Doing it

Heh.

The smoking issue.

I won’t be surprised when lung cancer claims me at 23.  I went for a jog last night.  Almost died.  Three blocks in I brought up gum thick and vinyl, stained brown like the juices that accumulate in my pipe filter.

Fitzgerald and I devise dangerous games to play with cigarettes, sitting in his room with the Bande-a-part dance scene dvd intro cycling for hours cuz we’re too damned to find the remote.  The search consisted of me sitting there, moving something – a book beside me on the couch, a pile of ash, the crushed cushion I was half sitting on – while Fitzgerald stood in one place in the middle of his room being stressed out about it.  “Now I really just want to watch this movie.  Where’s the remote?  No where!”

-Sit down.  I’m content to

“watch the intro.  Me too.  Who does this?  Seriously.”

-People at my mother’s work, being upper to upper-upper class as they are have real trouble understanding the fullness of impoverished lives.  She’s like a broke prophet or a snake oil salesman.

“Man?”

-Woman.  Person.

I strike a match and light a smoke, pull in a long, rich drag, and then toss the lit cigarette at him.  Fitzgerald catches it, ember to palm, and pops it in his mouth without making any fuss about the blister.

-She says: the starving diabetic daughter of the drug-addict upstairs comes knocking on the door at 1AM to use the phone so she can go to the hospital, and how she says her mom’s fighting someone upstairs, and the folk at work are all “Yeah, Marina’s telling her stories again” like they’re pulled from the pages of a cheap novel.  You see this kinda thing at low-dollar ground zero, alive and ripe with the people we know.

“Nah best call back ina halfhour  there’s a Jesus-tonne of cruisers outfront…”

Thick with rust and salt from the Newfoundland breeze.

-I tell her that and she tells me that her dad was the captain of a bowling team, and every week, same night, same time, he’d go out.  So one day a group of thugs that must not of liked his business come crashing in with long, sharp knives and hold my mom, aunt and uncle – all between the ages of 5 and 12 – hostage until he comes home.  The big black heroin addict that lived in the bottom floor of the rooming house my grandfather ran gets wind of this and grabs his shotgun, comes running in shouting, chases them all out of the apartment.  Of course, they left – rock beats scissors – and all riled up he spends half the night shooting out the street lights down Rene Lavesque, back then Dorchester Street.

“Jesus fuck.”

Fitzgerald rolls about his bed in a fit of laughter.  Blowing smoke out through his nose, and choking on his own carbon dioxide.  These moments happen so often, and they can’t be dulled out and have to burn to completion.  He giggles down, and the room falls silent hanging with white webs of smoke, the still smell of his lungs.

-There was another guy, Loftis Love, that lived in the same rooming house for a while.  When my mother recalls him she laughs, but pauses to interject “He really wasn’t a nice man on any level.”  Apparently he looked just like Hitler, and in the early 1960’s was about the same age as Hitler would be.  All throughout his room he had framed pictures of himself taken as the Fuhrer.  For the longest time, my mom was convinced that Hitler had been boarding in the same house as them.  Every so often he’d burst into the room and shout a deep, German “SEIG HEIL” and scare the living shit outta my mother and her siblings. Mr. Love rode a big Harley Davidson, big fat hot, which he kept tied up to a signal contraption consisting of pots and pans that’d warn him if anyone ever touched his bike.  Naturally, every day my mother would find a way to trigger the system, and Hitler’d come out on his balcony in a bathrobe throwing empty beer bottles down in the general direction of the bike.

Either way, he was involved in child pornography and propositioned my aunt.  My grandfather overheard her telling one of her school friends about the scenario, and no sooner had he heard it than he was up there, beating the shit out of his Fuhrer.  Broke a couple of his ribs and threw him down a flight of stairs, shouting that he’d never step foot in the building again.

“Joe, switch!”

Fitzgerald and I toss our lit cigarettes simultaneously like circuis acrobats doing a dangerous trapeze stunt, catching them with our bare hands and continuing the inhalations (though by this point Fitzgerald’s room atmosphere has been declared a certified carcinogen.)

“How long do you think it’ll be before we burn this place down?  We’re going to keep doing this until it kills us.  You know that, right?  We are going to die from fire.  We have to keep doing this.”

-Don’t worry.  I’ve got firefighting experience.

Fitzgerald snorts.

