up to the sidewalk.

Rush of air and bright lights

“All my rights have been violated for political reasons.”

A shirtless wild man wearing rubber boots

does push ups in front of a stag shop.

An albino python tattooed to his back