“Frozen in an Oral Ancient History of A Father’s Schizophrenia” by Kevin Spenst
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Frozen in an Oral Ancient History of A Father’s Schizophrenia” by Kevin Spenst.
Frozen in an Oral Ancient History of A Father’s Schizophrenia
By Kevin Spenst
Well, you see I grew up in the seventies, but it was the paisley patterned albums with photos of my three
sisters and our dad playing in the sixties that raised my imagination and the photos of our parents getting
married in the black and white fifties deckled my understanding of how smiles could go out of fashion
and it was our iceberg calving father on the lazy-boy who collapsed our home into cold waves, emptied
in the eighties of my older sisters and everything but the tv, which all taught me how to break off from
the century and now, almost a quarter of the way into this new one, I’m pretty good at timelessness. I just
freeze and then… you know, where have I been? I have an uncanny knack for knowing the exact time but I
have no clue what’s inside it. If I had to speculate, I’d say time is a confluence of tears from all the
parents lost to their children. I guess knowing the time is like cracking the ice to draw a cup from waters
flowing backwards —
Copyright © Kevin Spenst
A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024).
Kevin Spenst has authored sixteen chapbooks plus an upcoming one with Anstruther Press, and four full-length books of poetry including the latest, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press). He’s an organizer for the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.
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