Samples

The following are select samples of Adam’s work, both published and unpublished.

Press Releases

Articles

Columns and Reviews

Poetry

GRIDLOCKED (published in the 2006 Alberta Anthology)

Doing one hundred and thirty
West on the Sherwood Park Freeway
Racing no one in particular
But doing my best to beat my previous record
Today, I’m getting home in under 10 minutes
It’s possible
I know it is
Because I’ve almost done it
On more than one occasion
But every time I try
I hit gridlock at 1st and 1st
Jasper and 101st Street
Gridlocked
At the symbolic centre of the city
The core of blue collar dreams
High commerce
Art and sex and drugs
And the unfortunate consequences of
All of the above
Gridlocked
With Frank crooning
About New York, New York
And somehow that fits
In this big town small city with identity issues
Gridlocked
With just enough gas
To get to the gas station
Gridlocked
With just enough cash
To feed my car
Or myself
But not both
Gridlocked
In this booming oil economy
With no place for the likes of me
Me, who wants to sell my words,
Me, who wants to work in art,
Gridlocked
In a town of transients
Everyone coming and going
But never staying
Never wanting to stay
Amid the heat and dust
Of a prairie city
Gridlocked
In blue-filled borders
Where elected voices
Don’t speak for me
Gridlocked
By love
Of a place
And a sight
And the smell of twenty-odd prairie summers
And increasingly mild winters
Longing for the biting winds of my youth
But not too fondly
Gridlocked
In the midst of traffic smoke
And horns honked in vain
Gridlocked
And about now Frank starts signing about Chicago
Which is far more fitting
I think
Than New York, New York
It feels closer to home
A place with a quieter kind of madness
Gridlocked
In this middle-of-nowhere
Middle-of-everything
Meddlesome gossipy
Dry, hot, and dusty
Middle-class wasteland
That I call home

Gridlocked

THE DEVIL DRIVES A GREY TOYOTA (Reading featured on Live at the Kasbar)

That car
That fucking car
Is outside our building again
Pushing toxic shit
Down the throats of those who no longer possess the ability
To say
No

And the cops
Those fucking cops
Say that the best thing to do
The best thing
Is to call the drug unit on Monday
Because they’re not open on the weekend
Drugs, apparently, are only an issue from 9-5
Monday through Friday

And it gets me to wondering
How long will it be before an ambulance shows up
Downstairs
An ambulance that isn’t there
To pick up a departed retiree
From the old folks’ home across the street
Or, at least, not one departed
From cancer, or stroke, or the other ill effects of old age

It’s funny, too, because
I’ve always thought
This is the most beautiful part of the city
You can keep your long, green valley,
And the long brown river that forged it
Nice as it is, I prefer the concrete
And it’s musical din
To the sublime quiet of a river valley morning

There are glass pyramids
Modeled after Wonders of the World
Across the street
And in the square around the corner
Churchill takes an unmoving stance
That gets us nowhere nearer a solution

And that car
That fucking car
Is making another round
Circling the building
Slowly trolling for goblins to feed
And pixies to ruin
And you
In your store
Wishing you were simply feeding “the munchies�
Start to think that
Maybe
It’s not so crazy
The way the owner keeps a butcher’s knife
Behind the counter
“For the punks,�
As he says

Even a sympathizer
Such as you are
Finds it hard to avoid a hard-line stance
After one too many run-ins
With the broken mothers of crack babies
Twitching out
And asking where they left their children
Before snatching another
Convenience store sandwich
Stale bread
And old cheese
And somewhere in the city
A baby
Is going through withdrawal

And those cops
Those fucking cops
Say they can’t do a thing
Until someone gets shot
Those aren’t their exact words
Just the unfortunate implications
Spoken by a desk-jobber
Who’s just hoping his kid doesn’t get into the stuff

And that car
That fucking car
With it’s fucking Manitoba plates
My memories of Manitoba
Are of moose and muskeg
Not morphine and meth
And those plates are circling the block again
Looking for an open parking space
To stop
So the goblins and pixies
Can come out of the woodwork
And get a hit
Of what ails them

And now I’m watching
23 floors up
An atheist hoping for an angel
To save the goblins
From the devil
Before it’s too late