Betwixt of any sense beyond experiment, I sat on the bed between shifts and out-whipped the bag of Concerta given to me by Matt, o'timey hard-worker-soft-souled Matt, who felt, perhaps, that I had a legitimate reason to explore this legal avenue of pharmaceutical mind-manipulation for reasons he would rather fathom in retrospect. I popped a single pill, and voilà, the legal-cocainnabinoid began to flow between my red and white blood-cells playing cops and robbers.

It is when I feel nostalgic that I feel the need to write. I remembered, at work, with all those strange everyone-elses faces gliding past (and myself annoyed at the general lack of positive reception "Hello there!" "h .. i ." is one sour-looking businessmans sultry whispered reply.. once, a woman told me 'look, I know that you are told to say hello at the door to everyone who enters, but I don't like it. I just want to shop in peace, and no, I don't need any help' and without case to what my managers could say, I somewhat-hissed-back, "if you don't want to be greeted, then perhaps you shouldn't walk into big private corporate establishments to find the books you're looking for," and she shrugged and muttered some ****-talk under her breath and glided upstairs to find a copy of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Machiavelli's The Prince to validate her bitter attitude, I bet, the sour witch), my time spent living in that backwater Esso suburb of Port Coquitlam back in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street was still a hungry potential, not yet bogged down in procrastinates over herbal teas and talk of chakras and enlightenment and how the typical Wall Street businessman probably never had a real ****** and hence had never truly satisfied the energies now burnt-to-crisps inside his Root Chakra or whathaveyou, where I believed I would find a better, more interesting world further from the musty-smallness of forest-drenched rain-drenched Powell River, only to discover I may be right outside my front door, but that's EXACTLY where I was, no further than right outside my front door.. I mean, for Goddaskes, I was born in Vancouver, this isn't a culturally-shocking move to New Delhi or Kathmandu--- and so on and so forth is how I once berated myself thru constant cycling thoughts of no-escape, I, a little walking hell of devils-advice and panic disorder-- the Great Big Port City of George Vancouver only succeeding in further overwhelming my already delicate attempt at false optimism thru self-voided Buddhist smalltalk as I travelled from bookstore to bookstore reading Alan Watts in shady attempts to save-myself but only digging my walking grave even deeper into the soil of feared-insanity.

Port Coquitlam itself was a small-town wearing a business suit and holding hands with an angry father forcing him to college for computer networking as it's the most economically viable market at hand.. at first, I did not see this. I saw my idolized imaginings of Vancouver (never Port Coquitlam), the shining water-reflected skyline of my past and present legacies, where my father once snorted ******* with a bohemian group of someones, and my mother tried LSD just to prove to her friends how bad it was (and lo and behold, what a terrible time she had!), all this Otherness, Strangeness, yet still Connected-- an Otherness with which I was taken, left to whisper into empty Campbell's cans so-as to speak with the city from a distance, two children growing older together 'til my inevitable return and our agreement to share costs on rent.

I returned, as planned. I returned, and found that old-best-friend hating the Homeless and loving the Rich-- spending time with the Peppy Plutocracy whilst enslaving the Middle Classes (first Letter Capitals to Assist YOU in Grasping my Anger with All Five Thumbs) and the horrors I saw in my already delicate state, all the starving addictives slouching-inching down the sides of ***** old walls, the only thing missing a smear of blood to follow their corpseish collapse, all just footnotes to history, footnotes to wealth and progress-reality, all footnotes with no shoes O my God O my Goodness and O Canada, Our Home and Native Land!

It hurt like it did, but I felt powerless and gaited. Felt like it were just as well me (*** it just as well is), I, in Vancouver.. *Great Big Port City of George Vancouver.. saw the end-stretching-cold-legs of Nietzsche's Dead God.. those in cutthroat-black-suits armed with calculators and wives could afford private jets and yearly trips 'round our globular strangeness whilst others had to beg and berate and debate and break-down to get a crummy old bagel and a past-due mostly-empty jug of old milk and perhaps a 'side of fries with that order.'

