left open to interpretation

"how old are you?"
one question that leaves me hanging on a ledge
I lied once
18

It wasn't that I thought 18 made me any older than 17

and I still don't know why I lied about it.

I want age to become as meaningless to me as gender,
but like gender,

everyone wants you to define yours.

Seventeen, and I'm blushing.
Eighteen, and I'm lying.
Nineteen, and nothing will have mattered anymore.



Pubs, liquor stores, probably even bars,I'm in.
I forget about age until the person I've been talking to asks.

"heh...seventeen"
and they admit they were fooled
and I admit it happens too often

The conversation carries on, in the same manner as before.
but I can hear myself talking with soft R's
my opinions sound naive
I'm getting words of advice
my piercings become embarrasing
I'm clenching my wallet as though it's babar's trunk
all my emotions feel like they're coming through invalid
they're coming through as angst
and if I had been drinking, the glass would have turned into a bottle.


I can sense the grey in my eyes reverting back to blue
and I've fooled myself again
into thinking that this age,my age, will ever been taken seriously
the conversation dulls

when my feet make their way back outside
I see beauty in snow that I've never seen before
like crystal clear sequins falling down, adhering to my clothes.
like babies breath when it hits my hair
I reach out for it
jumping and laughing at the sight of something new
snow that doesn't melt, snow that twinkles as it turns to ice
I hold it in my hand, smiling, as it falls
Grabbing the otherwise untouchable shapes which shake and revolve ,
turning and gleaming,
above my head,
past the walls of my crib
like a baby whose eyes have just opened,
mine are re-invented.

I am as young as the snow is gripping

piece of paper on my floor..next to the towel..by my bed

ON ONE SIDE :

DRAG IT OUT YOUR WINDOW

-picture of horse
-hippo dinosaur
- bumblebee?

"hold onto what you need we got a knack for fucked up history"
modest mouse quote?


and then some squiggles

and then some shooting stars...they even have shooty lines!

A HAIKU

"wrapped between two rings
through side a to b
we all sustain hope in verse"


and then the coming out of pansexual nothing 'i like boys girls and other and i dont really even care what that means'
SCRIBBLEZss
I wonder why I write things down.

ON THE OTHER:
- a large wasp stinging an anatomical heart
-a 'd' cut out of the paper by a pen
-the printer's typed 'page 13'
------------------------------------------------------
I think we leave little fragments of our own under-appreciated art all over the place
I want to frame this piece of paper on my wall
blue and black pen
pencil
and ink.

Where Are Your Friends Tonight?

Last summer I nailed the screen in my window to the frame, preventing it from being pushed in or out. I had to do it because of our cats. On summer nights, when the heat got so intense in the house it became impossible to sleep, they’d push the screens out of the open windows to go wandering through the streets, hunting the breeze they hadn’t really felt since we moved here from Ontario. Of course, every time this happened we’d spend the time between their escape and recovery in a state of panic, worrying about the fate of our de-clawed and mildly obese charges. It was this worry which eventually led us to nail my screen shut. As the hammer pounded out the sentence, I allowed myself to mourn the window, both literal and figurative, which I was closing. I thought back to the summer before, when I’d slipped out the same window and into the night.
My conspirators and I had planned it out perfectly. We hid my shoes under the bed and placed a stool under the window, removed the then unsecured screen and set up a signal to let me know when to make the leap over the windowsill and out into the streets. Everything was optimized for stealth and speed, and when the time came to make my move everything went off without a hitch. I met up with my team a few blocks from my house and together we marched through the orange pools of streetlights and darkened corners of our wicked little town. Together, we own the streets; we’re lawless and only as young as we choose to be. We can do anything and just to prove it we hug the ground to our chests and crawl under the bent up fence surrounding the golf course.
Once we’re inside we unfold a blanket and lay it out wide enough for all of us to sit on it. There’s a meteor shower, so we lie on our backs and count the tiny dots of light moving through a place we’ll never visit. Whenever a car drives by we tense up, afraid of discovery in spite of our knowledge that everyone driving by is far too busy to notice some kids on a golf course; far too busy to notice the sky is falling in above them. Watching them pass also serves to remind us that we have places to be, that we can’t lay there under the apocalypse forever, and soon we’re back on the roads that take us home, away from the blinking lights and other revelations the dead, dry streets hold.
More than anything I wish I was still back there, but that seems more and more impossible as time passes. The candles on a birthday cake are like nails in windows, and a person can never wish themselves back to somewhere they’ve already been. Friends grow distant and cold like the air in their hometowns; essays, tests and paragraphs start to grow out the bottoms of your feet, like roots through clay; girls get jobs and new friends and bosses and boyfriends, and girls find god crushed up inside ecstasy tablets and hospital dressing gowns. Friends leave town for somewhere new, leaving docks empty as the streets on summer nights, but colder. Applications get filed, portfolios neglected and mud settles into carpets until you’re old. You still can’t find what you used to have, and you still can’t shake the dust.
But for now I’m seventeen, and I have a lot left to lose; a lot left of me to leave on the streets and a lot of people to help me leap into the night. So maybe wishes could still come true, and maybe even if they don’t I can be alright with now.

