we write letters

bodies in winter

2011-11-30T09:08:00.008-05:00

Naked from the waist up, with limbs outstretched and trembling, the trees look to the holy expansion of sky - grey and always moving. In the fall, the wind visited each of them. With a whisper, he asked for their leaves and slid his never ending arms around them.

Some dropped their covering boldly, opening wide to his inspection and let go so that their fronds rocked slowly to their feet. Others pulled their arms close to their bodies and when the wind tore them open, it scattered their foliage across the street leaving them whipped and sore.

Now he moves right through them, howling at their bodies while rising up to caress and coax the clouds to move south. The trees wait in silence for the modesty of snow.

from the drunken pages of a little green notebook

2011-06-12T21:57:00.001-04:00

How foolish -
to be
coffee stained tiger striped
fading white white lines against skin
red

with the flush of blood to the surface
the flush must remind me of sex
or maybe it is the knowledge of the body
that stops me on the street
face flooded

Wine stained,

dress splashed

red

the mosquito I crushed against your shoulder

leaving a wide dark mark on the green of your sleeve

a strangers blood against your skin

intimate

tiny twisted body ruin in the grass

you hold me up

stained red

you hold me up

intimate

two soft lines that twist and

unravel like the long broken limbs of an insect

i dream of the colour of our blood underneath our skin

I wake up

and flow

2011-04-16T23:27:00.000-04:00

there is a pull in the arms
taffy twist long and lean
a stretch in the sinew
Windworn and waiting
I am heavy with dirt
I am heavy with waiting
when alone I spend my nights listening to ghosts

I hear the coast is lovely this time of year
with the air moving off the water
dragging the smell of the deep deep deep
Yet when I arrive
my hands get buried in the sand of your hair
and your limbs
taffy twist long and lean
wrap around and keep me above the blue ripple
of your bed sheets
the back of your neck does, however, carry the scent of the deep deep deep
and with my head swimming
i anchor to the mattress
hand to hand, still dreaming of ships.

Ebb

2011-04-04T20:07:00.002-04:00

Last night I marveled at your body,
after your words had washed away with the rain of sleep
and your breathing slowed and steadied
I placed my face against your neck and felt your pulse through your skin.
How strong your heart is!
In the dark I traced the green chain of your veins - softly as not to stir you.
They sing of your system!
your arms, locked tight around my body, encouraged my oceanic survey
and when I finally followed you into those murky waters, I dreamed.

I dreamt of wide oceans and you, a little ship.
I hovered just below the water's surface
happily tethered to your hand
waiting for the tide
to pull us home.

When you wake
And I have pulled away in sleep to touch my forehead to the wall
Pull me back

Here,

place your ear against my heart,

press your cheek to my skin

Hear

the current as the rivers of my body rush to meet you.

end of march

2011-03-31T22:15:00.001-04:00

stumbling through the chill to reach you, finding you warm and sockless near the end of March.
I am tired of winter but grasping hold of it with nails chewed short. I am writing terrible songs to scare off spring. Making hideous faces at the grass peering through the melting snow, curious to see me so wholly unwelcoming. I am whining and hanging back, pulling at winters long cold arms. It stops for a moment before turning it's flurries on me, opening wide it's fearsome mouth, endless black tongue dangling.
It is as ugly as I am, wrapped up in white coats with white fur

with the snow gone I wait for your wolves to find me.

in an art museum in cleveland

2011-03-19T01:13:00.002-04:00

I am looking for the etch of a finger nail

a perfect crescent moon hanging blissfully unaware
under the crease of the lip, or maybe within the iris where the colour shifts
something undiscovered, below the jawline,
a smudge
a secret

following the wide confident steps of a lover

or stumbling like a child on a grade school trip

I linger

over all the wrong pieces

old love, new love, all love

2011-02-14T21:00:00.000-05:00

photo by frances beatty

I was going to tell you of myself in love. Of how I am, all encompassing complete and unforgiving. I had written you, a letter. detailed my past. Tried to make you a map of all the dark corners . If you decide to venture further you'll remember where to turn - please don't turn the light on (sometimes I can't stand to be illuminated so)

this fool can die now (old love)
words
get
small
-er
and
fragm-
ents
seem
prettier
then
the
whole.

Like
grains
of
sand
or
freckles
followed
or
ants
marching
one
by
one
or
the
seconds
that
pass
when
you
realize
you
have
less
and
less
to
s
a
y

he believes in beauty (new love)
I am remembering how the spark feels
(along the centre of my palm)
through the lines in my hands
the one that leads from the cavern
(between my pointer and middle finger)
and ends just above my wrist.
I'd like to think of this line with
(your mouth like a rain swelled cloud)
the kind of presence normally set aside for
giant storms and great wars
(or miracles, body in body)

cats cradle

2011-01-30T15:08:00.002-05:00

last night,
dreaming,
of numbers
of the whispers on a body
of the change and the shift
of winter through my body

I am here
still
close to the pavement with
a cat's tongue
rough salt lick
and staining my paws

I woke up to a prayer
too warm in your sheets
too comfortable in the space between your elbows
where your heart nestles beneath it's calcium cage

"please let us see the spring
please lets see the spring"

how strange we will look in the sun
I want to see you golden

winter words I

2011-01-12T22:50:00.004-05:00

Coffee & old songs

like old voices

like old seasons

When I dream of old landscapes

(beside your new body)

do I smell of spring?

do I make summer sounds?

Or do I stay winter worn

heavy with snow drifts

sprinkled with footprints

simply running circles?

You, light and wild, pale against me

you are spring, and summer

you are all things in between

and when I shake my body free of this crystalline dust

and have to shield my eyes from the brightness of your body

will you forgive me?

will you let me wrap myself around you

lowering myself over you with a newness I had forgotten?

will you excuse these fumbling fingers, this wayward mouth?

Can you be patient

as I stumble,

I am slow to remember what it's like to fall

from "you can never really achieve silence"

2011-01-10T10:48:00.000-05:00

The winter marches through me, a drone, a dirge. I am carving shapes into it's surface - blades on ice. I am making us a winter song, a carol I can sing. I am making you a place among the pines and the snow storms.

I will be archivist.

*******

I woke up to his body stretched lengthwise across mine - reaching for his alarm, set too late, and now drowning us both into waking. Today is the anniversary of John Lennon's death, 3 years before my birth and 8 years before the birth of the man who sleepily presses his body against mine to escape the urgent cold of the room. John Lennon was shot 4 times in the back by a man whom he had autographed a copy of Double Fantasy for earlier that day. Lennon was shot 4 times as he walked into his home with his love. Ono would've felt the shock of the body if she was standing close enough. In high school I would've observed this day with reverence, perhaps with almost a sense of personal loss. Funny that it was my first thought upon waking. I open my mouth to tell him but instead choose to clamp in shut around the dry winter lips of this man, all bones and blood and breath. I had been dreaming of pineapple. Get Up. His mouth tastes of morning and night. Of sleep and history. It is momentarily overwhelming. Get Up. We shuffle through a rushed morning routine.

Clothes. Our clothes on his floor look strange, our bodies bright, flushed, naked. The idea of fabric against skin is unsettling, but I pull on each article quickly. Taking a moment to observe my reflection, my shape looks distorted with skirt and sleeve. I feel absurd.