What crushed me so much about this playing a Witness to God's Death (or, not so much a 'witness' as a relative asked to the morgue to identify the body) was my intuitive grasp that this is the poverty of the First World.. this is not as bad as it gets and on a scale of 1 to 10 this would only be a 3.. all the poor and displaced of Eastern Europe.. Moldovan families indifferent to the whims and what's taken.. someone called me a Socialist and said I would later grow out of it as 'reality' angled its rearing-ugly head to chop me smithereens like it did so mercilessly to the Poor and Irrelevant.. I looked at them and still look at people like them and think 'that is evil unsure of itself.. that is evil unaware... that is evil and evil is  evil to watch..' the Evil Act being the use of Money to purchase the world, demanding us all to pay royalties (mass royalties) for the privilege of life so afforded by them.. (the Sons and Daughters of God first stabbing their father then stabbing themselves then locking away and ignoring their young brother with cerebral palsy '*** he could never be armed with a calculator, nor wife)..

I learned, thru practice, to cope with these evils as laws-for-now. Coping did not mean tolerance, nor did coping mean agreement.. I had charged at life expecting hugs and bottles.. what I got was hugs and bottles.. all while I watched over the shoulder of whoever embraced me and saw young-others doing the same, where are the hugs and bottles..? they sank into the nether as the crowd ebbed past, ignoring the cries of pleading love, pleading love over time so traumatised as to distort this love (so inherent and implied in the Heart) into confusion, confusion into loss, and loss into hatred.. as the crowd ebbed past, the crowd ebbed past..

After 3 and a half months, I moved back home to Powell River.. the soggy ol' calm of what I already knew.. the warm arms of the rest, the warm arms of water-reflected sunsets.. and I got my hugs and bottles.

but was this really a happy ending?

Getting sick of my best friends
Just want to meet some people on the surface
Everyone's a little ugly on the inside
Or maybe I'm just blind, haven't been able to look past it, it just resides

But I don't need to be picked apart by you, and I don't want to pick you apart
Because maybe we're the problem
Maybe I should stop trying and study hard and go to work
Get caught up in this dishroom small talk
Talk to her till I don't have to think anymore and
Get caught up in what could have been

I've been trying not to write to you.

I spent a lot of time alone in museums as a child.
Often it was the Museum of Fine Art in New York.
My father would teach, and I would go to the museum.
I was too young to be there by myself.
The marble floors echoed with footsteps.  
People swirled around me,
But as I was so small, nobody really saw me.
I was glad they didn't.

There was a room full of statues where the slanted ceiling was made of glass
And sometimes rain would slide down it and make them seem alive.
I burned to touch them.
Their skin
Looked soft.

I never spoke on those days.
I just looked.
Sometimes at the art,
Sometimes at the people.
Everyone had somewhere to go, it seemed,
Buzzing with murmured conversation like bees in an enormous hive
They blurred past me.
But every so often I would wander into a room
And find a stranger standing alone before a painting
Completely still and starkly different from the others, as if caught in amber
And I'd know that if I looked at the painting too
I would see a little piece of their soul there.

Maybe that was where it started,
Maybe that was how I began to look into people.
I say into-
I mean
That if you place a mirror directly across from another, the repeating reflection goes on forever,
And if the light hits it just right it creates a prism-
Hallways of mirrors all throwing shards of light and color and shadow back on one another infinitely.
I say into, and I mean that I haven't found my home yet
But I've seen little glimpses of it
Refracted in someone's eyes
Just for a second-

Only ever for a second
And only ever there.

I've been trying not to write to you.

There's something I'm looking for,
And I've been searching for it since I can remember.
It is a constant hunger in the core of me,
Deeply rooted and deeply unsatisfied.
As I grew, it grew
And bore fruit I could never stop craving
But could never be sated by.
People sense it in me, now.
I see it touch them.
Sometimes a stranger will move around me like a moth around a flame
Trying to get close enough to thaw, but not
To burn.
Sometimes, they will withdraw
And look at me with shining eyes
Like an animal which knows something with teeth
Watches.
Whatever it is,
It moves me like it moves them,
But in here is no retreating from it.

