Chekhov and Murakami came to me in short spurts of memory; as if the life of a keyboard was a retro invention sinking the ancient sea bona fidelis. Temper Fidelis and sorry larks wish upon the galoshes you wore to repeated proms instigated in large moral distances between burning barns (it's a dangerous hobby). Starved for trapped frogs with claws and violence was a question answered in blood so two wrongs made a state of nothingness free of wrong or right (you nihilistic *****!) she suggested a better drink to pick at Starbucks: 'a flaming frappucino at 140 degrees.' (what are you, some angry Russian aristocrat contemptuous of an English wife T-minus a decade ? )close-bracket)

God is sick of two things: my continued and addicted references to Judaeo-Christianity and the dragged sympathy of humanity for his lost son ("it's been 2013 years for Chrissake")

you melt on me like a strange evening spent with a stick of butter

*self improvement 46% complete

it's night now
and events have stopped.

Stillness evades the froth of evening
calm leather moves none under the fabric.

This home -- older than our world -- flushed
with wisdom -- flushed with glee -- flushed
with the violent storm of transience and
correction -- eyesight jiggled and adjusted
for new intentions -- meaning frisked for
rocks on a Boeing --

it's night now
and events have stopped.

you have stopped.

I have stopped.

setting myself down on an anvil pillow. sleep is an anvil pillow. anvil and stone are a suicide dressed in 8 hours of mini-Godheads.. you become a repeat offender in the ever expanding realm of emerging fractal patterns sewn upon the quilt you lay across your sleepy bones like rushing water in an underground cave miles below the Yucatan Peninsula..

by electronic firelight they lay on my leather couch with the scraps of bedding I could afford to share, as if for some reason I can't escape the money analogy and see this, too, as a transaction.. buying.. a transaction.. as transfat is to nutrition.. money is tao.. my hate for money is tao.. I'm a love-and-lost buddhist like every other dreamer before me.

I'm tired of giving myself a *******.

All I ever give myself is a *******.

I refuse to bend over and at least try to give me a *******, or go to the next level in love and **** myself.

I keep telling me to do it. Keep grabbing my own *** during passionate tongue-twisters but I keep on insisting that I just CAN'T go any further.. rationally I may be right, but irrationally I still get shrieks of jealousy because I see that ******* sneaking out to kiss girls all the ******* time as if I didn't exist. As if I wasn't always watching.

I stalk myself. It's a terrifying state of affairs. No matter where I go, there I am.

Watching.

One night, I invited me over, and as usual, I gave myself a *******, yet refused to go any further.

This was the straw that cracked the camels back.. and come 4 AM I kissed myself softly on the forehead as I slept and slipped into the night, hailing the first taxi to sail past me on the concrete river.

I awoke slowly the next morning and.. still dazed.. noticed I was nowhere to be found.

A great grief flooded my solar plexus and moved into my hopeless bones.

I had not even left a note. What a ******* I am!

I had not even left a note.

The rest of the day was spent in sordid grievance. I shivered, lonely, under my ever expanding realm of emerging fractal patterns sewn upon the quilt I lay across my sleepy bones like rushing water in an underground cave miles below the Yucatan Peninsula..