*****

I am able to get the christmas tree together before the first news breaks. It locks together- each section of the tree sliding in and-click. A satisfying noise. The lights are built in. It smells like nothing, its needles soft, a thin fabric. I wish for the telltale sting of pine as I run my fingers along each branch. I am met instead with butterfly kisses, phone call. after phone call. Familiar voice on the other end, speaking of a girl still sleeping without breath - the silence in the room unbearable
*****

"If you sit still in a place that's silent you can hear your nervous system and your circulatory system"

"What am I listening for?"

"A low hum and a high hum. It's why you can never really achieve silence."

And when those two things shut down?

My mind is a million words, grabbing for each other through the darkness until they merge, a wild song. I'll move my head to your shoulder.

I hope you hear me humming.

********

promise you'll find me

2010-12-04T17:25:00.003-05:00

memories of last year

and

years before

and

all our ancient winter promises, like mythology. christmas stories. christmas past and past and past.

"WE REFUSE TO BE COLD" (2011) - trailer from North Country Cinema on Vimeo.

small town winter in the big city (aka skating with the american pt I)

2010-12-03T22:00:00.006-05:00

chasing you
(chasing me)
in quiet circles
a scratch of the blades on rough ice
the sound of pucks on baseboards like
a slap in the cold air
wind whipped hands in fleece lined mittens
mixed with the inexplicable pull of a body
to a body
stirring our heat like an exchange of breath,
waiting for the ice to clear.

prayer

2010-11-18T22:52:00.000-05:00

fuck.
i tore that story out

like a splinter or

a limb trapped beneath fallen rock

knawed that story free

using my teeth to tear at the skin that holds it down

against my muscle and fat

Bloody and barely breathing

in the aftermath

splayed naked and grotesque on my bed

my window open to let in the air - I hear

city raccoons fighting over a toppled compost bin

their screams sounding like fabric ripping

and I am full of the terrible truth that I will die

eventually.

oh christ

i do not know you but

I know the explicative

I know the feeling behind whispering

oh god.

part of the painter

2010-11-17T23:47:00.001-05:00

her lover - a slight man with ribs that pushed at his skin like a cage - was a painter of landscapes. his fingers long and nobly wrapped around a paintbrush, wrapped around her hand

ran along her body and

seeing her body, green mountainous rolls of oil slick skin

expansive

stretched across the canvas, headless and footless

her heart dropped into her gut

that night, with his body inside her body

he prayed over her with lovers psalms

"beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty"
he ran over her body with lovers palms

all she saw were her waves of flesh, crashing down around upon the bed

and under his gaze, she felt sea sick.

hope you don't hate this one

2010-10-30T00:23:00.001-04:00

My mouth feels warm and swollen,

a mess of words hanging from my tongue

over ripe fruit, heavy with the need to fall
drowned by the sound of heat throwing itself against the radiator
a rattle in the chest

the man with silence on his skin
takes my my wrist in his fingers
takes my face with his hand
and with his lips, moves my lips
mouthing words on my neck -

a game

like talking underwater
the sound distant & weighted
can
you
hear
me
now?

creating nostalgia

2010-10-05T23:09:00.001-04:00

I am usually so full of goodbyes.

i had an old love's songs on last night. I remember sitting in the basement of that house and him plugging away behind piles of wires and synthesizers and guitars and earphones. the guitar with the carvings of bunnies all along the face, gone now. Once we lay in bed and listened to his voice on a tape from his early 20's. It was him but it wasn't him. There was lots of that. Him but not him. He is new and lovely, new. Last November I got to witness that. I try to tell myself the story of how it was to love him, but find myself tripping over the details. I forget.

I am funny. I am lousy with want. My sleep pattern is all wonky. I would like to hear the truth sometimes. I have a hard time believing most people these days.

I have moved into the cinema, I am burying myself in late night music. I may not sleep for the next week and a half. Wine and lovely girls with bow mouths or hair longer then mine. Freckles or dark eyes. Nothing but films and music, music and films.

And you. Yes. these new hands are long and feel good in mine. and these new eyes are bright and seek mine out. and this new mouth presses mine so. We mark each other and skin our knees. We chant and rave and wrestle. I whisper poems into your skin so every pore will know my history. so every time I touch you, your skin says "yes, yes, i remember this. sparks and colours - purple and gray. Like winter skies over Georgian Bay or the backs of pigeon necks. yes. yes I remember"

rising

2010-09-26T14:44:00.000-04:00

from behind
i feel your fever dreams through my skin
hiss and rattle on the back of my neck
with breath that struggles from your lungs
beast of breath.
your heartbeat on my spine,

flutterofwings

all afternoon we bucked and brawled

coo'd and caterwauled

sought out what makes us animals

dark dark inside

outside

all wind storms and moving clouds and promises

of rain.

you have left me

for sleep

i make out silhouettes of furniture

sound makers

waiting, unmoving
my breath

i can hear howling

i can hear them crying for me from the streets

i can feel your fever dreams
i can hear them crying for me from the streets
I can feel your fever dreams

i love what you're wearing

2010-09-18T20:20:00.000-04:00

art/ crawl -
followed you home, drunk, drunk, zoe on my arm

i had to work in the morning

dance night at a old hall.
The one who told me i was cute, I slept with him
a total of 5 times.
And then stopped, it suddenly seemed silly.

but this isn't about the summer
or
how the jealousy of him tricked you into thinking you wanted to be with me

no

this is about a year ago.

last autumn.

when I followed you home.

drunk.

with zoe on my arm.

And it was cold.

and I had already kissed you.

and seen flashes of your skin beneath your clothes.

and felt how your hands found my body.

and guessed how your body would find mine.

yes.

It was cold

I knew that you'd be warm.

Simmering with stories.

Hidden behind nonchalance.

Charm.

Warmth. Stories. something i couldn't place.

A lot changes in a year.

But the season returns.

the air feels the same,

Although everything is not.

from a journal of eroticism and misadventures

2010-09-17T10:29:00.001-04:00

The waitress slid her gaze down my arm, following the long purple scar that rests along my bicep. This scar, earned in a most unheroic and mundane way is my way in with girls like her. She is long black hair, wide eyes and soft eyelashes. She is thin and unassuming. I shift my weight and she looks up for a moment - but I can't tell if it's embarrassment or interest she wears on her features. So I smile. A gaptoothed wide grin with too much gums. But genuine. She smiles back, shy and gives a little trained bow, shuffling off towards the back.

I am not a beautiful girl. I'm not even pretty, although my father's relatives would tell me other wise because that's the kind of things you tell people during small talk at funerals. I am however charming. Charming & immodest with a memory like a bear trap. I use these like weapons. Defense and attack. Rarely do they let me down. I do not see myself as a predator.

Summer drew it's last heavy fevered breaths and humidity, sliding on top of my body, was a welcome bedmate. I lie in bed too often crowded. I lie too often in bed without sleeping. Autumn will be dark - skin and eyes and demeanor's. After a summer, all sunkissed blondes, all milk and honey and heartbreak, I will turn my attention to falling leaves and chilly fingers that twist around my own and the very best ways to keep warm. I have had such dreams in your autumn bed, and all these places I store memory slip out from under the sheets to rest upon our skin like dew. In the early morning I run my hands across your face to try and collect them, your features new but familiar with the dust of sleepy lovers past.

