Leaving my phone on the
morning strewn bed, the
bus courses by and drags
me along for the ride. Old
high school friends pulse
through my head and I
contemplate their distance.
Every unrecognized human
who seeps into view or
distance causes me to bury
into my phone and feign
distraction. Feign importance,
like someone is paying attention
to me. Until I realize my phone
is my hand and my real phone
is still fast asleep in Asia.

I feel like a ghost today.

Not one word shared between
others as real as me, I figure
I'd feel as lonely at the bottom
of the ocean as I would on
-stage in Madison Square
Garden. 4 hours of work
slithers by like an injured
snake. After exactly an
hour and 17 minutes on a
bus home, addiction knits
the phone into the palm of
my hand like resentful lovers
wishing they didn't need each
other. Only 1 text message
and it's my significant other
slipping me recognition. Old
high school friends pulse through
my head and I contemplate their
distance. I return recognition
to my lover and hear nothing
from her for hours to come.
None of these old high school
friends seem to acknowledge
what I thought was love between
us. I pretend not to care as the
world ignores me and fall back
into the confused trance of
'keeping busy.'

I feel like a ghost today.

What happened to the school
-yard friends? The late nights
spent with nowhere to be?
The happy conundrum of life
as a game? What happened
to freedom? What happened
to freedom? What happened
to freedom?

I hold a sliver of hope that one
day life will electroshock my
existence back into existence.
It's been a beautiful fight, but
lets hope the war is over by Christmas

*** momma, I'm coming home.

snow-water dribble dots are mountain spheres on my sweater
outside, the cold is hol-ee ****
the weather is wholly enveloping wooly anythings
so good luck telling skies to quiet.

I tried, and the skies whispered back
by breaching the bottom lip of my jeans to crawl a great big
'ha
   ha
     ha
       haaaaaaa'
up my Pyrenees spine like God had laid out a line of coke days ago and was only now ready to gracefully snort.

they said 'blizzard' last night,
I said 'blurry blank' in the morning
rain and slush and cold and rush and
no no no, my veins weren't heating up.

the busses I've been on could fill up a football stadium
if each given merit per ride
per rattle-shake snake through countryside

each in its own little protected purpose
cute journeys of love, sturdy journeys of response-ability
hedonic riddle and rides to the end of the road river

like a musical interlude;
run the metal inner-tube;
comfort-context-cannot-climb

all my attitude is altitude
so I almost don't care to be grounded.
Greyhounded, maybe.

tablets of Vitamin C

Campus shoes

picture that, ha ha!

Pixel that!

One of my favourite things to do, of holy proportion to the passionate student painting words onto a blank canvas at the last minute, eyes falling shut like a broken garage door just before the glassy vibration of a mid-winter sunrise, is to sleep little for 2 or 3 nights and sit at a cafe as the clock strikes 9:30 PM with a full cup of coffee glanced in the peripheral to my right and a world shaker book of cosmic sputtering.. philosophies of new and of old.. quivering between my overworked fingers, reading like a raving madman who understands how false it is to understand anything as mundanity.

I am the
Voluntary insomniac.

I suffer from no such misfortune.
Midnight to 3 is a blessing,
At night, I'm reality's surgeon.

Delving head-first into current events,
And philosophies of East and of West;
Jack Kerouac and Jean Paul-Sarte have me sweating;
And I look forward to Alan Watts next.

Lets discover it all!
How exciting it is,
I've been privileged as I am alive.

I read and I write,
Walk dark streets on some nights,
And on others, I lay and watch stars.

I am the
Voluntary insomniac.

On some nights I sit and sip tea,
Read Al-Jazeera's new headlines,
And depart upon intellects sea.

In the depth of the night
I become everything;
Every person, every move, every sound.

Every taste, every touch, every feeling, every thought,
I am the stars, the ocean, the ground.

In the present I become the future and past
And explore the great misunderstood;
Everything becomes clear as my boat starts to steer,
And my feet waver from where they once stood.

And on every sweet night, it doesn't matter how far
My ship crossed infinity's sea,
I am lost on open water forever;
I adventure eternally.

remember remember
old widowed December
and Pluto
the moon with a moon

the sun drips an artist
a walk flies the farthest
O farther than birds in a room.

remember remember
the priests peace and temper
and wet fingernails
Tinted teeth smiling tunes

the moons seen me naked
my virginity taken
I roar from the ***** of what Godkind consumes.

Don't you listen?

it spoke to me in
medieval Dutch,
like an obese King
of Belgium who
hands out free ale.

A cute girl with blonde-streaks and pink skinnies marches dignified past my cubicle, stopping for a moment to inspect me;

"Is that-
Nevermind."