writings and ramblings extracted from my journal that I write in in the winter garden at UNBC

everything around me looks like poetry
everything I say is the absence

I listened to the words of chain smoking blues poets
and nomadic punks
rusty growls and scratchy beautiful shouts
even my favorite poets can't speak to a well tuned-ear
tone deaf opera singers who tell a story of fucking up, dreaming, and trying again
So I tried again, to talk to you, to talk to my words.
but all I hear is
the perforated pitches
and garbled sounds
so I sty quiet
and I see
that there are only two types of well-read poets born into language

the silenced, hopeful, and beautiful romantics
and the unorthodox screaming,dreaming, well-spoken revolutionaries

the babies that are tongue-tied
the skin beneath their tongue disallowing the formation of words
grow up keeping their pen to paper, and sealing words behind their lips

and the babies that get older and ripen into being tongue twisted
the clumsy state of tongue hitting cheek but missing teeth
their words hitting us like lyrics in a song
harsh, loud,muffled, mumbled, but heard,
their clarity has nothing to do with pronunciation

we learn their lyrics and they ferment like fine aged wine
replacing old conceptions of who we thought we were
and they construct new values and hopes
into the beating pulse of a pumping fist.


I was thinking for a while that the only poems worth writing are those that are screamed out
mumbled
cried
or shouted
but then there are those poems
that get our heart pulsing to it's own beat
the ones created by
the tongue tied

who lay out words that have never been uttered, but amplified by their own beauty and fear
and I fear these words

the words that need no microphone to be heard
the words that need not be held up
because they're locked in
and they know the struggle
of gently training the strongest muscle in their body
to stay quiet
to enjoy a moment
to let words speak for themselves
and to keep their tongue from ripping the flesh beneath which ties it to the floor of their mouth
I fear their quiet revolution
as they know a strength that can tear
but instead holds back

and so they're held down and grounded
by a fragile flap of skin
nearly as thin
as the paper
that I wrote this on.

On Birds:

I wish I too could have evolved from reptiles,

and could fly.

Caw, caw.

Why I Write

I write because without the words I am powerless
Without the words I have no claim in the form or shape of the world
or the forming or shaping of the words that tell us that form and shape
Unless I can say "I do" and say,
"Like a comet falling into the ocean, I am going to push back the land to see what's under."
and mean it.
I write because if I didn't my fists would be free
and they'd punch windows and make deals under tables or covers
and fuck if they wouldn't tear away at my body
the body that makes them want,
and if I keep punching in these windows I'm going to start bleeding
I could be so god damn human so as to bleed
and it wouldn't stop,
and it would never stop.
So I write.
Because if I don't I know I'd start to strip
peel away like yellow paint on the oldest walls
slowly, with a practiced languor
the kind that makes men say stupid things
like, "his neck is nice to kiss."
to giggle uncontrollably.
I'd be dangerous.
I'd be temporary.
I write because when I'm writing you can touch me,
unlike now
when though you might think you are
it's really just rubber burning under your fingers
and I'm long gone.

confidence trials, non-transitory aerodynamics, and cryptic coloration

Last week I attended an interrogation
one-way mirrors turned double, pointed outward and reflected back on a face
accused of 14 years of slandering its smile
but like the the innocent who do not have the effort to appeal and to fight
I turned myself in,
pleaded guilty.

we try so damn hard to get ourselves to believe that we are our biggest felony.

