Blog Fourteen

Starin g into

the river

is a rainslick city street

Blog Thirteen.

do you miss me? i/ve run my course, my body is spent like miles of road lain out behind cars and hiways that can/t find my rearview mirror any longer, travelling back to cities i/ve cursed, that once filled me with love and loathing in equal parts before i forgot the love, and the slush and snow took me further into the lonely night time, but the sun came up and i/d stopped and found warm caves that your body was in, and that, i had eviscerated, serrated edges all along your hips like my hand too. did the ghosts ever come back? i still see them sometimes stealing through my house like theives in the nighttime but i wished they/d stay, i wish they/d come back and stay awhile, i miss them and not this gnawing ugliness that springs up like condos in swamps, where once that primal warmth of decayed vegetation held me in vegetated states underwater for years, like a soft coma without consciousness of doctors and nurses and worse, wellwishers and voyeurs to see my body lain out, spent out like water and finished.

Blog Twelve.

my father shoots at wolves through the screens on the windows of a cabin, in late june when snow still hides in the shadows of the backcountry though its been gone from the valley for months. and my dad hands me the gun and i shoot at them too, as the wind rises up to howl in harmony with the wolves and the gun jams, and i can/t shoot them as they fade sinister into darknesses of the woods. they will be back tomorrow night and i can/t stand watching over my shoulder nomore.

Blog Eleven.

there was ghosts in that house like guitars strings plucked and slid, like metallic wires on fingers could touch your hearts, and pianos lay broken and lonely (so we thought) in desolate rural ontario, northward ho! but instead led secret lives of their own and gave self-professed concerts everynight in attendence by the floorboards the drapes and you. but it still can/t quite show the beauty of slow muddy waters swallowed up by dams in hazy kentucky afternoons, sloshing into the silt like that water and that dirt becoming mud held your naked body more comfortably than sheets and beds of itchy woolen hotel rooms ever could where trains cry in nebraska nighttime and goodwilled christians give us seperate beds for single lovers, and christ lay with us and christ lay with us and no, no he didn/t. no we didn/t. no we didn/t because japanese poets had it wrong: we did not murder god in our sleep but dreamed ecstatic of blood and it flowing through our bodies and rivers that we swam in while state park rangers watched disproving behind windows (so we imagined) and slept uncorformorftable but beautiful in sleeping bags and tossled bodies looking like caterpillers and we did, we fucking did turn into beautiful butterflies in our fucking sleep, but it just wasn/t enough to break the c--cocoon of the lazy days and the hot and hazy days, flea markets that sell shit instead of love and statelines that don/t mean anything despite what once we sang (that statelines mean more than you think) and driving instead accidentally into three seperate states: idaho, mississippi, indiana, repeating wrongs of 16 months previous into dead armadillo arkansas and charles manson balladry. but we didn/t see no dying squatter on the side of a nonexistent interstate after leaving towering factories for reflective saltwater lakes and deadend backroads. no, we came home. we came home to where we said home was and we made our home there, and settled down among our books and stacks of knowledge to let our bodies settle like a cage around our hearts, and the slow callous machinery of our bones slowly sinking in the places where once we stood, and instead we lay us down each night to rest like so many disconsolate dreams. did we murder god in our sleep? no. and the electric ghosts can still waltz through our neighbourhood for i love them and i love you.

Blog Ten.

and the sad fagboy brothers of sisters i/ve known take photos of their secret loves and leave em laying around and the secret loves all look beautiful + romantic like they should and they never know that neither i nor the boy behind the camera lens can see the beauty they/re trying to hide, the kind of beauty that sneaks out through eyes like bedroom windows in summernights to go searching past streetlights and asphalt still warm from the day like lovers bodies, to go searching for love or mystery or a sad and lonely fuck, that never comes, never arrives, never shows, instead to contemplate their lovers radiant eyes and praying yet knowing full well the impossibility, and full knowing yet ignoring the future loves that might yet save them from themselves or early death, tragic by riversides of skipped rocks and wishful kisses that never came, never showed, never arrived, just another polaroid day scarred by unjustified desire in a present too contemporary for now, and too hazy to be real, and instead returning home through the front door and slamming it hard to wake parents unaware of secret lovers or internal struggle.

Blog Nine.

there is broken glass in the church parking lot which reflects the streetlights, glittering against the black asphalt like your teeth in their hollow opaque mouth.