I watch the shadows my hands make on the wall. I find your mouth with mine. You taste cold and sharp like the edge of a knife, like the air as seasons shift.

ghost songs

2010-08-19T11:15:00.003-04:00

She'd like to not dream. If she can't tell him about them in the morning with a body full of visions falling like dust then she'd rather not.

She gave Jake concerts, music seeping in their skin and passing between their clasped hands like electric currents. Bands neither knew, or cared to know really, each ending with their bodies pressed in rhythm. She has gone to maybe 2 shows since, always alone, and always cries. With Adam it was tennis, although neither were serious players. For the most part it consisted of her making a animal noise, him serving and then the two of them racing across the courts. There were no boundaries with them. When a moment was needed they're meet at the net, wriggle their fingers at each other through the net and kiss. After, sitting in the grass of Bellwoods they'd walk their fingers over each others skin, each radiating heat and sunscreen.

"I've been talking in my sleep like crazy lately... I can tell because I wake up mid sentence.."
Or he'd been told, by whomever was then sharing his bed. And yes, she assumed it had happened again, because that is the way he works, and she'd always been aware of that. A strange sad part of her had appreciated his attempt to help her heart. Afterwards, in the time of his missing she found herself hating him most days. Absence does very little for the heart and she had no intentions of ever dreaming again.

But last night there was a fox on her pillow, turning winter white. His breath was slow and collected as he watched her with penny eyes. Through the curtains clasped tight she could hear the sound of the city crumbling, like icicles falling from the windows. The kind of crash that shimmers. Fractured light on a stranger's arm, blond hairs catching the sun and curling them inwards towards his skin. She once loved a girl who's hair was so pale it was silver. There was a poem, but she had long forgotten it and the name of the girl. She is constantly losing parts of herself to these bodies that collide and then fall away with the kind of crash that shimmers. The fox, now white except for his copper gaze pressed his nose to her cheek and nudged her into waking.

in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die.

2010-08-09T13:07:00.001-04:00

There is a single blood stain on the bedsheets, blackened with age. It is a small spot, about the size of a loonie. I've poked at it with my finger nail, trying to etch a strip into powder but it has sunk into the fibres. It has been washed and washed and now it is a part of the fabric. These sheets hold the earthy scent of night time bodies but not that of the blood. I think it's mine, my foot and hands torn up from a over zealous leap into a pool - all blue night, 3 sets of hands and me. and me.... but I can't remember. It could be someone else's and if it is that's a cue that I need to buy new sheets. Either way, I need to buy new sheets.

I am waiting out the night. It is warm in this room and the fan pushes air like eager hands into my skin. I am staying awake. I've been having terrors and dreams. Simple ones, struggling against someone who aims to pull me into the ground. ones where an old lover moves like a ghost across the desert of the lake, walking across the yellow dust to toronto island leaving footsteps and feathers behind him. I am writing things I think would've made him laugh.

I danced down streets with an old friend and new strangers. Early mornings all sweat and sore feet. My body on a bicycle becomes part of the great machinery. and my hand. my hand held with a gentle comfort becomes part of his body momentarily. on a small couch we quietly connect because sometimes thats all we have in the early morning. in the early morning he pulled my body into his body then pressed a blanket around my body like a child. Strange comfort in new friends. I am not scared of anything. And I have nothing figured out. and I am in love with this new aspect of myself. I am in love with my ink stained callosed fingers and walking home after films with lovers tumbling around me shining. I like reading outside at 3am. I like these men full of stories that walk with me and kiss me with conviction. I like these women full of dance and song.

Tomorrow I turn 27. I have nothing figured out. And it's ok. In fact, it's golden.

you love me when you're drinking.

2010-07-23T10:55:00.002-04:00

My mother asked me if there was anything I wanted from my grandfather's house after he died. I chose the embroidered picture of a jar of jam, the sweater he wore every Christmas and the plastic pool cups with the turtles on them. The cups once had turtle flotation devices so you could float them about the pool although more often then not as kids we'd ditch the glasses and float Barbie and her friends around. The sweater is folded up and placed ontop of my winter things. All green and red knit patterns. The jam picture sits on the shelf with a few cookbooks and as soon as I can find a hammer andnaili willhang it, just so, near the aprons. My home to be my castle if the construction is ever done.

I woke up early to sort through piles and piles of things on my bedroom floor. I had emptied my closets a week ago and just kind of left everything everywhere. I am trying to hide from little truths that have been following me for nearly a year. They lie perfectly still beneath little mountains of skirts, fabric, shoes and notebooks.

Rainy days are the worst to remind me of who is gone and who was never even here to begin with.

boys in the trees

2010-07-14T17:39:00.000-04:00

Holding hands like children. Palm to palm with fingers to mimic limbs that wrap and unwrap in new positions. I hope he doesn't now think too much of me. While you, I hope you don't think too little. I just wanted to run through Toronto till my feet hurt and kiss the mouths of those who fill my time with such abandoned joy, my friends, my strangers. I wanted to dance with my whole body, tell the secrets of how I move. I dance with my eyes closed, with my eyes down. I want to sing along.

I sewed my way through a city that was full of ghosts, places that were once someone elses but had begun to feel familiar, something I could take hold of. I stood outside your old place in Brooklyn, thought of the postcard my Rah sent me in March 2008 which I read to you as we sat in a bar the afternoon before I left:

"This city reminds you that you are small. And you are on a leash. And that it is up to you to make your own fun, fighting a good fight. Angela, I will find you again. I promise. I love you"

We were tipsy and we leaned over our knees to keep our faces close. I was optimistic. I was electric with adventure. You asked when I saw Rah last and I tried to remember his face the way it was for me. A man of mischief. A man of love but capable of great hurt. August. I haven't seen that face in almost a year. Its strange to think how we've shifted

This city feels the same, spread wide with the heat pressing down on my skin. It still has traces of him, it always thankfully will. Your face has changed, I can watch it break and fall back. You can see when I think too much and you furrow your brow and mimic pulling out thoughts like a mist.

Your face the way it is for me - a man of secrets. A man of potential but capable of great hurt. I have woken up to that face for almost a year. It's strange to think how we're shifting.

L'Innocence des loups

2010-07-05T10:13:00.011-04:00

i followed your footsteps across town and country
and continent.
content
as i was with loving you so completely
years of you and i and distance,
i am suddenly wanting to lead.
i have made a pact
a pack
i run the wolves through the city
wet feet on pavement like a slap on his skin
and these minor injuries, i wear,
cuts spread on my palms like the constellation of freckles on your back -
sun
kissed
my palms on the lips of these new animals.
these beasts I show my body to
cleaning my wounds with humid velvet tongues

I am wild with new want

excerpt from "Theft"

2010-06-30T13:46:00.013-04:00

Beneath the mattress of her parents white lattice bed Marie's mother hid old photographs. Each yellowing portrait with it's smiling, innocent subjects seemed strange and forbidden. They sat on couches opening christmas presents, posed in front of dark houses carrying babies in white christening gowns, stood shoeless on sandy beaches with hands shading their eyes. The misty saturated colours looed like a dream scape, the clothing strange and flattering. The black and white ones felt like a rainstorm, the people's faces bright and clear. After that initial discovery she quested other secret places in the house, determined to find more of these beautiful strangers. Beneath the mattress of her sisters four poster bed she found a playboy centerfold sprawled on top of red satin, the woman's fingers reaching for mysterious places. Under her own mattress she pulled out a sock smelling slightly of wet dog and lipstick she had stolen from her teacher's desk. Slowly Marie turned the silver ring at the bottom of the tube, the lipstick rising, pink and moist like the tongue of the centerfold between her lips.

