x / ?

iamb, sfu's creative writing journal, just launched it's third issue. good on 'em. got a couple of poems in it: "all i can do" and "the furthest away". pick up a copy pretty much anywhere on sfu's burnaby campus and (hopefully, maybe) some other places too.

iamb's been nice to me in the past, publishing four poems previously ("thief", "so i was at this reading", "2005", and "cassius").

here's one of 'em (from issue two, fall 05):

2005

here

as close to
the middle of nothing
as possible

we seem unable
to construct a name
for this decade

the 'tens' sounds ugly,
especially when
compared with

those glorious,
shining 'twenties',
but still

it is infinitely
better than
this decade

which must be
the 'zeros'
if anything.

we launch cameras
up our asses, explore
the outer reaches of our colons

but still stand
around, mumbling,
wondering how to

describe this decade
we find ourselves
squeezed inside.

maybe that's why
the 'nineteen-zeros' were
void of history

a century of wars
famines scandals
plagues terror

maybe the
nineteen-zeros were
the same

(pestilence, death,
squalling babies:
the works)

maybe there were
tear-jerking stories
to be told but

no one could
lay out the
timeline so

they skipped on
to WWI and hoped
no one would notice

and the devastation
of the zeros was lost to us,
the terror erased

or lulled into
hibernation, waiting for
the zeros to return.

now it has
begun seeping up
through the grass

corroding our
pipes, raining down
from the sky.

we're trapped here in
two-thousand-and-five
(as close to the middle

of nothing as possible)
with this terror we
can't explain, we

can never write
down and a century
from now no one

will know how
to describe this
time, they'll say

"you know,
the 'two-thousands'"
but no one will understand.

it will be
the death of us.
it will be

terrible and calm.