What made Anthony so elaborately cold in those early autumn months? What made him glare so sourly at my exhaustion whenever I slithered past his adonis figure in our overwhelmingly ***** kitchen? Was I the quintessence of a terrible roommate? Irresponsible? Ditzy? Was the kitchen—in its pig-trough pig-sty bacon-grease glory—tacitly my fault, despite the observation it'd been I who had purged the mess last? Or was it my drug habits and the fact that on the night Anthony returned from his impulsive trip to Alaska, I was with Chris—blasting Bob Dylan and the Tallest Man on Earth—cradling my chin on the jean-sand islands of my cramping knees, high as a shuttle in the ketamine nebula? These were all questions that stoked the fires of internal doubt whether I liked it or not. People pretend to talk themselves out of status anxiety as if it were possible to entirely neutralize such a natural reaction—as if it were possible not to wonder what earned such irrational disfavor in the eyes of another. Especially when “another” is a roommate, an almost omnipotent staple in day to day life even if efforts are taken to ignore or avoid—a constant weave of growing atmospheric pressure and a pang of anxiety at the sight of his shoes or the sound of his grunts and clangs while at work on a meal in the kitchen—of course, as is obvious, I can take things far too personally. But there were points in which his silence or indifference would scare me—as if he might've wound up a psychopath and broke my neck in a fit of overboiled passive-aggression.
To be fair and give the reader a clearer picture of Anthony, he had—historically—been an incredibly generous fellow and a relatively close friend long before we approached one another on the idea of potential roommates. He was large in build—not overweight in any sense—but incredibly fit with an active agenda to exercise and eat right, both habits of which I had never had the stamina to maintain. Girls loved him. Physically, he was gorgeous—puffy curled hair deliberately stylized into a modern European pompadour; dark hazel eyes with a constantly evolving dynamism in the way they gazed... and a masculine stubble that seemed to naturally grow-out to look as posh as David Beckham, just without all the effort and pomp. Mentally, he was the perfect synthesis of adorable geek, thoughtful philosopher, and strikingly suave, dapper, athletic, and goofy 'good-guy'—he was always out with his friends or at home reading Terry Goodkind's fantasy novels, and on occasion I would see that his looks were almost burdensome to him. As if they were a superfluous gift and a personal curse—constantly forcing him into social over-exertion as an extrovert when he, at heart, was a closet introvert unable to disentangle his self-reflective image from his internal reality. As if he were unable to process the amount of attention he received.
I had tacitly wondered, at times, if he was also in-the-closet regarding something else as well, though I had always admired his effeminate qualities and mannerisms as he never once hinted at a negative self-consciousness about their strange manifestations in open view of the world. Externally, at least, he never acted like they were problems or indicative of some internal lack of found-definition, even on the comical occasion when I walked in on him bathing on his lonesome, quietly listening to Miley Cyrus and playing with a troupe of three rubber duckies—the bathroom light off and several candles burning in aesthetically strategic corners of the room. He also constantly brewed tea using an adorable teapot designed to look like an elephants head, with the hot liquid pouring from the Disney-like characters trunk. This—I reflected—was most certainly connected to his love for the 1941 children's classic, Dumbo. It was a movie he and I held in common, having watched it together on multiple occasions before our cohabiting turned sour. Of course, what was most indicative of this private wandering judgement of mine was the fact that he worked at the city's only gay bar as the youngest bartender employed. At 1 AM every night, all the bartenders (whom were pre-screened eye candy for the patrons' sake) would peel off their skin-tight neon tops and romp around shirtless, shouting last-call through the bright-eyed frey of top 40 hits and cannonading flirtations.  
Not that I wish to put him under the microscope, as if any feminine qualities in a man were something strange or problematic to me—nor do I wish to study his mannerisms like a condescending anthropologist of imperial Britain, establishing pathological definitions for what was never an illness to begin with. No... I ask these questions because he decided, one day, that he didn't like me. I ask these questions because I came upon him in the living room multiple times listening to Alan Watts's lectures on taoism—a strange anxious-emptiness behind his eyes—and when I began to worry he was dipping into some sort of existential depression, I approached him with an Alan Watts book—The Wisdom of Insecurity—in order to make a recommendation and strike up therapeutic conversation on the basis of  a philosopher we had in common. As I did so, he would frantically nod and avert eye-contact, hiding any perturbation well enough for me to assume he was still with me as I spoke. I later found the book on top of the fridge and placed it back on my shelf thinking, 'he probably has a ton to read as is.' It only became apparent when I finally decided to ask him if he was unhappy with me—this was about 2 weeks before he finally moved out—and he responded with, “I've definitely been annoyed that you use my stuff and eat my food all the time without compensation or asking,” which I understood at first until I realized I only did so because he did the same—constantly eating my cereal, using my milk, reorganizing my couches in the living room—but I didn't mind because I assumed it was a reciprocal arrangement and thus took his eggs and his bacon on the assumption (and belief) in pooled communal resources. But he continued: “And you talk at me all the time about things I have no interest in which is kinda frustrating,” which confused me even further when it was only friendly concern I was tacitly attempting to translate into his feeling wanted and liked by the person he lived with. These words, in the end, released the built-tension between us like a bursting pressure valve. He eventually apologized for how he'd behaved, and then largely disappeared from my life.

Sometimes I'll be brushing my teeth, and I'll wonder if he's doing alright. I'll wonder if he found his taoist balance in either silence or speech.

the adderall dripping down the back of my throat tastes like sour oranges. little patches of sooty blackness caress the strange dips under my eyeballs as a sign of overworked modernity eating filth to break the fast of a dinnerless evening. cars... more and more cars... glide up Johnson Street on direction to an anywhere packed with reason and meaning, travel-wrung after hours of work and play like Greek tragicomedies written in an Indo-European language lost to the passage of endless time in the Urals. Trailing behind us, the Cossack signaled for the rest of his entourage to approach a little slower if the city were to be won from the Mongol horde approaching Baghdad at the eastern gate (A.D. 1258) and within the little eyelid movies drizzling through my mind every time I close my eyes, I heard screams and scrambled hashtags pleading for humanitarian assistance.. pleading for a chance to rescue the Islamic Golden Age from the brink of its twilight battle with obliviously obvious tired-eyed savagery reveling in the soft moonlit warmth of Mesopotamian beachsand. Blood was being worn as some sort of slimey undergarment, leveling the entire populace to a place so far gone, the mind could no longer discern the universe as a set of tetris patterns blocked and connected with a light string of consciousness, the light of intense college-student starvation as if tuition were the bloodlands trapped between ****** and Stalin.

