Sleep Alone

I plan to sleep and dance alone, when constructing an evening
I can envision the floor, the sweat, and ringing in my ears
I see myself, man on fire, dancing for not knowing better
My signals are grounded in a language I don't understand
each word a root that fans downwards and out
tunneling, blind as lizards, fixing my limbs to a place
where they swing cluttered and remote
dumb in spite of shouting
anchored in spite of constant motion.
It doesn't matter how articulate the roots
the endless jerking protrusions spreading nothing but rumor
unhollow fingers smearing through the soil
ugly as painting, ugly as songbirds.
I see myself there, man of earth on fire
knowing better than to dance
knowing better than to sweat.

This Week's Theme

Keeping Up Appearances

Moving places I've never been.
It was not spontaneity. There were no gutsy moves. I have no guts.
How could I?
I used to talk everything to death. I still do, but back then it was more safe. Back then it was just talk. Back then I did not make any defining lines between imagination and plans. Things never just happened, because things never happened at all.
But now imagination is something I find necessary to point at and laugh with. Who the fuck would want to imagine anything if it is not going to be beautiful?
The year has already let us down so many times.
Who the fuck wants to keep making plans when they know they might fall through and why the fuck would anyone think imagination would lend you hope or the chance of something beautiful?

This pessimist speaks to me at night, in dreams, when I'm not there to fight back. They get into valves that become too rusty to pump and blood pools out of my throat until I'm spitting it out, seedy and thick, screaming "I'M SICK OF THIS!I'M SICK OF THIS!"
I'm sick of this. I am sick.
The year had made me so fucking ill with this.

And how badly I have wanted to give up.
But the day does come, and there are phone calls home.
And you are always laughing.
And how dare I give up on the hope of good fortune when this year has gone by, and I can still hear you , despite everything, telling me your post-op plans...as though they sound delightful, and sleepy.
How dare I deny you of that resilience,
of that beauty?

I plan never to complete my plans

I plan to make better art

I plan to floss regularily

I plan to clean my room

I plan to stop crying so much

I plan to stop caring so much

I plan to fix my left foot

I plan to make you happy

I plan to start doing yoga

I plan to tell you to leave me alone

I plan to tell you to stop being a dick

I plan to be more organized

I plan to sleep more

I plan to stop drinking alone

I plan to expand my music collection

I plan to get a working phone

I plan to start my research project

I plan to start my holiday creations

I plan to buy more posters

I plan to make more art

I plan to learn to use a sewing machine

I plan to eat a healthy meal 

I plan to stop thinking about bashing my head through a window

I plan to hate my neighbours less

I plan to move out

I plan to spend all my free time with you

I plan for us to work

I plan for us to last

I plan to stop stressing

I plan to stop hurting myself

I plan to finish my homework

I plan to buy some school merchandise

I plan to move my furniture

I plan to make you not want to sleep with someone else

I plan to get a job

I plan to stop hating my own existence 

I plan to stop hating everyone else's existence

I plan to find some good galleries here

I plan to find a sheesha cafe here

I plan to find someone worth  my time here

I plan to call my grandma

I plan to call my friends

Cross, Cross, Cross

There's just so much foundation to be laid down
before we can even imagine what could be here.
Bricks, mortar, copper wire and bones
Work boots to help you leap the too high hurdles of
Yellow Caution Lines
you loved so much in school
marveling at the novelty of lines that people wouldn't
cross.
Now they're choking you
coiled over and over around your neck, threaded through
your lips and their lips
because a certain measure of safety is required
it's a prerequisite of sorts for working on this ambitious project
this architectural feat.
Because if everyone you've ever loved were a building
unto themselves, designed and shaped by the two of you
erected and maintained by the two of you
slept in and bathed in by the two of you
it's important to remember that you have a history
of foreclosure,
a brief history of demolition.
You're afraid to pay the rent and you're afraid
to put any nails in these walls, because you know how quickly
cement can form around workman's boots
how hard it can become to throw caution to the wind
when it's affixed around every inch of you,
even with buildings so tall as these.

