Jay MillAr

AN OLD JOKE

Stop in Toronto
Knowing you’re alone
Even if you’re sitting there next to the phone.
Why – the phone is obsolete you moron! Get with it!
But feel alone as long as you can, it’s important
With that community attached to your hip
And the ideas you imagine really mattered
Left like breadcrumbs
Scattered for the birds.
Then go out and attack the trees.
They will forgive you, but only because
They never held it against you in the first place.
Not like everyone else.
This is the birthday poem I meant to write for years,
The one in which I look back
After reading barely and widely the works of
Whatever happened to come within reach:
“If you are a poet at forty it is because you are a poet”
And here we are, um, yeah.



Jay MillAr is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of, among others, the small blue (2007), False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), Mycological Studies (2002) and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000), and more recently esp : accumulation sonnets (2009), Other Poems (2010) and Timely Irreverence (2013). MillAr is the shadowy figure behind BookThug and Apollinaire's Bookshoppe. He teaches creative writing and poetics at George Brown College and Toronto New School of Writing.