Blog Eight.

i went to a show at the albion hotel, just over the hill and down the steps of the ominous catholic church presiding over downtown like maybe god himself would if he cared enough to. the day before i saw an excavator sitting below the cathedral in the torn up street, now dirt like a western movie, on a heap of earth pulling debris towards itself with mechanical insect arm like a fat baby sitting on it/s jiggling haunches in the sand at the beach. the albion hotel, dark wood and big stones made into walls and al capone partied here when making liquor runs, no half sober drives across town but international smuggling affairs. i at one point during the opening band, the two headliners being buzzing indie hipster darlings current, managed to divorce myself from the context of bar, music, scenester, drunkeness and just stare at these people, all presuamable subject consciousnesses unto themselves and could not then, stripped of context, derive why all these people, so oddly attired were all crowded into a dark room with old wooden floors soaking up spilt beer and stare in a singular direction and standing so close to, yet so completely unaware of, each other, and several men stood above the rest making jerking motions with the bodies and repetitive irrhythmic noise, and i reckon they must wonder what so fascinating was occuring behind them that so many might stare at it. and people i pass at night as i leave the library sad (because lonely music reminds me i/m sleeping alone tonight and elegaic suburban novels about eastern mystics and the abscence of answers), and suburban kids in collared shirts on brickwork sidewalks making text message drug arrangements wax quiet as impotent campus police slide obliquely by in silent cruisers in no nighttime of impotent streetlights, and as the cruiser slips around the corner and out of existence become bold and mutter under their breaths (still fucking afraid, you fucking pieces of shit) "fuck the po.. anyway" "yeah... fu- fuck them", as though buying drugs where still somehow rebellion, or better yet, and get this, get this get this, this is fresh: as if by buying drugs and listening to PE, certainly not understanding the lyrics, but for NOVELTY/s sake, were a revolution. lets get high and smash the fucking state with our suburban disobedience listening to misunderstood hiphop on iphones as did our parents before us listening to misunderstood jazz on fivegrand stereos, then get fat and old and bald and impotent in fat old bald impotent suburbs as did our parents before us and leave such petty rebellion to our children, but then again: i don/t care. i don/t. i don/t. and i don/t know why it bothers me so much, /s/not like i do anything more than them. or even care to. i don/t. juss their hypocrisy /s/all i guess. and all i want is to go home and sleep with my girl and be able to cease caring again. at least until i wake up.

Blog Seven.

haha.. long time no midnight ramble, tide yourself over with bad poetry, but i am indeed back.


geography

I am a tactile learner,
and I desire to learn your body like once I desired
to know mountains and canyons
in my youth:

to run hands over rolling hills and jagged
topography,
full knowing the impossibility,
and thus losing interest in landscape
and geography
desiring now to learn, instead:
smooth buttocks
or protuberant hips surmounted
by pale flesh like cracked ridges
smoothed over by virgin snow
threatening to avalanche
burying hot flesh and quietly beating heart,
in warm,
dizzying

suffocation,

the peaceful acceptance
of a quiet death.






also:






youth


Once, we were young
and threw spears
and followed trails of blood into
thickets where the mystery of death
had been enacted.

Now, we clutch shrieking bodies to our chests,
smothering, strangling
if only to see the blood on our hands
and our faces
feel the noise and the fear
if only to feel something now
the mystery ravaged
by our own collective orgasm
of death.

Blog Six.

i/ve had an open sore on my foot for over a week. it scabs when i sleep, and i think it/s finally finished and then i put my shoes on and the scab reopens and coagulates to my sock, so i wind up reopening the sore, again, when i take off my socks and then it scabs over while i sleep. and there/s a bar in the countryside where i go alone and old people in cowboys hats sway slowly to glittering steel guitar and kids play outdated arcade games, and an old woman take my order at the bar and her husband shuffles over to my table with fish, chips and beer that looks like black coffee. there/s a man here that looks like he was in a fire and all of him was badly burned except his upper lip because he has blotchy pink skin that sags down his face like melted wax, and a closely trimmed moustache, but it/s only because he/s real old. he still has a nose, too, and a cowboy hat. a stranger asks me how i/m doing. much better, as it were. (what does it matter anymore that all my friends are dying and have abandoned me to the same?) i drive home hitting 100 clicks on snowdrift dirtroads listening to ryan adams, and appear without warning over a hill into fastfood bigbox suburban outskirts guelph. i drink another beer walking alone towards downtown, watch a garage-punk band open for a garage-pop band. james arrives with andrew. andrew leaves. another james arrives gropes me mutters something latently threatening to the first james then leaves. they/re roommates. the garage-pop band stops playing. me and james wait in a long cold lineup outside a bar, i piss in the alley. james runs up the fire escape, i walk in the back door, fuck the lineup, but still don/t have the two dollars necessary to go upstairs where james and andrew and everyone else is. i call andrew and he comes down and he pays for me. james and me run into kate/s sister and dance with her. a girl from my writing class recognizes me and talks to me on the dancefloor, james and meg make eyes to suggest i try to fuck her. i/m happy for once and couldn/t care less, i dance with my eyes closed. i apologize to a friend of a friend that last time i/d gotten down and drunk, had ranted at and probably insulted some too. she seems cool about it, says she thought i was depressed because we used to have a lab together and i was always nice then, so i invite her to our kegger. i spend the rest of the night wondering if she/ll actually come, and wake up still happy. cooper is happy for me to finally be over my funk. i pray it lasts until the kegger. i pray also the open sore closes by then too.