There isn't much to be said for the way she used to dance. It was sort of like a jimmied cow-- I say 'jimmied' in the context of a cow, out late, midwestern meadow, center of the winter, shivering... shivering so profusely, it was almost as if it were dancing. Dancing, jimmied, silly, frightened, escapist sentiments pulsing through his beef belly blood as if he were capable of some sort of latent sentience, some sort of ability to discern love from hate, black from white, ethical standards from matters of the spirit. That's the way she danced.

She'd shiver to the beat like a dangling mango, misplacing herself in the music. She would cry a little, too. You could see the tears in her aura, flagrantly asking to be left alone. Flagrantly leasing themselves to the moment and whatever delight the moment could afford.

She asked me; "so, what do you look for in a girl?"
I said: "a decalcified pineal gland."

She jingled her keys in front of me, and smiled. I lost myself in someone elses talking points; across the room, I could hear the chatter of some teenage lip-reader repeating her every word line-for-line. It was 12:58 AM, the Mongols began their destruction of the Abbasid libraries. I just stood there, amazed at the near ventriloquism of this strange pretender. Was he, perhaps, pulling her strings? Was she, perhaps, a puppet? Was there, perhaps, an instant connection between these 2 brains on the quantum level, one effecting the other, regardless of the distance in space and time?

Up as early as the dawn, clouds sifting leftward westward shimmer and drip-- half like empty crystal void, half like deep-ocean Mariana's Trench with happy-little-pockmarks all up-in-between.

What in the Heroes am I doing up so early on a Thursday morning? Not sleeping. Downloading new video games via Pirate Bay. Watching old-analog-rendition documentaries from History Channel circa early 2000's-- one doc in particular about U.S. government tests on unwilling (and largely unknowing) civilian populations. I as the orifice and experiencier of the world at large, all at ONCE THRU THE EYEZ and at TWICE THRU THE BRAINIAL CRANIAL and out thru the thoughts and words and cramped headspace full of starships, *******, eloquent and twisting sunrise dimensionals...

The Internet? It'll make you the universe as-if you weren't the universe already!
Straight through the blood and sweat and 'it's-too-earlies-for-this.' You wanted a bit of laughter, and that's exactly what you got.

Though it time-lapses across my faulty-flick'ring eyelids, I can tell past the Buddha-Bottle-Buddha-Themed-Beer sitting empty on the windowsill amidst a wild collection of coffee cups and power converters that the Sun sees the Capital Letters that were written out line-for-line in Times New Roman across my RNA-DNA slow-Saganite Cosmic Poetry by God the Author.

Eyelids are heavy and yet inverted and living-- real and concerned with loving the affair of life rather than the marriage! Life as an unofficial longevity-but-not-forever kinda thing.. like young love, old love, marriage, too, when you really get down to it.. just confused little souls feeling pulled to one another in the proverbial Dark Under the Sunlight and Illuminated by Aurora Borealis Forever-Daytime-Forever-Nighttime-Forever.. Syrian rebels waking up on a Monday morning to the sound of gunfire and ALLAHU AKBAR's in distance.. creeps, yea, a television Evangelist preaching God is Love and God Treats His Children Like Children (discipline the soul, yes? discipline the soul!) (**** the widow and ask her why you did it)

All the preaching homelessers who think they've found God in the same dark alleyway they found their snot-drenched headaches every casted winter night-- neglected by the Government, always remembered by the God-- Lucifer (Government, Passivity, Watchful Indifference), and God (A Few Dollars Here and There, A Shamanic Vision at Franciscan Ascetic Extremity) aaaahhhh all bungled-up and waiting for a Savior when the Savior is themselves or the debt they owe to Royal Life Ltd. and we wait like the rest of them, they angry over my no-dollars-to-spare ("look, I make rent, I grab groceries, I pay debt. In all likelihood, you have more money than I do right now. I'd love to help you out if our poverty's weren't so close to kissing") all such rudeness in one respect and yet delinquently honest.. how I can admire the travelling Hippie Bands reckless abandon and yet never forget to fear Abandon..

and all the preaching Home-Leasers.. the strangeness' clad in glass and patchwork straight-black perm-pressed leadership stench and pastel markers smeared across the sidewalk.. ".. if you take away your consideration of the company's weak future bond equity, there are three different ways we could tackle this project.." busy-ness-man.. snarky and corrected with a Job To Do. But Who Am I?

A Job To Do. A Job To Do Do Do Do.

