Category Archives: apocalypse




Repeat. Flesh
of snow, pocks
in tarnished snow.
Snow of lust.
Snow of cash.
Blathering omega’s
travesty of dust.
Snow breaking
vows of poverty
but not silence.
Snow of theft.
Sparrows buried
in snow.

Spring’s blind surge awakens rambling epics. Evidence
gushes First things jockey for position. Feet sink
a car sounds different. The exotic bark of a dog shatters
Orion, spilling sand from a stunned hourglass.
Thereafter, molecules relax and history tries again:
A garlanded mother emerges playing a kithara
as her darlings weave a pedastal, the better to adore
the quixotic colorist: proof that sensory deprivation
binds minions to a redundant diety. Lids can’t filter
catastrophic light. Sap’s flight quickens, guiding
moments trickling toward a slack horizon. And again:
over the years weep scullions at their skinned rabbits.
Peddlers of risk lean into showers of delinquent buds.


Camille Martin

Nancy of Wisconsin and the Zetas of Nibiru


Y’all have a nice doomsday!


Camille Martin



A deserted city. We’ll have to imagine
it’s in a movie. Beneath a listless dome, walls
crumble into backlit dust. Flames on a hillside swarm,
tattered auburn fishes in the autumn wind. Glints of dying
light fall on unmoored mountains whose thoughts of home
come to nothing. Everywhere, flocks of matter dip pale snouts
into inky ponds. We’ll have to imagine someone watching
praying to the mother of a tarnished idol presiding over a flock
of angels, breath attended by golden lice. Others
paused long enough to view dusk’s leisurely descent
over the white noise of crashing surf. All found something
to swear by before it was too late. Photogenic dullards jazzed
in the waning light. A ship’s captain jingled his coins
before staving in the ship. Embers in a hearth
illuminated fish bones on plates.


Sonnets and Looms are available from the following vendors:

Small Press Distribution
Book City in Toronto
Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe
Shearsman Books.


Camille Martin


from Sonnets

Glib spice announces the news bleeding
in the monochromatic distance. The short-term
memory of distance flees in fear. Enemies
fall, money flees. Falling gloom dazzles just
as history taught it to. Not the history of stars
made of tumbleweed nor the annals of a dust mote
singing rich disaster. Masoch was never so rich,
or so it seems to each geological layer. No
notebook records a pocket of posies between thick
of time. “Time to return to star,” announces
tumbleweed on the news. The news shrinks
to a speck of pollen on a posy’s anther
in a pocket caught between thick layers of ash.

2012 - 2

Sonnets and Looms are available here:

Small Press Distribution
Book City in Toronto
Apollinaire’s Bookshoppe
Shearsman Books
The Book Depository


Camille Martin

Fiddling While Earth Burns: Poems for the End of Time

          I’m obsessed with The End, with the smorgasbord of choices for Armageddon that Neil deGrasse Tyson cheerfully ticks off: asteroid, caldera eruption, mega-tsunami, black hole. Not surprisingly, some of my poems have an apocalyptic theme.
          So in honour of the rapidly-approaching December 21, 2012—of the dreaded cataclysm that Mayan astronomers predicted (unless they just got tired of chiselling)—I’ll be posting poems to while away the countdown to the terrestrial torch. The first poem is below.
          And what would 2012 prophesies be without a little shameless commercialism? I’m selling poetry, not opulent underground condos, but then, to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, survivalists die miserably on doomsday for lack of what is found in poems.
          The clock is ticking, but you can still get a copy of Sonnets and Looms from the following vendors: Small Press Distribution, Book City in Toronto,, and Shearsman Books.
          Help keep my kitchen, where I’m hunkering down with proper Canadian garrison mentality, stocked with beans and rice during these anti-climactic end times.

from Sonnets:

From a helicopter at night, an aerial
view of a city. In the dark, gigantic
iron statues loom with an ominous
aura of permanence. The people
who live in the city obsess
about the possibility of doomsday
erupting among their soaring
buildings and effigies. Of the end
they’ve made a fetish, chatting
about it at cocktail parties as if
it were the latest vogue. They believe
that it could happen at any moment,
so they no longer bother
to make their beds in the morning.


Camille Martin