Poetry & Artwork by Phil Hall

Snot-Song


Gimmenowwhyrotpagsuckslopmaminewethaveno


Geomrfiw 09e7tlx  ihj’ ti8g fgjk;  r8gs’r gjior98sg

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As this too-often-painted now-white chair turns slowly I turn inside this log cabin    
whose walls I have labelled with Letraset cancer / depression / dementia / prison     

Each wall has a window & beside each window hangs a square electric 50s clock & on
top of each clock stands a toy plastic white buffalo from the Thieves’ Market in Lisbon      

Outside as I turn random phrases drift by a ZZ TOP sweatshirt or shared an ice cream
with Meryl Streep in Papyrus font grey-green

I am naked but not tied to the chair or totally bored yet so if as often happens
the going-by stops & my chair stops & the clocks stop

I get up & tap each window to make it all start going again cancer tap tap / depression tap
tap / dementia tap tap / prison tap tap      

Then the white buffalos run to wallow again & the clock-hands change aim again the way
arrows can’t     

.

Each line is a totem cumbent eyes & beaks emerging oceaned by etymology type-craft
errors & ligament atrocities         
                                                
Turn any open book page of poems sideways spine down the lines in pulse-chains
standing of varied lengths upright the left margin now shaky ground


What creatures each word invites letter by letter what a composite of transpositions each
word is become the spaces between arbitrary recent ignorable taxonomy

Legends of sound perch on the inflection-heads of (or are held by the
pronunciation-claws of) the words above or below when read out they ruff awake in the
larynx

From sternum to sinus-root welcome Lynx-Oyster Apple-Clarinet Esophagus-Ringbone
here make yr one full snot-song


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From shaggy mane to blacksmith bell acknowledge your shadow let it mouth off then
move past bitterness & betterment to invent a form that highlands

.

Between willfully accidental typing

& revelations of character unshelled from vowel arrangements

mammal anguish in a pasture

slowly being reclaimed by scrub cedar & blue thistle




Ph . Otty Lake  . 2017

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Bio: Phil Hall's most recent books are Conjugation (BookThug, 2016), and Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall—a Selected Collage (Sir Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015). He has won Canada’s Governor General’s Award (2011), and Ontario’s Trillium Award (2012). He has twice been nominated for the Griffin Prize.

photo credit: Nance Fleming

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