NOT so much A Job Well Done (Never Quite A Job Well Done) (serendipity has a crease-and-fold collective opinion of our concrete jungles and military juntas.. "'I can't even watch the game tonight.. Brasilia is the capital of Brazil?' 'Sao Paulo, you drunk buffoon.''No, Brasilia!' 'Sao Paulo!'")
stupors, collect-calls, drag-queens, militant armies and school shooters in bullet-proof vests all the best, all the best.. what I wanted was a reason to crease my forehead all adult-like and say to the kid, "I really think you'd do a lot better in computer networking.. check the job statistics! international openings are through the ROOF.." and she sighs at the weight of every crush-ed dream coalescing into filmy-slime-froth at top of inadequately-heated Cream of Mushroom Soup.. what silty salty ****.. all the parochial worldviews of the 20th century being swallowed in the Liberal Boom and Bust, Boom and Bust, Boom and Big ***** ***** ***** Bloated ***** (click the link and see your fantasies pass Disney's red-light and hit **** ******* with a vintage glass bottle of ol' Coca Cola Noir)..

After a sleepless neverend night, I stayed up and bored on the black leather couch with my roommates cat waltzing in-an-out-an-in-an-out still confused at his relatively recent move to our war-zone clone of a home.. poor ******* of a cat, names Tonic.. has a bred sister named Gin.. drink a cup of joseph trying to finish illegal-pirate of newest Splinter Cell (sadly o'sad it demands too much on the vide-ah card and lags all creative and bleepy) all the steam from my ****-preground coffee in'ah French press doves upward to the window and the clouds sifting leftward westward shimmer and drip.. I contemplate concerta to stay perked-out and take a shower, pop just that, XL release concerta.. not sleeping makes it strangest experience, uncomfortable at first.. pressures in lower jaw, electric tightness at tips of front teeth as I talk myself down on the 6 to Royal Oak Exchange via Downtown all freaky-vibed anxieties about my blurring vision and perhaps eternal cross-eyes I avoid looking at reflections *** they father me out of my bedroom, warm sanity.. warm seance dance-arounds-a'naked-and-praise.. I feel okay now, though. Better than okay, I feel elated and awake as if I slept a solid 9-some hours and Alex to left writing stories of horse-drawn labor with Petter on Skype telling tales of his not-so-gladness to be home in Norway for another 3-weeks.

A group of hearty-look hardly-look investors in stock business pajamas march past in strange rabble on way, perhaps, to next coffee joint down road. The unfamiliar block next to window I sit near seems as mysterious in existence as Diagon Alley.. where in the fuckssakes is it, exactly? I once ventured to find out and came across library courtyard I tagged as future-reading locale. The hungry sun above was at snowblind potential and eating away at my lack of protected retinas. I've stopped worrying about protection as it all dis-integrates equally careful.

And it's our covert motives that give us reason to shame-- unrealistic to be ashamed, but ashamed you'll be anyway for disliking the guy or avoiding the girl and slithering into a fetal position to deflect the ***-flack from Moral Mike. You escape yourself successfully, and douse the city in gasoline machines for another 15 years 'til our fossil fuels shivvy dribble flop fade into literal thin air.. bubye.. the sun is getting brighter with every passing minute, it's all summery out and I'm inside typelocking myself to a circumferenced earth at the tip of my bleeding fingers. I'm just waiting for apostrophe, and realize that, some day, I will be a fuel source too (you're welcome, Succeeding Race).

and all races are inevitably lost. This is not the cynics drawl.

it is optimism.

with a little bit of dust
under yer skin, you
sense something ancient
and dead-yet-still-living in
everything. The love tapestry
on the walls of your mind beg
to differ, complete- who was
that sunuvabitch and what
why did he stop the music?

is he waiting for a drivel?
or a smile?

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.

we promised each
other a

broken

lawn

mower

so we mowed
the dirt

instead

I

Testing that nuclear feeling pulsating through my ventricles, a pain sour at top of my genitals in the area above the ***** dr's call the pelvis
it hurts for no such reasons; mysterious numbness to the pain as it aches and yet it is only a suppressed fear of cancer, the dr checked my prostate jamming finger in ******* n twisting like a diamond fairy-- perhaps nicer not jammed in my ******, but this is 'the nature of the examination'

nature, nurture, I am suffocating myself in her addicted presence, regardless of how much I may love her she was cuddled next to me last night before slipping into a gasp-snore sleep and the ****** intrusive evil thought came to me-- wat if i took this lighter and singed her hair or her skin and fer sakes I scared myself, the same way I scare myself after watching documentaries on serial killers and wondering, so wondering, 'that could be me- the killer- torchering stray cats with infected syringe, binding its legs with an unwound coat-hanger and tossing it off a bridge-- and then years later I pick-up a hitch-hiker and ******* him against his will, slit his throat to keep him bound in the loss-progress of forgotten history'

this 10 mg escitalopram oxalate / i cannot tell if it is working / but my head is a pill and the dr agreed to prescribe me .5 mg xanax n maybe this is why i feel close to losing the mind in burn-ache-scare-myself-away /

