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softcomponent May 2014
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?
softcomponent May 2014
there is a stretching vein in the
minutes of my life, shaved and
unsaved with every drag from a
cigarette, line of *******, or sip of
winey-alcohol. there is a moment
left unseen and soon severed, 20 /
40 / 60 / 80 years down the road.

I don't mind-- I've got the lungs of
an angel, long run, beast on the skivvy.
I've    got a mind like a bottle of sand,
scratch-scratch, lest we get the questions
in the little book you didn't mean to purchase
back before you knew your fifth grade teacher
could make kids as real as you

c'est la vie / & creeks would run the
blood like broken-facet-dream-containers

-- so you kept on waking up, j'st screaming
at the void
softcomponent May 2014
'Dutch Bakery' in purpled-neon, lights of the cross-street behind slink outward vis reflection projected unto Liquor Plus, Empire Theatre. Kind and married-typical common law couple with a fellow looking feel-low sits with pack atop his lap, tapping bottom, fidgeting leg. His partner whispers 'shall we go for coffee?' and he seems a little fizzled to respond with 'yes, ha ha, yes!'

They all look tired on the bus and I'm wired on the bus, a psychoactive passion for coffee in all forms the general complicit in my make-up brazier. The fuzzy-muffled image in the dark beyond the moving windows are like ground-level star-scapes hopping from eye-to-eye. No one here can see they're part of the greatest story ever told. Part Ten I etch unto a sketch upon a smartphone, I won't forget this moment and neither will the world. All of them I love, they love me back in some corrupted way. Won't admit the night is bright with kisses and arms up past the hemisphere.

Noting every quick fix is a way of ******. Brooklyn ******, 'MOI-da,' counting ways to be defunct. It's a long day every day, some days are handfuls and others vast oceans wherever. Spliced and shared between the masses, each mass correct of parts who think the masses are a giant individual with a fluctuating waistline depending on the era.

You can't help but come and ask yourself, 'whatever became of me? whatever began in hoping? whoever saw land in site?' before the histories rot in landfills, nothin more than sun-drenched wood-sheets, sketched-out symbols on a saw. and this, and this, and this

and this, my friends, is how the story told itself again

          again

                     again

again

              again.
softcomponent May 2014
Called in sick to work, disappoint the boss, *** of a terrible ***** hangover I framed as the flu.

'I've got the cold-body-shivers and a bucket next to my bed. I'd be no help to you, trust me.' Thankfully, one of the friendlier dishwashers agreed to work the shift in my absence. My hangover eventually plateaued into one of those fried-brain poetic calms, where you're pretty sure that terrible habit of yours shaved a few minutes or days from your life, and yet you're in some sort of involuntary (yet accepted and mostly secretly-desired) state of meditation and trance with the world. People walking past speak of strange, complex lives, with their own problems, their own triumphs, romances, fears, and aspirations.

Two young college-boys, dashing, laugh with each other at Habit Coffee. My debit card stopped working for some strange reason, with the machine reading 'insufficient funds' as the cause, and yet I managed to check my balance via online application, and I still have a solid $15.86 available so something is clearly wrong. I explain this to the baristas at Habit, and the girl understands my first-world plight, gives me a free cappuccino as a result, and I sit there at the clearest panoramic window overlooking the corners of Yates and Blanshard thankful for the kindness and finish Part One of Kerouac's Desolation Angels (Desolation in Solitude).

*****, echw. I spat at the brink of ***** above my ***** toilet seat, perhaps the more unhealthy fact-of-the-matter is that I somehow managed to keep it down. So it rots away my stomach and eats away at my liver. Disgusting. Although the prior stupor was quite nice.

On my way to the Public Library (where I sit now), some girl with a summer-skirt was unbeknownst of the fact that it had folded somehow at the back and as she ran for the parked 11 (Uvic via Uplands), everyone could see her thonged *** and they all looked back, forth, back, in *****-awkwardity (I included) wondering what was ruder: telling her? or just watching her spring away? I think I heard someone make a quip remark about it, and yet glanced away and forward as to seem unaroused (their partner was with them, holding hands and all, avoiding the lumpy desire and lust that always appears in short bouts during moments like that).

