Active motion
act in motion
spark the plug
and speak with love                  smalltown rain
occasional clouds                       bus stop lights out
hazy thoughts                             sway your imagination back and forth with
                                                      violin­ and incessant heartbeats

I adore you saxophone
and appreciate the pattern of your voice
there's a little something for everybody here.

(at least for those that act on their own
volition!!)

existential essays among
the Spanish backpackers belongings (Camus' Myth of Sisyphus)
the sound is dazzled with itself/
my attention wanders to the distant mountains
where snow still sits meditating on
my dreams and your dreams.

(The more we get together the happier we'll be!)

In a flash the coffee shops close and large homes from decades ago
are physically moved to other lots
and cranes observe the night
a little ways down my street
across from the Apartment I lived in around 2002
(My cousin Rachel came over while I was sick with summer fever)

EVERY STRANGER SLEEPS
I WONDER WHAT THEY DREAM
I WONDER IF THEY ARE DREAMING RIGHT NOW

painted animals wait idly in the fields of parched grass
for another bomb to go off
and I've forgotten the static of the TV
I once saw them in

May day May
day
I can't believe how hot it's been outside!
I'm forcing myself to be confident enough to wear a T shirt
(ah) at the line in the grocery store the woman ringing thru my
soon-to-be plastic bags
she's a child of her cigarettes and a mother
of her ashes. Her hair salted and her face like tired glass
I'm so sorry
I'm so sorry that love is hard sometimes
(and o so soft)

I was at the sleepy supermarket once
(in an imaginary place)
and a child was with her parents and noticed the expiry on a 2% milk
she asked
"What does this mean?"
her mom looked down at her to what she was pointing to and replied
"That's when the milk goes bad. When you can't use it anymore"

They continued down the aisles and she asked
"Do people go bad too?"
I don't know what caused her to think this so early
it's such a shame dear,
her mom frowns in that way when you're trying to hide it.

"Yes, you gotta drink the milk fast, but some people drink up life too slow and it leaves them sour"

and upon leaving back to my mattress
I never saw which direction they went or where I wound up
after accepting that my heroes would never appear.

PASSING the elementary school I once attended
during a windstorm
throwing tantrums during assemblies and making
friends with car accidents.
I try to remember names and only Sean, Alexis, Daniel and Dean
come to mind...

..So long to childhood vagueness in
days deceased to
trashcan calendars
it was nice to see you
but I really must be going now.

                   (TODAY IS A UNIQUE SHADE OF YELLOW)

I

Flowers already,
sputtering bicycles and the mad drums of foreshadowed
Springtime,
Massage therapist of the universe!
The extracted final note in a bird's outcry and my ears are full of sound
and sleep.
A cities undeterred heartbeat welcomes me to the continuous span of events only separated by the lambent verve,
windowless eyes watching each other
a signal-light blue ocean winding around a wicked mattress
seductively spinning a cowl into the night for her lover
(who's thoughts have been paused!  he's 100% clocked in and spun out, a hanging aluminum)
DAZZLING!
toothpaste spit outside into January's soft grass from a second story dorm room that's curtains reminds me of The Glenshiel..
(or maybe I'm suddenly feeling sublime death slowly knotting itself into my lungs, always been there but kinda like noticing your nose resting on your face for the first time)
On the bus home I thought of new years eve, 2015.
After the countdown, emerged from the underground
James Joyce pool hall,
rushing out to the streets
an asphalt madhouse
lunacy, absolute, and stabbings nearby tortured parkades.
Here's the new year made real,
a tangible calendar
an authoritative sentiment
while I listened to Donovan's "To Sing for You"
My new friends laughed, arms together,
I felt like I was standing on the edge of an undiscovered sun,
replaced by Vietnamese clouds
(Which I'll sail by come September)

