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.