Circa Today

You drive along the highway, closer to something

Leaving something else behind,

The first thing you see is condos

Makes you wonder if there’s anyone left

In this city, or if they’re building just because,

If you ever get the chance to leave

They’ll be the last thing you see

Before you’re gone (the condos)

But most of us don’t, or won’t.

Every day a coffee shop springs up around the people

Traps them in like caffeinated ghosts,

We already had a zoo but now I guess

We’ve got two, one for the kids

One for the tourists, foreign and domestic,

They arrive on planes, leave on planes,

But in between they’re part of it

And I bet there are six or seven

New condos to confuse their photographs.

You feel lighter than you did when you arrived

Are your pockets half-empty

Or will you cling to your suburban optimism?

In spite of endless, relentless skinny white girls

There are vague notions of gas money

Bus tickets or dingy western trains

Still buried in your wallet with a

SIN card and a bunch of hard plastic

Photos used to spell your name.

Grande decaf lactose-free no fun latte please

With a vanilla biscotti to go

Just to spice it up for once, those days

You remember that you came here

For adventure, wasted all your time

Waiting in line at the entrance

Now you’re wishing these sidewalks

Could take you home, too bad

They’ve built another condo in the way.

There is a necklace on a hook upon the wall. . .

There is a necklace on a hook upon the wall,

I think it had meaning once, not long ago,

Now solid and still, the ruin of months,

That tortuous noose in pages past

Become a nothing,

Like Jesus Christ strung up among the sinners,

The idle set between a damp and dirty towel,

Just lately used to wipe a face,

And a little red umbrella,

Lately housed a stranger’s face just a half a world away.

There is a necklace on a hook upon the wall,

And a charm upon the chain,

I think it played a tune once,

Or slightly skewed it kept the pace of every step

Once forced into the future, carelessly unknown,

Or choosing not to know,

Seen and unseen but never fully blind

And all the worse in time because of it,

Real or illusioned, a thickening coat of filth

Repulses every kind of human contact

From the gentlest, most graceful tips of fingers

To the wreckage of the clasp,

Impressed as you are by rust.

And on the hook upon the wall,

Whole and surely broken

Hangs a necklace,

And I think I knew it once.

Quiet

The world in blue, a study in lines,

Byzantium forged, fearless, fallowed;

In the space of a single moment, forgotten,

Rotting like the hand that gave it life.

If you could only hear the silence

You would see,

If you could only close your eyes

You might have been a part of it.

This dream was not the product of sleep,

Not the half-remembered

Excrement of bullshit REMs.

Awake, aware of all the motions,

A mass of conscious flesh and blood,

Serving only as the path on which

The vision stakes its claim.

Roughly splayed in sweeping strokes,

The page becomes electric,

From dust to dust an eager age

Peaks out around the curtain,

Ready to expand and fill the world;

The moment passes unaware,

And in the quiet, dies.

Villains

They called it, “Yes,”

Watching imbecilic children

Rise and fall, spewing

Every damnation ever let to

Ministers and Ministries,

Preaching to the iron bars

Of this crooked, travelling

Menagerie. Corner into corner

Sweeping dust from

Each and every corner,

Then cornered, left unnamed,

Unplaced, even worsted,

Understood.

Underestimate the praise,

The chorus of souls,

The trembling of the masses.

Underestimate the scorn,

The villainous flow.

No space left for symmetry

In the balance of things,

No space for want.

Frivolous constraints

Imposed and recomposed

And again, waiting,

Now the fall and the laughter

That precedes it

From the belly,

Esophagus littered with bile

Composition laying waste

To the water and air.

Remember what you saw,

Friend, the smile,

Contempt to every edge.

Smile, friend,

Remember the dead.

Pragmatism Failed

I hate this place and God

Myself

And all the artefacts of rage

Suppressed and rearranged

To look like smiles

Genuinely forced across my face

And thrust into the world

Of eyes and lips

With their endless perceptive

Thirst for fiction.

Pleasure was evicted

With a promise

And regret.

Self-containment

Reawakens every shard

Of broken spirit

Every scar and

Every mask I built to

Hide them.

And for what?

This mobility is static

Stuck in one direction:

Down.

Assembly Required

Pop another Tic-Tac and salivate,

Wait until the taste is gone and kiss it on the cheek,

Betrayal of the inside,

Smiles spilling out profusely

Just to crush them underfoot

When I am finally alone.

There’s a minty fresh odour in the voice,

Critical pressures in the air

Trudging through the mud

In the space between,

This transformative zone is where it happens,

Where You and I is You and it,

Where once there was a face,

Now a mask.

Often subject to erosion

And a family of other metaphoric geology,

Like fault lines and quakes,

Not eruptions.

Buried just below the surface

He survives,

In this self-made cinematic prison cell

Oxygen is not the breath’s foundation,

Inhalation thrives on freedom,

Expression,

But with every desperate gulp

He’s one step closer to repression,

And he knows it.

Zero

I remember the isolation,

Crushed, claustrophobic

Pressed up against the walls

Of invitation—

Grey and plush

So as not to bruise or maim

Just embrace a body thrown

Against

This desolation

Like the routine arms of

Lovers lost in ceremony,

Never really thinking anymore

Just doing,

Lovers more like strangers and

Less like the strangers from

Their aphrodisiac youth.

Deflate...

Repossess the strength to look strong.

Reach in and

Pull out a response from your mental filing cabinet,

Memorized and automatic after so many years,

So many repetitions and retrievals,

Throw or place it in the space between

Yourself and the Other

Step back and wait,

And smile (if exposed).

I remember the aftermath,

Subtle changes and behaviours

Reproduce and coalesce

Become this monstrous thing

With a prettier face.

The phenotype’s the same

But the clockwork slows to a rusted halt.

And what is the sum of these subtractions?

Habitual answers predestined to fail

Allow this dense mutilation of the soul

These scars and historicity

And an unfulfilled desire to balance this equation.