Twelve Months in Fifty Minutes

Start the CD on a high note; something reverent about girls late for class, then move on to the heavier songs about catharsis and coming clean out of love with your lovers. Document the malaise and the haze of two winter months in a chemical daze and the sublime machinery that lifted you out of it. Make a point of coming back to the beginning and recognizing where you've been before sprouting off into the second stem, whose petals have proven more ornate than their glass tipped sisters which serve no purpose but to whisper about the ominous changes in the weather patterns. In closing make a salute to sails and the hands hoisting them higher than anything, wish them good luck and let them know that it comes apart.
Let them know anything could come apart and that the fact that it doesn't is the greatest testament there's ever been.

Every Night Showdown

...so really when you get right down to it there's nothing new, just the same dysfunction; the same disconnection between the emotion and the response; the same old humiliation reminding you
that you've never kissed anyone sober and nobody cares how much you move your idiot body around.

So stop your fucking dancing

Upon My Blindness

Bruises with origins unknown and irrelevant
are still assigned a sinister quality,
as though it was them and not the drinks
which brought you here
along this path so winding and blind
to waking up on a couch after kisses
that are just starting to bruise.

La Stanza Distrutta

Ardea herodias

They shook dust from their wings.
Little cast-away particles from their hollow crushed bones,
Sticking to splintered hairs lying dormant on my face and sticking up rigid on my arms;The detritus of history balancing on bunches of skin cells.
Dead, yet somehow still growing.

And the rain was perfect that morning.
Breaking as it hit the concrete, gleaming off boney tree branches, making my eyelashes web, and gathering together small oceans at my feet.
The gravel crunched under tires that were tarry and black
like when we closed our eyes so the sleep would come to us
so that the earth would become shifting sand dunes as the car pulled into the driveway.
The heat and the dust rising off the tires and fragmenting the rain’s mirage opened different realities to be embraced within, and I could see myself starting the ignition as I prepared to drive back in search of home and the prior week.

If it had been more than imagination I would have diluted my orange juice that day, skipped the coffee ,and said “I like to do the dishes”. Or would I have been anything but pleasant, tossing away passivity, demanding myself as in charge? An informer, sliding onto the deck, slipping on saline, squawking out to the heron perched on the old branches, asserting that there's little use to come back here, unless to stay perched forever or to be shot. And his feathers hardened into bark , stripped from the rotting trees, and blown away as ashes into the wind, gusts that controlled puddle tides of the tiny oceans that were now soaking into the down of my pillow.

When my eyes did open, the freedom to pretend closed.
I woke up to slanted ceilings and odorous books,
Weary eyed-dogs and a reminder in twisted sheets that had folds creased like furrowed brows.
And out the window no herons perched on the tree,
But were floating serenely in the breeze.
The last remnants of a life blown away
burnt up into sunrise and tail feathers;
the drama that I never had, and the archaic cessation I was expectant for you to die for.

myheadmyheadmyhead

I have this reoccurring image in my mind of me digging my heels into your back
and your skin gathering up like mud or dirt
leaving indents in your flesh where I was


Then I'd melt into you


I'd melt into your back
my flesh into your flesh
and there'd be nothing left but you

Recent Architecture

An evening spent drawing fake homes for the affluent,
each one on a three inch wide and tall piece of card,
the bottom folded down to allow for convenient application of glue;
one of them my grandparents' house in Morris, Manitoba;
another the one belonging to the Brady Bunch on Glory Circle.

At the time it seemed a task of both import and relevance,
one to be remembered through the ages as an ambitious undertaking
and to be exhibited in large museums where Warhol used to scoff
and van Gogh would never have stood asking, "What was that?"
or tried to understand rock music.

I'm alright with knowing that such wasn't the case
and that the closest I'll come will be another boy
with proportions strange and tiresome saying things like,
"The beams are crooked" or, "Who would build a house like this"
joking against the facts, though the facts are jokes themselves.

But my God, how tiring.

Red Balloons You Forgot About

"Where are you off to now?"
I should have asked it that, as it bobbed across my path, but I didn't.
I was fourteen, I didn't understand what I'd just seen.
Now I'm seventeen and just enough time has passed that homes could seems worth revisiting.
Stupid forces call me back to them; to the time and place
where the Winters are more sincere
and you never needed to worry about red balloons or truth and beauty bombs.

Despite my better judgment, I have the insane urge to revisit Fort Frances. I don't know what it is I'd expect to find there other than the same old wasteland complete with marauding bandits. Maybe I'm looking for closure, or some obscure feeling of understanding. Maybe I want to understand where I came from?
There's nothing there to understand; just bones and railroad tracks and one highway into town; a cemetery beside a pulp and paper mill, and a lake.
Oh, and the bass tournament.

lingering on

Eventually we all may be frightened out of honesty and the consistent search to relieve ourselves of apathy
We’ll stay put, remaining concealed even when the covers have pulled in
but for now I may have to stretch across maps
two greyhounds, one bus, a taxi, and an airplane
found at a stop in traffic, deported to ask permission,
wondering,waiting, and reading all the signs
907 kilometers away
blasting track nine on an album that chased me out of the year 07
music pouring out of speakers
I no longer know which trip I was on, what trip I just left, and where I’ve vacated to
where the trees still glow white in the background, like the moon luminating down from a night spent rising over the harbour.
And I’ve awoke to a lot of things,
fire alarms, phone calls I stumbled to reach, an alarm from a neighbouring room, a noisy roommate
But not a single morning since I returned has left me startled with unfamiliarity and confusion, and never, not once, have tired,red,wet, eyes and heavy sobs of breath kept me up tossing and turning, posing as insomnia.
I may always want to turn back around, but when these anxieties are stripped down, I know now that there are no more excuses I can swallow to avoid learning what home means.