You are a crawling
Hunch-backed,
Dried up thing.
With ripe blue veins
Threatening though translucent paper skin.
And highway nails that stretch to some place I do not know.
With blood, and skin, and sweet sticky residue
Underneath.
You are
Cold to the touch.
But you were once a person
You were once a person
With a taste for fruit juice.
You lived with your mother
On a small farm in rural Canada.
With an apple tree in your yard.
As a child, your mom picked two dozen on Sundays
And fed the rotten ones to the soil.
You’d grab two before school.
One to eat as you rode on your bike
One you left on your teacher’s desk.
And she’d pat your head
And tell you that you were her favourite.
But you sat alone on the picnic bench
And watch how the other kids would play,
Unless you brought your mother’s baked apple,
Kept warm in a Thermos.
And the kids would swarm it like flies
And dig at it with their forks.
As it warmed their hands and stomachs,
They loved you with that childlike ephemeral passion,
Until the cold wind blew them away again.
Your stomach turned
And you buried the core under a pile of autumn leaves.
As a man you moved to New York
To make something of yourself
Though you weren’t sure yet what ‘something’
Would be.
You were sure you would trip onto it.
Like a bump under the carpet hiding your keys.
As long as you just kept your head straight
And kept moving.
You surrounded yourself by the top of the food chain
So you could either climb or be eaten.
You kept a pitcher of cool fruit juice
On your dining room table
And brought it to work in a Tumbler.
You’d wince when you took a sip
So the other men would think it was coffee.
Even though they never noticed you,
Never mind what you were drinking.
Your head up to their shoulders;
A lowly intern on Wall Street,
With a picture of a farm
On your corner cubicle.
In meetings your mind slipped in and out of conversations
Of practicality.
As your eyes focused and unfocused
On marble grain.
Co-workers smirked and checked off an easy defeat.
Thinking you’d be handing out coffee the rest
Of your career.
But they didn’t know it,
Did they?
You didn’t even notice it happening.
Until one day,
Accidentally,
You slipped into a blurry world
That teased your finger tips
Your mind steadied like a surgeon
And caught onto the string of a vision:
A world so radical
And colourful
It would hurt any common worker’s eyes.
With no reprieve from sweetness.
No busywork, no sitting, no graphs or charts;
Just neon.
You clung onto the sides of your desk
You clung so hard that you stayed there
While somewhere else something grew
Entirely without you.
You were formless but craving
And no honey nor lady nor granny would satisfy you.
And you sweat out all of your dopamine until you were devoid.
While the nightmares grew intense, grew into daydreams and fantasies.
You followed them into the blurred dark night.
And then there is now.
Now, I find myself sitting across the table from you
Dressed in your suit
Fine Italian Leather
That your skin sticks to.
Onto which you drool.
Your milky blue irises dissipating
While black pupils dilate,
Fixing onto your prey.
And bursting like ink coating your whites.
“Hi, sweetheart”
You look me over now like I owe you something.
My fingers and hair and arms and legs.
Well, I retire,
They haven’t been of much use lately anyways.
They say never to make deals with your type.
The lonely boy who eats with the teacher,
The Wall Street wannabe kid
Who looks up to businessmen,
The antichrist
Craving something sweet.
But I am sitting across this table from you
Because I’m willing to give and you want to take.
I believe you may be able to help me with my head
The blood will smooth your wrinkles
And there’s
So
So
Much.
These headaches may finally go away
From when my head was struck that day
The sound of blood swooshing across the brain
Remains.
When I turn in my bed
When I look up or down to the ones I loved.
And oh, how I miss looking at beautiful things.
So I go to hand you the drill
But
You leap over the table
And I can’t move now.
The pain is gone but so am I.
Totally and completely.
Simply the air you expel.
God, what have I become an accomplice to?
Maybe I should have hid under the piles of rubble
With the others
When we first heard rumblings of you.
But
I feared these things that make up my human form
Like my fingers and hair and arms and legs
Only conceal a devilish, neanderthal system of cravings
Like yours.
And while the CN Tower is being devoured,
And hot
steel
rivers
Run through all of the places I knew,
While my friends and family are getting trampled in the race to Boston,
In this basement
I will give myself to you.
Because you are hungry
And if they don’t make it,
They will surely want to give themselves too.
Oct 8, 2025
Oct 8, 2025 at 9:05 PM UTC
Adam put my hand in his hair and asked me if he looked nice tonight.
You look like you’ve been traveling on the wind a long time;
Your eyes, a whirlpool of brown and green,
Lent to you by the earth.
Dark when the sky turns, clears when the water escapes through the river.
And as the tidal waves calm; storm passes, your eyes lighten.
I feel your heartbeat slow
And your eyelids no longer feel the need to keep watch;
red roots no longer take your peace for nutrients.
You look like you’ve been taking pebbles and cactus flowers along the way to rest.
You’ve been guided by the other particles on their way to becoming,
To travel faster in your chosen direction.
And to catch a ride on the wind when it’s lazy; tamed by the hot sun.
You look like you were first formed someplace in outer space
You look like the great beyond, all that’s happened along with being narrowly avoided,
and a vintage kitchen toaster
all collided with the force of fate.
And their death - the dust -
Was solidified by the hot American sun, and made your body.
And when you stood, everything else realized it also could.
You brought the sky down to kiss the solid ground.
You said it was easy, anyone could do it.
I reach my cupped hand in the water searching for salt.
Just a speck will do.
Placid- you stand in my hand, you look up with wind behind you now.
You’ve been searching along time for a place to be that’s only yours.
You tilt your neck back and sigh.
And river beds form for you in the crevices of my hand.
You trace the ivy up my arm,
Up to my shoulder
We can watch people, places and things rise and fall,
In sync with the movement of your chest.
I straighten my hand
Come stand beside me now.
So yes, you look nice tonight,
When I see you
All I can see is the heart-stopping feeling of staring into the eyes of everything that was, is, and could be.
Your love is not the only thing you’ve done, not even the greatest-
But it’s the best thing that
i
have ever seen.
Sep 29, 2025
Sep 29, 2025 at 4:26 PM UTC