“You’ve got firefighting experience?  You know one day, I’m going to just interrupt one of your tirades by putting out a cigarette in my eyeball.  I promise.”

-I’m going to hold you to that.

“Oh, I know.”

-Good.  So you know that I’ll be waiting, and I fully expect this to happen.

“I’ll keep edging the ash closer until the day comes.  You’ll see.”

-You won’t.

“Not with any depth perception.”

-I was staying with Evan and Meg down south, just shortly after they got married, and we were roaring drunk.  Evan, in his stupor, picks up a bottle of perfume and a torch and lights half of the room on fire.  Here I am freaking out, and he’s laughing too hard to do anything about it.  On the floor in hysterics, and I’ll stomp on burning books and beating shit down with my shirt.

“He wasn’t laughing.  He was just practicing stop, drop, and roll.”

-After that mess, he curls up on the bed and starts crying.  “Why did you marry me?  I’m such an awful person!” and he goes drunkenly to sleep with Meg stroking his precious hair.  She sat up after he was out cold, grabbed another six-pack from the fridge and we stayed up until 5AM listening to Leonard Cohen and talking about how much of a dirty hipster I am.

While drowning the cigarette in the ashtray, precariously perched on the edge of Fitzgerald’s bed, I knocked it to a side where it fell victim to the vindictive forces of gravity.  Ashes covered his floor like Constantine’s vision of the apocalypse.

“What am I going to do about that?”

-Broom?

“GAY.”

-Weave a throw-rug?

“And beneath that lies the great spill of 2009, in which Royal Joe Sharp sent 300 to their deaths.”

-God bless them all.

I light two cigarettes and toss one at Fitzgerald.

-Sartre argues that all things become their pre-determined essence.  I think I like cigarettes so much because they embody this so eloquently, a thing unravelling of its initial form into pure essence.  When talking about it, Sartre means that a kitten will become a cat and do whatever it is that cats do in their essence, but since humans are continually bound by their awful chains of freedom what it is that they do is not as deterministic as that of a cat or a cigarette.  Thus, man has no essence.  Heidegger disagrees with Sartre, arguing that humanity’s essence pre-supposes its freedom, and that its essence is to contemplate its relationship to Being.

-There’s notably this drive in the mass intellect to reclaim archaic ideas of Animism and spirituality, ideas that place importance on the movement of spirit through all things, and the absolute sacredness and interconnected of things on Earth.  We, dashing young radicals, yearn to embrace this sort of romantic revival of the spirit, yet we do this.  On our heroic quest to save the world, we spend our nights choking on cigarettes in a small room.

“Relating to that I heard on someone’s TV today a  man who was talking about the global eco-crisis. He said that we’re victims of a kind of momentum – rape of the earth etc. – that the most detrimental words uttered or written on Earth were that Men are the Masters of Nature, rather than part of the harmonious whole. But because we’re at the top of this abstract heirarchy, there’s no immovable object to stem the tide of our unstoppable force.”

-This is the spirit of our age, which is all very strange.  The Zeitgeist.  I think it was Heidegger that was largely responsible for the popularization of this term.

“Well, it’s German.  Ghost… Time.”

-He argued that all people, no matter what their social status or awareness of it, were doing the bidding of the spirit of their age.

“Well, it’s an absolute.  The zeitgeist isn’t absolute – it’s not a closed system, which we can just step away from and say that that it’s a thing over there and that we’re not a part of it.  It’s an absolute in the sense that it is what is, the ever-changing, maliable social, political, economic, and spiritual atmosphere which we exist in and label the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.”

-Some may be able to recognize and manipulate it, but so far as what it is…

“Well, it’s our essence.  While it’s maliable and changes, no matter what we do with our essence, however we move our essence throughout the world, we cannot escape it, even with absolute freedom as Sartre argues.  It’s inextricably connected to us.  It flows and conforms to the collection of our will, of our individual essences.  In that sense, it conforms to us, although we conform to it.  While the Czech Communist Party may have been able to remove Clementis from the history books, they can airbrush him from photographs, they could not – as Kundera points out – remove the hat which he placed on his leaders’ head before the photograph was taken as a gesture of good will.  That’s just a poetic appropriation of the hat symbol, but the point isn’t the hat, but the point is Clementis’ impact on the Communist Party, whether they attempt to hide it or not.”

