Cigarette butts and grey ash
like the static of a tv. screen
occupying every cup, plate and empty beer can.
Ruminating across my mind in circles
an answer remains at the heart of this confusion
too weak to acknowledge, or at least too afraid.

I sat at the foot of his bed, and he stood beside me with his pants half down, the top of his belt hugging the base of his **** and a thick bed of ***** hair curling over his jeans. On the sides of his upper-thighs where they grabbed the hips, his skin was striped with razor lines.

“I cut myself here so no one can see.”

People never trust you with these sorts of things when you’re sober. Then they open up to you with such shocking honesty and determination to reach something human in someone else, secretly trying to identify something human in themselves.

I thought to myself “what kind of genuine advice can I give him?” I thought this because I didn’t actually have anything genuine to tell him. I was riddled with uncertainty—which I certainly wasn’t about to reveal to him.

I kept searching for the advice that would mend the sores of my half-panted friend with his bare thighs in my face and his heart on the floor in-front of my laced converse. But I had nothing. So I simply told him, “Want to get lunch sometime?”

He agreed that we would.

A few days went by, and both of us got distracted with life as tends to happen. Our lunch date felt more and more remote. But then I started to feel a little sad myself. Then I started to feel a lot sad, and I thought about death a lot. I wondered if this was the way he felt before talking to me, so I called him and asked to meet me for lunch.

We met up in a Chinatown bar, drinking cheap beer and trying to be young. After a few sips, he asked me why I had been feeling sad lately, but I still didn’t know what to tell him. If I had known, I would have had an answer for him when we sat by his bed, drunk.

I don’t think he knew what to say either, so we sat at the table and drank.

He told me I was a great man, and lucky too. I told him he was the best man I knew.

But somehow we both knew we had lied. Or at least our good praise cancelled each other out.

That night, I got a phone call. He had moved away in the night across the country. He told me to come visit, and I said that I would. Naturally, I never went out to visit him, he was simply too far and I didn’t care quite enough. But I still think about what I would say to him.

Our grandmother sat in the corner, an irish-plaid towel hung over her legs, in a wheel chair, drinking two litre bottles of apple juice and orange juice, the little droplets hanging off her chin, her head tilted back. She said as a little girl, she would always try to get as much vitamin c as possible if she felt herself getting sick. Now she just drowned herself in the stuff. We kept telling her orange juice is not a viable cure for cancer, so she started drinking apple juice too.

She got diagnosed with cancer a few days after our grandfather died. They say couples always pass within a few months of each other. My grandmother hated my grandfather, so her vigorous orange and apple juice guzzling was really an ambition of divorcing his name from her in death; she didn’t care whether she passed or kept on living another hundred years, so long as no one associated her death with his.

As I left I locked up, remembering to leave my key in the door for Rooty (whenever he got home). We could only afford one key, and couldn’t afford a doormat to leave it under.

I told grandma if she just went two days without buying lotto tickets, we could get another key. She says it’s just her luck that one of those days would be the day her ticket goes to someone else. I didn’t see it mattered, she was gonna die any day now anyway. She wants to win so bad I often think if she did win, she’d die right there on the spot, her life’s greatest ambition crossed off the last line of her to-do list, and being too dead to claim it would be forced to forfeit the prize leaving us here alone with one key, a cellar full of juice and still no doormat.

I drove down a side road
Because I’m a man of adventure.
It was a beautiful path.
The birds sang.
Honey smell in the air.
A breeze sustained.
The sun kept my skin warm.
The soft clay held me in place as I negotiated the turns.

But it was a side road.
It only strays from the main drag for so long.
Eventually, I’ll leave the road—as I always do
even when I don’t want to.

Otherwise risk the possibility of parking the car
Getting out.
Realizing it was only a side road.
The likes of which are only infinite and true
When you leave them
And when you re-travel them, it’ll be that of mind and not of body.

Our memories last only long enough to allow us to learn a lesson, that, by the time we are done learning, we have already forgotten—our minds wiped blank by encroaching knowledge, a new lesson, making it’s way into our mind.

It’s a ****** wheel. All the activity cancels itself out.

to work towards a goal; to **** yourself slowly
to remain still and try to remember happiness; you will die unfulfilled
but even the most fulfilled men and women
die, only to forget,
Even the happy
die, forgotten

So our lives are cruel continuums
circular tail chasing
quick whiplash memory
depression.

I **** myself slowly
boiled in the human condition.

beaten by a life
that never mattered

in the centre of obsidian
my skull hanging with crystals that form overtime
when you leave your mind running
like the calcium deposit in my teapot
the crystals form overtime

But overtime,
the *** has stopped working
no water can fit through the spout anymore
so i’m left with this kettle, so full of water
my tea cup is empty
it’s empty and now useless

with nothing to pour
into my tea cup
I’ll waste away
and so will my cup
and so will my kettle

I met a friendly man today

“Hey! Whatcha workin on?” He said.

“Oh, just work.”

He beamed at me, a stale glaze dampening his eyes.

“Just work? You don’t enjoy it?” He smiled at me. 

I looked up from my work once more.

Mouth puttied into place.

Wax eyes.

“Just work.” I replied. 

He told me to “cheer up!” 

But I wasn’t sad.

I tried to keep my gaze steady
to keep from going sour
glazed over and false happy.

His **** eyes.

Were sadder than hell.


I wondered what my eyes looked like to him
and if this is what it meant to be human.