Broken Puppets

I tried to be healthy enough to screw your screws. Really. We could’ve at least danced a happy imbalance with marionette strings doing all the work, like: my jaw to your skull with no blood but just ideas, your tennis elbow replacing my cyclist knee, delightful body confusion contorting our contours. But why can’t you smile? Is that still broken?

I Can Be Left Alone Under Trees And Be Perfectly Happy

Where did the flowers go? In my teeth, of course, over the course of a fine summer when wine and timely thoughts did the tricking. Can we can-open the things that I storm-cellared? Are the old bones ready to dance new tunes, soon clattering a white smattering of meaning-making under things that aren’t excuses or reasons but just tree branches?

The Weather of July 23rd

Raining, talking to me, pre-saliva on pavement now worm-washing and frothing. Are they puddles of rain champagne? Are those your eyes or sewer drains? Raining: talk to me, softly, the kinds of things men kill for kindly. Rekindle the kindling, re-speak the speaking until our beaks remember a kind of breathing akin to lovemaking, death-rattling, aching all the way home.

Trust

Dulling myself for your sake is the best way to make this fit into sixty, into you. You see, I’m not asking for much besides throughways to straw-suck your fucked-up philosophy, in sixty, between your redeye reading sixty-splitting brain fingers. Isn’t that how you said you’d touch me? Aren’t those the ones I feel at night? Aren’t you here? Fuck.

An Overgrown Lot, Revisited

Sure, my electronic crawling piano teacher used to creep me out but now he just creeps around my empty yard, lawn-crawling for song drawn keys and long gone fingers like the most beautifully pathetic weed you’ve ever seen. But, do you think he’ll ever find me? I’m with the piano. Does he know that we’ve moved? It’s so lonely here.

Ground Cycling

I rode my bike into the city-strike-tall grass, wanting to lay all day like lovers, cables and veins, legs through frame smooth and close and greased for laying activities while watching the grass grow seeding to seed. And there were others, too: two insects sex-attached almost forever, like us. Don’t move. Soon we’ll have bike babies. You’re my favourite hobby.

Still Learning, Still

My good intentions involve body-forcing yours into a fridge so you can cool off. Cool? I guess I’m just tired of burning my tongue over you, of petty pretty-petting, of sucking, of playing nice; it doesn’t always have to be so sweet. You taught me that. Sometimes I think you're a genius. I want to be so good to you.

Maybe I'll Stick With Drugs

I’ll do anything for sleep. Anything. Sometimes I wait incurably, in-bed insane, thinking of all the things I’d do for the sleep curtain to blankly blanket me. Like: blowing my head apart with double-aught buckshot to make a brain-bouquet with memories and future plans blossoming red through the cracks. I’d even let Satan rape me (but only for three seconds).

Antennae

Wanna lay on the floor and let things happen over us? Not bored, boards of floor and everything in your hair. I’d go fishing off its edge, pulling expressions from your face. Wanna? At night wanna? Or how about-. Or hands wanna chop them off and trade? Your love-handed piano puppets for my hip-tapping, blood-moving you-feelers. Who’s feeling who, now?

Probably Not

Then there were times when I was your Dahmer-zombie, like the movie: ee-ah-oh the whole way home. And there were deliciously doom-filled moments of certain sights of certain sexy bodily angles like you were pouring battery acid into my brain. Dhhhhhhh – chin unhinged, lower lip out and begging, battery acid again and enough. I still wonder if you could tell.

A Careful Process

Every hand is a spider in our wonderfully wooden house: when rain is the music, oceanic breathing between speaking, the sounds of our magic-making like acid flashbacks like fucking in every room. And that’s how we’ll paint it, the walls and me on you on me and slowly like knowing, expanding like our colours knowing, explaining blood through wine tasting.

Sharing

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to drink blood. I can think of three-… four people who have been, at some point, within teeth-reach. It’s a startling desire, starting again like a vampire after an entire decade of entirely missed opportunities. I’m glad, really. They weren’t thirsty enough. But, can anyone really be as thirsty as I am?

Endurance

Your ideas move through me like ghosts. Have we always known us? We know each other like fingers on a set of keys, memorizing the shape of their teeth in the dark: memory fuel for two months as ghosts, stretched along long-distance, awaiting, longing and waiting hot-weighted baited breathing us awake at night. We’ve got this down to a science.

Did A Patched Eye Cause A Semi-Blind Date?

It was all about edges, feeling them together as they came together and smooth along the oncoming edge of night. Then it was the edges of drinks, of shrinking tables and magnetic chairs, of bodies. We smoothed them all. We blended, easy and sweetly unrecognizable, inter-intoxicated in bed where the last and longest-savoured edges outlined your face in the darkness.

Learning You

I’ve always considered myself a multicultural kinda guy, kinda riveting along your culture and finding out while finding how you work – it’s all the same. You know we’re all the same, riveting the same with good things in skin and good things further in. That’s the exception: how deep we go with it. I love how deep you’ve made me. (Not that kind of "deep")

AN UPDATE (in sixty words)

Six months of sixties have ended. Daily became difficult and I’ve been tempted a few times to “mail it in.” However, bullshiting this to us would be a great injustice. I shall therefore avoid that indecency by scaling back my posting from a daily to weekly format. Thanks to everyone for their supportive comments and general patronage. Please read on.

Critics’ Choice

It’s easy to compare things, like blades of grass and your hair, knife attacks and my asking and your breathing, with paint. It’s always with paint so we know it happened. We could show it and make shows and finally be artists. Or it could be blood. Add some pelvic bone powder and they’ll know our medium is the thickest.

Seeing Eye Insect

At first it just crawled your hand, insecting up an April arm until our laughter faded. Then it kept going, ladybug-going, up and tickling with us talking. When it finally crawled into your eye, it filled the lens with a poppingly blackspeckled red, wetted and wonderful. And you could see it, ladybug-eye perfect. The whole world opened out to you.