Every morning at 8am her father went to work, leaving the television on and his mug 1/4 full of tea. At 8:45am, every morning, her mother came home from work trailing the smell of heavy cleaning products - lemon, amonia, vinegar. In those 45 minutes Marie would carefully clean out her father's abandoned mug, place it back on the self, wipe down the counter and turn off the television. Then, she'd move into her parents bedroom. She'd kneel beside the bed as if in prayer and slide her sweaty palm into the space between the comforter and the box springs and pull out the ziplock bag. Spreading the photos on the carpet like tarot cards she'd try and find her parents. Try and find herself, but photos gave nothing away. The centerfold with sleepy eyes and the family waving from inside the train will give nothing away, she could stare at them until her mother's keys rattled in the door and never see a thing.

victory is overrated

2010-06-29T12:39:00.002-04:00

image by brooke manning

His hands inch up her legs and in response she spreads them wide like a map, letting rough palms sweep her thighs. He follows the fault lines of these muscles to the root ,the ground shivering beneath his fingertips. The pressure to split the land clear open is crushing her body in waves but she is rock these days. Unlike the route familiar lovers make on each others bodies with sage touches, this is a game. Their hands, long fingers intertwine as they collide over her skin still moist from rain . In this playground where heads are ducked in amber oceans he nestles his hand between her legs in a taunt. This movement, like a cat call from the tree tops, simply makes her follow suit, scampering over his pants with animal digits. They do not acknowledge each others hands, they just try to find the tremors. The interest is not urgent, it is playful, it is the fumbling forceful motions of children, unsure of what the outcome will be. They play act fourplay for the satisfaction of having small secrets. Four square. Ollie ollie oxenfree neither seek the other out for more then a glassed in kiss.

tin can love song

2010-06-27T02:13:00.000-04:00

It is summer, for real. it is not just an unseasonably warm April that fools the heart into a fever. No, it is fully summertime. Sailing down Brock Ave, the asphalt is smooth and quiet. There are many river streets that lead to the heart of the city, air caught in my lungs, my skirt sliding high on my thighs and my arms sore from holding my hope so high for so long.

They say the city's on fire, but it isn't that bad. No, not so bad.

I am attempting to quit bad behavior. Empty, useless things. i am trying to keep myself full. Ideas and words. Oh I used to write you letters. Tonight I read so many words

In a backyard three houses down a couple fights, loudly. She is shrill but there is the heaviness in her voice that comes from drinking.

"I am so tired of these weeds"
"they're not weeds"
"those are weeds"
"they're flowers and they're beautiful"
"they're weeds"
"they're snap dragons"
"no, no beside the snap dragons, they are weeds"

she doesn't sound real. Something in her tone. He sounds tired, they're flowers and they're beautiful. he sounds beat. he sounds defeated.

somewhere beyond the clouds and smoke that line the sky like paper curtains there is a partial eclipse. somewhere on the other side of the line i try to keep my voice up.

I hope I don't sound defeated. hope i don't sound beat. I'm not, not really. Still covered in goosebumps and small pink burns which fall away to white scars. my fingertips are still rough from pressing down strings and pushing my luck. the couple is silent, retired to bed with their arms and bodies spread wide about each other. i will be silent too.

small works in progress from sk, found crumpled up and folded in my wallet.

2010-05-24T19:01:00.004-04:00

the roots are slender - like her brown legs jutting out of the landscape
her long
brown
legs
stretching wide in the tall grass
_______________________________________

Against the trees that wear the snow against their crevices like pale lipstick
I pull my scarf, blood red, at your neck
twist at it, pulling it tight.
and when your face is held near mine with such violence
I kiss it -
softly.

after the boys of summer have gone pt I

2010-05-15T15:09:00.007-04:00

Two weeks become a month, a month becomes a few, a few become a year, and then the years splinter off into many until everything is a kaleidoscope of mouths and moments and stories.

It was the year of perpetual heartbreak, and the city had grown to represent this loving unrest. She had, many times, decided to turn over a new leaf, but the fall gives way to winter which turns to spring and the summer hits the pavement and sends heat into your skin from all directions. seasons shift and she does not. Never really. She is lost in love. in love with love. in love with lovers loving - piggybacking each other through summer sun, sneakily running their hands across each others bodies in the park grasses, as if the sudden showing of summertime skin is too much for their winter blind eyes. All these legs and calves arms and backs yes, yes. Summer romance born out of heat and sweat.

Hers is a slow burning love. Hers smolders through the cold and flash fires into summer. Suddenly unbearable. The sight of you was like a slap, all tingling skin and shivers. You smelt different. Dust, smoke and when you pulled her in for a hug, a cologne. Gentle and quiet on the back of your neck, like a kiss. You said she smelt like summer.
.....

excerpt from "only living boy in..."

2010-05-14T01:54:00.006-04:00

Every time he hears a siren a small part of Micah wishes it was headed towards Crys. That there was a hideous blaze at her apartment or that she was involved in some sort of fatal accident. Not out of spite or revenge. In fact things ended quite pleasantly between them, quietly in her bedroom as he packed up his things in a rucksack. She even cried a little. Hell the break up was even his idea. None the less, when the blaring noise and flashing lights of an ambulance streaked past him he felt a pang of excitement, and would peer after it, trying to see whether or not it turned towards her old apartment. No, it's not that she deserved to die, she was a pretty wonderful girl, a lovely companion and her parents were crazy about her. It kinda broke his heart to think of how hard her pops would take her death. He knew that the world would be a colder, lonelier and by far worse off place without her.

and yet.

If she were dead, he'd never have to wonder where she was. Who she was seeing, what she was wanting, if she was sad or happy, if she ever thought of him. If she were dead he'd know the answers to all these questions, because the fact of the matter is he didn't believe in the after life. If she was dead she was in the ground decomposing, which means he could date girls who were stupider and less interesting then her and fuck them without agonizing if some other man was making Crys purr the way he knows she does when she's really satisfied.

He'd planned it out, how he'd attend the funeral, solemn, maybe with a friend. No, better yet, his mom. She always liked Crys, and never got why he broke up with her to begin with. Crys' parents would be happy to see him, but wouldn't have much to say. Grief stricken they'd nod to him, maybe an uncle or cousin would chit chat with him about how much it meant for him to be there. In his fantasy funeral her family wouldn't know that he in fact broke her heart and left her behind. No, in his dream he was a beautiful representation of their daughters love.

Last time he saw her was in New York outside a bar. Micah was a bit drunk and uncoordinated due to the fact that it was later then he was used to. She greeted him without an ounce of pretension. Without embarrassment or regret. She wrapped those long arms around him, so long you'd think they'd envelope you twice, and held him in a distant embrace. a safe hug. With her stood a boy, handsome and goofy with a mop of blond hair. He simply smiled at the two of them, still thumbing through the novel they were discussing when they came upon Micah. She held the scent of musty books, reminder of the book shops she always seemed employed in. The other guy had these long hands and bruises on his upper arms. Micah hated him as much as he could hate a stranger. When the conversation began to lag into small talk and her companion began to shift his weight from foot to foot she said goodbye and genuinely was glad to see him. He ran his hand down her arm, an act of intimacy that didn't see to register with Crys or the dumb guy she was with. The two broke away from him and strolled off, their arms rubbing against each other as they walked. Micah simply watched until their figures melted into the horizon.

