Trevor Abes: Writer
Tag: poetry
February 18, 2021
Moving On
When the broken glass of life
Scrapes dead weight from parts of you
You still treasure, gathering the slivers
Is a short path to hypersensitivity
As opposed to applauding the poetry
Of how long you’ve had your head down
Letting the unfairness nestle
Into the corners of your smile
And bloom into the tender sweetness of a heart
Whose open arms proved insufficient
The music in your hips newly sprung by bae’s absence
Her face in every woman’s face regardless of age
Stop trying to stop seeing her everywhere
Stop beating yourself up for finding yourself asking
What do you mean what do I mean by love?
Years into thinking the answer was set in stone
Just steep in it and get familiar with how you are
Too much food to finish for basically everyone
Until someone comes along happy to wrap you up
And save you for delectable exploratory unravelling
Which, for the record, is the opposite of cutting back
To compromise on the tenant between your eyes
—Liked what you read? Grab a book.
February 11, 2021
We’re Number One, Baby
After 2020, I’m determined more than ever to celebrate every win. I am overjoyed to report that yesterday my book of poetry, The Breakup Suite, hit #1 on Amazon’s Canadian Poetry eBooks Chart. We’re number one, baby! Thanks to Rupi Kaur for ceding the throne for a short while!
Grab your copy in print, as a PDF, or for Kindle. The support thus far has been overwhelming and it’s something I will always cherish. Thanks for reading poetry!
February 4, 2021
The Answer to Dancing is Yes
Everyone has something substantially wrong with them
At brunch, overcast, maybe you decide to say yes
To the adventurous and inadvisable
Further feeding your little infatuation problem
Superimposing your imaginings of things onto real things
Hoping to chisel your vision into actuality
Unmodulated by platitudes and spared the need for gurgled battle cries
Then there they are, in your bed
Having just ridden the subway together
From that show with the description that read good enough to attend
They say, I watch the news for my safety
You say, I’ve been told goals should be small
Numerous and directionless
To still have life left in them when you run
Out of original mid-life crises
You both hold beliefs that would scare the other
Into a different person
But your limbs and ideologies bend
In the same agreeable way
Which is close enough
When what is absent is a game
Whether you memorize an ending
Or you’re your own accomplice
And call it a new beginning
You say, so long as I get to flex my perspective
In seemingly insignificant ways, like
How I stock the fridge for midnight ruminations
Gash ice cream with a melon scoop
Knife a pillow to keep certain memories intact
They say, I don’t need confirmation of your desire
To exercise your right to know yourself
If it involves damaging me
I’m prepared for it to happen
January 28, 2021
Arteest
Leading myself on’s got the old animal instincts shot
But ruminating til your stomach turns inside out
Not really knowing where you’re going is what R&D is
This is why sugar generates sense when shit goes to hell
And death and mindlessness fess up to being family
When Wipeout or Floor is Lava is on
My latest chance at self-expansion, tarnished
By a lack of dabbling in evil, disguised
As fun that wouldn’t have been any fun
It helps me heal to think
On a path with space that means I’m independent
Or afraid of refreshing my email every 10 minutes
To see if I get what I want
Playing clairvoyant only if I think I know what you believe
Whether or not you hinge on it to stand out from your chosen throng
To suggest purpose + minimal reverence for inevitabilities
That can’t be made to wait for rest
January 21, 2021
Slightly Less Terrible
Digging without treasure doesn’t make sense
There is no moment between yesterday and today
It just keeps going
When I said I hated the incense
And you still let me smoke a cigarette inside because it was cold
I didn’t have the lenses to intuit the presence of preciousness
When you quit drinking and neglected to call me for a month
And I didn’t give you any shit about it
You mistook my devotion for a sign of low self-esteem
Despite the park sunburns, laundromat ruminations
Elaborate budget-salad meal prep
And diminishing shame for the buoyancy
Of Burgundy and brie on brioche afternoons
The universe still failed to smarten up to us
To how we stood against going TV test-patterned
Late at night to clean ourselves of the gunk of the day
Because it gave us something to control and accumulate
When $11.25 an hour felt like a blessing
Even though it made us unfathomable in our critical awareness
As if we were owed interest on our anguish
When that’s just not how fixed income works
January 14, 2021
10K-Foot View
As I trace a finger down my warped pages
And my schedule’s specks of glass hidden on the tile
Not bothering looks less like tidiness
And more like deferred contentment
Gotta do it like it’s meant to happen
Watch for feeling good just past ill will
Or persistence, once it gets going
And starts to make things seem smaller
And more manageable than being a brick wall
As a self-preservation tactic
Blocking all exits and entrances
With generic Powerpoint as-you-can-see
Sometimes commitment is afraid of getting back
On its laissez faire bs
What if it works out? the operative question
To see as I dream
January 7, 2021
Water falling into a fine mist before it hits the ground
The first time I fell asleep to a television
I was self-medicating for my fear of the dark.
Now I’m more interested in the voices than the light,
The unexplained aches and pains of getting older having begun:
Now I find humility in how bad Earth looks from the outside;
Kinesio tape is something I prefer to keep magical rather than learn about;
Would rather look saturated than nourish another and enjoy my own consumption.
The suggestion of church organ fuzz in the buses’ revs on my morning walks
Kneading away the desire to produce a well-written thing nobody can understand.
I meditate by breaking down boxes to podcasts in a cramped office now,
To quiet the ripples in my flavoured water tracing back
To copyright documents for the first Jurassic Park movie.
I usually box people between vitamins and kinesio tape,
It’s the molecular configuration of my personal raincloud,
Eroding me til all I really want
Is a newspaper dispenser I can rest my coffee on,
My cut of the sentimental appeal of certain pouty 90s sedans.
You are aware of my sense of wasting away.
Looking for what I want in what I don’t have.
Setting aside all the beliefs I hold because I was told to
Wasn’t as good a look for me as I had hoped.