Germinating

Thank you for the Paska bread, Baba, the ones you’ve laid out for us like brains. They were like shrooming nuclear muffin-top thought bubbles with our minds rolling outward and expanding, bigger, bigger, sticky from egg yolk and memory-dotted by raisins and apricots. Are we the seeds or are they in us like apricots? I haven’t figured that out yet.

The Ultimate Ex-Girlfriend

Today is good Friday but it’s really the best Friday ever, with your whole forehead hole-filled in a spray-pattern so holy Thursday’s memories can leak out. Was Thursday gooder or holier than today? When can we debate these things? Can we at least meet for coffee, Jesus? I know I’ve said some pretty rough things about you in the past.

Miss Treatment

I’m in love with multiple rodeo clowns. But I’m not actually in love with them. We don’t love each other like your daddy loves your mommy. We do different stuff and sometimes they come and burn me with cigarettes. Or they hit me with the telephone receiver. Or they break stuff that I really like. They must really like me.

Taking Turns

He was walking his bicycle alongside her walking jean-legs. It seemed so noble, too, with the rear wheel clicking along, thoughtfully unpeddled. They were walking and it was clicking and sometimes a car would drive by. It wasn’t a busy street. Things were allowed to happen like the calm between passing cars, the wind making ocean sounds in maple trees.

Listening Spaces

I don’t like words in music or crackers in soup but I like yours, in yours, in mine. You can sing birdshot to outer space, singing it. You can sling my ears over your shoulder, taking me home like listening. I’m all ears to you, now, pressed up perfectly to yours and listening only to the hollow space we've made.

Sorry

Feel my pathetic dominos like we’re playing it on carpet, sitting cross-legged and youngish in shag like it wasn’t, doing it like we weren’t. We’d be playing games with each other’s veins, locating sweet spots for sweethearts and sweeping up any unusable unfuckables only. You’re my only. But you already know that. You already know and that’s why we’re not.

Going Down

The boat had bullet holes and so did you, leaning against the mast, no longer worried as it was all bleeding out. You were even smiling and when I get to that part of the story, the part about you sortof smiling, no one believes me. But, damn, you were some guy, Jim. I guess we did all we could.

Rationing You

I’ll blow you up, mouth-starting, but I’d rather condense you into a small can of condensed milk. And there would be a little pull-tab to open your little lid so I could pour you, a little. A little bit at-a-time, any time I want with you coming steadily and white, thick with ideas. I’ve always wanted you. Even like this.

Syrup

Cooking for you has afforded me pleasure, getting my fingers bloody with my fingers in dishes, in ovens, bleeding into everything. Dessert was even better, with my hands all bandaged up and smoking a red-stained cigarette when I sat by your window, in your kitchen, contemplating cherry syrup. The recipe calls for cherry syrup. I can definitely do cherry syrup.

Watching For Them To Happen

“There’s so many birds here” and then one flew out from your pocket. Its flutter sounded like rushing water and it came from your pocket, gushing, then gone. “That’s why I come here,” you say, hours away from dusk. That was when we spent time thickly in thickets, waiting. We were looking for birds. Sometimes they would find us first.

. . . . . . .

Run run run run mol. Run run run run molto run run-run I’m taking you with me run-no run-no I’m taking you with me. No. Run run run run mol. Motlo. Don’t to. Taking you. Run run me. Run me. Taking. I’m taking you with me don’t. Taking you don’t, run run huff huff down me with me taking you.

Re-Worked

Why did I care so much about you? You, for a while. You were everything for a while, waiting on fingers till e-mails refreshed us and meshed us until I could maybe maybe maybe. You were so much, way too much. You were so much, now a figment of bullshit. Now I know. You did did did did did did.

Small-Time Yachting

About the time you read this I’ll be sailing across Lake St. Clair with sails and quills equally as sharp like herringbone. They can break the air apart, tear pages through multiples, tear you in two. On my voyages on your waves on the nickel to your places and islands, on leave to beach and bury jawbones in sand.

Apple-Picking As A First Date

Like all professionally-minded rapists, we insisted on killing the tree after plucking its fruit. And so, wanting to destroy any evidence of our first date, we stripped a ring of bark from the trunk. Dying slowly, it was the only witness to our sap-covered embraces. More rings would eventually appear on our fingers making more killing, more or less, necessary.

Gifts

I'm sending you six marimbas, as gifts. I made them as gifts. They were made while I thought about you and how much I like you. They are made of human fingers and they don't sound as good as normal marimbas. I'm not really a normal guy. They have fingers, instead. I really like you. First, it was the fingers.

Trying To Sound Cool Over The Phone

Dark matter is what’s the matter today when we’re supposed to eat ice cream but our lymphs get in the way and when the fish all fall from hooks like dead leaves and when you were supposed to see her again supposedly seeing her again but phones break in hands with broken hands breaking up and running out of drugs.

Writers At A Reading

How come we come listen? How come we? It’s like cotton candy the way we sit and the way you stand and they way the words hold us in, in stasis in cotton, a constant constellation, a jar of pickled cocktail onions all pickled and writing as you read. That’s the problem with putting all these writers in one room.

Sickness Prevails

The coldest vodka tonic I’ve ever sipped. It’s usually gin but every now-n-then, each night of the week, we make exceptions that pain us equally in the morning like the way you itch healing sores until it’s a bigger problem than cosmetic injustice, until it makes you shake and grind for more, like that eternal internal combustion engine working-n-wanting, and.

Professionalism

They buried him to mid rib cage, arms stuck to sides with eyes as wide and bloodshot as stop signs. They buried him good and it was good and hilarious the way he squirmed in the earth, saying things about his kids until an executioner made his face smoke a wrong-way cigarette. He was remarkably quiet when the stones came.

Side Effects

Only on certain self-medicative doses does it do my legs in and turn and grind them in waves making muscles quiver and itch to be moved for moving provides temporary relief for the sedative-induced restless leg syndrome that makes me walk in bed long after I’ve fallen into black sleep, auto-piloting in dreams, to your backyard, in trouble in dreams.

Excerpt

Then there were faces and hands and people talking, helping him back on the bike. Someone had tried to interfere and that caused a scuffle in the crowd with much yelling and explaining and more hands while Tom automatically slipped his shoes in the pedal straps. They were helping him with that, too, and pushing his back, yelling “Allez, Allez!”

