SKATE SHARPENER’S PANDEMIC LAMENT

 

Matt Robinson

 

 

                  It’s damage as cottage
industry gone ghoulish, as far as I'm concerned;
this sideline of mine’s—I’ve learned—a way
to get out of the house on nights, on weekends,
whenever I can. But it’s past high time I re-evaluate
my plan: I read somewhere how the death of a star’s easy
to confuse for the birth of a cell, if you only glance—
too quickly—or you maybe just squint? I’m skint,
what with all these latest restrictions & shit. Worn
down & tuckered. My net worth’s in the can. I’m all edges
& angles—everything’s a bit of argumentative math:
grumbling cos, sin & tan—a matter of sickened physics,
slant-wrangled attacks & a cruel-tooled, daily grind.
My books? You’ll find them a flint about to spark
the bone-dry kindling of my anxious mind. A kind of
fool’s errand, this constant cutting & cutting along
gleaming, steeled quicks. Each & every new shift’s a test
of my mettle, a weight my filing hands can’t balance,
can’t settle along the shining crest of someone else’s need
for speed or purchase. It all rings hollow. It may be time
to cut my losses, is my guess.

 

 

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).