It was the first time he wished she would die, stumbling through the strange streets of a city she always said she never wanted to visit anyway.

beach baby

2010-05-13T11:08:00.004-04:00

I wonder, when seeing films, and actors look at each other, really look at each other, if they know what they're doing. when two lovers regard each other before a delicate kiss and everyone is watching, the boom mic hovering over their heads and peoples voices are nothing but whispers and even though in post it was re-recorded over and dubbed because it was too quiet, I wonder if they mean it. If they realize they are making something important and somewhere there's someone curled up alone in a chair trying her very best to keep breathing. Or if they're thinking about cleaning out their fridges, or just wanting to get home and crawl into bed. If they're really thinking about where that girl they dated a few years back is, you know, the one that for one reason or another just didn't work out but she had the best laugh? If they have someone waiting for them to be finished so they can go out for coffee and exchange books they lent each other and during this whole scene she's worried about how she's going to tell her friend she really didn't like the prose or that the author used too many long unnecessary words.

When I told you this in the middle of La Regle du Jeu you laughed and pressed your thumb into my ribcage before running you hand down my side absently to rest on my thigh.

"Well what did you think about?"

I shrugged and you laughed again, patting my leg like you would a precocious child.

I was thinking about you. Your eye through the lens. If I looked permanent to you.

wonders how she's doing out there, in the fog

2010-05-12T06:09:00.003-04:00

There is something to be said about bravery. The kind that has no shame and takes no prisoners, like 2 am bike rides in short skirts racing you from her house to yours. It's the heart on sleeve, tattooed or real. She wants to make sense of the senseless, wants to arrange it all in a rhythm scheme and yes, maybe that's her problem. She has always been enamored of order. Of routines, as simple as latenight meetings with bottles of wine and how long intervals are between sprints and jogs. She'd like to make order out of how she tried to love you. She would not however make order of you. Maybe that's your problem. She liked your chaos, your pull and push, it drove her mad but she loved it. She let you get away with it. She loves her mistakes, although she still isn't sure if you are one. She is rational to a fault. She loves working. She likes cleaning out the popcorn machine and wiping down surfaces. She likes waking up to sunshine and watching lovers in the rain. She loves strangers and draws in stories like breath. She likes the softness of palms and pushing her hand into the hand of others. She likes sleeping rolled up in the covers. Dogs. She likes the noises she makes with her voice when everything that makes her sad wells up and spills over her lips. She likes songs. And whispers. She drinks too much sometimes and finds great joy in waking up disheveled, making coffee, cooking oatmeal, sitting down in front of the big window and listening to a record first thing in the morning. She likes going to the cinema, eating expensive meals and exploring cities alone. She likes sleeping, showering and getting lost with lovers. She is competitive. she is worth the fight. She is full of hope and heartbreak. She hates lies and lying because she puts her trust and faith in everyone. She is resilient, resistant and militant in her defense of love. Of the importance of. Of the existence of. Soon enough she may burst or break away or fall apart. But soon enough isn't today, is it? So cut her a break.

Two Weeks, in the dream

2010-05-09T10:10:00.003-04:00

Ten churchbells to mark the hour and in another ten you'll make a wish. Going over the dream. Us, unable to contact each other, blessed by the satellites falling from orbit and rendering our cell phones useless. Somewhere in the ocean, words drown. I can not call you so often that I begin to imagine you looking to your companion and rolling your eyes at her. Yes, the death of modern technology has done us good. Can you remember how dependent we were on cell phones? How few letters we wrote? Do you remember the internet with the constant wall between communication despite the fact we were always reachable, little homing devices, keeping tabs. It is much nicer now. At 10:10 however I will imagine that you are trying to call me, and confused by the busy signal, you keep trying. Like you did when you are excited or stircrazy and wanted me to arrive to fill the space left behind by absent boys. Like you criticized me for doing when I was full of hope and that dirty word I've tried to stop using. At 10:10 I will wish I could remember the hum of your voice.

in the morning

2010-04-25T13:08:00.003-04:00

in the times i want to touch you
(with these fingers that climb all ivy)
and you face the wall
(with your arms across your chest)
I busy myself in other ways
(with these fingers that climb all ivory)
and count the spots on your back
(although they never make a clear picture)
and your arms across your chest
(in the times I want to touch you)
don't dare to tie up in mine
(with those fingers that strike like iron)
in the morning when we don't kiss
(I busy myself in other ways)
count the minutes spent
the time I want to touch you.

ottawa will always be a city full of you

2010-04-19T00:50:00.003-04:00

His skin was gray, thick on his bones like too much dough. He was older under these lights, long fluorescent tubes that cast no shadows, spilling over every crease on his bed - water over rock.

"But you didn't even like her that much... said that she wasn't important"

He sighs, running his dry tongue across his lips.

"Correct."

"This makes no sense Mike, you know that right?"

I'm perched on the end of a chair with my feet twisted around the legs. I am clutching a copy of a magazine his last poem was published in.

"It makes perfect sense. The ones that you love make you feel good. Make you feel right. The ones that aren't important make you feel like shit. When you feel like shit you do things like this. I only ever want the ones who aren't important"

He drags his hand across the bed to extend towards me. He is all bandages and familiar territory. I tie his fingers up with mine.

"If you ever do this again I don't know what I'll do."

"Don't worry puddingpie. Next time I'll get it right."

I didn't realize he meant what he meant.

kinda sorta love ya a little bit.

2010-04-09T01:11:00.000-04:00

In the spring, I ride my bike far too late at night. There are bruises on my forearms the size of your fingertips - I wear them like war paint, like a map of the world.

I am split wide open. I am bright on a rainy afternoon.

I lose words like hair on the pillow, I drop time and hints and avoid his eyes.

I want to take you to the river. I want to take off my layers until there is nothing left but skin and water.

the sound of water against the dock, warm and wet. Water and wood, something alive and dead. Something past and present. Stagnant and ever moving.

Excerpt from Collecting People: Man at Bar on Wednesday March 31, 2010

2010-04-03T11:11:00.004-04:00

His wife is going blind. The house, once full of plates singing songs sliding up against each others bodies and the thunder of pots and pants swinging is now silent. She is afraid to move. a month ago she sent their dog, Charlie, out the back door keening after she kicked him swiftly in the gut. She had thought he was a pile of dirty laundry, dumped in the centre of the family room.

"The den, I suppose if you don't have kids, it's called a den, ain't it? We never did have kids. Well that dog just yelped and ran full speed against the screen, broke on through, ripped that screen straight from the seam. He ain't come back. So I know what it's like to lose a dog."

She sits quietly now, save when she needs to stretch, the rustle of her feet on the wood floor, each step slow and deliberate. sliding across the hardwood. He watches her fingers, groping the walls, white knuckled over the backs of chairs. Long fingers, moving like their own animals.

He's begun to play their piano again. It's out of tune, seeing that it has spent the last 15 or so years as a display for knicknacks and graying photos from vacations and holidays at his sisters. He started off simple, Jingle Bells, it may be March but it was the only one he could remember. She had laughed as the first shaky chords hit the walls. So he began to sing. He jingled all the way to the end, and waited. She had turned her face towards him. Lips parted, mouth dry and white pink. He smiled, although she can't see it.

