Should I stay, or should I go?*
Reveal the consequences I first should know
If behind the red velvet drape
it means I lose you, do I still escape?

We courted across mountains and cherished our flaws
If I head to the coast will you stay true to my cause?
I waited for you across thousands of elk
Will you now linger, as I re-boot myself?

How might I render your mind at ease?
I seek only to love, if not to appease.
Let me have a summer by sea.
It isn't you, my dear, it's me.

Served best cold, the soup of the day:
Should I go or should I stay?
In between stations, tossing rocks
settle in the seat, or get off next stop?

I want the whole cake
big as you can bake
I want the biggest slice of my future
I want a bellyful of something pure.

I want the wind, I want the rain
I want to dance, to love again
Should I go or should I stay?
"Everything seems perfect from far away."

I weary so fast of the City Games
I'm a Shire-born Took, I long for old names
Life isn't green here, the hues do not play
Colour-blind amidst the shades of grey.

When I run, I run in circles
I try to dream, my dreams are purples
I know you try to assuage my alone
I love you my dear, but I want to go home.

Underneath all of the sea
silver pennies lie
in the echoes of wishes
that fasten me to the sand
dreaming beneath the blanket
of a manta ray, exhaling bubbles
to the astronomy of jellyfish
as I'm rocked in the crush of all the earth's gravity
cradled deeply
within the songs of whales
twenty thousand leagues below the stars.

Ready, set-
Enter the dream.
Almost like real, now,
the retro cross-section of a house,
picture: Eighties
Complete With Dishes
thrown away furbishments-
relics of frat houses past
a lonesome piano
a most questionable oven
and ***** carpets.

And a little porcelain doll
glued together many times over
arms outstretched, a perpetual please
and the head askew, cocked for
the sound of the front door
under her mothy crown
as the dust settles
as the sun goes down.

Almost like real.



But not quite.

And when she told me, eyes flashing,
"the one most important value is to love yourself"
I asked her in one breathbut how do you
love the   self
   the            self      that
the self that is in transition,
evolving, im(ex)ploding
colouring over tradition?

How shall I love what I do not even know?

And when my Morrie, starting to quiver
turned from solid to liquid
she said in one breathyou gather up those
*******-i-n-g pieces and you love them
you love them s-o h-a-r-d anyway

And that's when it dawned
that I'd be okay.

In a Sherlockian air, her slender fingers touched tips
like a steeple over the one safe altar she knew,
herself.

And so, as I began to build,
I knelt at the steps.

spooon me in your mouth
tongue-melt my hardest bits
mostly sugar, babe.

Always take the stairs, my dove.
Sweet girl, put away your knife.
You need not cut asunder these vines
they'll make you grow so tall in life.

Always stand up straight, my heart
Let them see your imp eyes burn
as you sing in constellations
swirl as you turn.

Always mismatch your socks, my dear
Never forfeit your spontaneity
for conformity, my sweet,
live your eleven in gaiety.

Always love your love freely, pet
My baby sister, your soul consumes
each who touch it, it follows me still,
bursting like a rose in bloom.

Today is the noon of my existence.
Never again shall there be morning.
The sun is high and I- I am still quick.
I reel into the hurry of afternoon,
watch it spin ever soft into evening
into the dark embrace of everythings,
float six words buoyant upon the crest of strife,
I recall the only saying that ever had value:
"Make something beautiful of your life"

I am in the coffee shop.
You wish you were.
Your snouty head is one great flappy nostril.
Your belly is huffing and I know if I could hear you
You'd be whining.
Your eyebrows are raised in a way
that defies (or proves) evolution theories.
Your pinkly jowls dripping with the mixed
urban aroma of cars, pigeons, and
smelly bipedal mammals.
An olfactory carnival.
You sit on the pavement red-leashed to a bike,
a statue of solemn dignity as passerby
pause to scritch your ****.

I feel the answer to approaching adulthood gracefully
is to chronicle your life in Stuart McLean vignettes.
Spoken like Bach. Rubato. Cadential.
Lovingly. With humor.
Because you will notice, you see,
that job burnout, the belly fat,
and the dent in your bike are all crispy
slices of burnt toast
on the warm Christmas radio sound of
Saturday morning CBC.

They don't matter.
And that's exactly what makes
these stories beautiful.

I see a Woman eating her muffin
looking at Man who is looking
looking into the depths of his paper cup
and the wrinkles and rivers on the back of his hand
thinking When did I get those?
Coffee Cup looking at the blue bin in the corner
Coffee Cup thinking Well, I guess this is how it goes

The secret force that wrenches eyes upward
from the secret morning monologues
happens like electricity happens
and Man sees Woman's eyes and frowns
and can't tell whether they are blue
or brown.

Crumbs are on her lap.
Man doesn't notice but Woman thinks he does
Moving imperceptibly and not wasting a calorie
she flutters her hands over the warm loaves of her thighs.
Man notices an ephemeral strain Simon and Garfunkle and
becomes aware of a softening within his sternum and
electrons slowing, softing, into a May spring aesthetic
Woman rubs her finger which does not have a ring
and Coffee Cup wonders if it will still
have sentience within the bin or if the world
with all its broken beauty and mornings and warm hands
will suddenly just stop everything?

I look at my keys. The sort that express, not
the sort that open doors and drawers
but even these, time to time, will
fall beneath the wooden floors.

Man pulls his long coat off the back of his chair
without ceremony rises and turns to go
leaves his cup on the table for a coffee girl to attend to
and exits as the rain turns to snow.

Woman sits. And sits.
Woman might order another pumpkin muffin.
Her knees are chilled, watching her pinkly from the edge
of a pencil skirt like children's faces from a blanket.
A moment later she makes that same comparison
and laughs internally without gesture or sound.

And Woman looks around.

Woman smiles. Not because of Man or muffin
or the secret life of a Coffee Cup
but because she is Woman
struck lively by the sudden meta
fleeting passage of The Bigger
and her eyes, definitively brown
spark like bumper car antennae
and struck by magic, the same magic electricity
for an irreversible instant meet mine.

And for one fourteenth of a moment
Woman knows Me with all her life.
I shiver and she lobs me the red bean bag
and I hold the image in my mind like
a relic of the living divine.

The Bigger, the morning
the secret was mine.

August nights are deceptive
in almost every way.

Chivalry may only go so far
two blocks in the dark.
Pausing in natural progression
cross-legged pavement within a 70s orange halo
to pet the neighborhood cat and to measure
the circumstances of the crossroads.
To measure up the exhausted opponents
of the oldest colosseum.

your frown spoke only negations
betrayed by your truth-or-dare eyes.
whites revealing an ancient wound,
irises concealing an urgency
that spread to me on the sidewalk
like purple chalk on the driveway
Or tendrils of ink in water.

I watch the Janus of your being
oscillate like glass
afraid of breaking itself.

The mouth that denies
is the mouth that calls its own bluff
Renouncing its resolve all over
damp trembling skin and
the high of oxytocin.

I'll... I'll see you again tomorrow?

August nights are deceptive
in almost every way.

Dilate my pupils
hasten my breath-
my Sorcerer conjures
the prettiest death.