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.

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.

Troubled, trouble again he felt
How could she tried to do such to him
How could she throw out all he ever ate up
When all he’s ever done was loved her till health
Oh he wish to fly a dreamer n’ say goodbye to it all
The stumbling and fights - the curses and the brawls
Theirs were none compare, but now, a finished ashes
A fire that burns and burned, n’ then flickered out
Leaving a wound that bleeds more gashes

Is his knight of shinning armor now a fraction
An embarrassment to the highest order - a madness
Does she see it in his eyes - though he'd tried to hide it
That the best things in life aren't free, so why get blown
Stay young and let the wheels keep spinning in motion
For easy beams of life are a glee - it all ends in a frown
Some in the graves and some the caves
Some in those cravings that end with AIDS
But you’ve trained to trample on scorpions and snakes
So where are your wits? My heart teased

Is she willing to stay? The brain bellows
Tis present, what's yesterday? my heart replies
And that of her mischievous plans? He echo slowly
A flunked! I suppose - I know she craved for tomorrow
That at times love isn’t prove by poems and presents only
Sometimes it has to be proven through pains and patience
But as for the incursion pain, that plan must not delude me
Not today, not forever. Indeed good and better suits us well
But the aim must not dethrone me; let’s it makes me a ******
For if one succeeds in turning a man from his manly posture
Not only do it loses his humanity, but it also earn him a killer
And yes! I see all the beautiful flowers up ahead

Mi lady in red (s2m) : oh she is bleeding out red
Redder than the sunset n' brighter than the black
We all have planned and all succumbed to its sorrows
But if one’s wise, they will realize there’s always tomorrow
Ours is right now, so swallow the pride and take my throne
Cherish the Prince and decorate his life with your flames
For good is better n’ bright and better is best n’ prettier
And the Boss n’ every other are only petted and petter
The perfect story: I bleeding you and you, only me
(s2m) : Oh! A dream come true

(s2m) : Break the rules n’ have a fun
Let’s loose ourselves and swing along
In a music that rules the day and all night long
But I refuse be a victim of saving someone’s mom
Most especially one who seems like she’s drowning
When in truth she’s not – when she’s acting n plotting
I ought not to be the next Lemuel that fails and felled
Hush! My heart spurned again, she’s all I want ever wanted!
Can’t you see how wide opened I am – I’m always wondering
Where does she? How I long to see the sun rise on her face
What is she doing? Is she okay or is there someone else?
Is someone loving her more: a guy or a girl I suppose
Does she get lost in their eyes too? Oh, it’s absurd
You and everyone versus me and everything
A logic bomb and Elle - a soldier and Simi
(smh) : Oh! A gleam that’s not true

So now I am standing on all men’s behalf
I guess it’s only me who’s saying: we are sorry mom
Sorry that we made a fool of ourselves and broke you
I’m sure we all prone to love you but it all went wrong
We fooled ourselves - we’ll get over her just like a song
But I can’t live that lie anymore - I be a fool to lose you
So again my heart bleeds: a change is all tis asking
The chance to rewrite all the cries and scars
That’s keeping you from a change.