-In essence, two men smoking in a room, expecting to die of cancer at age 23.

“Draw!”

Fitzgerald shouted as the embers crawled toward their end, flicking the smouldering husks toward each other. My own careened past his face, and his found home below my chin.  A tiny burn, and quick movements to stamp out the butts before we lit his room on fire.

New poem, in need of title

Freshly inked, my latest. In need of title.

Also, today’s reading recommendations: Heather O’Neill and Max Blagg (Autobio A Gogo, googlable, can you spot the influence?)

————-

Hopped off the bus at Central Station
where the junkies winked thru the winters etched on their faces
where I lifted the empty tin of a Berri Square beggar to my ear
& heard the sounds of suicides in the Saint Lawrence river
Red-light Archambault drew me up the street
and the unhatted hustlers sheep-herded me in with Peeping Toms
We clung to our seats & our whiskies & our favourite girls
knowing it was concrete and cold outside
but here the lights shed red roses on our eyes & the dancers’ skin
Lights off. Doors shut. Kicked to the curb like unwanted kids
blowing over the streets discarded burger wrappers lined with grease
I drifted with the taxi cabs upwards St-Denis after they’d dropped the bomb
everyone’s a liar their guts & hearts empty as their coffee cups
eyes desperate as their cocks & cunts & wallets
like Lucy, with whom I traded an eye for a tongue
& we danced til dawn when up the sun sprung
On I went chanting with my new tongue to the foot of the mountain
where the cross was up-hung over me
& Pan played his pan-flute to the laurel tree
Onward and onward til the bars let us in again
danced I & the satyrs past the unfucked and dreary
their jeers and their laughter drove us downstairs
& when they ask me @ home “What do you remember of Montreal?”
The hip of a UdeM girl like the ’90s, on the blue line.

because good poems should be repeated

and recited to kids on mushrooms, and in your lovers’ ears

and they should be read and talked about, and shouted drunk on the radio

and they shouldn’t be about the clouds, although the clouds are permitted if they’re relevant (and they rarely are)

but instead should be about how we are all lousy lovers

and how your boyfriend is probably gay (sorry to break it to you)

because of this I give you something that would never appear on Paul V.’s faggy blog about poems

poetry from the bus blogs tony pierce:

women who plan on loving me, i am not a good choice

i am mean and dumb, im fat around the belly, and lazy in the soul.
my heart is black, my opinions are fixed, my head is hard.
i will lie in my blog, i will exaggerate on my site,
i will create photo essays that will make you cry on varied levels.

if you leave me for another, that other better beat me at everything
because i do see it as a competition, because to me everything is a competition
and because i have issues with my chicago cubs, it is my job to win at everything else

because im a blogger everything will end up here in some twisted way that will make me look like the victim/hero/loveable one, and most others will be painted with an unfair and miserable brush.

i will live alone and be bitter. eventually i will burn in hell. my grave will be vandalized and used as a commode for the homeless and the wise.

but while i am alive i will do evil to the sweetest folks, i will betray your trust, and i will mock your choices.

im not much to look at, im boring to be around, im not well read, im unedjumacated where it matters, and you will be left unsatisfied on every level of our romance.

i will not cook, i will not clean, i will not offer to help.

i can turn anything into a mess at the drop of a hat, i will find wrong in anything, i will be quick to use the bible against you as well as rock lyrics.

i will compare you to women in my past, to your face, i will argue in stupid circles, i will bring up the worst examples to try to prove my point.

ultimately all i want to do is sit on my couch and hold your hand and wait for you to please me by ordering chinese in high heels and a cowboy hat.

my secret dream is to have a top hat and a monocle and a kegorator and for you to perfect the lost art of making deep dish pizza because oh yes i am also so very cheap.

and yet still better than that mess thats on top of you currently.

Bare feet

I can barely remember just as many details as it takes to find out nothing about where you might be now.

For the first time since you left, I’m feeling it now… I’m feeling this overwhelming regret.  I regret taking your yearly letters for granted, when I had addresses where I could reach you sent right to my doorstep each year.  They stopped coming a few years ago, after I so indignantly ignored them for so long.

I can find a few of them now, stuffed in my files or in the console of my car before I cleaned it out and got rid of it too.  They’re like crumpled leaves I used to examine as a kid in the yard, sifting through my fingertips and pulling the season away from me.