Predatory Practices

When I ran I’d do it for you, thinking about doing things to you while we were still into doing things in the dark. It was my excuse all along to hear the ghostly specifics of your run-breathing alongside my breathing. I set them up in loop patterns, multiple lovers in loops, doing laps. We could be doing for days.

Polska

Since I’m gone for you I’ve fallen in love with your country. Since you’re gone I’ve gone to the countryside like a paint-stained artist like your mud-stained Dziadek, wearing a suit and working a trowel in the crop with white hair and veiny wrists. And it’s with young wrists that I dig you up with potato folk songs, vodka, polonaises.

An Early Cyclist

She rode in knee warmers in my rearview mirror, enveloped in velo in late day red as I motor-paced her at a leisurely 16 km/hr. Overly leisurely for that bike, that kit, that body, but that was probably just her Raymond Avenue cool down. Raymond has seen many cool downs. I fell there last fall and it ended my season.

Previews

Illegal friendliness, touching only with tips and jotting down the rest, we’re locked in ways and ways or a way to determine the rest with dancing pieces like curtains and rainy ways, saying names, same days, saving face; saving it. I’m saving you in me. I’m saving it long, along, always. You’re always to be part in parcel. It’s us.

Warm Nights And Train Stations

Waiting for nice things, especially you, can bring me to an astounding pitch of misery. A rough patch of night, waiting by porch light and looking down roads and railroads for your incandescent eyeball headlights. Mine bleed when they’re watching for yours, bleeding like most things that wait in the dark. Train stations always seem to attract us wounded animals.

Immunized In The 80s

God failed, so they made me perfect. A Ministry of Health print-out, old as me, reads Polio, Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Hepatitis B and Dr. Lee would stick me so I can be perfect for you, so I can fit in your hands, so I can be manageable, so I can be safe when all the fingers come.

For The Inattentive Driver Of A Bread Truck

Crossing guards are the goodest people in the whole world. Dinosaurs too. Even when triceratopses eat crossing guards they’re still good and neat with scales. But they aren’t slimy like snakes and snakes aren’t slimy like worms or like when I showered and my scab got wet and slimy. I don’t think they’re like that. When will Mummy be here?

Upsala

It was after photographing your post-lake sunset-lit face and a long day of driving. It was after dark when the temperature dropped and my high-metabolism filled the tent to warm us, when it was quiet enough to hear the logging trucks, droning, distant, dark. Later, it was the howling of wolves carrying through night. I wonder how close they were.

Ice Water

The clarinetist, playing into a grand piano and vibrating its strings after her raised-eyebrow staccatos, wore very nice pants. Returning to her seat, she calmly curled fingers to mouth. I checked their outlines in the dark, quietly admiring the edges and bends and wondering why they were so still. Bored and teasing, not shaking. How could they not be shaking?

Imola: Curva Tamburello

You knew it was coming when it came for Ratzenberger, rushing to Villeneuve Corner, seeing his helmet not moving. That’s when you felt it break part of you like the broken suspension parts that ended your life. No one survives the irony of your last gentlemanly gesture: Ratzenbergers’s Austrian flag bloodied on the cockpit floor when they pulled you out.

Fighting Island Again

BASF, my big green savior, rehabbing topsoil and leaving us alone for growing grass and the growing environmentally-minded minds of children visitors. The tips of these day-trippers’ fingers, sweet wine-tipped cigarillos trail like dead reeds in my dead water. Thank you and danke schön and enter me like you mean it, like a twisting scoundrel, Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik.

Islands In The Rust Belt

Party your faces off on Sugar Island with your miserable toes zebra-muscled and mucas-rimmed Busch Light cans, dry heaving about the current political situation regarding the bridges to your Grosse Ilse grossed out across Fighting Island with its natives then boxers then alkali effluent from Wyandotte Chemicals Corporation so we can all mercury-choke on the beaches dredged out in dredges.

An Introduction To The Suffocating Weight Of Existence

If you lay perfectly still, alone and in the dark, you can sometimes feel it coming on. If your head and heart is empty and you haven’t got a reason to move a Friday night finger, listening, instead, and feeling your ends and edges, it will press you down. Heavy, only existing, you’ll know what it is to be pointless.

Recording

And I just stopped by the river. To see. Where the fish come. It happened when I met you on that Friday night. To see where things come from. How they get there. And when I’m gone. And you’re all over. But the fish swim, still. And when they sleep they float with us. There are many nice things here.

Poor Judgement

It was a bad idea, hiding body parts inside a grand piano and waiting for Pollini’s parts to play parts of Bartok. Too obvious, with everything sounding like elbows, sawed bones and bloody strings, attracting the authorities who’d "CSI my ass" and later when I called that one detective a music-hater we both laughed. I actually didn’t mind that guy.

First Impressions

It’s like ghosts, all of it. So much easier. You’re so much easier after wine and some time alone. Twined, alone, mid-summer with wine beached and my face way too close. You let it happen with me just talking. I only wanted to talk to you and walk in you, with cups and hopes and palms that you’d never know.

Mixed Signals

Obsessed with sleep but afraid of it, doing things to trick wreck it and make it fake and drugged skipping its dreams and healing properties just to get to a new day. I should eat vegetables, collard greens instead of just feeling green and waiting. One time I even waited for it while exercising, like trying to catch a curve-ball.

Marie's Curies

It came from the mines of Belgian Congo, innocuous little pebbles that beamed and splayed an infinite amount of fingers. They touched inside your bones and tampered with the very essence of who you are as you carried its dust in the cracks of your skin and the folds of your Parisian dress, cutting your life in half with half-lives.

A Constant Education

I don’t have a shoe fetish. I just tend to notice them all the time and casually bring them up in conversation, lost in texture, colour, amount of visible wear. I might even ask you questions - but it’s not a fetish. I just have a tendency to look down. And when they’re off your feet I lose interest… I think.