Blog Five.

it was one of those exams where you glance at the questions and you think, oh shit, i/m completely fucked for this one, but you start writing and it eventually gets to the point where suddenly all your frantic observations are coming together into a miraculously coherent utterance, until the last few pages when your ass is so blown out from extracting golden horseshoes that everything turns into a trembling mess of repetition and you/ve drank so much coffee it takes two hands to keep em from shaking and you/ve gotta piss something awful and to add that your stomach/s gurgling with some derelict cousin of diarrhea and you/re mysteriously famished in spite of that and between it all yer in such pain you can barely hold the pen, let alone steady, so you hand it in, and you piss your brains out, and think fuck it, its finally goddamned over, and you reach some bs state of inner peace reading henry miller on the bus ride home.

Blog Four.

i like to drive through the crummy old neighborhood where i used to live, listening to the allnite jazzstation with my seatbelt off and the windows down so i can feel the crispness of the autumn sky pushing in, partly to rinse the interior of my car of the reek of beer vomit, and partially to pretend i feel some intimate connection with these brokendown warehouses and bustedup churches and sad decayed homes, speeding down the backstreets and hitting every red in town and not caring for once, because tonight, except for the corner of elizabeth and duke, where the copcar/s sleeping, tonight it/s all mine.

Blog Three.

i danced with an elephant last night. a couple nights before that, i made peace with my dead grandmother in my dreams. i kissed her on the cheek and i told her i loved her, and meant it for once. but about the elephant. i was drunk, and sweating: winter jackets, flannel shirts and toques don't make for good barroom apparel on hot fall nights and it was so dark i couldn't see, so i just closed my eyes and grinned and danced. bumping into people and animals and amorphorous shapes, secretly pretending it was the beer and the beer alone causing me to crash into everyone that i could. but about the elephant: her trunk kept hitting me in the face, so i kept my eyes closed and grinned more. alex and mark tell me she was cute, which makes me regret doing nothing, but it was too dark for my eyes, which were mostly closed anyways. and when i placed my hand on her hip, she didn't notice through the thick fur of her costume but my hand still stayed there like it mattered. the band took a break, and i pushed my way out to the balcony and stripped off the jacket and flannel: let the coolness of the descending night absorb my sweat. one of us left after that.

Blog Two.

i realized a couple weeks back that i missed riding the bus. i mean, i've known for awhile that i've missed ridin' the greyhound long stretches through the day barreling through books and music and northeast ontario to arrive in frozen montreal, but i mean like the city bus. the sadness of the old ladies taking buses to kill their remaining hours to putter about grocery stores looking to stretch benuded pensions and still cooking for two and not even eating their own. the pretty girls who married young into ugliness and poverty. fat slow men with their dim small friends, laughing dumb at incoherent jokes to disappear at bus stops behind factories, churches and warehouses, all broken. the students that look down their noses, and the students that look down at their feet. i like to think sharing silent anonymous minutes in transit connects us somehow, like in ways bikeriding alone through cold quiet suburbs can't. but, then i ride the bus a bunch, and miss bikeriding slow, through cold and quiet suburbs.

Blog One.

my official entry into bloglandia. my right eye hurts. just got back from double pool night: billiards (beer) and a hot tub, and while the pools at the school appear well lit, i still can't see without my glasses in them. i saw a girl in a black bikini with a tattoo. the tattoo was a blur. her face was too. i can't see far at the pools. discussed how our new house and neighborhood are unsuited to keg parties, and how rude the police in guelph can be. etc.