I need some sort of adventure, tasting the potential of existence as I called in sick to work and immediately felt better once the shadow it cast was delivered from the day. I think of Alex and Petter, with their motley crew of savages, riding highway 101 toward San Francisco. Last I heard, they had stopped over in Portland and perhaps had said hello to our friend Tad in the area. I wish I could have gone, felt the road glow in preternatural beauty and ecstatically bongo'd every breath. I haven't felt the true excitement of freedom and travel in so very, very long. Always, the thought of debt and labour. That's the niche I've crawled into for the time being, and I owe a lot to the friends who wait (without hate, without anger) for me to pay them back. I have some sort of shameful asceticism in the way I work now, as if I cannot just up and quit as I may often do, because I'm doing it for the friends who kindly (perhaps, dumbly) propped me up with coin. Even if most of it goes to an insatiably hungry MasterCard Troll living under a bridge of self-immolating sadnesses and post-modernisms, at least my fridge is full of food.

I lost my passport anyways, they would have stopped me at the Peace Arch and turned me back to Canada without exception. That's a modern border for you, there isn't much room for kindness. Just pragmatism.

*****, terrible, clean-cut pragmatism.

That house, at 989 Dunsmuir, the place I call home in the Land of the Shoaling Waters, is exceptionally lonely on days like this, even with Jen there reading her Charles Bukowski and offing a few comments about the gratuitous ******* oft-depicted in the book. I feel trapped, at times, by all those machinations I so deftly opposed as a teenage anarchist. In principle, I still oppose them. Most intensely when they trap me, although the World of Capital has successfully alienated me as a member of the proletariat work-force and somehow twisted my passion into believing that the ways of economy and rat-race are just 'laws of nature.' If this is true, which I believe for pragmatisms sake they are (*****, terrible, clean-cut pragmatism), there really is no such thing as liberty, and what we have called 'liberty' is nothing more than a giant civilised liability within which we are all guilty until proven guiltier. Yes, because I owe it to myself and to the landlord.

I realize, often, the endless love-hate relationship with existence that one calls 'life.' It seems undeniably true that everyone is in this same jam, secretly loving something, and at the same time secretly hating it. The distinction between 'love' and 'hate' quickly becoming redundant when they are found together drinking champagne at the dusty corner-table of the most indescript and ugly bar in the alley of eternal psychology.

My back hurts, my brain
clicks, it's all a little
melancholic; trapped,
finicky, yet calm,
hopeful, excited, and
real. About everything


all

at once.

How can you write like a beatnik in an age of eternal connectivity? Just keep writing messy, weighted passages, whine-and-dine frustration, and cling on to dear life as if it were better in a lottery ticket? Dream of a rucksack revolution, ask yourself how you're not brave enough to be a Dharma ***? Would you not question your motives in rebellion, keep yourself at arms-length for sake of self-hatred, and posture yourself on the sidewalk insisting it's not pretentious?

Ah, all the vagueness and all the creeps, all the I-guess-I'm-happy's and all the success stories mingling with each other on this planet-rock. Some sort of hybrid productivity asking to be heard. Writing about liberty and livers, both accepted as ok and yet all take a beating in the face of silence and revolt. There's a science to all this, no? Some sort of belief in mandalas and star-signs, opening portals to Lemuria to take a weight right off your shoulders. I am Atlantis, and I am sinking.

A cigarette doesn't care, and neither do I. Addicted to a moribund desire to live. To really live! Not just add a few more moments to longevity by swallowing a carrot twice a day. Not just brushing my teeth twice between sunrise and sunset to avoid halitosis. Not just sitting and waiting for language to speak on my behalf.

Be-half, be-whole. Be-yonder, lose yourself. Be-yonder, and travel. Be-yonder, and forgive. Be-yonder, and don't forget. Store those memories and add them to your landscape, next time you drop acid, run amok through those stairwells and fields, re-introduce yourself to your life and remember the every's forever. Become highschool you again, where you'd sit on your mothers porch June mornings on your third cup of coffee, writing a poem with the drive of existential freedom unpresented with fears of rent or labour. You want fast-food? *** the change off your poor mum, and meet your old friends down at the local A&W.; These days really don't last forever, and thankfully you were smart enough to avoid working all those years. They will remain the best years of your life for.. perhaps.. your whole life.