Palisades

The approach of Spring calls for the reading of dictionaries so we’d sit in patterns and go over the patterns making new ones with tongues and being so sadly ourselves along the rows of words and roses into and out too, to the diction-spine dictionary to practice diction with you tenderly and not altogether popular but at least we’re together.

A Question Of Etiquette

I should like to inform you that upon receiving your postcard, which presented a perfectly deep turquoise behind your words, I instinctually raised it to my face and stopped, thinking ,“Nah, this is stupid,” before going ahead and, like a bloodhound, smelling its surface for any hint of you. Was that stupid? I bet a lot of people do that.

Preference

And for the times that I couldn’t sleep, I’d press my ear to the bed and tap out rhythms on the mattress. Those sounds, in the springs, went on through each coil and hummed almost forever, almost until I’d finally drift away. Now I’m tapping on almost everything, though it’s best that I use your skull. It’s my favourite surface.

Realism

Remember that scene from The Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo cut open his tauntaun and stuffed Luke inside? As a young, obsessive child, I tried to recreate that scene, handing my mom the end of a toy air hose and demanding that she slice me open so my tauntaun guts could spill out. But she didn’t do it right.

Alternatives

It comes in on slow, grinding waves - the Dramine I mean, coming to see me and seeing that I sleep with sweet non-dreams. It’s not glamorous. It’s all I’ve got and it’s working for now, for when I need to medicate myself which is oftener and oftener no longer getting off-in-her so now I just wait for the waves.

Famous Among Paramedics (Another Guy Trying To Escape The Cold)

His name was “Suit Coat” because he always wore the same one and one time he rolled the sleeve to show his track marks. One time, clench-fisted and shaking, he said through his teeth, “I’m tweaking.” One time I found him in the lobby bathroom, overdosed and on the floor and after that one time I never saw him again.

We're The Best

We are: realizing that we're not as good or cool as we think we are. Realizing that can be the sweetest and swiftest descents down down down, double black diamond down, the best fall, the best, downing us and grounding us, making us really feel it. Down. Not. What? Down. feel it? Fuck. Feel it. Feel it. We're the worst.

More Sleep Abnormalities

I used to sleepwalk, navigating stairs in pitch black, staring at pitch blank TVs and scaring people. But nothing scared me like the half-dreams with that beam of light slowly coming into me, through the hallway, and I was trying to cry for help or get away but I all I could do was cry and feel it still coming.

Curiosity And Cats

When I finally fall asleep I talk in it. I used to talk from a guilty mind, admitting things to you in sleep, encoded. But now that we don’t sleep together, who am I talking to? Am I talking at all? I guess it’s mystical like snoring and I’ll never know while I’m still alone. Who are you talking to?

A Twenty-Five Year Old Male?

I’ve spent today shopping for antique stopwatches and a very specifically shaped coffee cup known as a demitasse. I’ve even gone to the mall, alone in stores with housewives and newly weds and although I feel like an alien, I at least know what I’m looking for. You wouldn’t believe how nice it is, knowing exactly what you’re looking for.

Cutting Things Out

It’s made up of minor victories: her perfume on your coat, things that fade away like “ghosting” matchbooks, chewing all the gum at once, summer romances with her hair dangling and tickling your face. Now, even the hair is gone. It’s no longer her, but a mess on the stylist’s floor swept into pointlessness, garbage. Unmeaning. Like it never happened.

Scopophilia

Am I so starving for you that I become entranced by sharing an elevator? I know it was only 15 seconds but it allowed for some things. You’ll never know about them unless you read this. I’m just listening and walking past and wondering and sometimes seeing real things and sometimes it’s the ugly parts and those are okay too.

Fergus Falls, Minnesota

All the kids were stoners and worked in grocery stores. They’d look at each other under heavy eyelids and when they spoke it sounded like slow, jar-crawling strawberry jam. The fog moved the same way, thick and sedating and rolling onto another morning’s interstate. Maybe it just held everything together. I’m quite sure its foggy every day in that city.

A Working Relationship

You’ve been a great friend to me, all those years, with all those teeth and trying things behind 7-11. Do you remember sleepovers, when our faces kept changing? It was marvelous, making art out of vomit, being nice to each other, doing things that looked like birds. It was always like that. Like birds. You know when they fly away?

Independence

Wash your hands in a brook and tell me exactly how it feels. Report back after you’ve done things like washing hands in brooks and overturning smooth, smooth rocks. I don’t want to know but tell me anyway. No. Don’t wash your hands in brooks. Don’t do anything nice. Go fuck yourself. Wait, no. Please tell me things. I’m weak.

A One Sided Story

Your hands, holding phones then doors then pints of Guinness, in the air talking then in jacket pockets walking, in my gloves after I breathed in my gloves and made them hot half joking and half deadly serious, in my car and around more drinks, then thighs, and when you were finally alone so it wouldn’t be “cheating,” on you.

Going Somewhere

Pretend you have arms and legs and the train just started to move again. You work on trains and because you’re on a train it must mean you’re also at work, collecting tickets and looking neat in appearance with your arms and legs. Moving like an insect, it’s still a respectable job in uniforms, in trains, inch-worming in the aisles.

Exorcism

Awkward with an uncomfortably mannish voice, our server at the Olive Garden was one of those spazzy types that you feel compelled to shut up in a most pleasurable way. Rattling and talkative at our table, there’s obviously a better use for such nervous energy. And when we’re over she’d be slower, smoother, nicely empty. Everyone has a breaking point.

Things

Some things just go together like coffee and cake. Some things are beautiful like that, a natural marriage, alcohol and pills on an empty stomach with everything feeling the best that it possibly can. And you can save money and time this way when you’re empty but full of them and almost gone. You can save a lot of things.

Enjoying It

Self-mutilation can be performed in a variety of ways with each being very beautiful and worthy of consideration. I prescribe to mental mutilation, which, surprisingly, doesn’t involve alcohol or drugs or concussions. Instead, I only need to think about you. Just a little. Today, for example, I pictured your bent and held together jean-covered kneecaps and that hurt particularly well.