I sat staring at my accomplice
at this reflection
at the creases and the folds that bend around my words
locking testimonies into brackets and paranthetical citings
of stories once taken from a three year old
that were spat back out , dulled down,
and presented in proper stylistic format,
with logic and reasoning and boredom.

these things we call dimples
that now contain my usage of language
and present a facade in the form of a smile.

but when I look through the mirror
and I'm my only defense
I'm asking questions trying to gain alibis
as to what caused the change in me that ruined these lines
that were once just dimples
extending deeper into the skin making the brackets appear more like question marks
that marked the curiosity of a child smile
and I look familiar to an old video of myself when I was three and laughing
singing about the cowardice of some butterflies who flee the entrapment of their cocoon
to attempt finding beauty in the air with hopes that wings outstretched would carry them to freedom
away from the trials and tribulations of the earth-bound creatures
the ones who once were
the creepies and the crawlies
trying to survive with the struggle of motion created from prickly hairs trying to push against ground

while awaiting my acquittal,the mirror resonated a voice
that questioned like the marks of my three year old smile,
trying to know the motive of a monarch butterfly
and why a caterpillar would bundle themself up for so long
only to discover that their verdict
is that the glorified spectrum of vibrant colors saturated in their fore and hindwing,
are that of the same which rested against
their strong,muscled, flesh
before they traded themselves in for a weaker self
just to find the same beauty in fragile wings

I want re find the spirit of
the youngest butterfly who knew the wings she was growing would not hold
when she jumped off the monkey bars
and laughed while hitting the grass
feeling the snapping of fissioned bone,the break of her growing leg

I want to know the motive behind why she denied the crutches
why she did not want to be held up

and when the question marks un-folded like wings
they said she just wanted to feel grounded
to open up her chest like a cocoon
reverse with blinding speed from chrysalis to larvae
just to land back down and crawl amongst the brush
and to find freedom in unpalatibility

Forget writing your own poetry! (joke)

Anis Mojgani

There's still a lot left of you, Travis Cannon.

these anxieties

pushing upward, metal bars grate against thin skin
peeling of thin tubing
the science of capillaries

it stops the bleeding
keeping toxins out
no need for blood letting

in this moment there is flesh
there is cotton
and there are materials being ripped off

organic chemistry and biology
and hell, probably even a bit of history

we've got an art student
laughing at those who believe in the existence of non conformity

the existentialist makes them giggle
the scientist thinks in extremities and talks with nothing
and the historian holds a bias

I'm simply poking through bodies of water
trying to belong inside the mystery of a meniscus
and I'm a catch phrase a way from being that fucking person I learned to hate

Dead Fire

It's when you're watering the new flowers that you miss the old ones most.
Their wilting leaves and modest, slow to bloom petals seem most ideal,
when compared with the short-stalked and ostentatious breed now gracing your finest dinette.
Suddenly, I miss red wine, boys too soft to touch
and most of all, the heat.
God, how I miss the old heat.

threatening a cameraperson,

they are filming a documentary
asking someone whose loved one had just been shot,
what they think of the apathy shown by police,
"can we have an interview?"
She refuses them, gets angry,and screams,
"Go away,I'll break your camera, you know I can do anything I want in this country and get away with it"
Yeah, she screams this.
Like laws that are put in place should be our only moral reasoning
I'm sitting in a chair feeling my crossed legs going numb and
wondering how we can be so fucking blind
and I'm sort of shocked by this dramatic irony

the lady next to me is sighing
and I am just really fucking angry

their red nail polish being wiped off by vultures
and cops in training
trained by our patriotic people in red
calling them 'nothing'
and her body has been laying there, and I think it was after a rape,
waning in a heap of garbage and rotting,boiling,submerged in oily liquid
and it's 48 hours later
"she's a prostitute"
the police don't do anything

and then they all just stand around the body and pray to their god that this stops
"dear jesus.." whispered in a spanish prayer

and a lady next to me let's out a concerned 'hmm'
she's still sighing, and I want to know what she is thinking

