Idyll Thoughts It seems a myth now from some hazy past, listening to Lightfoot and Willie P., we five together in your place above the laundromat and the antique shop: I with the woman I took from another man and you with your own woman, she Madonna with her child so untouched as we were not by the world around us. Perhaps it was later I came to covet your wife from a distance and you began to see another nearer greener pasture. Do you suppose it never happened at all and we have always been alone? Static I’m a charged electric rod grown excited as lightning while you come and go as felt sparking up and down my spine. I sit nude in a deep bath but you with your fine clothing and hairstyles not to be touched close your eyes and won’t come in. I am unsure how water or static can flow through me or why you make me feel like you’re real and unreal as wind. The Crimson Rising filled the space between our eyes vividly incising the love that we had seen until Hannibal Lecter would have been proud of the various workings of our minds as they bowed bleeding in the shower.
BOB MACKENZIE grew up near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in rural Alberta with artist parents. His father was a professional photographer and musician and his mother a photo technician, colourist, and painter. By the age of five, he had his own camera and ever since has been shooting photographs and writing poems and stories. Raised in this environment, young Bobby developed a natural affinity for photography and for the intricacies of language. He now lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Bob’s writing has appeared in nearly 500 journals across North America and as far away as Australia, Greece, India, and Italy. He has published nineteen volumes of poetry and prose-fiction and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies. For eighteen years Bob’s poetry was spoken and sung live with original music by the ensemble Poem de Terre, and the group released six albums. Bob has received numerous local and international awards for his writing as well as an Ontario Arts Council grant for literature, a Canada Council Grant for performance, and a Fellowship to attend the Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia. Bob MacKenzie’s novel “The Miriam Conspiracy” is scheduled for release in the Spring of 2023.
Confessions 