II

I got a blood-test the other day, my way of praying to science to ask its all benevolence if I, perhaps, have ***, AIDS, chlamydia, godknowswat

immediately afterwards, I went home and read 3 articles on the Russian intervention in the Crimea as if it were my insanity civic doody

cracked-open my budget and calculated my debt to be somewhere in the $2,400 range n felt trapt and angry and unreal as if high-school is when time stopped and ever since I waste my life / spending it on money / money it on spending ******* /

i go to work, feel dead or mad already, as if 20 yrs is too late for me and it'll be one hell of a trip when I realize I've made it to 21, let alone 30

let alone 30

let alone *30

III

last night i begged her for ***, a remorseless evil pulsing thru my veins and no compassion save for some manipulative control of a dark-force--

she was sleeping, sleepy, woke up, i deliberately watched **** with the volume high to keep her up and guilty

she called me *pathetic and it only hurt becuz I believed her and knew it

it spunnn outta control and into other vortextual matters of an unexpressed zeitgeist diatribe and she went as insane as me, threw my coconut oil at the wall in my bedroom when i insisted i sleep on the couch muttering to herself i feel like dying like killing myself like ending, if u *******, how can u ******* when u know i feel like this it makes no sense and it hurts and i call her one great-big-guilt-trip-lookin-pretty she insists on a slam-slouch next to the door and says i wanna listen to you ******* and i will i don't care we are both now in the grip of an evil cabin fever trapped in each others soulz and i become eviler as she becomes eviler, we look like madmen women to one another going tangent after tangent and in some sick sense realizing how petty and empty we must be to feel so petty and empty and expressive of a dark chill within us each a hot ember of hopeless cold firing the spot-team responsible for motivation and direction due to budget cuts of the soul

and by god i hate myself, and by god at times i hate her the same and the world but only as reflection to that dark chill within us

an empty chatterbox

IV

i wake up, write this poem, refuse to pop a xanax pill today and feel a gritty dirt rubbing thru my hert hertz heart

better, it's better, i love her

and yet there is that dark chill within us

an empty chatterbox

I will clamor atop mountains and fire flares from Everest to contest the interrelated anonymity of can'ts and don't's and wasted places with covered spaces taken by sadists with nothing left but the trace of a face; have-not's become robots in the mist of my nicotine blood-clot, distraught because it's all a ******* weak-spot

if you hit hard enough.

if you spit far enough.

if you write like it might make a difference and not just a scuff on the new polished hood of a ******* Mercedes Benz..

who are you again?

- - -

I tackled my trousers like they were Bowser in Mario, I'm still looking for my own impresario.. go on, try and call me another Joe Blow and I'll know that you meant to say I'm on a quest to Joe Blow your mind.
as far as I'm aware we're both just as blind so whatever I find in my mind is a sign of the times I confine to finite from infinity; I'm looking to have Salinger-like salinity. **** masculinity, it's all femininity, and within divinity you'll find me in vicinity.. scared, frightened, lost to evil affinity with zilch for priority.

I'm aimless. Goalless and faceless a ghoul who wishes to fill his void with school.. but the rule is disillusioned, imprisoned and moving, and written on loose-leaf like life.

I'm worth the hype.

but I'm not your type, I'm your type-face and font, san-serif you flaunt, and look at us now, it's just blood on our hands.. our names written out in childlike comic sans. we wanted, we waned, we haunted, we craned

our necks

to look past the deck

saw islands as specs

in the distance.

this whole life is persistence, and some hallow insistence that I am much more than industrial pistons.. so listen

you wanted this, and I wanted that.. I'm not so pretty with eyelashes to bat, so instead I still sit and I sat.. past tense and all that, but the grammar is last in my mind as I tap on the keyboard.

"Sing Free Bird!" screams the crowd. "Be a Free Bird!" I vowed

to myself.. on a shelf, eyes wide open and melting the matter that makes up this tattered trash called reality; but in all actuality I'm actually insane. plain as a bagel washed-off in the rain.. and just as soggy.

just as groggy. just a hot-key for those who forgot me ( and they're all free... now).  

I wipe the sweat off my brow as I cow-tow to the ouch in my bones, a lack of texts to my phone as I read Buddhist koans while my stomach moans like the fall of the Roman Empire. my entire life is on fire.. or was. now it's just moldy, just old bread with a fuzz.. so I tossed it again and forgot about zen because it's irrelevant, not a 10 out of 10, I can name off the labels, samsara, nirvana, brahmanic, the Lama.. but somehow I'm just as empowered to cower.. to tower above like a camera angle provided by angels who dangle on quantum entanglement.  

I strangle myself in profundity, it's no fun to be me.. sometimes. but what do I see when I turn out the light? I can't tell you, but I know that it's mine.

and I'm fine. as long as it's mine, I'm fine. I'll find my right rhymes as finite time slithers by. I'll find my right rhymes by the day that I die. and we'll all sigh in relief..

*** then I'll finally be the thief to steal your attention with words such as these:
go on, try and call me another Joe Blow and I'll know that you meant to say I'm on a quest to Joe Blow your mind. as far as I'm aware we're both just as blind so whatever I find in my mind is a sign of the times I confine to finite from infinity; I'm looking to have Salinger-like salinity. **** masculinity, it's all femininity, and within divinity you'll find me in vicinity.. head spinning in constant affinity.