And on she floats into the grand sky-blue matrix of life.
That was our moment together.

the world can seem
from the glassy eye of a computer screen.

addicted to the ego trip of the
face
book

and

all of a sudden
the trip is no longer enough

ignored; neglected
the only response is a snippy
bit
of
sarcasm

a negative
disguised
as
a
neutral

your head
screams
'*******, *******'
but if you stood up
for
yourself

they'd say
'calm down,
it's just
a
*******

joke.'

Lost to the in-mind,
Eyes almost teary with exhaustion as city exhaust expends my already weary body, (... mind... soul!...)
I walked into the washroom at Tilley's travel emporium (you know those hats you see on Steve Irwin? The stereotypically Australian saucers with a tilt like a collision? Tilley hats. They were invented by the creator of this store.)

and it smells like you.

all my weary head can imagine

is your

midnight mouse

of a snore

and
       your

soft

       lava-stone skin

the solar system of freckles on your shoulders

the stars of

birthmarks

on your

      arm.

I say good night

as

    Canada

     tucks the 2 of us in

   for the last time


     until

    April.

the oldest picture
I've ever seen is
of a velociraptor
dying on the cross
for mankind.

the same cross
that the Beatles
snapped their
famous picture.

the crosswalk
at Abbey Road.

I am the biggest
******* who has
ever loved.

tetris patterned-shirt
weird, life-is-a-creamy-dream feeling every ever
I spend here
in
Downtown Vancouver.

is it the thought of the chilli-pepper eyed parrot
grazing on the street soul from the corner of Davie
and Granville?

is it a birth trauma coma slam
considering the fact that my
passport
says I awoke here
for the very first time?

is it the caffeine pulsing through my sweat like blood
the triple-sweater sandwich I call my chest
the passing of my dear old Auntie Debbie
the alien faces of a city-gone city goer
the warm freeze of 15 dollars in my pocket
wallet
crunch

perhaps it's the red pants
the folded skinny's
the overalls
the great validation of Shakespeare's scream:
"All the worlds a stage/ and all the men and women merely players."

Did he mean John Players?

Each and every all of us to be smoked
in the soaking rain
pretending that we
each
have brains?

- - -

I know
I'm not as intriguing
as most of these Greek-God's and Goddesses

But I still wonder
if man and women gaze to me
like I'm bless-ed.

- - -

could that explain the dream feel?
the creamy steamy dream feel?

my lack of validation
in this crowd-work calling card?

- - -

it's just about time
that I mention the women
whom gazed
from the train
that traverses the
clouds.

East Indian I assume
I the troubadour
I gazed right back into her eyes.

We played this game
until 'screech' went the train

and I moved on in space and in time.

She exited there
at the same place I glared
to the tiling below my unfit and soaked
sigh's.

As to why that I raced
so that she couldn't chase
and speak words that would open the
light

I'm unsure

but I wanted to
even as I
slipped from sight
into Vancouver's day bright of a night.

5 dollar bill curled like a tunnel
a ****** kicks a toonie kicks a dime
the tunnel is built into the mountain
of my Lonely Planet guidebook to
Barcelona.

the laptop cord slithers above like
a stiffly frozen waterfall. The world
is an okay place.

bring me sunken ships. bring me the
daniel that called your name through
can't and nevers. he waited like a
switchback earring for the roller coaster
to simply answer a simple question in
regards to salt flats in Utah. the all-ages
cross-dress was broken in two and
expected to dance for the window washers
incorporated slogans, in what sense did the
teacher employ simile in the following sentence?
I like to like, it's like love but it's like. whistles and
bears make a combination as deadly as nitrogen
and nuclear fusion. any relation would have it's
way in Greek sandals marking Tumblr asks and
wondering where the littler of the 7 was born.

My life is occasionally a continuum of anxiety of and or relating to the possibility of my going insane. My greatest fear is schizophrenia, thanks mostly to Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. At my worst, I am standing in a Wal-Mart under the surrealistically bright lights of dead consumption waiting for my head to become an unfamiliar place filled with unfamiliar voices. It has never happened. The closest I ever came was on the night of February 4th, 2013 (which, in this case, just so happens to be last night), when in a state of silly pointless inconsequential anxieties I thought I heard the faint hum of an unfamiliar voice chanting, 'Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.' It went away, but the moment I started hearing it I freaked out a little inside as I was lying in bed having just finished reading. I attributed it to the possibility of over-reading, over-conceptualization, not enough time in the real world. I blamed reading and writing and watching for the feeling that I'm never quite in the real world, because my head reads and writes and watches and asks itself; “are you real? Can you truly say with any certainty that you exist? How much sense does depth perception make, and now go to sleep and dream in your head because one day dreaming will be considered a symptom of mental disease. Enjoy it before it terrifies your strange fettered wits.” Sometimes I listen to music in my head and wonder if that's insane. Sometimes I listen to music in my head and contemplate innocence. Sometimes I listen to music in my head and sing along. Sometimes I listen to music in my head and realize all music comes from inside so I calm and I calm and I calm.

