Whim

I saw her hugging you.  I felt strange because I don’t even know her, but I know something she’d kill to know about you.

And I don’t even know you that well.

Somehow, I took an interest in the two of you standing there in the frosty morning, in the doorwell of the car you bought together with the heat pouring out and the muffler humming.  Her eyes were closed and her mouth a curvy, happy, tired smile… opening and closing to throw words in your ear.

But you probably weren’t even listening.

I sat in my car, sunglasses propped on my head with Oasis playing on the radio.  I finished a steaming egg and cheese croissant and threw the foil wrapper in the passenger seat.  Somehow, life seems more mysterious and purposeful when I make my hair wavy/sexy in the mornings, and when I have to scrape thick ice off my windows with my 12″ orange drafting triangle in my worn black dress shoes before leaving the house.  My heels feel unsteady on our river rock gravel, and it’s somehow purposeful.

I don’t really know.

SamSara and How to Thwart a Sharp

I’d been calling M. (Sharp) all day and he hadn’t been answering. Finally, sometime between 5 and 6 he calls and tells me he’s at Casablanca Books. We each walk about forty feet and meet for a cigarette, make plans concerning a trip to Toronto, and I meet Sara (I being Sam, we embody the great downward spiral of perceived existence, as Sharp has mentioned) for the first time, (an amiable lass who seems to like Robertson Davies. Okay by me.) and then part ways again.

We meet again at the downtown bus terminal where he was to drop off Sara and I was to meet a mobile pharmacy about a Christmas present. A Sara is traded for a Sam, and 12 percs are traded for a smile and a hug. It’s all very Dickens, but we stirred to Sharp’s abode and along the way he relayed a tale of the other night, wherein a former object of my affection, to whom I had sworn a (mutual) vow of sobriety, accosted him while Drunk. I laughed and yelled and fumed quite properly. I promised to explain later.

At Sharp’s we listened to Vinni Paz be angry and Swollen Members be underrated. There was talk of literature and music as I tried to convince him to stop by The Tim Horton’s Time and Reason Both Forgot so I could pick up my gloves at around midnight (a friend at whose friend’s house I had left them was working that night.) Sharp said he’d be sleeping by then.

I offered to buy Sharp a glass of wine at Maestro. He said yes. On the way I suggested we get drunk instead at the Walper. He said yes.

It was getting late.

We got sufficiently buzzed at the Walper as we talked poetry:revolution:acertainsuccubus while I attempted to defend my stance on said succubus from the all-penetrating phallus of Sharp’s intellect. Needless to say I was raped.

Here’s how:

“Pissed off because the vow of sobriety went two ways, well, wrote about it, here…”

One for Me and the Other Guys

Here’s what feels like the angry
You Bitch poem. Well,
she never called herself
mine, but her hair,
there’s a reason I remember
the smell, and her bed, the same,
and her dog’s goddamn hair everywhere
for two weeks, and the deadened
face of the Other Guy (poor bastard),
and my face, drunk and high, smiling,
sadding all over the place for benefit of ego
as I became He, the Other Guy,
and she yelled at me for taking
pills and drinking 3:34
in the morning
where I worked and she
used to work, but now
she’s with some dancer
and the first Other Guy
still follows her around
like a retarded
cat, while I
write bad poems she’s still
sick with the awareness
of her own
chemical gravity – the smoke of her voice
and the alchemy
of her images.

So that was what I wrote days earlier and Sharp read as I went to the restroom. When I came back he had scribbled this in my notebook:

“She was hardly
worth your poesy,
bad or otherwise.”
- Michel Cherpentier

And I was buzzed and didn’t know how to take that. Was it bad? Was she just lowest of lows? Both? Then…

“You killed me on the ship of reason
beneath the wrap of tide
covered in the algae of the bottom
my ghost is writing poems
appearing to get tired,
aging handsomely.
Soon, I know you will kill me again.”

…This referencing my frequent good-natured threats of Sharpicide. Chicken-wire, poison, etc.

Anyway he was buzzed enough to follow me to the Abyss to get my gloves. I got them, and he came with me. It’s the small victories.

Sharp left, and the Abyss, as it sometimes does, degraded into partydrug mode.

The proceeding four hours were full of valium, perc and ganj, and now I’m here at 5:38 AM writing the bits I remember, minus a few that are far too complex to add in terms of the context and exposition required.