"I'm smiling, I told her, I know you can't see it but I'm smiling and I'm gonna play another."

He dug through his memories and all that came up was christmas, all snow and smells and violence. Him, at the piano, banging out songs for his little sister to sing with the kind of off key earnest that only kids can give you. Now, in his 60's, his voice a tired and desperate growl gives his wife

"I've done her wrong, but I love her more then it all"

song after song with the kind of off key earnest that only men who've earned it can give you. She has returned to her chair and sits with her face in her hands, crying. He stops playing and turns to face her the last piano strains sinking into the cushions of their couch. "I'm smiling. I know you can't see it but I'm smiling."

Brooklyn, Brooklyn take her in

2010-03-28T13:20:00.000-04:00

We are made up of stories. Mine come out in overwhelming frequencies, yelling matches with a closed window. Yours trickle in through cracks, ease out of you in liquid that I collect in my palm. I collect pieces of people everywhere I go and store them like treasures. I forget nothing because i keep these little bottles of moments tucked in my front pocket, i hear their whispers.

I am surrounded by stories this morning. I am ghosted by a stranger who knew my face. I am trying to write but I'm dizzy and sore. It's going to rain.

This weekend Andrea leaves for New York. an adventure worth taking. a city that has been pulling at her long enough and she finally gave in. This part of the Toronto story that includes her ends here. When she leaves she takes a chunk of the past year with her, and the future landscape that I live in will no longer have her in it. There is something strange by sudden absences.

This city won't be the same without her. But the other city will be different with her. Brighter and better.

Safe travels.

ghosting pantoum

2010-03-26T00:43:00.003-04:00

Been playing lots with pantoum's... been thinking lots of adventures in my city. been telling other peoples stories and mine and yours. been wondering how you've been, been thinking and moving brightly.

Tonight a large dog followed me home, her nails clipping the sidewalk like rain. at the cross walk she edged her head under my hand. We stood like this, animal and animal, waiting for the green light. her fur is still and brittle under my fingers and I hear "Blood" by the middle east, I hear "The Wolves" by Bon Iver. I hear songs that hit like a wave but sound like a whisper. little voices in my ears. we cross the street, I stop in front of the abandoned convenience store, and her body brushes beneath my hand as she keeps moving. She heads to the water, she heads to the woods. she is not mine, i do not own anything.

it's a windy one tonight, fingers tap on the window, keep me up and ask me to come out to play. Not tonight, not tonight. Tonight i am poems on ancient thoughts and the softest songs. Tonight I am telling our history.

excerpt from the "sense" series

2010-03-22T22:55:00.006-04:00

painting by egon schiele

There is honesty in scent.

Making pots of curry, his fingers would touch my lips, stinging the cracks with traces of pepper and onion. His hands tasted like cooking: garlic, salt, rosemary and when they touched my tongue in play I'd lose a moment. Love smelt like my kitchen when it was full of heat and him. Pulling down pots and gently criticizing how I sliced the vegetables, opening windows to let out the steam. This is something I miss, big meals in small kitchens, a thousand smells and a hand that taps my skin in passing. Some nights this smell overwhelms me. There are certain things I no longer cook.

you smell like your skin, like the story of your day. sweat and dirt and bed sheets. you smell of a tiny history packed up and folded tightly in the crook of your neck, hiding in the folds of soft skin that protects the underbelly of your elbow. You stretch your arms out and the skin goes taut, you smell like the perfect combination of what touches you. Sometimes my hands smell like you, a sample to carry with me on the train. I create your story using the smell of your skin. Your smell sticks to my pillows and the side of my face. I like these kinds of marks. I have worn bruises and scratches and scars from past lovers. I prefer wearing your scent which attached itself to my skin. An exchange of sorts, brought on by the friction of nervous hands and steady bodies. I commit this to memory, like so many other things, a collection of details tucked away between the mattress and the springboard.

music making

2010-03-15T22:32:00.001-04:00

I move effortlessly through bodies piled front to back, thick along the sidewalk. I am making my way to the park. Across a battlefield of green, kids run unable to settle with the first taste of spring in their lungs. It's a narcotic that coaxes yells from their throats and sends them whooping down muddy hills, tumble rolls, determined to scrape their knees and tear the sleeves of each others coats. You never learned to somersault.

All night I listened to you singing. Your voice in whispers made a song of fragmented breath and half truths. Almost, almost you had words for me. I woke up from a dream where I wandered disjointed from my skin, my body moving a little slower so I can feel it rattling in my skin. I turned over to tell you but your body was curled so close to mine I lost my nerve. I stared at the ceiling and tried to harmonize with your breathing. I was sharp.

At the tennis courts sweethearts ace & volley. I message an old lover about the spring, tell him that our courts are full and that it is warm suddenly in Toronto. I pull out the tiny orange Ukulele i've begun carrying around. I tried to remember the song you taught me while I was dreaming of my skin, borrowed from another body. It didn't quite fit.

Across a battlefield of mud dogs chase each other in tight circles, unable to settle with the first taste of spring in their lungs. It's a narcotic that coaxes yelps from their throats and sends them tearing up muddy embankments, tumble rolls, determined to draw blood and tear the skin off each others ears with bared teeth. I sit, perched at the top, watching them make their magic. I am lost in this snowless cityscape. I have no wolves to follow. I have no dogs to chase down alleyways. I am unsure how spring will be. But I know I'd like to wake up and tell you my dreams. I know I'd like to skin my knees and tear the sleeves off your coat. I'd like to find your mouth with mine and pour secrets from my tongue onto yours. I'd like to tell you ghost stories. I'd like to touch old walls until my skin itches with history.

I'd like to learn your songs.

From "Re- Connections"

2010-03-08T22:56:00.003-05:00

I'm sorry I've been missing. I have been focusing very much on writing a script for a project with a lovely boy. In the mean time I am also working on a collection of stories about reconnecting. Heres a tiny tidbit. I'll be back soon, I promise.
********************

i found your hand in mine. See, the morning sun hit the skin of your arm, the reflection dazzled and when I came to there it was, tucked neatly between my fingers like an animal. Your hand. Earlier in the evening that hand found it's way across the winter of my body. Those fingers slid from the neck of your guitar and slipped over my arm. I stayed very still, afraid to spook you, let your hand rest on my arm. My cheek. my mouth. my stomach. my thigh. When it got tired i took it's fingers to my lips and breathed life back into it. We fell over the sheets like a storm.

I loved you because you had the name of a bird. Wren. I never heard anything so perfect, and you let it fall from your mouth like a song. You tossed it out, let it resonate. It rattled in my mouth. You were a childhood hero, a boy with long hair who whispered magic and ran his fingers over my ears and made me tingle. A strange sensation neither of us could place. We are no longer children and your fingers fan out over my body like boney wings. You still smell of soil and secrets.

