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Jacket 18 — August 2002   |   # 18  Contents   |   Homepage   |  Catalog   |



Rob Budde

3 Promises; A Renegue

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fully negotiated lines

the father, soon

the wholly lost


Looking ahead, creating a future, prompting with RRSP’s cue-cards and bonds of faith, sutured the glimmer pots of fame and esteemed luncheons beckon to the strung-out, strung-along and really tired because it seems reachable, it really does, the little sandwiches and locks, the impossible ream sunk through the purest of recollections, spat out.


holes filled bilaterally

landed self-serve or immigrant;

promise, missile, demise


Capital expansion and deficit re-election orders of the delay and consumer relations department making strange bedfellows in fiscal mission position, the hard headboard of directors knocking up the catch phrase, knocking down our dormant queues, ballot-boxed. The party system the morning after and fragments of memory missing.


this mission, locked

me, missing-in-action again

the prom’s dead


This is the trick, this is the illusion, the one-fits-all happiness a profusion of Armani visions of cocaine-sheik angels and behind-the-pulpit buggery lulling the present, foreclosing on the home instead (RCMP present), putting us on reserves of democratic fervour (the beaver present, for now), monthly nationalism cheques.


cruise missive to-the-letter

strafing with smartbombs

UN profits = silence


Iraq and Kosovo “peacekeeping” entrepreneurship buying up the global gridlock like stacking the internet with porn for fat gazes to get off/ on, hard to get around when searches keep loading up on spreads of “evil empires” and “global responsibility” air-brushed and quick-referenced by preference.


miss master mix-master

queens and irreducibility

a segue not a call-to-arms


Misled, proactive, and unsure probably due to what’s due, I (that counterfeit clause) keep wanting to say more, fill the space (the promising, promiscuous white) tarry while the getting is good and they’re not looking at this “unpromising talent” (Winnipeg Free Press review 1996), this discourse without a future, asking and giving no surplus but wasting (away) wasting wasting everything.


jeez, come again?

mock funding canceled

repercussions “under review”


Now, what is to be saved might be a question but the phalanx of reporters will have no quarter and the intravenous media drip CBC/CNN tallies another direct hit, another addiction only minutely aware of those who slip it under the tongue, spit it back out, tuck it back into the gooseliver paté, make fun of Wolf-fucking-Blitzer’s fake voice, W. Bush’s hairless ass, Oka on the “Other” channel.


manhood feigning non-complicity

come staining bills

“poetry” section “priorized”


Language owns no promises, keeps no keepsakes, charts no glorious finale (not a ride into the mushroom cloud, not a glance back at the camera) so they will say that this “makes no sense” and it has “no voice”, that it “just plays games with the reader” and is “obscure” knowing exactly what language should be in the grand scheme of things. Book reviewers have a special place in my cold cold heart.


cruise a fix

representation non representation

cry me a


Delivering substance; gradients of connection based on translation (what?), based on grids of knowing, based on base 10, based in the Gulf whereby easy access, logistically sound decision-making, and political proximity become assets to a regime of rhetoric; deal if ringing, subs dance.

fuck you Campbell

cigar = expensive glasses

vote-rigging wad swallow

Weren’t “we” here in Granada (a poetic medal of honour for Dionne Brand — you are admired), in Vietnam (surname Viet), in the Bay of Pigs (oh, that one, don’t mention that one! Cuba a burr under John Wayne’s imperious saddle), wasn’t this clear before and how does now differ when time collapses and nothing moves forward this oppressive present just keeps on fission for bodies, diving to dredge up new excuses — this is capitalism as date-rape. Arms sales = election year.


tell-tale figurations shine

dark leisure politics

expedited with “return-to-sender”

Fear is the refusal to accept the machinations of the world as a given and so I am fearful and this fear fuels as new machine, one where the gears turn inward. At the edge of semantic availability comes a slice inward. Justice in translation, re-substantiation beyond the means of payment. Before currency I could not have could not have you (love).

extremeanings: an offering / a refusal.

what would words be without betweens?




Photo of Rob Budde


Rob Budde teaches creative writing at the University of Northern British Columbia. He has published three books (two poetry: Catch as Catch and traffick, and one novel: Misshapen) and has a new novel, The Dying Poem, in the Northern Fall of 2002 from Coach House.


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