Talent

It’s all in the wrist, pouring wine like your wife depended on it, pouring it out and out and detaching yourself from the rest of the spilling world. Broken saucer, bones, clavicle, the icicles from your house remind me of your house while my wrists guide you to drinks and glass and lips and everyone’s suddenly being so cordial now.

Same Story, Same Nickname, Different Mornings

I would always believe “Ghost Guy” when he drifted around the lobby like a ghost, talking about the ghosts in his house that kept him up at night. “Ghost Guy” was a nice guy and he smelled like hair and alcohol. He once informed me that P. A. had the best soup kitchen and I believed every word of it.

I've Actually Thought About Killing You

Century Rolls was what I listened to when I wanted to make movies of you. Remember? I sat at my writing desk, forehead on desk and just listening for the pretty parts that let me visualize your pretty parts. Yes, I was drunk half the time. I was yours. Half the time, I was. Nothing. Done. You. So close to.

Sappy Cycling

Every weekend I’d be on the Trans-Canada and giving it in the wind, my very own Liège-Baston-Liège: Saskatoon-Elstow-Saskatoon, dying for town signs, fixated by their letters. I only bonked once, knocked loose by the wind and calling for a ride. When the unmarked Sunfire team car arrived it contained water, Gatorade, and a coach whom I was in love with.

Fear of Birthdays

As you get older, you start doing strange things like wearing socks into bed. You start wearing gloves more often. These things were never done because feeling cold was never a problem and, certainly, feeling old was something you thought would never happen. But it did. And now that it gets dark earlier, you just wither away in post-shower robes.

“The End of Something”

We could both feel it coming on, standing ashore and seeing that storm roll in as it chased canoes across Kingsmere Lake. And at night we returned by flashlight, watching the lighting that was far away and thunder-less. And that was it. When we finally heard what it was all about, it was you and I who were miles apart.

Incongruity

She danced in the dark. This midtown milf-type, looking because I was looking, was looking thirty years younger in jeans, plaid, skateboard shoes. Skateboard shoes? Maybe that’s what it was….. Anyway, she moved like a stripper and her edges were the softest, most slippery things I’d ever see and although I’ve been made pitiful many times, this was the worst.

Winter Training

The party is over and I’m ready for my punishment, getting back on track, back on the bike after a long layoff and laying off the eating and drinking and impulsive/regretful/drunken cigarettes while fighting with rusty/cobwebby/heavy half-muscled legs that forgot how to spin. Spin, remember? They only burn and make me sick. Remember? I used to like this? I remember.

Unlimited Texting in a Work Setting

A strategically placed cell phone, on vibrate mode, can be a very pleasant thing when you’re working midnights and full-wanting and half-having minor cybersex through texts, walking funny in front of co-workers between visits to the bathroom and the car and other such places where one can particularly enjoy vibrating pockets and filling inboxes and vibrating pockets and filling inboxes.

Trying

Nothing’s better than saving wet worms when they’re up and around sidewalks and shiny driveways. Many creatures want to snack on them but it’s your fingers that snack on them, saving lives and feeling so many pulsing heartbeats that it makes you, almost, sick. But where can you put them? In pockets? I put some in my pockets. In pockets?

Self-Preservation Through Good Writing Habits

Kill your darlings. Kill them off even when they turn you on. Kill them, the sweet ones, when they still sound pretty. Kill your darlings before they kill you. Kill them, and do it before they start looking so cute in tennis shoes. That’s the worst, when they get so cute in those shoes. They’ll kill you in tennis shoes.

Our Problem

“I tried to sleep way late today but my brain wouldn’t cooperate,” was how she explained the effect of rusty fingernails clustered in a brain that wouldn’t cooperate. And yes, my darling, I know just how you feel. Feeling with those clusters, having them in you like you never wanted, but we certainly wanted. We always want. That’s our problem.

Accidents

There are always options. You can put coins on railroad tracks and wait for them to get warm and smooth. You can also do the same with fingers or arms or legs and watch how they go flat and apart from you. You can even use the rail as a pillow and wait for the best sleep you’ll ever have.

Light Pollution

You could lie in the snow. Night, snow fields, orange sky, snow fields night, you, sky and no sound, sucked in snow. Night fields and orange above from reflected street lamps. All the city’s amber when all the city is amber. All city sounds sucked in snow and still orange over. You could lie in snow and not hear anything.

Just a Simple Matter of Appreciation

Nothing in the world and no one and no hair in the world like yours and nothing like getting lost in your hair because I love to be lost in there like a blind traveler who feels better than he sees and has nothing in but fingers and fingers then fingers in the darkest and darkest and stop-stop, stop, and.

Memory

I have a rare and remarkable talent for remembering your clothes. There are other things, too. There are things like car interior, the specific smell of your house, but I can still remember your outfits like my hands were in them. They’ve been counted, itemized, and put into a mental laundry cycle, reducing my brain to a lovesick washing machine.

Two Very Affectionate Girls

My car: me, Warsteiner in water bottles. Your car: who knows, until you both ran out freezing into the dark in t-shirts and out of headlights, flailing and fun, down the riverbank to where you thought no one could see. You didn’t mean to be seen but I saw your bare arms, wrapping, faces, laughing, kissing, making everything warm again.

Following

Even before you snap the day’s first photograph, when you’re waiting for phone calls and red lights, an audience collects in your camera like fizz in dropped pop cans. Their potentiality gives battery life to cameras and careers and you. And your glass eye gives fleeting cures to the blind spectators who are always with you, waiting for the light.

Loving Yourself

Sometimes your mind and body become strangers. Splitting up, their divorce will force you to choose sides uncomfortably. It happens with cycling, when you get turned on by the otherness of your own freshly shaven legs. It also happened when your urine looked like coffee and the doctor said it was blood and for you to stop such “hard living.”

Big Deal

The foot hung off his leg and dangled like a broken security camera. But he was cool, never telling how it hurt or kept him up at night or ruined his chances with women. Even when it bled and smelled like salmon, he never made it seem like a big deal when it was clearly a pretty big fuckin’ deal.

