I can’t write an &
The curlicues and complexities of its curves
escape me.
Where does one begin?
Instead I write 3s or 8s,
finishing them off with fancy flourishes
to hide their simple roots and
fool readers into believing that what they see
is a real
and full
&
So instead of tying me 3 her
together
or my brother 8 I
I create convoluted sentences that have no real meaning
I am a writer. Which is only to say that I write. Many people write, some even more than me, but do not consider themselves writers in any sense. But it is my conceit that my writing is worthy of other people's attention. A banker is worthy of the title because a bank has put faith in him to bank, likewise an actor is worthy of the title because a director has cast her in a role and people watch. So now I'm looking to the internet for the edification that the banker gets from the bank and the actor gets from the director and the crowd. Descartes said I think therefore I am. So, likewise, some people say I write therefore I am a writer. But if a tree falls in a forest...
June 2, 2012
May 27, 2012
words tapdance
away
from
at the worst times
they
twist and m
o
v
e
sideways and
overways
like a steel beam on a rainy day, a rain train track meeting leather soles and
there
is no
grip.
Once was what upright
now
tilts then
f
a
l
l
s
tumbling down steps to lay broken on the
landing.
It’s only meaning found through an archaeological
anthropologic,
anthropomorphic
reading that includes everything
but misses the point entirely.
But somewhere, after the digging and the soft brush on the bones of dinosaurs, between
everything that was found,
meaning sneaks
when you aren’t looking.
May 13, 2012
To Mom
Because all she ever wanted, despite the her smiling face when we gave her jewellery, clothes or even hand-made cards that look like a five-year-old could make them in five minutes (most likely because we were five and made them in five minutes) and her happiness when she gets a new purse (or handbag, because the name changed when I wasn’t looking), were words.
Words via email.
Words over the phone.
Words on paper sent the old fashioned way.
But preferably face to face.
Simple words, like how our days were going, what we were doing and how we felt. Words that opened doors into our lives so she could be a part.
And most importantly words that said we cared. Loved.
And sometimes we would fail, brushing off the words, closing the gates. But it’s because she would not give up, was not deterred by words mumbled carelessly over telephone lines tumbling through like unladen beast of burden, and each butterfly word would weigh her down. Each evasive answer, transparent lie or opaque word would worry at her mind.
But here, Mom, is my gift to you. The words that were always true, though I didn’t always say. The words that I kept from you. The answer to those question I didn’t have time to tell you. The answers would have been different at the time, but the meaning is the same.
I love you Mom.
May 7, 2012
I wore my crown, not so much to impress my peers (whose crowns were better gilded and had more precious stones and which they wore at a jaunty angle that I could never quite get right), but as a statement to my Mom and Dad. To tell them that I loved them, trusted them and respected the effort they had put into making me a king.
April 28, 2012
It’s a city I never got used to, perpetually a visitor, at least in my own mind, I never studied the back streets and intersections of the city. A few street names found their way into my head, but I was perpetually brought down to blank stares when given directions. Google maps was my friend with it’s turn by turn directions which I paid more attention to than the city surrounding me. By the time I left I still knew nothing about the place I had lived for a year, to blind stubborn to recognise it as something worth looking at I kept my eyes forward, looking to the heights I had convinced myself I would attain, if I only lived here for one year. The city was a stepping stone and as such I didn’t need to look at it, just feel it solid under my feet so I could push off. There were a lot of things I stepped on in that blind year; feelings I never looked for and relationships I was afraid of, I pushed past the spider web thin tendrils that reached out to me. Eyes on the prize.
February 28, 2012
The predators are so much slower now. Too slow to track without specialised instruments, until they’re at your jugular and you can’t recall putting on a red tshirt this morning. Adrenaline seeks new homes now, in the safety of harnesses and helmets. Fight or flight, we’ll take both just don’t give me the slow decline of amputated body parts and non-functioning electrodes ruining down the body. Immortality seekers seek safety in generational studies, and glacial movements scratching signs into tortured clay. How hard it must be to watch that glacier run down people like some getaway train. A horror movie in the worst sense: ‘get into the basement’, the inexorable steps of the mass murder, and no. way. out. Just the horror of the weight, though the killees don’t know it yet, because they don’t know the internal logic of the world in which they live. But those with the scientific distance know, and watch, and take notes, to defeat these mass murderers in molasses. They’ve defeated the cheetahs now. It was easy, the research was quick: just move too slow for them. But these new brutes are too slow for us. And as we strive to move slower new ailments strike us all.
February 22, 2012
My heart is a dreamcatcher
I still dream about the same things I dreamt as a child
of astronauts and sea captains and things yet more wild
At times, these dreams, they make me light enough to fly
at times the dreams, their weight pins me down till I cry
When I was young I had dreams
that I kept between paper covers
that crept into my life at the seems
dreams too close to tell others
And I would lie in bed at night and dream myself to the sky
And clutch them to my chest during the day just to get by
Yes I still dream about the same things I dreamt as a child
of astronauts and sea captains and things yet more wild
At times, these dreams, they make me light enough to fly
at times the dreams, their weight pins me down till I cry
I grew to be the man that I am
some dreams, they came true
and some weren’t worth a damn
but that didn’t make me blue
Cause it’s the dreams that still hang around that string on my neck,
an albatross or a dozen singing birds, I still pack with me on my trek
Yes I still dream about the same things I dreamt as a child
of astronauts and sea captains and things yet more wild
At times, these dreams, they make me light enough to fly
at times the dreams, their weight pins me down till I cry
February 18, 2012
In praise of shadows
Of course this “sheen of antiquity” of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling—which is to say grime. If indeed “elegance is frigid,” it can as well be described as filthy. There is no denying, at any rate, that among the elements of the elegance in which we take such delight is a measure of the unclean, the unsanitary. I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or for worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them. Living in these old houses among these old objects is in some mysterious way a source of peace and repose.
- Tanizaki Junichiro
February 15, 2012
For Valentines day?
She was fierce and she was wild and she had me walking Spanish down the hallways of my heart. But she was free too, and when the wind blew she didn’t have the weight to hold her down. She left me in those crimson corridors, lost in an unfamiliar maze. I found myself there, spent time weeping in the left ventricle, pacing in the aorta, feeling low in the inferior vena cava. As I walked the baroque passages of my heart I became acquainted with the turnings and workings: the red velvet giving way to royal blue, the soothing tide of my blood that would turn to jagged storms of weeping. Lost, as one gets in a new city, I learned the byways of my heart and watched my emotions travel those well trodden alleyways on their daily commute. So when the storms receded, and the eternal tide recovered its rhythmic lapping, I made a heart of my house on the beaches by the waves and settled down to make it a home I could invite people to stay.
February 14, 2012
It’s one of those days when the snow crunches like Styrofoam under the soles of your boots and the North wind sings it’s lonely tune in fire-engine-red ears. A cold so harsh it freezes your soul to your boots, and it doesn’t come back to your chest until you’ve been inside an hour huddled over naked flames, rubbing your hands together hard enough to spark a fire. It’s a cold that freezes the flames solid to popsicle-stick kindling that you put in your pocket and suck on later to get some warmth into your chest, and all you can think about is a warm dinner at the end of the day: visions of hot chocolate and Hot Toddies dancing through your head like sugar plums, until the end of the evening when you’re sitting in front of that fire, with you eyelids sinking low, while the stars twinkle in the black, frozen air. Yeah, another one of those cold, clear, Canadian nights.
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