So if any of you are planning on criticizing this bit, know that it was intended as a sort of Samsaric Sample Snippet, nothing more. Like you turned your radio on and then off really quickly on a frequency that contains only white noise. This is what you remember a few seconds later. A general impression that something happened maybe and it was slightly interesting. Anyway I’m high and drunk and hungover and burned out and high and tired and laughing so hard I’m coughing and tired so I’m going to bed.

Onelove.

Don’t hate me in the morning.

The Day I Lost

I spent the entire day vomitting, and rolling around my couch in strange consciousness.  I remember comparing it to when I was rolling around Sarah’s couch on seven grams of mushrooms, only I didn’t have to deal with a large spectral ligase beaming into my head, fusing prehistory to my perceptions of love, forming a new species that I later tried to map out with 200 pages, scissors and a glue stick.  I remember my mother telling me that I was sick.  I wouldn’t have it because I have been eating like shit, and this was just a response to all of the biscotti and chocolate.  I remember discussing why Catholicism, despite all of its evils, is both way cooler and psychologically healthier than any form of Protestantism.  I remember Glenn Gould playing Beethoven/Liszt: Symphony #5 In C Minor, Op. 67 – 1. Allegro Con Brio, and wondering if Jedi Mind Tricks ever mentioned this madman.  I remember meditating between vomitting and keeping myself fairly happy, but still being in bad enough condition that I had to turn away a coffee date.  I remembered to check the date when I woke up less than an hour ago to confirm that I’d missed the anniversary of my father’s death five years ago.

Lip-Skin in Los Angeles

On Venice Beach Mia told me to put my shirt back on,

because my chest was embarrassingly white.

Most of L.A. makes me feel embarrassingly white,

whether I have a shirt on or not

because, let’s face it, white skin has 4 90 degree angles

unless it comes from east end anywhere.

But we were staying in Manhattan Beach,

an idyll of hills and mansions and piers next to the Pacific Ocean

on the far side of LAX and strategically distant from the Redondo Beach metro.

It was boring there,

it had, like, a Starbucks and that,

and very few minorities,

basically a SoCal Carmel with oil refineries visible from the suburban hilltops

but there were palm trees and ocean winds

and it was sweaty and sexy and there was sand on everything,

so it almost didn’t matter that she was on the rag when we did it raw,

or that she’d break down into tears in bed

’cause some other guy dumped her two weeks ago

or whenever I went limp because her handjobs were lousy.

We stole a bottle of wine and drank it under the pier

because neither of us were 21.

It was like high school, only I got laid afterward,

and she told me I cured her nightmares when I slept next to her,

and it was very sentimental and romantic-like,

like ‘Round About Midnight,

and I’d spent 4 months listening to

“La, la, la, la, wait ’till I get my money right,

la, la, la, la then you can’t tell me nuthin’ right”

to get here,

so it was kind of like a dream,

in the way that I’m not as self-aware when I’m with someone else

and I don’t have to think so much, or write at all.

Now it’s winter, and I’m in Canada,

and since I didn’t take any photographs while I was in L.A.

I’m writing this instead.

It’s like a memory, only better,

because I can say something like:

If I could make liquorice out of salt breeze, citrus, palm tree dreams, and heat,

it would taste like Mia’s lips,

and suddenly that’s how it was,

and, personally,

I like the way that tastes more than lip-skin.

- strych9

Two new poesies

Charity, Awareness of Death, Lesson Learned

“Excuse me,
may I buy a cigarette?”
“You can’t
but you can have one.”
“Thanks.”
I was on my way to sell
some books and movies
for cigarette money
when the man’s kindness
was expressed. I stood outside
the book store, smoking his cigarette,
too light with a thick filter, too cold
to keep smoking, debated flicking into
drift of wet snow, snuffing the gesture,
because I craved the warmth.
I thought of the monks who are taught
that each ball of rice could be their last,
that they may die
before the chopsticks reach their mouths.
I smoked half the cigarette,
then flicked it.
I made enough cash
to buy more cigarettes.
This time. Jesse even gave me
an extra dollar.

Nullification on Christmas Eve, 2008

Mentioning
a thinking man’s poem
is like calling a gun
a wiseman’s. If he’s wise
you won’t know
he’s got
a gun
because he won’t stoop
to use it.

