Poet Mark Lesage

Mark Lesage lives in Tweed, Ont. A musician, he plays bass with the classic country and rock n roll quintet, the Charlie Bird Band. Mark has been writing poetry for as long as he can remember: “I regard poetry writing as therapy. It allows me to get things off my chest. To put down ideas just to see what they look like in print,“ he says. He is also a regular contributor to First Tuesday Muse, a poetry reading event on the first Tuesday of every month at the Tweedsmuir, the brainchild of Billy Piton and Peter Snell.

The Dancing Serpent On the Seas

The serpent was the garden’s cleverest his skin was karma, peeled off every new moon, religiously.

His soft eyes drank in the sun and bled with pity; a gift everyone refused.

He danced on two legs and chased his long tail.

“See, I am not that serpent” he said His friends still doubted, but did not say anything, lest it might be true and they would have no claim to fame in their midst

Did I say that he danced? He rocked and he rolled where his hips might have been in another age of revolutionor age of creationhowever you want to look at it.

If his friends could see him they would say he was being shamefully self-indulgent But, the reality is, he was quite invisible. On the seas on the beautiful seas I ride a boat a dinky dingy with a full mast and a large breasted woman jutting from the prow, I do yoga with the rats Still, it was a bad idea rescuing them (even though I’m breathing very well) because they are gnawing at the ropes my ankles everything Don’t they know how to die with dignity? There are so many... Could we not get them to sing as a choir or something? That would be lovely; a chorus of squeaks and squawks going heavenward Except for the doddlers those picking hemp from between their teeth with the bones of dead relatives.