**finishing.

I wish, most of all, to have had a tangibly physical notebook to write all this in. instead I use the 'note' function of my smartphone, smoke a cigarette. busy on forward, it's Pandora.

one of those acid-high coffee overbouts, feeling the brain compress inside the skull. for an hour. for a few.

some man in tattered-all's gets angry when I state I have no quarter. like I'm lying when I say it, and must be lying because my pants aren't worn like his. bus and car alike ghost past, the monastic rise of the local music conservatory pokes at the skyline, straight at the overcast.

I toss "If on a winter's night" by Italo Calvino atop the third step of the church stairs leading to the church doors, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Where we meet Jesus. I begin to write this poem, huddled atop my cellphone as if I were in silent debate with a lover, only sitting to make a point.

to the left is a McDonald's flying a McDonald's flag. A man with a thoughtless white ball-cap and a thoughtful tattoo walks past with a McDonald's dollar drink in his right hand, pointing his arms in opposite directions to illustrate the dimensions of something he wants. "See?" he says to the woman he walks with, her face scabbed over with acne scars.

my eyes are tunnel-visioned to the screen every time I follow a thought, or the glancing past of a passer-by like the woman with the black scarf, black hair, black sweater, grey pants, black shoes.

the orange 'don't walk' sign pulses 7 times, and then sticks, as if waiting for a high-five.

I reach into my backpack for a cigarette.

severed ******* joke be
fore it was even stated
in the basketball court
prior to the game.. he
stuttered and it came
out 'c-cl-c-c-****-o-ress
ss neverm-m-mind.'

tarantula drag queen. it was you and me and everything beneath our feet.

walk with slammed gods from bar to bar to car to death-by-streetlight and you will see the deity as well skits itself into a fantasy.

every blasted anecdote and every ******* in naked clothing.. hookah my thoughts and we'll share a belief.

she was reading haruki murakami
and licking her lips of muffin crum
bs - - i, placated via cellphone, calle
d to leave a message for a friend ab
out Oscar Wilde's De Profundis  a
s i think i forgot it on his couch spea
k-easy speak-fast distract myself wit
h cigarette headrush rants and slow-
mo's she moves close gazing as i c
uriously whisper back with connect
ed pupil and she comes so so close - - g
arbage can next to me close - - she keep
s peeking at me, pulls out norwegian w
ood scans road i awkwardly pull out an
thology of chinese poems from backpa
ck to possibly impress! she keeps peek
ing peeking peeking i almost start conve
rsation but heart-beats race-track grand
prix miss my bus and i know it almost re
trieve cigarette from pocket (ghoulish goo
dy) second-guess she may think it unattra
ctive? no shiney faced race horse (do u ev
en lift, bro - - no dude i don't, i literally do
n't lift) cement truck clamours past and i n
ot really paying attention to the ******* c
hinese poems anyway begin to read the way
the sun glances off the spinning barrel like c
hinese poetry - - glancing always to newspea
k my way into awkwardity so ******* he
adrush she walks away, turns on heel to loo
k me in darting eyeballs (are u coming? i sup
pose so, jesus) i clamour onto my feet and foll
ow her pretend to be checking bus-times ya fu
ckin goof 15X arrives and she departs without
a smoke-signal we were close we were close we
were close and i missed my bus waiting for my
self to brave-and-snake so i walk away pretend-
careless and finally retrieve cigarette from pocket
read the smoke like chinese poetry (ghoulish goody)

twist around and call me deadly.
call me deadly, so I know enough
to cramp a headache away and steal
an evil from beyond a lifting pick-up
of a cell-phone denied service as it acted
strangely at the last house party it attended.

bereft of all wings, you did not glide... you
plummeted to the earth like a
question mark.

the vein clasps mentor rr rr s
exposed to coke AND mentos
vehement contamination - - correction
facility of the soul - pull-off / pull-over
push-up - pedestrian, panicking, my
map marks nothing in the nested
rest-stop

CASTLE, CASTLE

*correction facility of the soul

Waterborn water horse upon shutter drawn blades,
in the form of these blinds in your face
as you peek beyond peaks in your ability to see..
pixels in the mountaintop, drippity drop drop on the cottages embalmed moss roof,
and a beautiful day, and a beautiful day, and a beautiful thought that told me to say
I felt it in the air when you said that you cared through your fair molten hair on that blonde summers day on top of the rock of Eli, in relay for the slight elegance
upon and underneath irrelevance, and shelf Imams in books on Islam..

Shabat Shalom on Hanukkah.. celebrate the stars insofar as Andromeda,  
my mommas thumb on her 13th year, her 16th beer, the work-man's clear intentions with the way he mentioned words in tension, clenching marbles in his startled glance,
***** minds rubbed upon his work-man pants as this city grows bigger prose in the rows and roads of goals never reached upon the age of 70,
plenty see this creed as Cree in nature,
ship-shaper upon white paper, written in natures hip-hop hater,
forests are erased here.. drugs are never laced here.. I feel like I'm 8 here.. but I'm 8 with a career in thinking intangible all-honesty's on unity..