Windsor is a Very Small City

Over the years, throughout the different bars that you’ve worked, my drunken alter-ego has been following with quiet, admiring eyes. And despite all the coffee, gin, and Guinness, I’ve never been able to make a move or even say anything more than “another,” “bill please,” “thanks a lot.” But what would I say anyway? That I’ve been politely stalking you?

Honesty

This is not a poem. Seriously. This is not anything but an open invitation for someone, preferably female, to enter my life and destroy things after we have some pretty decent times talking about various Russian composers while lighting cigarettes and getting drunk off each other and being completely numb but open but empty but numb and good and empty.

Portneuf Downers

Life sometimes requires a strict diet of pills, soft cheeses, and red wine. La Sauvagine with diphenhydramine getting slow and runny, limbs ready for sleep and tugging at limbs and giving drug hugs until quitting time when you can’t trust yourself to breathe. You better stay up and concentrate: in and out, in and out. Stupid and scary. In. Out.

Harold Pinter, 1930 - 2008

I went on a Christmas date with Harold Pinter and pinot noir and everything noir from the start with hands getting dry and chapped from his moisture-sucking book binding. But that’s just Harold. That’s his skin, old and scratchy while I’m trying to read. I later found out that he died that night, while I read him, during our date.

Waiting with the Regulars

It was so nice with the sun dripping into our drinks, lighting up beer mugs and bent elbows. Quiet. It was nice and dead and everything was quiet except for that guy whispering to himself and the other one not even watching the TV. It was a subdued circus act of medicinal wrists. Afternoons like this just dripped on forever.

Parts

You could’ve been the worst person in the world but it didn’t matter. I followed behind in trails of your perfume being completely nothing, obviously observing, watching the obviously dyed hair of your perfect ponytail bounce and collect snowflakes like it was the best part about you. Best parts are all that matter. If only our best parts could meet.

Trajectory

The records of you in vinyl I’m buying and loving your records and needling long spirals in smaller and smaller and smaller loops spinning smaller and closer to the center where the music ends and sends our ears out of business getting worse and closer each time just needling along in long predictable grooves until the music ends in you.

Updates

Like everything else, truck stops gave me time to think. That’s the plus side of getting paid to keep the prostitutes away, walking through sleeping rows of trucks armed with complimentary coffee, flashlight, sense of humor. It was interesting work, later reading through paperwork of each woman’s case file. Some astute individual had written “deceased” on about half of them.

Christmas, Olfactory, Relationships

Wine tasting is like an open invitation for strangers, first entering your nose and then your mouth and in the end, when you’ve forgotten how to taste anything, it’s in your brain. Love works the same way, when you forget about how you shouldn’t and shouldn’t but shouldn’t, when it’s already in you like the wine and teeth and tongue.

Ice Fishing

On the eve of Christmas Eve we went ice fishing for the drowned bodies of ice fishermen. Most catches still looked normal, preserved in the Detroit River’s cold and polluted embalming fluid. All that mercury and cadmium just pickled their bodies perfectly. The rest of them, the ones missing eyes and fingers, we threw back. It was a wonderful day.

Before Anything

We could spell our names in scrabble tiles and go “all the way” with cheap wine suggestions and midnight beaches during blackouts so it wouldn’t make any difference. No light to light our way on these early dates, just eyes, just lighting enough to get us enough. It was all we needed to find home during blackouts and body parts.

Incoming

Unusually cold for Windsor, she flew in from out west and brought the winter with her. Wind and ice and bad drivers, things getting stuck. Cold like back then, back when winter nights held people together out of necessity. Now, a lot of it out of necessity, out of reach, caring not to know certain damaging things, but still caring.

Oral

If I could just figure you out with fingers, helping your head into my lap with mine onto yours, mind into yours, there wouldn’t be a need for all this talking. We could finally do things with our mouths besides second guessing because all that talking never really helped us. Words never made us easier. Words, like licking rock salt.

November 25, 1990

A cold night, even at the beginning with Guns N’ Roses, selling gloves to buy Silent Sam, getting kicked out of “The Sev,” getting hoarse looking for Lucille Horse at Snowberry Downs, just getting more drunk. Cold, touring Saskatoon’s arctic North Industrial, colder by the Hitachi building on 58th Street, one shoe missing, walking for a while, snow, stars. Frozen.

Be Honest

Like, if I had 70s skin and an ugly blonde girlfriend, would we go to drive-ins where I’d pressure her to smoke grass and drink my dad’s beer with my hand rolling clothing back like a pack-a-smokes rolled up in sleeves? Like, would I compete with a movie that sucked so we could suck, or would we be roller skating?

An Explanation for Various Things

Damn. There were times when I’d take walks late at night and just feel you in the wind. I would feel you and all the possibilities in the wind, blowing through me until I became delirious, exquisite, wanting to rub my arms up against random objects. I lost my mind out there, channeling you, saying your name. I lost it.

It Comes Naturally

At some point you realize that you don’t want to throw yourself in front of a truck on Huron Church Road. That’s the trick, the realizing it, the pretty little trick that’s tucked away like receipts in pea coat pockets. But plot twists, if they’re good, twist easy like screw caps on wine bottles. As easy as drunk-texts. Just right.

Going Clean

There comes a time in every man’s life when you just want to settle down and coach soccer and have a small beer gut. You’d be a pretty good coach and you wouldn’t show the kids pornography on road trips or aggressively pursue “casual encounters” with single soccer mothers and you’d probably forget all about that one night in Kitchener.

You

You know things are pretty bad when you want to spend Friday evening riding the bus. You’ve even convinced yourself that it’ll be an “art experiment,” rattling through the night, looking, listening to how people talk. It’ll be like a date with yourself, making out with yourself, and you’d realize that no one will ever love you quite like this.

Sam Plays it Again

Sentimentality, like a sack of piano keys, is no good to anyone. Even when you dip your hand inside, and your fingers and the keys get reacquainted and remember things and it all gets a little weird or confusing, even then, it isn’t any good. It’s just music for drunks, dead fish. It’s wet cigarettes. A bunch of horse shit.