You were so pathetic the last time I saw you.  At the time I felt so justified, and I was so determined to keep you quiet at the funeral.  It wasn’t your day to die, but you insisted on turning someone else’s death into it.  I didn’t know at the time it might as well have been your funeral too… I just told you to stop making a scene and to leave me alone for the moment.  For some reason I thought we’d pick it all up later, but something inside of me knew we wouldn’t.

I guess I thought I’d always receive those yearly letters, and I’d always have the opportunity to find you again if I wanted it badly enough at some point.  Like so many things though, when you stop having the opportunity is when you realize you want to do something about it.

You’re the source of the loss I feel over miniscule things.  You’re the reason I’m so sentimental about everything.  You’re the reason I have such severe abandonment issues, and why I’m so damn paranoid everyone I love is going to leave me.  So I abandoned you…

I’m so sorry.  If you knew how bad I felt now… god.   If I’d have known, if I were older, I never would have abandoned you.  I’m just so sorry.

Robert Allen “The Encantadas”

Having just stayed up all night writing an essay on the final work of my professor’s recently deceased poetic mentor (a short-sightedly-made nerve-wracking decision, I mean, how the fuck can you and your puny undergraduate brain hope to do justice to this man’s magnum opus, finally completed and published as recently as 2006 with virtually no critical essays written on it other than a small section of an essay in a book assigned for the course), I have an urgent book recommendation:

The Encantadas by Robert Allen.

Look, it’s fucking $15 on this website if you can’t find it in your local bookstore (which is probably the case). Or, if you know me and I’ll see you again, some time, I can get you a copy here and bring it to you with the appropriate re-imbursement. If you’re not sold, I’ll loan it to you when I see you, but I’ll demand I get it back before I leave town, and will hunt you to the gates of Hades to get it.

It’s one long poem about Jack the oceanographer from les Cantons d’est of Quebec, his body-double Teddy the Antediluvian Vaudevillian (a tap-dancing turtle), and then Jack-as-Dionysus, smuggling wine from Crete to England.

Fear not it’s “Canadian poetry” categorization, you will not be assaulted with boring-ass Canadiana, word-paintings of the prairies or la fleuve St-Laurent. No mention even of Toronto or New Brunswick (a handful of Montreal references, never explicit), only Hollywood, New York, Hotel Gobernador on the jungle coasts of Mexico, Crete, and the islands of the title piece, The Galapagos Islands — as well, for those of you who resent Canadian literature or poetry that disdains its own geographical location, the Eastern Townships, and an acute awareness of its Anglo-Quebec context. In other words, whatever your opinions on “Canadian poetry,” you will hard-pressed to get pissed off about anything, either present or absent.

It’s also the best piece of “Canadian” poetry I’ve ever read. It’s one of the best pieces of poetry I’ve ever read, holding up against the works of any American, British, French, Chilean, Greek, Latin or Russian poet, dead, alive, or zombie.

Easter morning my room smells of brandy-sweat.

Tony says that when you get older, it’s hard to still rock and roll. There are exceptions, of course. The man’s over 100 and he’s blazing all over the country, interviewing Metallica, rumping and rolling with cheerleaders. He’s probably got a secret stock-car that he uses to jump on da scrape during his midnight drifts.

There are certain virtues to rock and roll when you’re a creative person. They’re basically the exact same virtues of doing something really stupid and then writing about it later.  To other misfortunate people–your audience–it makes you almost pious.  Polishing off a bottle of hard liquor and then drawing a sword on a girl that you’re interested in just so she knows your passion is the lesser road to veneration.

 Proper people need proper idols.  I too love the elephant-headed gods that walk beside the holy, the Jesus (whoever he was), the Tathāgata (whether he’s coming or going), the Madonna, agios Demeter, and all the untouchable men and women that can die and then come back.  (That’s my tequila trick, and I’ve been phosophorescent ever since.)

Perhaps telling of my propriety, I’m more likely to be found in a bar than in a church.  I say my prayers phoetal and shivering, and I find my words in the sad eyes of the people I see passing through the night.  There is more there in the shriveled faces of dying men and forgotten women than in every religious trinket, than in the violent trembling of any minister’s voice, than in every chorus of Hallelujah.  At 3AM, the empty streets and how they always threaten to snap from loneliness are far more revealing than scripture.  In mutual bad faith, I’ll tell you that I pretend to be a bad man with a saint’s heart.