II**

A crow waits on a balcony, wet and lonely from the rain.
Radios buzzing an electric tuba.
Smoke is the father and
dew is the mother
I am the son cold and clothed, while others soak beneath
canopies, cement gaps, they pray, I pray for them although I
wouldn't consider myself religious,
"Agnostic spiritualism"
yeah, the has a nice flow to it
but that's just my opinion..
Waking up before the sun has breathed
the first western factory.
Yellow hats
****** fists
a faint star is singing
I'm listening
ears are ringing
a static drone collapses
consciousness reaches a peak before subsiding to sunlight
(sequel to the last day, prequel to the days to come)
I'll fall in love again, I know it
I have it marked on my calendar you'll see!
Water a few hours still/room temperature/is shaking because my foot
beats against the carpet/
this music isn't exactly conventional or pure as the morning
more a glass shatter
or a psychotic scream in distant queer Victoria nightclubs.
Passing Christmas,
Oak Bay,
Spanish holiday (potentially)
and ** Chi Minh City market walks
(future events ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A university lecture from Vandana Shiva,
watching my dad's cat for four months
(Where my room was destroyed in a forty-five minute
terrified chase thru the house to lock him in a carrier for an urgent vet appointment due to kidney stones, or what we thought was urinary crystals at the time. He howled the entire car ride there)
I think back to childhood, 1996 Apartment light and the December blizzard which buried parking lots, blocked entrances/exits n forced people to be patient for once, sit and talk, make love without setting an alarm for the morning after
(before I was even 5, or 10, long before I wrote poems, and lost those I would come to care about..)
Hopefully all those elementary school friends turned out okay.
Since moving, I've frequently passed great corner store curtains,
green and grey dusty
by the rusting tills
an empty town
where the soccer fields became overgrown and ice cubes melt slow on
people's fingers (As they wait for time to roll by like it always has)
a forgivable loss of community.
Even so, there's that consistent disappointment in lost years,
a waiting room, and I'm choking on oriental carpet threads lodged one by one into my throat and here I thought I'd eventually taste the Chinese
but it appears that they have instead swallowed me, downed me with tequila (label torn from passing months and birthdays not celebrated)
The holy temperate wind expands down and through bare branches,
argumentative hours
desperate hands
a loudspeaker CALLING!
and the WILD MACHINE cuckoo cuckoo past the insulation.
Silvery sweet, undreamed kisses, misunderstandings,
the cool reflection of a kettle while two wait for midnight and for the butterfly to creep up on their shoulders.
(cradled by cosmic lobotomy, hours where not one person can sleep,
and Sadhus give spiritual advice for those that need it, India, while I need their voices here on Vancouver Island, far from the Ghats)
When can I go for that intercontinental voyage??
to escape the warehouse cathedrals,
capital Christs,
nettled lipstick,
weariness in the age of wireless consciousness
and a spectrum of commonplace goddesses who wake with no lucidity.
My breathing getting heavier every day, with the weight of wanderlust,
an asthma designed for those who's material position is dictated by a secluded room
(slowly catching fire)
I'm only months away from the prophesied airplane..
all been leading to this
here, now
soon.

The only known alleviation
on this unrest for experience
resides in poetry.

They say to
write what you know
but I'm just so
sick of
tragedies

I am Heavy-lidded tonight,
Heavy-lidded
and inscrutable in my childhood.

My childhood that was spent hysterical in airing cupboards,
Where I wept unashamedly to the fixed God
And the stained glass, rose-hewn Angels of churches
That reeked of oak and holy water.
Where I sat in the trees, high on life and vanila-blue ice cream
And with knees skinned by the ****** pathways of woods
Or the safe gravels of playgrounds.

Where sunbursted mangoes dripped with musky-sanded chlorine
And the sun-hot metal gates clanged shut in the holiday winds.
Where rocks were thrown by fated children
And paper-cheap candy wrappers filled up plastic trash cans.
Where strange, money-minded housewives gaggled and giggled
With their ******-white teeth
And reflected my mother' s bipolar poverty
In the lenses of their plastic sunglasses.
Where my self-hemmed summer dresses were stained
With green and brown and red finger paint
As the days outside grew warmer
And the inside self grew older,
Colder.

Where I was punished for expression of the self
And confined to the sanatorium
Or the offices of Moloch's servants
On a sun-stippled day in May
Where my scrap-bruised hands
Were bandaged by the words of the Real World
And threatenings of expulsion.
Where I hid behind felted display boards
On a landing somewhere near Neverland,
And lay and listened to the friend-fuelled ramblings of lost boys
Who sat and smoked in dormitories
And hallucinated Peter Pan.
Where I wrote self-indulgent fuckery in toilets
And drew crude artistries on mirrors with lipstick
And contemplated
Amo
Amas
Amat
As I sat and stared at my own disassociated hands.

Where paper aeroplanes flew and were thrown
By hungover kids in threadbare jumpers
With chewed cuffs and prefect badges,
Where holy Evian was poured over my head
After a long last day under a white marquee,
Where I disassembled pencil sharpeners with iron-smelling razor blades
and violated erasers at an exam hall desk in a stormy June.

