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My Writings

I'm now working on my novel about my family connection to Finland and our visit to Finland back in 1975!

(update: September 23, 2009)


Renown Canadian poet, Todd Swift, has taken my texts, and created a poem from my memories in Bright's Grove as a kid in the early 1970s!
 
Bright's Grove

Not a bad little memory from Bright's Grove in the very early 70s... it was like yesterday

seeing that woman dig up those coins.
We thought she was a human magnet!

That strange woman had a brand new, modern brick house that seemed expensive.
Something unusual at the time in the Grove in the early 70s. Thus, the rumour was
that every brick in that house had been paid for with coins she found on that beach.

Also, since most of the summer was spent partly on the beach, there was this sleazy,
greased-back hair, Elvis-looking (1950s-looking guy) in his actual 50s who always was on the beach
with his girlfriend. He was the pre-Fonzie of the neighbourhood. The rumour about him was

he was rich but had to make the choice
between owning a corvette or eating a Sirloin steak

every day for the rest of his life. He had supposedly decided to go for the daily steak and a cheaper car.

It seems ridiculous now. A millionaire could afford both...
wouldn't one get sick of eating the same thing every day?

Lately, I've been looking at my left hand and under the light, and I noticed it is becoming slightly withered! 
Tonight, I came up with this poem!
 

My left hand….

My left hand has become old…
It still works the same,
Though under the dim light,
I see in it, my parents’ older hands,
Before they became grandparents,
Now crisscrossed with subtle,
Yet aged lines,
Noticeably Martian canals,
Under my telescopic eyes,
Rather my microscopic soul wonders “why?”
Just awaiting the day,
When it will all turn to dust.

Peter Forrest

(April 10, 2005 – 8:32 pm)

Here is a a poem that was published in Nthposition.
 

A Palm Tree in Winter

In winter there should be palm trees
Covered in hanging icicles, reminders
Of a forgotten age, of ice
And stillness
In a never-ending season
Leaving few witnesses to see its end
Or beginning, when nature was giving birth
In the romantic times of creation
When atoms spun anonymously
No explanation was needed
As angels surpassed the speed of light
As the world was young, an infant in time
A happy orphan of the universe
And I, looking up, into the winter sky this night
Stars blinking, lighthouses of the past,
While my mind rearranges the distant points
I imagine above me, a palm tree constellation,
Blowing in the universe's shifting winds,
In the dead of winter.
Other works

 

My Bildungsroman novel: Moonbeam

"Peter Forrest's Moonbeam is a sublunary event of the first magnitude: the witty manuscript marries nostalgia for the haunted 80s with a vulnerable yet decadent sensibility, as if Rimbaud had been in a ska band, and lived to write of his adventures. Featuring romance, madness, and a cast of hilariously offbeat characters, this Montreal tale recalls the bars and streets of an autumnal time, sad and tellingly funny all at once. Move over, Young Werther, there's a new Bildungsroman in town."  Todd Swift