Tuesday poem #183 : Jason Christie : a portrait

gallery walls acrumble
and i'm inside eating

i'm inside eating my
lunch before work

sunlight and dust, so
much that a new

statue has formed
around me, impossible

to resist the accumulating
import, sunlight howls

my thought to shift
from tight couplets

to a disregard for the dust
that i follow and my body follows

and at some point i remember
the layers of shit on the walls

that seemed so important
while i was eating lunch

in a broken gallery surrounded
by colleagues and acquaintances

before i had to start work
dismantling the portrait exhibit

Jason Christie lives in Ottawa with his wife and toddler. He is the author of Canada Post (Snare), i ROBOT (Edge/Tesseract), Unknown Actor (Insomniac), and a co-editor of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (Mercury). He has three chapbooks from above/ground press, two of which were nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award: GOVERNMENT (2013), and Cursed Objects (2014). The third chapbook is called The Charm. He is currently writing poetry about objects.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan