"just talk about love, or ***, or starving hearts, or just shut up
and I'll go

but" - Jonathan Richman

(..NIGHT)

A drunken man is blown by bathroom paintings,
with shower curtains displaying crowned sparrows
who laugh at his
crowned ****!
and humor his life!
also crowned
(but only subjectively if you were to ask anyone else)
I'm a burning insomniac surrounded by a whole cast of characters tonight, including the one with with a lazy eye who mirrors Chaplin
and arrived to the party disoriented from recent Salvia.
Then there was the one with a sleek current-edge-type haircut
who spent a few good minutes telling me about the film works of Philip Glass
            B E A U T I F U L
They play Bowie,
the whole social palette disintegrated beneath the weight of intoxication.
I, too, am dazzled from pale alcohol already (eight minutes past Midnight!)
The Dancing Athlete ambiguously dances on an absent television while my head hurts from a blue bulb glowing from a nearby lamp because it's too late for all this
and I'm reminded that I know almost nobody here.

(...AND DAY)

Maybe thirteen hours later, walking with Dante the bearded dog,
my friend wheeled a stranger, narcotic-vacuum-cheeked amputee.
He begged for light, as in a lighter, not that light of GOD, no no,
all the while he showed off his stub leg (cut off at the knee) bleeding out all over the sidewalk when his accident first occurred.

"THIS GUY THREW ME FROM THE BALCONY!" he preached

Past the cathedral narcissus
"JESUS COME/
JESUS SAVE MAN/
JESUS MAKE FIRE/
JESUS WAS A HOLY INDIA"
Across the street, village of enduring tombs and firesmoke,
shadowed tent outlines
breathed-in
playing cards and tricks
mandolin reverberations among tents and tents of
sickly or addict, all listening in on the live performance, a blessed Alice with dreads, lively chords emitted from her skull of ideas.

The forgotten noose of man ****** in a parking lot
by a liquor store, while we pick up some wine, which is, and I quote here "DRY AND CHEAP"
A sunny quiet perched on the field
of gleaming downtown streetlights
thru thinning clouds.
Olympic mountains in view, the kind of mountains only seen in magazine articles to be experienced by those unafraid to die.
All these sad people out here, too!
Their faces expand beneath capital industry,
Elephants occupied with jackets sewn in an anonymous factory.
Quick tip, I wanna write it down before I forget: don't listen to that old music when you're feeling lonely, it's all about love and especially in tragedy this is a bad idea.

I'm sick and wept and my teeth have been growing cameras,
the youth are dressed in drag, carpet cleaners bob their heads to unheard tunes but you can see the sound thru a glass window.

This city, oh, this city..
with bodies sprinting hard by each other and who bike across train tracks associated with very vague childhood memories.
We all float on hands electrified by the night!

Jonathan Richman tonite, who's vocal deliveries have been honest
and romantic, in a passionate sort of way.
He's singing that live track "A Plea For Tenderness"
(I know you were waiting for me to get to this)
and past few days have been strange
and past few weeks stranger, still. Not as bad as a lot of people but man, strange..
that night, and day.
Walking by the Victoria Hospice care center and looking down on my wrists which'll soon be tattooed with loving hands yet oh
so
aggressively pained by abuse because of a terminal disease and attempted suicide (NOT my own life, to clarify)
and it got me thinking on how we're all mutually getting thru this place and every face has seen hearts and seen death almost equal.
It can get to be too much, that's why melancholy has been defined to begin with. But ******* Jonathan Richman had to make this song.

"if I'm better than the wall
(tell me now)"

"Because it's dark at night
and I'm alone at night
I'm so sad and I'm so scared"

Things I've said in my own head and felt in my own time
as has everyone else. I don't mean to specify that this has happened RECENTLY, but it's definitely happened before. These times.

"now, I've just read some writers
from the old days
because I knew, I knew that they'd understand"

but BUT everybody is accidental!
even Rimbaud has stubbed his toe and I know that it'll be fine
it'll be fine
it'll be fine
in Vietnam maybe
and it'll be finer in Varanasi
(maybe-r)
but for now I don't know
I can say it I can try and feel it and understand it and pretend I know it
I gotta get away from people to be replaced by a Hindu I've never seen before
and sleep on a mattress that (like a new pair of shoes) hasn't grown in to my spinal chord and hurts ****** bad at first and is unfamiliar and the weather is warmer than usual
and the horns of traffic will be frightening but that too, will dissipate with time.
I gotta save up my money and hug my wallet like a starved cat
Jonathan ******* Richman's "A Plea For Tenderness"
what a fitting title
for a time like this one now.

Today marks the birth of Spring!
             Sun Ra says so,
Halycon Jazz and
            desire blooming from a blossom's womb.
Glass tower apartments line the waterfront ignited by the
            sun's shy arrival.
Birds have become more public in their idling and a
            schizophrenic joy has flowered in people's heads.
Shining
showered
tended root
           the horn's bellow in all directions,
windshield wipers shall have their hibernation
          while this garden city constructs
a new tune!
AND A SMALL BELT OF LIQUID LAMPSHADE IN THE SKY!
                                                         SOLVENT!
                            HEARTBEAT!
         Weather's cleared up, AT LAST!
The candy-shaped hookers of Rock Bay can draw their laugh-on-lips
        and straighten themselves
to Patience and Prudence's “A Smile and A Ribbon”
A man outside a gas station one block down the street from my house
        can get his cigarettes and quell his KICK
to the sound of clouds evaporating.
Today marks the birth of Spring!
        Snow's wet corpse made into a child of yesterday
I'm in my 20th ******* year, I'll grow more inspired as it hits April
  
  KAMIKAZE PAINT
                                          RABID POET
                                                            ­      PAVEMENT TRANSPARENT
              All of it is H A P P E N I N G
                              this FORWARD CONDITION!

I'll lay in bed reading my books on reincarnation and
“Meditation: A Practical Study” (Adelaide Gardner)
while I finish the last of the Winter's wine.

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.