"HEY JESUS CHRIST, COME PICK UP YOUR FUCKING GARBAGE, HERE IS YOUR FUCKING RED NAILED HOOKER."
in haste, that's the only thing I could even think of praying

so I satirically whisper

'congratulations, jesus sends his vultures to take care of it.'

cuz I'm pissed off.

this film is reminding me of what I am taught to recognize as sexism
and I cry for it
and for them
and for us
but less for me
because I can't know this burden like they do

and even in this country,
where I'm being taught to think about working class women

and how, in this country,
she says they still get called this derogatory term known as "easy"

I feel even less of this burden
but I still carry it
Yes, I've got these burdens in a bag somewhere
and I can't relate to them at all
but I can carry them up high above my shoulders
because sometimes I feel pretty fucking inexistent too

no not nearly anything close to this


but like the unnoticed who are labeled as 'prostitutes' and 'nobodys' to legitimize the fact that nobody gives a shit

and like the raped, and the abused, and the ones who are judged,
and the ones who got fucked,

I get mad about spending my time feeling completely de-sexualized..
but I'm not going to let this become ironic
so instead
when I start to feel like my personal injustice is being marginalized by such bigger ones
I stop seeing this marginalization as a bad thing
but more of a reason to feel solidarity with these other struggles
because nobody is alone with this
it's always the same issue
and even my specific one isn't left to stand alone
because it translates in my sisters beautiful poetry
and
in these womens' bullet and knife wounds
in her sixteen year old pregnancy
in the tragedies left by those who have gone missing
in the barrel that's going to forever roll around his conscious mind
in his tears shed for the family he lost

I think that quote couldn't have been more right
when it said something about how we're all the ones getting fucked

I unfold my now numb legs
tapping them to regain feeling
turn to the person sitting next to me
and making an eye contact with her that causes my tears to dry up,
I sigh too
"hmm"

planet earth findings

staying awake until the fog rose above us outside

nearer to you
and encompassing me


I always seem to forget about the antarctic, I told you this before

spent these last few years studying the foxes and the bears

never paying tribute to the march of those penguins

how they duck and slide and barely escape capture from the lions of the sea

we take our time to remember the polar worlds.

time ticks away
one batch burnt
one batch liquid, now near frozen in my fridge

the oven died on the latter.

I'm thinking you're not really a polar bear as much as you are a leopard seal
and that it's better to be with an advantage in water than it is on land
better to dive than to dig for your food

and in the ocean, you're not left stranded

Ah yes,
communication between land masses

I think you just found me
and slid down to middle ground
wher we're all pretty mediums
we never have to escape capture
or fear being preyed upon
I meant to say that we're nearly as south as we are north

and that I haven't totally forgot about the antarctic.

but it never came out very cool

Hello, Hello

Let's do something stupid and irresponsible that leaves us momentarily satisfied and full of hilarious stories.
Let's do something reckless and dangerous that leaves us waiting in line at the medical lab to get out blood tested for diseases.
Oh, hello.

Architechture

Back arched enough to suggest architecture
Above the flow of old, oft forgotten legs
Taut as the rope tied to the loop of an anchor
Pulled so hard as to warrant cracking, hissing
And smoke.
But at the other end is something darker
Weightless so as to hold back nothing
Nevertheless sinking sinking sinking
And this gull perched on the mast won't cry
When Venice finally sinks.

A Bird Told Me

and when I look at pictures from other people's lives and I wish I were there, I know that is I was I would have just slunk off into or a corner or onto a roof to be alone. Because someone has to be the asshole, and someone has to be the straw dog for you to dress and to hold, and the things we do aren't out of love or hate, but out of necessity.
and I know you say you've changed, but I'll always see you as the same girl who didn't call me the next day and didn't believe me when I said I couldn't tell what was real, and who upon seeing I couldn't even bring myself to say, 'your hair looks good' to. Maybe I didn't even need to.

Si j'avais le choix, je n'aurais jamais occupé n'importe où.