This Week's Theme

A Brief History of
P L A N S

meaning for a word i used to hate

we put out a fire yesterday and we thought we found the ocean.
but it came back to us
when there was a warm wind today. it thrusted against me the same way the beginning of a new poem can. i can tell it doesn' t know where it's going, where it's intended to be.

we admired the wind and i walked south west, a direction i've come to love probably a little too much.

vegetables and the people that love them, vegetables and the people i admire
summer crushes on farms replaced by fall and appreciated kitchen mashes
and im so appreciative of your words, these words.
although muddled too much by frantic smiles and head bobs
( and god, how many times can one person say 'totally' ?)

but this fall i dont believe in falling
because i think there are
three rules for me to live by

1. never fall down
2. always get in the way
3. I can't remember the third

but we ended up by the canal, singing, the wind and I....my toque almost blowing away, my hand on my head, like nights before, nights spent dancing
and we howled away
about decision making, and beauty

Hollllogram

He didn't get the nod, or probably didn't, it's kind of hard to tell-- but he's pretty sure he didn't get it. He moved along the sides of the floor anyways, daring for once to inhabit a space. Somehow he did it, dared to carve out a place in a room, to keep it open like a wound; scarification. His mind went blank, his body given to convulsion and whatever else may have staked a claim.

He knew it wasn't really though. He wasn't there in even the most abstract sense. Every moment he's a hologram, some clumsy memory from the future; living life as merely something to be reflected upon; living as something to be regretted.

He's not there, don't try to touch him. He thinks about wearing a signs; a sandwich board or barbed wire, just to show how serious he is. Don't Touch Him. He's really that serious. He's really that frightened. He's not really real, but he's both of these things.

In any case, he flickers. His guts spill in a lightning bolt flash, a short circuit. For an instant, he's present. I'm present.
Then he's gone.

Now I'm gone.

...it's been a while.....

we regress to it,
the pantheon docketed as romance
some arriving in their clamor, some following lyric, chanced with the larceny of love and lust,
stealing looks with a language i never learned,
their pious prayers,

i come languid.
i come with quarrel.
shamefaced, vitrolic, in vertigo,
a vulnerability that pits itself quavering deep within the venter,
a pantheon poached of polytheism

but we all regress to it,
as if that last metaphor made any sense,
as if dialogs direct heartbreaks and crushes or attractions into discourse,
into something more than they already are.
as if alliteration could make any difference to what i am really saying,
the reality of human relationships.
of my relationships,
as if i've ever actually had any that felt real.

but i regress to them,
for the hope that at some point I can allow for the singular lanuage i've known
to rise from being more than infidel, to infest words once infixed in being incompetent, and solitary,
to rise up and progress into inflection.

Played Tape

You made a mix-tape about yourself and those
who've loved you, were that the proper word
plucked three minutes from the radio at a time
clear transmission burned to hissing static for the scarce few seconds
between the acts

You played that mix-tape about yourself
to anyone who'd hear it
until the magnets were worn through and the jewel case
splintered.

You crushed the splinters of that mix-tape about those
who'd loved you, were that the proper word,
into your chest and kept them there like a secret

because nobody wants to hear again
about mistakes you did and didn't make
on a mix-tape about yourself.

Cut the mic.

No Captain

Anthem for wasted stretches

with horns and lost bass by the orange

building across the street which may

be viewed through a living room window.



I dance and sleep alone, twisting my feet as though

something could be done about it

shifting restless and unsavory against nothing and the other

in emergency exit rows with ample leg and elbow room


I am No Captain

and you my Singular Beauty of the East are No Navigator

All I want is an exchange, the trading of places

No Captain and No Navigator, neé Singular Beauty of the East

returning to the state of being a singular
a we in the face of this us.



All collisions are accidents with no navigator at hand

All hands are accidents, all hands are collisions.

This Week's Theme

a Brief History:


the
L O V E
A F F A I R