Here I find myself in grandpa’s new flat in Vancouver
Speaking in high English and making black Tea, He said
“It's always good to have company when I fear the world’s forgetting me”
The last time we made the trip, your wife saw naked apparitions on the roof
And fed the poodle chocolate and cheerios
Steaming like a chimney leaving
Smoke inside the bed linen,
But last year she had to leave
As her lost lover and world
Backtracked through the cavities in her fermented mind


For this, he sits in his arm chair by the home phone
Reading the newspaper with a seeing glass
Always waiting.
I like to think he doesn't dwell on the truth
But I can guess where he goes
When I hear old records play from his room

The day before, we visited Grandma Joyce in the ward
Where zombies wheeze and shuffle worn feet on the floor
She was displayed in her bed
In cold sterile light
Forgetting her blood and forgetting her sight

Her lips clacked open and squeaked,
“All these nice people came to see me
All these nice people came to see me
They stand in my room at night
And murmur like a chorus.
I think they want to **** me
And feast upon my dreams”
Lost, Lost and rambling, but
The guards confess that there are moments of clarity
Where she hurls her frame off the fence in twilight chanting “I need to go home”.

As the trip came to a close,
There was nothing we could do
Grandma has lost herself in the sepulcher or existence and
Her husband waiting for a resolve
He walked us to the lift and wailed like a baby to his child
“Just stay for me a bit longer, and make sure to come back.”
“We will be back soon.”
The door shifted and rang
And slowly shut faithful eyes that were never seen again

A Failed Attempt at Baptism

Before my mattress devours me and I am swept below
This feeling clouds the air
The stains have turned into a web so thick
That if I try to find the origin
It only rouses rats in my head
And they’re always starving
So I lie to myself and think, if I could just find the beginning

When I was hairless and dumb
I would lie in the breeze of the hot fan
Wet from sweat and smelling like *****
Lost in some world that I chose
Oblivious and blissful

I wish I could be that simple
But it hasn’t been since I woke
And it gets harder each time,
Standing with eyes strapped open and screaming
God set my mom’s hair on fire, and blood suckers
Driving up and down the road to check if I’m still home

It makes me wish I could be there now
I close my eyes, but sleep doesn’t come to me
I open the book, but the words aren’t real

I see married men
Who sit in old arm chairs
Without a word to say
And defeat is written on their faces
For them, all white flags have sailed
And their consolation prize is a television
And vampire children that laugh like imps
I see time unfolding
I see lovers forgotten
I see the way you pull down your coat sleeve
I see elbows rubbing
I see the smoke in the air
I see my father and twenty others
Plunged in to the lake
Trying to make whiteboards clean

We are all making do
With what we have and what we’ve been
I took my shadow to the port
And tried drowning him in the sea
But as far as I walked into the water
It never crept past my knees

I want to die with blood still in me
Putting garlic over my front door
And holding tight to mementos
Of the lives I once lived
Letters from those who once loved me
Resting in my dresser
Boxes flooding the basement
Holding teddy bears and trophies
And my dying dog wheezing on the floor

Uncomfortably, in the room of my best friend
while he nuzzles with his lover in bed
while I wait in my thoughts like,
a cold glacier below the veneer of the sea.
My back hurts.
I try counting down from one hundred and clearing it out.
But old projectors play from behind my eyelids
playing mirror images of horror films I wish I hadn't seen
I lost someone that I loved to sickness and I couldn't accept it.
It didn't feel like I thought it would.
I feel this numbness crawling me, and it's getting colder
Freezing over

There is a song whispering on the stereo,
that’s on the blank tile a few feet from me
Full of so much joy and life,
that seems to elude me
I wish I could rip the benevolent sound from the air
And consume it, and let it fill up every void
That is left in this soul in which I believe in,
Less and less
Day by day
As fate sunders me slowly
Like the song is lulling me now into darkness
Second by second

Wind blowing through white washed catacombs
And I keep trudging in the sharp shot chill
Classrooms, Occupations, all fallow wombs
Glutton for life, your heart never fills

Why? They fashioned our dreams in to chains
Toiling in the belly of the citadel
Chuck your body in the pit, fuel the flame
We were all dead silent in Moloch’s spell

Where? Is there no way to leave this ache?
Though some men have escaped to death
Broken backs; sour hearts, does it mend or break?
When we leave them behind, we may find rest

Your pain is your pride; your pride is your pain
You collapse in to the churning pit; again

Purgatory

Your voice I swear,
Is a frayed and rusty knife
That you use to peel and slice my eyes
with sadistic *******.
I'm sitting in a car with you as the night
drops blue on the earth.
I am but an empty vessel
While you fill me with quiet shame
as I sit,
your voice drills deep in my ears
and I want this moment to end
as quickly as my life will end someday,
but it won't
Moments like this are eternal.
Hell is eternal.
Swan dive your arms
with cold precision
in the depths of my mind
into the catacombs of my stomach
and steal the breath from me
But, we both took our trite words of fondness
And drowned them in the kitchen sink
Getting bits of you stuck under my fingernails.
I am a well, holding my grief deep below.

I hear your final judgment
In the car parked by the lake
as we are held in purgatory,
searching for a way out
trying to untie this knot
but it gets tighter the more I pull
until there is nowhere to go
and we leave it there
tangled and worthless.

I think I’m starting to figure it out
Like my thoughts about the future
Starting to melt
Like asphalt snow on roadsides are starting to melt
I am finally getting better
I found my way out

For four years I wallowed in your
Bereavement like this was something
That could make me better
But it’s losing meaning now
I think I’m getting better
I think I found my way out

The way my grandfather
Got that place in the forest
And how I can still see him there,
Every time I come around
Tricking the gods
And their pact of suffering
In which you hoped to evade
Thinking to himself of how he
Lived through life alone, and
He can leave it on his own terms
And when I have to leave
I will decide
The gun on the table
Near the alarm clock

One night after drinking he stumbled back home
Thinking of God, and how he could make such a world
Like ants in the glass where he laughs and he laughs
At his lost wife and his family and the things that he lacks
And the version gets blurry as he walks up the steps
And he bursts in the room panting last breaths
He holds the gun firmly and feeling its weight
Puts it up to his head and finally he isn’t afraid
He feels so clever in his way of escape
The trap of the creator in which he evade
And closed his eyes and then..
Left

His blood is still running in me.
I think I’m getting better.
I think I found my way out.
I think I’m getting better.
I think I found my way out.

This poem was written
For you, in the key of F#,
At a persistent tempo of 160bpm.

So, will you bring the timpani,
And sousaphone out from the
Back of this page, and let the

Brass roar at forte. It’s a glorious
Sound despite the clumsy trombone
Sliding off key; that my shaky hand trying to

Get it down right this time. The
Notes are there, and the feeling is
There, but it takes a lot to get it right,

And for one second we will feel the
Same thing in unison. I fear sometimes
My eye has surpassed my hand.

This poem was written with the passion
Of half drunken midnight karaoke in a
Bay Area China Town, but the audience still claps for the effort.

This poem was a song transposed for
The coyote barbershop quartets, to
Sing me awake at night.

This poem was written, because
I don’t want to love you anymore,
And I’m trying to love us, in all

Our beautiful discord, and for
The one time in a thousand where
The notes fall in to place,

As the wind instruments hum
And the choir sings at fortissimo
And for one second you hear what
I've been trying to get out, like a bad singer
Finally hitting the right note, we will feel the
Same thing at once, and our minds swing
Together in time.