A rare shot of the elusive Fitzgerald in captivity.

Tony also said: “the deeper well is in the blues, not in prog rock.”  And while I play with engineers and physicists, my closest comrades are blues players that string their guitars with their guts.  They are very close to rock and roll, the pulse of the everycat.  They wear the musk of their habits and the scars of their fun.  

One such person is the fabulous Mr. Green, soi-disant inventor of radio-wave mind control.  With his electric tongue he keeps the friction in the clouds high, and the air breathing heavy all night.  He lets me borrow his pedestal, the Smokin’ Word, to make holy the widows and cheats.  He’s a man that knows rock and roll and bluesy adultery.  I can’t see it dying with age.

Last night I tore through the show for four and a half hours.  I spit religious to taxi drivers and party-goers.  I complain about nature poems, and shit over everything.  My poems, I think, want to let loose into rock and roll.  They want to tear the world asunder, then venerate the rubble.  They aren’t happy as poems.  They want to be swords.  They want to kill and revive, using your bones as a whetstone, waltzing so sharp through your mind and your flesh.  It’s strangely hypnotic, religious, erotic, and I only know one word from church.

Amen.

Hock and soda water

“Few things surpass old wine – and they may preach
Who please (the more because they preach in vain) –
Let us have wine and woman, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;
The best of life is but intoxication:
Glory, the grape, love, gold – in these are sunk
The hopes of all men, and every nation;
… But to return, get very drunk, and when
You wake with headache, you shall see what then.

Ring for your valet, bid him quickly bring
Some hock and soda-water. ”
– Byron, Don Juan

For god’s sake, let us have hock and soda-water. Or water, coffee, and Alleve.

I once met some cat from Halifax who, hung-over at breakfast and offered coffee, proclaimed he only had “fizzy drinks” when he was hung-over.

The only really concerning thing was the colour of the bile. I think the only thing I’d eaten that day was a burger from the Mad house (hatters).

Lessons learned: When faced with 2 hours to kill before meeting your prof and class at the bar, go read a book in a Starbucks, DON’T go to the bar you work at and start drinking in the middle of the afternoon.

Likelihood lessons learned will amount to anything more than a half-hearted New Year’s resolution: goose egg.

So goddamnit, bring the hock and soda water!

Yours, from Montréal,
-strych9

Good Friday

Good Friday
should be a bad day:
my eyes are swollen
pink grapefruit,

a headache
over-ripe perched
on a high branch,

light pink
patterns crusted
by the toilet bowl.

Laughing from my
most vile recess,
whipping the sphinxes
that pull my maddened
chariot, roaring from
my poisoned viscera,
hailed the jovial tyrant
reigning bad wisdom
and credit

alive,
alive,
alive!

in this,
the dusking of
our Lord.

My life as a sailor

After Sarte, I’ve devoted my life to building small models of what it looks like to be lost at sea.

“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance,” he says.  I decided, researching Mishima for parlé with a friend over his Fascism/Anti-Modernism paper, that my models then must include the sly recognition of this through conscious limits concerning the sailor’s death.  Chance is still a factor yes, but the outcomes are limited by environment and dignity.

You see, Sartre?  I made him a little waste land for him to cling to out of weakness to see if you are right.  You see, Pound?  My paradiso terrestre is beautiful in it’s limits.  There is indeed a pale flare over marshes.  My sailor cannot escape because there is only sea.  His boat may capsize, or he could die of scurvy – there are only flakes of tobacco for nourishment.  He may just die of loneliness.  My knowledge of biology is small, but I’m mostly certain his potentials still move toward a singular outcome.  Yes, the body languishes sooner or later, and since my world’s a faithless one, there shant be much a trade-off – unless he makes friends with the inanimate for survival.  The Sea-Dog’s an interesting wild-card.   Sometimes, when I gander view my models, I’m concerned that I haven’t provided enough opportunity for life though, i.e., a creative suicide to show just how strong my sailor is.  My worst case scenario involves him taking up the dangerous habit of thinking, inevitably driving him mad.

What a terrible waste of an afternoon.  It would better have been spent talking with the wraith I’ve locked in my closet.  Why, he does tell the most delightful stories!