Proverbs!
What do you want, my wisdom?
My individual wisdom immortalized for soul and mind
Given credibility by a dash
Followed by my
Ego-steeped identity?

Proverbs!
Perhaps I was more honest in momentary transience
Than I could ever be consistently.

Who needs ideals
When all of it is here
Right now?

I loved that achey crane you used to call your neck
I used to passionately kiss that achey crane
maybe massage the middle more
so its 80 year contract with you
could be properly fulfilled
without having to take advantage
of the *******
warranty
again.

******* God and Angels Ltd.
free marketeers who planned our obsolescence.
give me what I paid for
you self-righteous Forbes ******.

of dust float endless like yard work
and the ships from pier won't float without buoys
gravity! gravol! gratitude!
under what is under where, if you ask where what is
sloppy joe looks like a rancid saint of morning pancakes
and the syrup on his lips feel like an early morning jog
Platonic on the plate tectonics
the **** he said means solid, hark heavenly.

if I fail my road test again, there will be
flames in the road and sobs in the ear of
the self that demands a piece of plastic,
demands legitimacy from social rule, demands
a head lain to pillow smiling with success.
if I fail my road test again, there will be
a clamour of bike chains and huffs met with
a very un-Zen slapshot clamp cramp stamp me
atom bomb salad. but if I pass, there will
be satisfaction, there will be gladness. there
will be love. and in reality, if failure besets
my tire marks, I will try, and try, and try again.
the old Chinese proverb states... fall down 7 times,
get up 8.

good luck, Kyran Paterson-King. you've got this, you
snarky-*** *******.

Winnie the Pooh told me Barcelona smells like raspberry soap.

at the psych ward with the client,
hardly anyone is quiet
they all say they feel okay
but 'they' don't even buy it.

here and there a light will flicker
pulsing on and off, I'm sicker
are these lights intentional?
pyscho-nautic centinnel?

calming, calming
smells like ****;
holy **** I need to sit,

who am I and who are they?
oh, here comes the dinner tray.

"Man is a crushed being. Floats like logs on an empty river in a wild with no predators,
because, Man knows, a predatory wild is immoral."
no regrets.

and water once said to the wall
"Can I speak? And if I speak why do I speak this particular language? Beyond my reflective frailties and your broken back, there really isn't much to be said for the anglo-saxon remembrance of loss, now, is there?"

and the sleep in the corner of her bedroom was like a feminist strike for equal wages
there was a resentful bitterness to the way she spat her measured love.

often, she would say nothing as a means to everything,
and everything as a means to nothing,
but either way the only one listening was every one of us, so we couldn't really hear a word she was saying.

some mornings, I awoke to the curious wondering of subject versus object, and sad endings versus no endings, and you know what?
not once did an answer appear and if it did, no way was there a syllable empty enough to describe our lack of a point
so I stopped calling I, I
and started calling I, we
so we slept until 1 in the afternoon with the only shame being that of novelized continuity with its great big book on the cons of finitism we tried to return for store credit only to realize it wasn't Chapters selling, nor the writ of the holy ghost, but instead that particular angle of our face that can only be witnessed if one mirror is placed in front of another with a third to the left

and suddenly, 'I' made more sense,
what a shame?

and water once said to the wall
"all things are all things," and the wall listlessly agreed to nothing.

so we walked to the water and agreed on behalf of the wall
and the water swooshed kindly as we lay out a towel
sleep on the beach.

and the sleep in the corner of her bedroom was like a feminist strike for equal wages
there was a resentful bitterness to the way she spat her measured love
so my nervous flinch began to wonder why the real world teases with stillness, distant mountains, open roads, warm kisses, sunrises, and cold rain
when I still have to get up for work in the morning.

He was never far away;
And the last to ever say he was gone
Was the same who could stutter brains and brawn away in the skylight.

The city is bigger and pretty,
Prettier aesthetically in his brain,
Where the pretty place he remains is driving him insane,
Can you blame him?

He called it, in the end,
He even said it was around the bend,
Yet as a friend to himself he threw out a hand to lend
In verbal assistance.

He feels the grease caress his fingers,
As the smell of sadness lingers,
In his mind from a past mistake he did partake upon himself to rightfully correct.

He is hauling himself from Hell,
Smacked straight in the face by the sale of his emotions to sadness,
He is buying back his shares,
Because he cares.

He was never one to trust complete optimism;
In fact he felt like optimism was simply one side of a schism,
That would take 1 step forward,
Only to end-up 2 steps back, and off-track.

Maybe it's his misuse of the art;
But logic and realism are a part of his mind he can't silence.