"soon enough"

2010-02-11T15:10:00.000-05:00

her mouth is not her mouth today. It is raw and swollen with your words, secrets shared and secrets gained. there are things she will never get back from you. there are things she will never give back. her bed will not be her bed tonight. she'll change the covers, she'll wash you out. there are things she will never get back from you. there are things she will never give back.

she'd like to hop a train. she'd like to see the country that way. she'd like to disappear and take everything with her. There are things she will never get back from you. there are things she will never give back.

she is waiting on the platform. she is going to get on the next subway. she will not get off at your stop. she will not get off at her own. she will ride it to the end of the line, and ride it back again. back and forth for the rest of the night. her body is not her body anymore, it is a quilt of too many hands. to many mouths. too many words. she will not stop moving until she forgets every one.

the 2am book club meeting minutes

2010-02-08T20:00:00.007-05:00

I like the colour of your hair. I like your mouth that curls up at the corners. I like the colour of your hair. Our mouths don't taste like coffee and cigarettes when they meet. You don't smoke. I don't think you do. There is something sweet to us. There is a niceness. I think this world is so full of terrible things, don't you? There's a meanness out there and I'm starting to get lousy at shaking it off. May I kiss you? Our mouths taste like whiskey snaps and ginger tea. Boy you are nice. I like the colour of your hair. You ever read The Little Prince? I read it in french when I was a kid. I read it in english too. You ever read it? Well the fox, the fox he gets tamed by the little prince. The Little Prince knows its a bad idea, but he does it anyway 'cause the fox asks him too real nicely, and sometimes when people ask things of you you start to think they can handle what they ask. That's a silly thing to assume. anyways, the fox says "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . ." nice sentiment, eh? The fox goes on to say that The Little Prince's footsteps will make him happy, that when he sees wheat fields he will think of The Little Prince. So the fox teaches the little prince how to tame him. what needs to be done, gives him the whole break down and in time he is tamed by the little Prince. Then it goes, see this is the sad part,

"So the little prince tamed the fox. And when the hour of his departure drew near--
"Ah," said the fox, "I shall cry."
"It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . ."
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields."

I like your face. I like your dark circles, olive green. They match mine. I like your cheek bones, I'd like to touch them. May I? I like how our faces match, have you seen? Here, look in the window, here, we match. I like your hair, the colour of bark in the summer, wet with humidity. May I hold your hand? I like the white flecks in your nails. It means we're missing an essential nutrient. Or maybe that's an old wives tale? I'd like to take you to the cinema. I'd like to push your body here against this tree and kiss you hard. May I? It will do me good.

I flooded my sleeves as I drove home again

2010-02-07T00:34:00.000-05:00

untitled
on the number 95 bus
north
i am suddenly surrounded by the thin, pink legs
of schoolgirls, age 17,
who refuse to wear tights
their wind whipped thighs goosebump before the eyes
of astonished TTC patrons
a sea of bare legs
lost among the men with their hands buried in the pockets of their winter coats
fingers trembling, remembering the thighs of a long ago school girl
who hid behind the portable and let them touch their tongues to her teeth
and their hands touch the skin of her calves, soft as a bird in a nest
the girls all disembark at the same stop
a flurry of humming ipods and flashing teeth
leaving the rest of us dazed with the scent of hairspray
like the perfume of sex
and the memory

I've played the same games ever since I was a kid. When walking down city sidewalks my favorite game is how long can i walk with my eyes shut. This game is best played in a spot where there is a stretch of uninterrupted sidewalk: an area of town that's a little derelict with empty store fronts and few pedestrians, or where a small city park has sprouted up among the buildings. I keep my pace comfortable, not too fast or not too slow, close my eyes with my head up and focus on a straight line (the goal to remain on the sidewalk and not veer off too far to the left or to the right). The real game begins in how long I can trust myself. How long i can walk without believing that my brain is in fact deceiving me and I am veering into the road subconsciously bent on my own destruction. I never am.

when walking down city sidewalks my least favorite game to play is not really a game at all. for some reason, when the cold hits my eyes and they tear up I pretty much go whole hog into sobbing mode. I remember a friend telling me he liked cutting onions because it gave him an excuse to weep. I didn't think I needed an excuse, but maybe I do.

I will get back into stories real soon. Be patient with me.

winter warm

2010-01-28T19:28:00.007-05:00

Biggest and brightest full moon tonight. I'll be sliding round the city on metal tracks, not quite ice skates, streetcar rumbles and trembles in the cold. I'll be holding the long thin hands of girls whose hair smell of summer fields and bodies smell like the musty heat of winter coats. I will burrow into my scarf, keep out the cold and keep in my words. yes, I will keep everything in. I will be a ghost this winter, moving seamless into the spring.

I think I'd like to be a train. A slow time coming, but fast enough to tear you limb from limb. I'd like to be mobile. Active. I want to slow down only to let people go. I'd like to keep moving. I always stick around too long. No, I think I'd like to be a train.

I am writing like a madman. Writing songs and strange words that don't always feel like mine. I have finally got tired of the male voice that comes up in stories. Maybe it's all this Alice Monroe & Flannery O'Connor.

I dreamed of us in the back of your long red car with the hippo glued to the dashboard. We kissed over the pages of an adventure story somewhere in the prairies. You looked older, sandy blond hair almost white - your teeth straighter then I remember, and body even thinner then in the summer when we said goodbye. I touched where the bridge of your nose jutted out, changed although it was never broken. You slid the strap of my dress down my shoulder. Found me. I dream the parts of our story we never had the chance for. You film the endings we never had the courage for.

Spring is a few months away, I'm saving up my summer dresses and sunkissed skin for the shores of Erie. Diving in with my whole body in motion. My life is my life.

i want to die dreaming

2010-01-26T19:11:00.006-05:00

The bodies in funeral homes and hospitals are empty,
without the heat of breath.
Even graves have the heat of the earth.
My grandfather died when my mother was 13.
No one told her how cold his skin would be when she kissed his cheek goodbye.
My aunt's body, laid out in a dress she would never wear,
I put letters in her coffin for her to read on her way to heaven.
I played scrabble with my second and third cousins in a room full of flowers.
I don't wish to ever be empty.

When I die I hope no one finds my body.
I hope no one even knows I'm gone,
My mythology:
Angela went to the woods to find her wolves
Angela went to the water and drifted out to sea
But I don't wish to drown. I don't wish for violence.
No.
No panic
not like the white of the ceiling,
like the lump on my neck that they push with their fingers
yes they'd like to take a closer look at it - passed out again?
(bloody nose and chipped tooth)
No.
No hospital
I don't want my obituary to say succumbed or fight.
when I die I want to die in my sleep
in my bed
with the fingers of someone I love tied up in mine,
yes.
I want to die dreaming.
I want to die, following dogs to the lake through the woods in a snowfall, holding love in my hands.

wearing your skin, pt II

2010-01-25T09:19:00.005-05:00

At the bottom of the top drawer, the one that was his, under stockings and garters and knee socks I found a white tshirt folded into quarters. His tshirt. How it was forgotten this long I don't know, but there he was: white vneck - american apparel - size small. My first thought was panic. He only owns a few shirts, 2 pairs of pants, a big oatmeal sweater and a zip up hoodie... what is he wearing without this t-shirt? But on second thought, he'll be ok,

He hated owning things, liked that he could live out of his car at any moment, liked that he often did. He liked writing late at night and then sliding his cold skin against mine, our long limbs tying together intricately. He thought my bed was uncomfortable but we fit like puzzle pieces in the most comfortable way. When we traded skin all things would become quiet and close. His mouth found mine...

I slipped into that tshirt easily, it was actually loose on me, which was a surprise. It no longer held any smell of him, had none of the trade mark coffee splatters, it was clean and white, if not a little worn. It was not him though, it held no traces of his body save the photograph of him wearing it.

