Pete Smith
$6
SELF-PORTRAIT IN A KALEIDOSCOPE.
I, clad
in clown-costume:
down-turned, exaggerated
white lips glabbering
with the antiphrastic glow of sadness.
It isn't the spotlight, the ring or the whoopie cushion;
it isn't the kinder section letting rip
tides of guffaws and rippled applause;
it's the geometry of the trapeze artists,
the arcs and loops and dissected sectors,
fallen angles, the gibbous death pinch
mirroring an unself
filled with true/false sequinned memories,
light-years from any known galaxy,
that calls me
home.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2026
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Bio. Born in Coventry, England, & raised there during its post-war boom years. Worked for forty years in institutional & community settings with people dually diagnosed with intellectual & psychiatric issues. They taught him a lot. A piece of slow writing under the working title Among Us is in progress.
Has lived in & around Kamloops, BC, since emigrating from England in 1974. Poetry is what he thinks he thinks & feels with. A ListServ of poets with closely shared interests revived his writing practice in the late 1990s. Agenda, Wild Honey Press, Poetical Histories, the Gig, Oystercatcher, Great Works, Alterran Poetry Assemblage, fortnightly review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Capilano Review, W, Shearsman Books (Bindings with Discords) in 2015, & the various outposts of the whirlwind known as rob mclennan, are among the places he has published poems, essays & reviews. A comprehensive list is found at peripetyandortronies.blogspot.com in the October 2025 archive.
This is Pete Smith's fifth chapbook with above/ground press, after Strum Of Unseen (2008), A New Love/ An Aching Stone (2016), Sing . . . Despite (2019) and Some Failed Eternity (2024).
To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com
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