He believes himself to be,
Optimistically realistic;
One who will not deny life's hardships a good cry,
But will strive to try in making things better using the side that's much brighter,
And lighter.

He is a fighter who looks not to fight,
But to do right, and live life,
Beyond his work as a writer.

I'm usually waiting. work-wait,
wallet-wait, wait for the waiter
(waitress), all wretch, no *****,
waiting. waiting for the moment
I can finally look around and say--

'ah, there it is.

always in my back pocket

jabbing my ****.'

credit card
hung on the
walls of the
Louvre

to make
some ******
point.

'it's beautiful,
isn't it?'

occasionally, a flash of white page blankets her face like a pale Swedish summer
the video stream clunks along on solipsist angles, falling, waking, back, here here
pen on her tongue and I wonder where it's been, disease travels funny highways but the constant revelation of
one germ after another makes the body a well-protected warzone, immunity flaunts its immunity,
the pen picker probably protects the person a bit more aptly than the hand-sanitized middle-man afraid of the swine flu

blue blanket holds her shoulders like she's swimming in a lake of silly putty and her white teeth glisten because
she's lucky and no one ever notices their fortune when it's so close you can't see it.

turn around,
have you found it yet?

I am not a lonely man,
Yet their are times when my mind screams,
Because my home, it feels empty,
And my life lacks real theme.

I am not a bad man,
Yet their are times when I can yell;
'You've broke my heart, you've tripped my mind,
You can burn in hell.'

I am not a daft man,
Yet their are times when my thoughts cease;
To figure from the start of things,
Would destroy my inner peace.

I am not the smartest man,
Yet at times my mind will speed.
From start to stop, the pages turn;
I devour what I read.

I am not the coolest man,
Yet to me, that means next to none;
I am and will be who I want,
From myself, I will not run.

I may be a free man,
Yet I lock myself to screens;
I lock myself to schedules,
I lock myself to teams.

I lock myself to a world which says,
'To yourself, you will not bend.
For me you will do anything,
And to yourself,
You will not tend.'

I lock myself to thoughts and feel,
That cause me to believe,
For some incandescent reason,
I owe the world, and weave,
Into the fabric of the rest,
I work for bigger goals.

For me the bell sits silent,
But for the rest, the bell does toll.

I'd rather not admit it,
No, I'd rather not admit it.
I'd rather not admit it, that I have yet to quit it;
Or that you still seem to plague my mind with words and images,
And that when I sit in the same spot that, for the first time, we held hands,
I can feel liquid as it swells up in my uncontrollable tear glands.

I'd rather not admit it,
No, I'd rather not admit it.
I miss you and I think about you everyday since I was forced to quit it;
Yes, I'd rather not admit it,
No, I'd rather not admit it.

I remember all the moments,
And all our beautiful components,
Which we used to patch together,
Perfect love within bad weather;
It felt perfect for awhile,
And then you put our love on trial,
And it ended in a second,
Yet you came back on that same weekend,
Saying things were now to change,
And we were to rearrange,
What it meant to be in love;
But you left me with the glove,
And decided to tear off the one you had.

It ended once again,
And 2 days later you did bring,
Your heart right back to me,
And believed that I could see,
You'd done no wrong.

You promised you had changed,
And that you would rearrange,
All your action in our love,
Yet once again you tossed that glove,
And left it all alone, to myself.

I sacrificed and compromised,
Believing you were doing right,
Yet you sat there in stagnant indifference;
I knew, inside, what that did reference.

Hurting, deeply insecure,
I broke it off, as you had lured,
Our love away from being repaired;
Retreated back to your single lair.

Sick and tired, upset and lost,
I knew my ending it would cost,
The girl I love with all my heart;
The one who'd loved me at the start,
And still did in the same way,
Yet she wished to get away.

My heart was broken,
And every time I breathed,
I felt my chest expand in pain,
My solar plexus bounced away,
In memory, and thought fighting tears;
You switched me out of silent gears.

I'd rather not admit it,
No, I'd rather not admit it.
I'd rather not admit it, that I have yet to quit it;
Or that you still seem to plague my mind with words and images,
And that when I sit in the same spot that, for the first time, we held hands,
I can feel liquid as it swells up in my uncontrollable tear glands.

Because, I'd rather not admit it,
No.
I'd rather not admit it.

I heard you whispering through the empty door-frame
Seeking sleep from your desired lover, unchanged and the same
the twilight years of life, are they anything like the twilight zone?
Perhaps the alzheimers leads to a quantum close
and
mirrors float like seperated identities, I let the spirit into me
Sentient flow comes with a pill of Gingko biloba
The oval Mandala SWEEPS me up!
Back in the circle of the SANSKIRT gumption
Carved like a pumpkin, that's sumthin if you're thumpin
Loud
Loud
Loud enough.