I see God as the groove master.
I'm just a disco disaster, looking to plaster a little bit of dissidence upon the fence in recompense for the densest chessboard invasion of Kicking Horse pass,
but alas, I broke my arm, wearing a cast you can hope to sign if you wish to charm the devilish sin of sugar-gin, open in to relig-IN.. as in I no longer ****, I Pope..
I wanna take a Pope of every single religiounana,
and see what they saw, and believe what they want, and concieve of their god and impede on their laws..

crows caw, upon a cross and there's a JEEzz-- static discharge.. he interrupts me..
he says to look.. and when I look he tells me to see see see see see, please see, I see what you see, it's not Jeez-me like the Bible Belt.. it's Jeez-US,
we must realize what I meant to grasp as the cusp you have teetered on since before the common age.. each and every all of us is a sage in the same way..
we're all God, and.. we're all God, and.. we're all God, and.. we're all God, and
shake the hand of the rainbows faint glow.. merry old isotope, Santa Claus hippy hope, never tethered hemp rope, old Egyptian space probe, great globe goddess..
**** decimated Odessa, I guess us was lest we forget this or get us to pinch out the **** of a historical era of error.. concentrated terror of terrorists in concentration camps..
an oil lamp burning upon sand saddled socks and snow-covered rocks and an old Buddhist templed temperament held in this mountain of tea and honey..
wearing my runny nosed halted-horrific, all-it-every-and-us is this terrific..
my distance from hand to hand is still as prolific, get the gesture? or am I just a cosmic jester?

lesser is best, so lest we forget the rest all congested in bread and butter covered brain matter,
rain shatters flames and her face was the place I escaped for a hit of false tragedy.

for the tricycle of a night, I conclude my life is becoming a literary event and I feel the poetry seep through every moment tinged with a beautiful narcissism some would call belief in myself or self-love self-help I'll-help-myself, thanks. I finally discover a glancing insanity of charm and wit- liberation, insanity, perspective, depends (on what) ?

I am slowly a freeman working freely in the free market freaking out in ecstatic *** for the world as a whole and even being kicked out of a pretty girls room for obnoxious insomnia gives me a reason to kiss the clear sky of melancholy happy-sad with another 'thank you' for making me whoever the hell I am, GOD, THANK YOU

it's another beautiful day in paradise, tossing dice to skew the probability in the direction of *it's the beautiful whatever and you're welcome for everything

tell me you believe in ghosts s
o i know who to believe / when
the time comes to ****** / all o
ver the ghost of your face / i pr
omise i won't forget to lie / and t
ell you that i love you / i cann
ot love you / because it is typical
to fear love when the chest is ope
n / the treasure found / and you l
ie dying with your heart still beati
ng in the October nightlife / believe
me when i tell you i wanted nothin
g / but

guts

we've all seen each other from a distance - never behind the eyes, where in time, we find ourselves eyeing the mind we all hypothesize lies inside - but can you look behind your eyes and see this mind you're so convinced is in hiding? where is the mind that keeps lighting my iris to allow for this writing?

the same question begs a Q and A session with the mesh inside insanity- my congestion, depression, transgression, suppression- Civilization and It's Discontents- it's inaccurate content, its torment to the inner accent I would consent to except I'm too poor to see you anew as I accrue symbolism and make do- I love you. All of you.

Through this fickle piece of data floating through space-time I make rhymes and say I'm a poet- but all I am are the words that are spoken so potent, I don't even live here inside of my head, I'm just a guest at best- perhaps a bird making nest for the rest of my life- after that, the soul flies into the radio wave of the grave where my behaviour is so unpredictable, it's unthinkable - I become what is represented in the word 'God,' 'Brahmin,' 'Ultimate reality,' the finger pointing at the moon and not the symbolist insanity - I

become

your

sight,

_ _ _

I

become

your

underbite.

you asked who you met the other weekend at that party - let's just say, you met a part of me. you met a version of you who you knew the moment you exited your mothers womb - the great thoughtless void you enjoyed - toyed with - left to sink into faceless space so you could run this pointless race and have fun doing it.

you can't win the human race, because the finish line is hiding in the that space behind your face - it's like you cross the line, and you die. disappear - and it all goes back inside the box - the creatures, the cash, and the clocks - a vulture squacks as your feet rot inside your socks and the trees mock your transience - the universe is a wave of ambiance monitoring itself through every iris shaping words to papyrus.

