Germinal

Broken Puppets

2009-08-07T18:03:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-04T14:24:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-23T17:07:00.001-04:00

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

2009-07-14T12:55:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-05T13:08:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-30T22:54:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-24T20:37:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-17T00:18:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-07T12:54:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-01T12:23:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-29T04:18:00.001-04:00

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

2009-05-17T08:15:00.003-04:00

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

2009-05-09T07:32:00.001-04:00

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?

2009-05-02T07:18:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-29T06:22:00.001-04:00

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)

2009-04-28T05:23:00.003-04:00

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

2009-04-16T14:18:00.002-04:00

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

2009-04-13T14:14:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-12T10:56:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-10T13:36:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-09T14:40:00.002-04:00

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

2009-04-06T02:32:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-05T07:18:00.002-04:00

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

2009-04-02T12:01:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-01T15:38:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-29T07:25:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-28T07:43:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-27T08:48:00.000-04:00

“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.

. . . . . . .

2009-03-26T21:32:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-24T07:49:00.007-04:00

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

2009-03-23T21:40:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-22T08:14:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-21T06:57:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-19T22:55:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-18T15:49:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-16T06:31:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-15T17:15:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-14T20:53:00.002-04:00

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

2009-03-13T16:19:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-11T18:34:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-10T21:18:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-09T20:33:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-08T18:18:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-06T21:39:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-02T23:21:00.001-05:00

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

2009-03-01T16:40:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-28T14:37:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-27T01:52:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-25T19:01:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-24T00:06:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-23T23:42:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-22T08:10:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-20T14:15:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-18T19:21:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-17T04:10:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-16T01:54:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-15T16:41:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-14T19:40:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-12T23:47:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-11T07:03:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-10T20:17:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-09T17:20:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-08T04:49:00.002-05:00

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)

2009-02-07T06:58:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-06T03:43:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-05T18:26:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-04T07:56:00.000-05:00

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?

2009-02-03T01:57:00.002-05:00

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

2009-02-02T07:25:00.004-05:00

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

2009-02-01T15:20:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-31T16:39:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-30T17:38:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-29T02:53:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-28T06:42:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-27T15:24:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-26T07:30:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-25T03:27:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-24T08:05:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-23T15:34:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-21T11:25:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-20T05:07:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-19T08:16:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-18T15:33:00.000-05:00

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”

2009-01-17T07:18:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-16T21:26:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-15T14:01:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-14T09:04:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-13T02:58:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-12T07:04:00.000-05:00

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

2009-01-11T10:43:00.000-05:00

“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

2009-01-10T07:12:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-09T19:47:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-08T13:02:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-07T03:05:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-06T02:35:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-05T07:13:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-04T07:51:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-03T06:58:00.001-05:00

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

2009-01-02T03:25:00.002-05:00

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

2009-01-01T11:41:00.001-05:00

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.