Transition

It’s easy. Everything getting cold and still like wax statues when the streets and windshields and faces freeze like forgettable things frozen in time. It is too easy, covered with a safe layer of easy emotional frost. Easy like ice, just crackling on and into the night, long into, onto glass that was once fogged up when things were warmer.

Eau Claire, Wisconsin

A perfect place for Jeffrey Dahmer, especially in the fall with all its plaid jackets in liquor store parking lots like high school dropout butterflies. A perfect place for a night in a cheap motel, mind still travelling from all the travelling, plastic wrapping from complimentary cups now wrapping the remote, cans in the ice in the sink. Everything okay.

Surrogate Father

You put me through a delicious rollercoaster tonight, uptight, shivering for results like I was your current (or ex). Like a current, or ex, who would’ve been there like a current or ex-boyfriend being there and waiting for results and "being there." Those guys got off easy, only knowing the fun part. Results? They got lucky twice. Well… three times.

A Hotel Security Guard

All that wasted time getting paid for wasting time, walking the floors and "securing" the parkade while learning to beat-box. All that time, sneaking every time around midnight to fake some Round Midnight on the crush-lobby Yamaha. I enjoyed Proust, surfed the web, played chess, got drunk with night auditors. Life was easy when I didn't have any goals.

My Female Drinking Partner

While everyone’s trying to straighten and dry you out, I’d like to play the bad guy (for once). I’ve always wanted to play the bad guy with you and now that we share a common interest we could combine sicknesses. It’d feel so nice, giving way to alcoholism and numb sex because we’re both so helpless and similar like this.

Industrialized Hog Slaughtering

There was something sweet about that place. I never liked making deliveries there because it always smelled so much like sugar. It was even in the air at the shipping/receiving bay, the smell of death, sweet and mildly nauseating. I guess it’s just from all that blood and the hyperventilating and the squealing. Frantically breathing, then just frantic, then… nothing.

Cyclical

Life re-arranges itself often. Our lives, re-arranging, re-configuring, often. Often it does things and shows us things and things get different really quickly different like different lovers do. Okay? I’m really just talking to you, okay? Everything’s okay as long as life keeps re-arranging so there’s a chance of forgetting. Let me forget things. Let me forget. Please. Re-arrange again.

Art Review

Sure, I really didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help but make love to you with such words of hot praise and high acclaim. And your work really made things easy for it. For it, so easy. You made it so easy for me to gush and gush because I’m good at filling things. I’m just good at filling things.

Motivation

Cardiovascular exercise, whether running or cycling, is all sex, secretly in the mind, her on your mind. Pain proves dedication and is only indicative of a most satisfying work ethic. Even when things go white and you might vomit, there remains a running commentary: “This is for you. Just like this. You’d change your mind about things if you knew.”

Like Paper Cuts

Keen observations, while they might translate into good poetry, will always cause small internal wounds that ache for days. Even when it’s bad poetry, or no poetry at all, the wounds will surely be there. Even when things are going along quite agreeably, or for no reason entirely, they’ll start you bleeding inside. It’s enough to make a guy sick.

Making Friends at The Kildare House

We drank at the bar, huddled like moths, getting loud and drunk and friendlier as everything darkened around us. We drank like friends while bartenders came and went and everything got darker, softer, drunker. Pleasantly personal, we exchanged inadequacies and I probably told you why I’d never be happy, or something stupid about “writing,” while liquor eroded strangeness from strangers.

Warmer Weather

Oh yes. Use my foot as putter and let’s finish some holes at mini-golf. Use my ears to catch bugs and butterflies and we can keep them all in jars, for later, for as long as we’re worth it with holes in lids so we can still "see other people.” You know? That’s just chillin’. That’s just it, missin’ it.

Composition

Not to get too self-referential for a change but I wonder how much easier it’d be if a few of these were beaten out of me by two ethnic Albanians with baseball bats. Baseball and literature, we’d all have a good laugh too. I’d just bleed some ink and things would get done and no one would brag about anything.

The Masochist

Sure, it might fade with time but it’s still a weakness of mine, that smooth way about you and your smooth mouth and that way about you that makes me crazy about you and the reasons that run roughshod over reason. Run over me, into me, into the ground and finalize things with no mercy, sharp and hard and bloody.

Dive Bar

We requested some Rick James to funk up the place and once Mary Jane came up you were up and alive again. You, the crackhead woman who got into a fight when I was last here, last year, rising like a phoenix with that glorious synthesizer opening, flying, telling us to dance with you. So we did. A nice coincidence.

More Than Socks

Whenever she moved, a gap widened between jeans and shoes. So many things go misunderstood. “I love your socks.” “Thanks.” “Seriously.” “Yeah it’s a cool pattern.” “No. It’s not the pattern. It’s not that. It’s not-… It’s not anything. I mean, I really love your socks.” “Okay.” “Can I touch them again?" “Please…. Don’t do this. I’ve got a boyfriend.”

Right People

The right kind of person probably wouldn’t steal your mail and make clothing out of cell phone bills or spend a night in the ER because things didn’t go as planned. The right kind of person wouldn’t get bent out of shape over you or when a word sounds like your name. Whatever. Right people are meant for each other.

Maturity

When I grow up I want to live inside hollowed-out pianos and scare the children. I want my hands to tremble and emerge from the woodwork so they can feel nervous about being here again. But a good kind of nervous, asking “What is that?” And one of them might say, “It’s nothing. Just my uncle. He lives in there.”

Minor Tragedies

A purity of feelings you’ve probably never felt when they were on you, directed at you, into those caverns. Eyes, finger webbing, caves inside cartilage, they were meant to lick you there and clean you and make you feel good. They were meant. It’s so lovely to actually mean something even if it meant nothing to you. It’s so lovely.

Late Night Shoppers

I never looked down on you two when the others did, when you smelled of cigarettes and cat urine, when you looked so happy together. It was late and you were only interested in snacks and each other and I bet you’d have the most wonderful night. Back home, television glowing, crumbs everywhere. I bet you were both completely happy.