Where I contemplated death;
Sang hymns in the darkness of my bedroom,
Took a blade to my flesh
Like the soulless piece of meat
That I believed myself to be.
Where I fell in love;
Hurt myself
More than anyone else ever did.
Where I read,
Where I wrote tear stained elegies
To my idols under the earth
And prayed that I
Would last
Just one more day.

Mad girls.
Moonlight-ripened fruit,
Fingertip-censored *****,
Fragile,
Toughened,
Violated.
Throats are burned by whisky,
Eyes blackened and tears shed.
Stars grew between your breast bones once.
Try for me now to care.

Looking heavenward, I see only the earth.
The stars align and the planets turn,
But what of the holy?

Archangels sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
And the collared cherubim bleed into the rainswept gutters
Like cut dogs in cardboard boxes by the highways of New York,
Or the roadsides of back-alley Brooklyn or Paterson,
Where the demonic masses lie naked in the streets,
Their souls bared raw to heaven
And their hair as messy as sidestreet dumpsters.

The misted rain fogs on the busted double glazing,
The bare limbed trees outside fallen victim to a long winter
And a late spring.
The air that blows through the streets of these mundane cul-de-sacs
Has passed through the lungs of cancerous dodgers
In those hell-indulgent cities,
Where children find their kicks by freerunning
Across buildings of bricks made from c-grades,
Or by standing atop high-rises in the grey wind,
And biting their tongues only to feel their own consciousness
Burrowing into them
Like parasites from the condemning schoolhouses or university halls.

You’re alone when your skies turn grey,
And the rain falls with all the purposeful intent of a neon god.
You’re alone when your smashed milk bottles and broken plates
Are like music on those drug-dampened dawns,
You’re alone when your cold, ash-stippled roof gardens
Are your only way to heaven,
You’re alone when your fingers are cut on your own writing
And you are dizzy from spinning yourself sick
Alone in your splintered art lofts.

Your stars are misaligned and your planets need engine grease to turn,
And you sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
But you still look heavenward.
You see your madness in the same silver moon
That compels the tide and transfixes wolves,
You recognise yourself in newspaper clippings proclaiming ******,
You acknowledge your expression in broken syringes
And powder remnants
On the glass-topped coffee tables of water-dripping apartments,
You feel your heartbeat in the gasolined engines
Of stuttering Cadillacs
And taste your own warm lifeblood in the burgers of roadside diners.

You see cosmological galaxies bursting like Van Goghs,
Horrible, bitter-cold starstorms underneath white skies,
Raindrop-dripping garden leaves in shrubberies and verges
And earthy rockeries,
You dream of enlightened, ***-smoking boys in beat-up trailers
And the cluttered box rooms of sky-high apartments,
Of screeching atop stone-cragged mountains of green in highlands,
Of bell-rung harbours in the white seaside towns of England,
Of the salt-chapped lips of fisherwives
And the bone-skinny children of sailors,
Of visionary angels in stained glass cathedrals,
Of the cobbled thoroughfares of lamplit cafes in a Parisian purgatory.

And yet you lie naked on floors,
You lie high on floors and let visions spill from your hands
Like the whiskey you drink.
You are under us now,
Under the earth like meat sacks.
But your vision lives on
In every piece of self-indulgent fuckery written for you,
In every copy of your collected works
Or your novels.

Seek,
Live,
****,
Die.
For you are immortal, in the end.

a mini moleskine notebook lays in the
pocket of my bright yellow raincoat
binoculars in hand, I seek out your face
amidst the crashing tundra waves.
you call out my name just as the fog
horn blows, I stop to smile, and continue
to watch the goldfinches zoom out of
sight into the grey vast sea of everlasting
winter solemnity.

I think about the days that should have come
as puffins nestle in cozy branches hiding
away from the bitter cold, as you and me
are left outside, bare.
skipping rocks has become such a bore
if I am not able to do it with you.
the touch of your delicate lips as
we swooned in the moonlight to
french jazz and the fishing knots that
would come undone no matter how many
times we tried to go ashore in that rusty
old boat, both dressed as sailors.

I’m content here in solitude away from the
ambiguous world, in our own making,
hidden from reality.
in our own frost-ridden snow globe,
if you must. lost in time, stepping
to our transient melody.

There are higher rooftops behind the fire escape
        if you would only take my hand.
The constant fear of losing sight of the stars
is apparent, yet the sun still welcomes your
       cherry lipped, delicate, pale face.
The wind whispers in your ear,
       secrets you haven’t thought about for years.
There are back roads and alley ways
       if you still want to find a home,
but sometimes being alone is enough,
       in your solitary complacency
may the moon shine as bright as your eyes.