we are the sound, and we are the silence

we are the peace, and we are the violence

we are the religion, and we are the science

we are the doctors, and we are the clients

we are all enemies in secret alliance

what is the sound of one hand clapping? (clap hand)
so much for zen... so much for Rimbaud, I rub my eyes with cayenne so you can laugh at my pain and say, "now that's a comedian," he's sweating, look at the grease on his chin. look how he declares war on himself when he tries to find zen, he's giving up with this 'trying' as a way of trying again, he's crying again, sighing, seeking, writing, tightening the loosening bolts in his skull as he seeks out his peace in the peeled potato where the point is to think of potatoes, not Plato, not Aristotle, oh God oh I condemn all these looping mazed thoughts to a bottle

first, it's beer, then it's wine, then it's ketamine time till I finally find there is nothing to find and I'm fine but the feeling is gone in the morning...
we've all seen each other from a distance - never behind the eyes, where in time, we find ourselves eyeing the mind we all hypothesize lies inside - but can you look behind your eyes and see this mind you're so convinced is in hiding? where is the mind that keeps lighting my iris to allow for this writing?

fitted dots
to particles
fasting on
insanity

dreaming of
a brittle
sack battle
on beaches

silted rocks
on depth
paternal

hereditary
slush of my
guts and my
guttural
attempts

at
insular
perspective

these

thoughts
are alive
now.

in the same way you do not choose your ****** orientation, you do not choose whether or not you accept the status quo as is.

if you cannot enjoy a typical wage labor 9 to 5, that is just as much a part of your personal physical constitution as **** or heterosexuality. Just as much as there is a physical difference between the brain of the poet and the brain of the CEO, the gay and the straight, the Buddhist and the Christian, the average and the post-traumatic, the loose and the fundamentalist, the oppressed and the oppressor, the man and the woman.

our world is built on generalization. if it cannot define you as wide, it will narrow and narrow and narrow until the grand generalization can enslave the marginalized categories to it's non-existent objectivism.

God is dead. By God, Nietzsche meant mans search for objectivity.

unlock the *******
door
and burn
your worthless
commandments.

they mean nothing
unless someone agrees.

and they can only
agree
for so
long.

I'm poor
and I'm
anti-dep
ressed a
nd I'm
lookin
g for a
reason
I don't
need to
survive

there are times
when the thoughts
float through my head,

of you,

and I picture your face as it glows
but from a place of distance
---like it wasn't
less
than
a
week
ago
that we ended almost 4 years of love in close proximity
--- instead,
it's been 6 months,
and with some distance on the pain,
rationality has processed all aspects of the break
and twisted the Rubix cube of my life back into its
solid reds, blues, greens, and yellows.

however,
as my concentration slips in the early evening,
this distance is replaced with what feels like a soft,
slow-motion punch
---not just to the gut,
but through the gut,
twisting my intestines into knots of withdrawal,
my eyes drooping from
AlErT
to
"why does it feel like I've had a death in the family?"

it's like clockwork;
I have a window to work with
each and every morning,
but by 4 PM if I'm caught mid......
-sentence..... in my....
textbook.....
"A History of the Modern Middle East",
my stomach dropping
like
global oil prices
in the 1960's
under the tutelage
of the
Saudi King
Faysal,
every word I read bounces off my irises
like they were tennis *****
and I'm playing squash with the pages.

me me me all me ** **** HOho ****

this the nature of the snowmen snowing

Peruvian wind blowing, hoping hoping

wonder wander with an all-night eyes-

-play-trickz and shout strange figures

peripheral dandruff / cigar / concussed

mental image of an addicts bloodied

scabs

IT WAS SOME SORT OF DREAM and for a second time in my life I worked at a McDonald's but this time it was a McDonald's out of a Philip K. **** novel.. a hoveryvibe with this strange baby-blue tint to the walls that sat so quaint and silent reminding the subconscious of aliens or restaurants at the end of the universe... there was a long cyborg tube that spiraled into crafted spritz almost made to look broken and being one of the strangest parts of the dream. working at a McDonald's again made me physically ill and I could taste ***** in my mouth but for some reason it felt like only moments before I had been quietly lying next to a male lover (co-worker with a Colgate smile that tipped his lips to haunt me) and as I leaned in to kiss him, stomach swelling with the lovers melancholic ecstasy, he began to fade, his lips presings softly to mine collision shape-to-one-another as he vomited a little with no loss to his Colgate beauty (I thought him dying or skipping a day of high-school?) fading away slooowwwllyyy to be replaced by that cyborg tube with me standing above it spitting that same kind of spit which forecasts a violent throw-up from the bottom of a wretch gut. I could see the little spritz made to look broken becoming spider-webbed with my saliva until finally the ***** propelled itself from my throat and I collapsed to the ground somehow still looking in only to awake to my alarm clock - - - wheel around in bed to hear music.

the Saskatchewan plains (planes,
plain) stretch eastward beyond you;
sumptuous emptiness pocked with
the 14 hour streetlight of the sun- -
you are out of your mind and in
everything else. you are free now.
remember that you do not find
yourself. you create yourself(z)
you create yourself(z) - -