Charity

It’s hard to tell if any of it was real, or if it’s still real when it feels hard against heart and dull against a skull’s simple understanding of two people melting skulls and becoming one. Did that? Did? Happen? Please, drink my chalk in your bone-soup and come back with answers that won’t depress or murder these little ideas.

CP 9759/9102 Eastbound Intermodal

Trainspotting at twelve, a sad indicator. A pre-teen trainspotter depending on your definition of either. But, he was, before he could grow a beard or drink coffee or experience male isolation. This, before driving to Portage la Prairie for the heavy freight traffic and staying at a Super 8 getting a little drunk and maybe getting a little native prostitute.

Thank You

“This is where poetry comes from,” he said, with her hair curled around his ear. He held it there, lock against temple, and it was true. It made poetry. And other things. All made like this in dark places, counting hairpins just to know. For reference. He liked the hairpins too and made poetry out of them and other things.

A Recycled Number

They call, looking for you and leaving voicemail or getting confused when I answer. They’re still calling your shadow, Ms. Chase, creditors and previous employers wanting things. You want things too. A boyfriend? I get text updates from dating services addressed to “Pimpette6.” Were you lonely? In debt? I guess we have some things in common. Thanks for your number.

Touring Late

It was the first really cold night and public urination was made very uncomfortable. Back in the car, better, smoking cigarettes and drinking rum out of ceramic mugs. In smoke, out of the wind, better now. Later, we stopped and you emptied your stomach in a parking lot while I looked across the river. The lights shimmered in the cold.

Hors d'Oeuvres

The old fisherman had a rotting leg that smelled like cheese. Roquefort, varicose. He invited children to come look at it and say things. This made him feel useful and was even better than fishing. Besides, he was getting too old for that. And all the kids brought melba toast and butter knives. That old fisherman… he was really alright.

Proposal

Let’s be unconventional and buy those little peppermint hearts and eat them with your cat and we’ll be the talk of the town just you and I on bicycles forever intentionally unconventional we’ll do it all and all scraping knees and laughing at dogs then making a scrapbook for later referrals when we’re older and more conventional and shitting ourselves.

Killing

Just a simple haircut. Her hands through his hair, eating away. Her fingers like dead ends killing split ends, killing. Eat. Away. All. Fingers all in and lovely, like bone-filled worms feeling lovely just like your fingers on on on on on on on on me just like your fingers. Just like your fingers. Just like your fingers. Just fingers.

Good Intentions

He couldn’t realize it at the time, but it was a selfish venture. He just wanted a pet and he liked frogs and he couldn’t see the harm in it. So he tied its leg with string, making a leash, ensuring a long-term friendship. But things weren’t mutual, and the frog could only jump so far. A pitiful show, really.

Better

You held your breath for it. Every time, holding. Hold and you go silent, waiting. A little death. You held your breath and waited. Hold in, leg twitching. La petit mort. I’m killing you. You held your breath for it every time. “It makes it feel better,” you say, lazy, after all the holding and the waiting, while we’re holding.

The Gift

“I don’t know what to say.” “Just say yes.” “But… are you sure you wanna give me your hands?” “There’s no one else I’d rather give them to.” “I just… it’s not that I don’t want them… or anything.” “I know.” They stood in the parking lot. His severed hands looked fantastic under the glow of the Dairy Queen sign.

Childrearing

Caring for indoor plants is a serious matter. They require specific amounts of water, sunlight, and good intentions. The air mustn’t be too dry, or filled with crystal meth. They can do without scenes of domestic assault and careful, marital brutality. They can do without fistfights and Marlboros being put out forearms. That sort of business makes them grow funny.

A Simple Operation

Split me open. Take out two cups of sugar from various organs. Let me, stretched out, get all excited about seeing you. Let it, like everything else, drip away until I’m quiet. Take it out of me. All of it. Take out warm things in cold blood. Let me get all excited then hurt me so I won’t ever again.

Practice

Whenever he closed his eyes there were combinations. Repeat. Knight, the L or 7, back and forth, taking. Knight takes rook. Over. Again, the combinations at night. “What does it mean to dream of chess?” he asked, finger on saucer, moving a droplet of espresso in a particular pattern. Knight takes rook. “Would you like to meet for an espresso?”

Etiquette

He was no expert but he knew the order of things, in a general way. He knew, especially, that the concerto had three movements. He knew they were called movements and not songs. Allegro, adagio, allegro. And he knew, against concert etiquette, to clap after the first movement so she wouldn’t be the only one. He was nice like that.

Read On

Typing it out, all out, like always. Typing it out can be so delicious but you’d never know. Typing it out, in all ways, always the best way to communicate and alienate a friend. Or someone more. But mostly friends, because these are for you. Always for you. Always for you. Always you. Meant always for you to love me.

Backyard Funeral

His first pet was a goldfish and it died quickly. A burial was held later that night despite calls for a toilet flush send-off. Paper tissue as burial shroud. Popsicle sticks as cross. It was all done with such dignity. The next day, curiosity dug it up with a stick and it was quite obvious the goldfish wasn’t in heaven.

Girls

He liked them all. He liked too much. There were times when he’d shake and shake and have to take walks late at night. And he’d think. No matter how hot, or how cool and distant, they were all the same when they got into their beds. They were lonely, quiet, pulling blankets over their bodies. They were all nice.

A Requiem

I knew right away. It was in the evening and I was playing the piano when the phone call rang in. You were at the hospital but it wasn’t serious yet. But the family scrambled like fighter jets. But I stayed and played the piano and I knew you were over. Listen. You began listening and I knew right away.

Subtitles

They sat together in a darkened room, with many others, but they sat together in a darkened room watching a film and struggling to read the subtitles. In a darkened room they craned their necks and bobbed their heads and suggested their shoulders. And they inadvertently bumped heads, comical and sexy, in a darkened room. In the dark, they did.

Health

“I can feel them,” he said, speaking again of the grasshoppers. And he did feel them. We all believed he could feel the grasshoppers. They were in the crops and we all knew he felt things like grasshoppers and oncoming strokes. And when they came to eat, they ravaged and ravaged and ravaged and the old man could feel them.