After years of aching inside, I learned to seal myself up.
It was so tiring to need all the time
On such a massive scale
To chase something I wasn't even sure existed.
If I can keep all the light out
Sometimes whatever is in there will curl in on itself and fall asleep
Dormant, like a plant beneath deep snow,
But even while it sleeps, it grows.
The world settles into a haze
And I find...
Not peace,
But at least rest.

Sometimes I stay like that for months,
Sometimes I convince myself that there is no other way to live.

But nothing is ever permanent,
And eventually someone
Takes me by surprise.

All it takes is the barest of seconds
And I am garishly exposed
And the light is harsh.
I throw up my walls, my defenses,
And huddle, praying in the dark.
But by then
I never know if I am praying to be overlooked
Or discovered.
I only know
That it's the hardest I've ever prayed,
Every time.

Days. Weeks, maybe.

The memory of light courses through me
A drumbeat
Attaching itself to the rhythm of my heart and vibrating my bones.
I struggle to contain it
And it echoes off the walls of me, pressing against my skin from the inside.
It seeps through my dreams, steady and strong,
And cracks form all over,
Pinpricks of light slicing in.

When I accept defeat it is like being rescued.

This
Is the feeling I have fought against and worshiped my whole life.
It is the feeling I have watched people run from
Wracked by fear I feel with them but cannot answer to.
It is the feeling which
Some days
Becomes so consuming that I can't eat, can't sleep, can't think.

Like any ancient deity, it demands blood.
But like any good one, it delivers salvation.

It is this... thing, this need,
Which has pushed me out into the world again every time I have decided that I am too fragile for it.
Its nourishment
Is beauty
And I am its instrument
Before I am my own.
I search, I wander.
And it has twisted me inside with pain, sometimes,
But it has also given me purpose.

Once, I stood waist deep in the sea at dusk
In the tropics
With the sun reaching red across the surface towards me
And something in me reached back.
The trees behind me shed their white flowers into the waves
And a storm broke overhead.
The water churned with drops
Lighting seared across the hot sky
Thunder rumbled through me
And I was surrounded by a world of chaos and light and fury.
Beneath me the tide tugged this way and that on the hem of my dress
Wrapping around my hips and pressing me towards the open ocean.
For the smallest moment then,
I didn't feel the twisting of need in my chest.

Since that day I have followed this strange gravity
Whenever I wake up inside.
I let it lead me anywhere, everywhere, as long as I find a moment of peace at the end.

I've followed it through London streets
Where mist hung thick in the air and turned the light from the streetlamps to floating golden dust
Dragging my hands along the rough stones of buildings in the shadows
Searching with my palms for something​ to soothe me.

I have been pulled from my bed
And out onto lonely roads made of dirt and clay
Trying to wrap my fingers around the slivers of moonlight that slant through the trees
In those moments of morning when the world holds its breath,
When the spiderwebs are still poised to catch their silvery droplets and splay out in shining galaxies on the dark, whispering grasses.

I have swallowed my hesitance and stepped into crumbling buildings
With vines snaking through their bare windows
Found the dormant hearts of them and listened to the small scuttlings without fear or judgment,
Spoken to the ghosts in their hollow language of sighs and coldness.

I have stepped to the very edges of high places
And looked straight down
Felt the complex craving that all human beings have
Which bids them fall
And let it swallow me without letting it move me.

I've looked into eyes that thrilled and terrified me with their power
And opened myself completely
Sinking to my knees.

All this in service of a feeling, which like a shining thread pulls me irresistibly onward, keeping me up nights with my futile searches, and filling me with words and art and music too intricate to make but too urgent to lock away.



I've been trying not to write to you.

It didn't work.