Some mornings, you would wake up late on a Pro-D day, sipping a fourth cup of joe and watching the Antique Road Show on CBC because it's the only half-interesting thing playing on a late Tuesday afternoon. Your mothers couch was leather at the time, placed closest to the deck window with some sort of ferny-plant right next to it making peace with the forest. You would get lonely at times, and it wasn't until you graduated that you noticed how beautiful those 4 high-lined stick-trees standing in the desolate firth as the last remaining survivors of a clear-cutting operation really were, the way they softly bent in the wind, some sort of anchor whether rain or shine. Your mother would be at work, your brother would be out, or at dads, or upstairs, and for half-hours at a time you would stare at those trees, warped slightly through the lens of your houses very old glass. To you, it seemed, the world could be meaningless, and these trees would go as a happy reminder of how calm and archaic and beautiful this meaninglessness was. Watching them always quenched a blurry hunger in the soul. Something happy this way came. Something tricky and simple.

I could never really reach myself back in those days. Not anymore, anyways. That old me no longer had a phone, had tossed it in a creek in a fit of idealistic rage. That old me was living in a tent somewhere, squatting on private property and working at a bakery north of his old town. He still worked there, last I heard. Every summer evening, he went swimming in the ocean, wafting along on his back to think and pray. He was a Buddhist if I ever met one, reading the Diamond Sutra and the Upanishads, cracking the ice of belief with Alan Watts's 'Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown,' and preaching to his friends in cyclic arguments to prove the fundamental futility of theory. He's the kinda guy to shock you off your feet and make you wonder. Really wonder. Whoever he's become is on the road to wisdom. Whoever he thinks he is has never mattered. He's just waiting on the world to change.

Fancy.

Above me, the patterned cascade of skylight-window in the library courtyard hints at sunset coming. I contemplate the warmth and company of Tom's house a moment and wonder if he'd like me over. I think again of Petter and Alex way down there in Cali-forn-ya. A holy pilgrimage to Big Sur, and I still wonder where my passport is. If hunger and destitution weren't a block to intention, I'd be everywhere at once right now. I'd watch this very sunset from the top of Mount Baker, and yet be singing along to the Rolling Stones with Petter at my side. The Irish country would be rolling by again, and I would wonder where I am. The happy patch-work of County Cork would invite me to the Ring of Kerry where I would wait and sip a cappuccino, pouring over maps of Ireland in hopes of finding my hostel, as I'm sure I booked online.

The warm-red stonework of Whitstable village in Kent comes to mind. I think of Auntie Marcia and Uncle Bob, soaking up the sunlight with their solar panels and selling it back to the grid. I think of Powell River and its wilder-middle-ness, the parade of endless trees stretching east out unto Calgary. I think of every public washroom I have ever defecated in, and wonder how noisy or silent they might be right now. I think of Sooke, and its sticks. I think of Salt Spring Island and my first collapse into adulthood. I think of work, and how I haven't missed a dime I've spent.

I think of wine in an Irish bar, that night I was in the homely town of Bantry, with its rainbow homes and ancient churches, reading my 'Pocket History of Ireland' in disbelief at how far I'd made it on my own when that strange old fellow Eugene came up to me and struck up a conversation on world events. He tried to sell me vitamin supplements, toting it all as a saviour. I wrote him this poem a day later, a year ago, and think of him now:

49 years old, names Eugene.

We talk politics like a plane
doing laps over planet ours,
North Korea threatens bursts
of lightening and Irish businessman
defaults on debts to UlsterBank in
the mighty Americas. He tells
me to guess his age and to be
nice I take a medium sum of
35 (white lies). He tells me
why he looks so young at
49 and tries to sell me a healthy
soul as if he were an angel of loves-
yerself or a devil
of capitalism pecking at
exposed heels. Tells me
he used to be drawl, pizza-
faced, suicidal before
production loved a spiritual
lung. Tell me what! Tell me
WHAT!
When life gives you lemons,
hug the lemon tree. Seems
the angels have sold out and
they're nice enough.