A Shaolin monk
who could kill for safety
won’t kill
in safety.

Call yourself an artist
and you’ve killed your image
in safety, hid it’s husk
in the walls, a portrait
to hang in your failing
house, beside Dali,
Picasso and the symbols
of your old friends.

The Catholic graveyards
are emptying
on Christmas Eve, the shame
is not forgotten, avarice
and the cruel wake of jealousy
disturbing the soil, the sun,
and the grey matter of entire
capitalist enclaves.

Hearthfires trampled
by the whining
dead, the halflight
of obsession’s halflife
glowing dully
in coin-fed eyes. The humming dirge
of low-paying industry
is the lament of art
and civilization

and it has been sung
before, you
just weren’t listening.

Rotten Tomatoes: better than the movies

Sometimes when I am bored of the book I am reading, the world is sleeping, the cats have gone their own ways, I’ve refreshed my inbox 375 times and little things like time crawl on toward something I’m unsure about, I like to read Rotten Tomatoes for critics ripping apart really bad movies.

You get to be informed about all of the contrived and overwrought things not to do when making a piece of art.  Best of all, when a movie is really bad,o or better yet exceptionally mediocre, witnessing critics pine for words to explain how its dull concepts were executed really well in between an entire page of scathing hate can be more condemning than each of the individual criticisms alone.

Louise Keller writes of the film Marley & Me:

a portrait of a marriage, a glimpse of a writer struggling to discover his strengths but above all, it is a touching story about the profound love between a man and his dog

Profound.  Would it be risky for me to assume that the average person that’d be excited to have a “heartfelt look at how a dog, even a badly behaved one, becomes part of the family” is someone that owns a dog, and already enjoys the magical intimacies shared between animal and man?  The budget of this film was $25,000,000 USD.  Just saying.

Isn’t he soooo cute?

Listening to Ginsberg’s Voice Vibrate on and on

Ginsberg entanglements,
two polarities operating simultaneous
and apart in the glowing day
after opiate and valium binge –
the spinning mind is vertical,
the rotating body is on the horizon
scaring suns into poetic emanation,
moving tides of poet mind projections
to degrade All into a love affair
or two, whatever number
lets one gather all the dirt
at the bottom of a clear fishbowl
to tell yourself it was actually there
and isn’t anymore.

Scatology

The language that we use says more about our cognitive biases and conditioning than it does about what we are describing. I am aware that I approach certain things with a flounce of judgmentalism and even arrogance. Above my toilet is a framed list of Lessons From Life that my mother is rather fond of.  A child that lives with criticism learns to condemn, it says.  Surely, my authoritative appraisal of other’s merit is actually counterintuitive and, really, I don’t mean it.  Comparing and contrasting ideas, such as two individuals’ behaviour, is an innarresting way deriving new information.  I mean no final analysis of one’s worth from it.

An interesting linguistic custom I’ve come to notice about the people of Kitchener is their colloquial referral of any combination of snow and wind, no matter what the extent of either is, as a “storm.”  We can see that other regions, like Owen Sound, refer to these occurrences simply as “snow.”   From this, I reckon that the label “storm” says very little about the weather, instead leading us to alternative conclusions, such as Kitchener residents’ inability, or unwillingness to “drive creatively.”

Circle

Dharma is Dharma, M. said,
expounding on Tibetan and Zen
Bhuddism. One man says
“I’ll go sit on this mountain
for five years.”
“Cool,
I’ll keep chopping
all this wood.” I mused
that smoking cigarettes,
despite health hazards,
is not a detestable thing,
though all things
are detestable. I joked
that I’d probably die
of a bad liver,
“though happier than Kerouac.”
M. shrugged, “Eh…”
“Thanks…”
“You’re welcome!”
I said I hadn’t been able to write
for almost a week. He said
“I’m going to give you a word
you have to write about
without using the word
itself.”

Introduction

Sharp says that I should introduce myself with style (see last post). I might not pull it off but I’ll be as organic as possible.

