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.

Round candle circle
light bounding wall to wall
dark vinyl corners and alcohol spews
from the dry lips of young people talking about how
the power has gone out.
There's Bossa Nova and a floral couch and conversation
decorating the room
cars hurdle on in the black, ferocious nighttime and I'm cold.
A GREAT PINK BIRD
Plastic and commited to a vow of silence hangs from the ceiling curved
like a beautiful woman, some of us are in bathrobes, a stretching tentacle hits the brain an incense smell
bubbles foaming in the core
a wicked liquid!
names are being called!
drunks DRUNKS DRUNKS
Drums DRUMS DRUMS
Literary minds taking puffs from the mechanical grapevine
center of this room now foaming
and a flute rises in sound
!L O U D E R!
The painted fruits have arrived!
Including the drag queen and the one who slept soundly in Saint Malo
(who currently reads from a flaming newspaper)
Smellings salts sharpen people's noses, an instantaneous rush and
nauseating sensations, SNAP OF ENERGY/
Which has disgusted Imogen and been repeated by everyone else
curiously.
The lights came back on hours ago.

India is on the mind,
talks of Varanasi now that it's previous inhabitants have moved to Spain, another step in their vulnerable but accepted state of mind
and journeying to find a definition of self
(Which I am going thru now)
The girl who held a flower sweetly bloomed in Alaska,
The girl who dances alone in an isolated cabin up island who still occasionally drives to the dentists office 45 minutes away in a small town I used to call home,
The martial-arts teacher/meditational healer who recited W.C Williams with me on the bus in July's romantic ash.

Where is
it?
Where is
what?
I and you and we
What to do
Where to do it
What times might it call upon us
It (this)
The current and present interval of morning
hours where my face aches from (trying) to sleep funny.
No, really? where's it at?!
Birds rise from a wintry treeline, a stranger waits at the bus stop,
I'm freezing out here the next morning and predict much the same
till at least March of next year.
Bones are blooming around me, youth to swell and
love to feel
we're peeling petals
and shedding subjective gold all over the linoleum
but don't ask me who made it I can't tell ya nobody can, later on as a windswept forest road covered in loose pine needles and fir branches
hits the eyes
I walk home and listen to a man imagining his own private orchard.
I'm reminded just then that Albert Camus once said that everyone has (at one point) experienced or will experience the realization that everything (all of it)) is simply absurd, and always has been. We either choose to accept the world, and recover from an overwhelming Nihilism, or decide that it's not worth continuing our lives.
But after a sight like this I'm also reminded that
sometimes even you or I could be beautiful.

Dark spotted room luminous
stage flare and fire
from the bandstand
reverberating energies
I hold a shipwrecked bottle in my hand
people are screaming
to the transient
and the metaphor
and the silent sky
I hold wicked form in my other hand
KURT     VONNEGUT    PLAYS
(Not a piano)
The room is faster
and chuckling heavy set back row phone call
girl scratches her lottery ticket
It's freezing out
I got a job at a movie theater, new time starts NOW
and we're all trying to make something out of tonight
Sylvia is shaking through the ferocious storm
that Sylvia, the same colors as an
inspired tattoo belonging to a year
everyone's on about
including ** Chi Minh City
and all it's superhighway narrowness n sunshine
What a hell of a year this one has been

(Blackout---Springboard--Parade--Pendulum--Butterfly--???)
­
SO LONG!
SEE YOU LATER!
THERE'S AN EASTERN SONG
I MUST PLAY FOR THE CHILDREN OF VIETNAM!
IN A LANGUAGE THEY DON'T YET UNDERSTAND!

After the show is done
I emerge and the modern rebel
puts on his jacket where written on his back with hard tape reads

“WAR IS OVER”

the hysterics go back to their usual voiceless catatonia
and I wonder at that moment
how we can feel so alone
with so many of us here.

You're alone again...
another daylight epiphany, detached, taxed, viewing traffic through the misty window
as the sun inflates and coffee warms
your gentle bones.
I'm in a rainbow hotel with a black cat, singing truisms
down the hallway when nobody is around
(and I can slam the doors OPEN AND CLOSED)
just to make it seem like there's more going on in here than there actually is.
Some would call that insanity, I don't know what I would call it.
You're a stranger again, slowly aligned by one's entire life to a
parking lot blacktop,
faces passing like curtains, and you're blue
I'm blue too.
I require an anthem to get myself up at sunrise,
I require a great staircase limelight triumph signaling the (future) snow-capped mountains
to watch my great decay.
Oh it continues and will never cease...
my matter recollecting into life and then death again.

The whole world is lonely,
ceasing it's communal conversation to heal by
fire flower bloomed
and the whistle of
a kettle hymnal
you're alive and for now everything is all right.
I understand..
I don't understand
.....
you can't expect me to know any better as someone
who's endured the last four years in a storage unit
fenced by archaic wigs
and cockroaches who throw model parties
in the overcast shadow I can't illuminate
as it is all darkness there.
I could listen to cars travel by the locked door
and I could see the faint glow of a headlight when the sun goes down but I lacked the strength to pull that door open or to leave.
The only thing allowing me to escape was companionship,
“Will your own reality”
there's some situations in life that are simply inevitable
such as love
and lacklove
the searing pain in one's gut when they recognize another night in solitary confinement (a punishment of circumstance)
Or an internal circus in witness of the amaranth figure standing by my doorway and it's incandescent approach
and you (I) don't even have to plead.
That black cat likes to hide up in the lobby chandelier purring thoughts
......
To itself?
or to nobody
to the cat it doesn't seem to matter.
I named it Franz
(guess why)

In public, I have found there's always qualities you can appreciate in someone's smile,
they have a way of seeming so distant and yet all part of the same face,
crying without shedding a tear,
whispering for help without saying a word,
ready and willing to try with one another.
But instead it's the songs on a bus or silence.
I decide which
and so do the other passengers.
(subjectivity)
Your voices are beautiful I wish
you could really understand that,
when I wade by in a night
enclosed to a single room
in a single house
on an island in
it's own wet corner of the world,
only music.



Out
                          there                    ­      making
what I CAN of living
            with
                                  myself
­      and
s o m e t i m e s
(if I'm so lucky)

Others

sweetly           spinning
          
      coinless
                   and
              covered in heartbreak
on
   the
       way
             to
                a
                  shrine
                   ­        to
                              be
                             ­     kissed
                                            by
      ­                                          possibility.