He really was a nice guy.
excerpt- 'the mystic hat of esquimalt'
softcomponent May 2014
On xanax, I want to
save the world. See it,
save it, savour the lady
who tells me it's 'jargon,'
the newspaper. It's 'jargon,'
all those books you don't
understand and thus return
to the library. 'Jargon, jargon.
All-right, fair enough, have a
good night.' A blustering, fat
-bodied strangeman, walks in,
talks of homeless hairies who
cut in front of him at McDonald's,
rudely assert their desperation
with greasy foreign hair basing
down the nape of their neck,
beseech the poor fat ******* to
his last-straw tossed toward a
health minister who won't 'speak
for himself' but has his secretary
'speak for him.' what the hell is
that? he asserts, face in a squeeze-
pause and a left-side lazy eye bowing offward, 'ridiculous, disgusting.'
'well, I hope you have a good
night, take care,
sir.'
softcomponent Apr 2014
coffee-cup perched between Amazon's of Grass-- the contents of which quiver a little with the shadow of the tree. above the purple-white porch-chair, the solar system point-of-direction pierces the glades of Leaf-Life, luminescently revealing the innards of each branch so-as to witness the plant-bones in-stretch-divine oh the summer breeze! (i have no lessons to teach you)

the yardened-gate tilts from wood-brown to moss-green to scuff-mold, shadows of an evergreen forming a movable continent across the half-mooned top-shave entrance-to-an-ancient-palace. were I an expert in floral pretend, I would be able to name for you the blue flowers which grow at the foot of the tree-I-don't-know-the-name-of (each branch percolated upwards and fanning out, bunchy-bulbs at each tip and jummed together, small leaves blooming outward from a springly inwardness). every time I lift the mug from out the Amazon's of Grass, there is a dent in the forest of calm accepting itself as if I grew here as well. (i have no lessons to teach you)

lawnmowers, the sound of suburban tribal beauty, signal spring or summer as sun-dance must have to ancient Egyptians and Coast Salish together forever in longhouses. There is nothing old about the world, save for childhood memories and parents with wine and with cornflakes, remembering you as a child as if it were not your lifetime ago (but yesterday). you run your mouth on the revelatory spark: both mom and dad were as launched to the planet and new just as much when they asked each other to dance circa 1991. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and Yeltsin was preaching The-End-Times when they asked each other to dance circa 1991. I come to the same conclusion-confusions as they did, and who says anyone is ready for anything? what did they know circa 1991? (i have no lessons to teach you)

Jennifer, in her Pink Floyd pajamas, eats her tofu wrap and wipes her fingers with napkin. she picks the fallen remains with a spoon and sees I'm writing beneath the tree. 'do you want some water?' she asks, I call her sweet and say yes, she takes the plates in and missions to grab the bottle. Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami and Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark sit apart on the sunny-side of the lawn as archives of contemplation in different directions and yet under the same solar system point-of-direction (the one and the many). how absurd it is to realize that every single story has occurred under the same sun, on the same rock. how absurdly beautiful. how protectively healed, the race can become (as death saves all from tragedy, whilst causing it all the same).

the shade under Leaf-Life seems to fill itself in, sketching an extra darkness to contrast the brightening sun. God continues to paint my life, on occasion resting from paint to back picture with narrative, typing calmly and furiously across the pages of existence to write me a myth. I become an image of what you imagine me to be, and the words you read are the widow of imagination once expressed unto the world.

you can imagine, but I won't be listening. unless you take the page and turn to me to point and say, 'shall we discuss?' it all remains a strangers question and answer, so as you can enter my head-long at will and believe what I do from inside what I call my home, you wonder how close we are in spoken word, and believe you may take value from these excerpts. and you may.

but as I write, all I can think is,

(i have no lessons to teach you).
softcomponent Apr 2014
Each crest-wave melts forward unto a cyclic downward unto a mix-exchange at the bank of the channel, fluid between the Georgia Strait and the passive Pacific, all the way from probably-Australia. The overcast is claustrophobic, sort of-- Victoria feels like a small wet cottage in a populated happy brain-cell, so when the clouds roll in all you notice are the creases on the faces that look as they grunt and push their eyes half-closed, exhaling a nicotine cloud in pensive thought toward a day job. Dunhill cigarettes always give off the faint odour of soy sauce, and the blue rot of the Johnson Street Bridge ticks away, caught in a state of eternal construction. In the aisle of an apartment somewhere else inside the city, one can smell the delicate remains of Indian food, curried and waiting for years ago to come again. The narrative has never been more than sheer observation, not to watch what comes and goes, but what flows across the fractal void of every-angle. There are dots on the rocks, and legs on the waves.. butts in the moss, and hours in the days. If 'forgotten' is the outcome of my every effective attempt, it will change nothing up those sleeves of mine. And nothing left exempt.
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