On an acid trip about two weeks ago a few things happened. First I tried writing in spheres, and then Sharp humored me as I tried to punch God in the face with words by insulting a rather sacrilegious statue dedicated to local firefighters in a part of the city that embodies the term “civic midlife crisis”. So essentially I’m a poet, a writer though not a writerer. I try to write instead of writer (verb). Being the writing, the writing being the writer rather than the writer trying to be the Writer. I write about love, though try not to write about Love: how and why rather than how much and for whom. Good poetry is empirical, bad poetry is not. Bad poetry is like an equation with nothing to the left of the =, if any such symbol is present or implied at all (see Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, certain Chris Bankses that shall remain nameless etc.) It’s useless to be scared of complete thoughts, and gift-wrapping empty or incomplete thought is not only ugly, it’s dishonest, immature and at best comical in an ironic schadenfreude(ic? ish? ian?) sort of way. As long as this MO is openly and gleefully supported by the Academy and those given free handjobs by said establishment, poetry will have no audience but poets.

That being said my poetry bears little resemblance to perfect expression (that being complete silence), but I like poetry so that’s okay for now. Here’s a few poems in the meantime, and I’m always after constructive feedback so let me know what you think. I’m fascinated to see what this blog can do, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the results so far.

Deathdrive, Possession, Manifestation, Meditation

Fitzgerald casts a storm’s shadow -
all the apt cliches circling him
like a lost collection of hesitant
halos – the man embodies
Cohen’s F., Burroughs’ Lee
and the thing we become
when we think we’re dead,
trying to drown in someone else -
this is what is meant
by deathdrive, wet
and often expansive, the recurring
massive metaphors for metamorphoses,
the bruise on the tough skin a virus
or a devil will always use
as point of access.

Smiling: Reading Adrienne Rich Again

The way the door
sloughs off its trespassers,
I want to be that.
Nothing has to burn
if even the dirty engagements of skin
are kept at arms length.
There’s Adrienne Rich,
smiling like I’d want to
at a ripe old age,
from the back of a testament
to eyes and breath
and the way love looks
when it borrows our clothes.

Commentary on a Paradigm Shift

Small black lighter hopping
up and down in hand until
I can let the apocrypha of thought
take control and the hand
isn’t necessary. Cigarette in mouth
where there isn’t any smoking,
a product of restlessness and an inability
to cope with most things
that have a habit of happening.
M. said romanticism is an excuse
for naivety, I think its lack
is an excuse for psychopathy.
She said yesterday she’s trying
to be less shallow, that I
made her feel bad, and I did
though it was purposeful,
it was the last thing I wanted.
How else to say a heart is broken
without saying it? My affections
were interceded? My words
were eaten by another?
Too many fuckers with six-packs,
Harleys, and a vague urge
to play the guitar. M. tells me
that LSD causes a paradigm shift.
Days later I’m having stitches, what some
might call flashbacks, suicidal fits,
no end to absurd notions, and a real
sense that all of it sees me, knows I’m there,
trying to wear brighter colours as the city
becomes more real, my self-image -
infinite layers of juxtaposition -
vibrating at its disused frequency, oscillating
into the paradox of death. The real issue
is the all-conquering shadow called jealousy,
its chambers too void for any star noticeable
on the skyline. There’s always too much -
remembering an attempt on acid
to write in spheres, because I knew
everything. Roll this page up
and throw it at whomever you pretend
to need. Romanticism is an excuse
for psychopathy. Psychopaths
are just more efficient
at completing the ego’s circuit -
all we need
is something that can tell us
what we already know:
that we’re only going
where everything else is going:
wherever the world’s crumbs fall
during slow entropic decline. Matter
falls into light, light into frequency,
frequency into the mind and out again
into null action. The lighter
is on the floor,
not moving, moving
when the light hits it.

Renunciation: A Discourse After Rejection

After talking about Milan Kundera,
the Three Principle Paths,
and my lack of direction, M. suggested
Renunciation as a cure
for despair. “What do you get
out of wandering the streets
with floosies and miscreants?”
“I like it.”
“Really?”
“No.”
I remembered an earlier discussion
in which he claimed that obsession
with another
was just an attempt
to complete the cycle of the ego.
I told him Renunciation felt
like giving up the sacred bonds,
whatever they are. He said romantic
obsession did these ties no justice,
that only when you Renounce it all
can you be full of love, not just
for some arbitrary individual,
but for everyone.
The way it stands,
I haven’t been able to accept this.
Outcome and examination
to follow.