It has rained all night and into the morning. Spring in January is such an odd thing to consider. It has been a strange winter. Strange fall and winter. The skins I have worn have been hot and cold and rough and soft. I'm back in my own this morning. Something feels right. Something feels hopeful. The winter is back in a few days, I will spend my evenings writing letters.

ladybug,ladybug, fly away home. your house is on fire, your children are gone
i wander around in cold circles reading
e.e. cummings under my breath.
"i will be moving in the streets for her"
rewriting in cold circles avoiding
the hands of my whiskeywarm friend.
he grasps for my waist
the chance
to pull back the layers I wear to keep out the shakes.
he takes hold
of the charcoal hem and stands,
like a child stands,
behind a playmate who recites nursery rhymes

the violence always makes him shiver.

wearing your skin pt I

2010-01-24T14:40:00.001-05:00

When I was 13, I asked my friend what it felt like to have sex. I had no interest in boys, or dating, I didn't want to be touched and felt no need to touch. I wanted to roll down hills and bike all over with skinned kneed renegades. I wanted to wade into the creek and chase water spiders that skirted the surface. She spent almost all her time with her boyfriend and got small clusters of candy wrapped in pink plastic left on her desk for valentines day. I made messy cardboard cards and glued tinfoil clad chocolate hearts to the surface. Once, I slow danced with a boy. It made me feel sick to my stomach. She paused, rearranging the words in her mind, english still a bit choppy. "It's like wearing someone else's skin. and then sheding it."

"i'm sorry i'm not what you wanted"

2010-01-21T11:11:00.002-05:00

my favorite things
Here's the connection: man with angel wings moving slowly across a tightrope.
a scene from a film first watched right here
on this couch with a cover pulled tight like skin over it's pattern.
a hand resting on my thigh, the inside where the skin is liquid soft
and both of us trying to keep him from losing himself any higher.

The man with a chair in each hand, a tender balancing act.

What I have learned from you:

- that you can wish at times other then 11:11. As long as it is the number doubled - now I even wish at triple times.
- just because you warm someone, doesn't mean your worth it
- that everything has a number and one must seek out the small mythology of objects.
- houses can not be abandoned or they become like ghosts. A place needs to be lived in to be alive.
- dreams shift and follow strange courses when they become something that needs to be reported.
- my little magic and mystery has a place in the world, and I am not so strange in my love of the little lights.
- that i will not allow myself to feel used ever again. by anyone.
- that there are moments between sleep and waking that people unfold and give the kinds of words that burrow under your skin and you can keep forever.
- I am brave.

Make a wish. 2010 has just begun.

excerpt from "the log drivers waltz"

2010-01-11T23:46:00.002-05:00

"Here" he said, "Here where the northbound and southbound traffic meet. Have you ever had a chance to walk in the middle of a city road?" I smile politely, tell him I have not. The streets were empty save a few cars abandoned under a blanket of snow. Yet here was a man, dressed all in gray, standing stock still in the centre of the road."I didn't think anyone else was alive tonight. I thought maybe everyone in the whole world had gone to sleep, and all that was left was me. and along you came. along you came" his feet twist on the yellow line and he faces me balancing tightrope. In one hand his keys curl up in an open palm. He takes his other hand out of his pocket an extends it, like a diver readying himself on the board, a gymnast on the balance beam. He has no coat and the snow off the dollarstore's neon glow settles on his forearms and catch the green light. I watch him as he moves, with slow careful steps the length of the yellow line. Follow slowly along the sidewalk, my breath in my throat as he dips, almost tumbling into the blackness of the road. That tar could be never ending, sudden sea between us. He looks over and smiles, wrinkles around his eyes, the night too bright in the city, his face too clear. There is a beauty in his body, this man in gray. He doesn't check for traffic, but there are no street cars, no cars shuffling slowly home to warm beds and slippered feet. He pauses to catch his breath, raising one leg and then the other. A trick! I applaud. An audience. I think you would like this. If I could call you up I would but it's too late. Or too early. These little movies no one sees but me, I think you'd get a kick out of this one. Maybe no one else is alive tonight. Maybe everyone in the whole world has gone to sleep and all that is left is us. The man in gray stumbles, and I call out.. He looks at me, his dark eyes wide, frightened. He is frozen, one foot on the yellow one foot on the black, his keys a clamor beside him. Our breath mists from our lips to hang in the air and we wait to hear the rumble of a streetcar.

exploration into the definition of sickness, parts I and II.

2010-01-10T21:12:00.003-05:00

Every sickness ends in tears. Under piles of blankets, trembling and wishing more then anything for someone to touch my head and let me know everything is going to be alright. Pat down feverish brows and warm up feverish feet. There's something so lonely about being sick now. As a kid my mom was always at the ready, soup and pillows. Stretched out on the checkered couch, a beagle at my side, I was so surrounded by warmth and genuine love. The softness of her wet nose, that little dog pressed against my side, heat and breath wrapped in skin. My mother, sure footed moved through the kitchen, out of sight. Pots and pans kissing with a soft clatter, cutlery clinking together as she closes the drawer. The slow moan of the cupboard opening and closing. Chicken Noodle. Grilled Cheese. Our radio murmuring stories for her to re tell. The sounds of voices and activity in other rooms was and still is comforting to me. I woke up to silence on Friday. There was draft crawling under the door and the fever filled my head with terrible things. Fears that haunt the body when it's weak. Half way through the day i was crying, inexplicably and with the kind of force that rips through your body and hits you where it hurts. But I shoulda known it was a good sign. As of Saturday the fever had broke and i was slow but feeling more in tune with my body.

__________________________________

Every sickness ends in tears. Under your body, trembling and wishing more then anything for you to keep your hand on my cheek and tell me everything is going to be ok. Help me trust you. Give me reason to. I'm afraid I like you too much, and the trust I usually have in new hearts hides beneath the covers. When I feel for it I instead find your warm skin. I forget what I was searching for. A moment of guilt and and sadness. There is something so lonely about being with you. All the good, all the warmth fades as the night shifts to morning and left behind is the far away, your body covered with traces of other girls. I know I am not the only one because you smell as much of ghosts and fresh blood. You smell like a hunter. Your voice hits the skin of my face.. I want to give you all the words that I have stored up about you. All the things I've seen. I want to hold you down and kiss you. I want to shake you hard till all the truth tumbles out. I could wrap myself up in that. But I am afraid of touching you in the morning, the intimacy I am normally so free to give freezes up my tendons and pulls my arms in to my chest. I am afraid of you. Fear that haunts the body when it's weak. Your fingers graze my skin, soft and absent. Half way through today I was crying, inexplicably and with the kind of force that rips through my body and hits me where it hurts. But I will see this as a good sign, and by Monday maybe the fever will break, and i will be slower, but feeling more in tune with my body.

changing day to day

2010-01-07T04:09:00.004-05:00

fox in the snow from red cap cards

It's the New Year so I think of these old ghosts. On my windowsill I have 2 photographs, the one of you in front of the liquor store, and the only one of me I have ever liked, wind blown in the back of the black pickup truck. Freezing. Serious. Face ripped into white by a flash. I also have the postcard from New York after your show had opened and you lost my letter(dogs on leashes, straining to get at the photographer in a blur), a dapper picture of Leonard Cohen (smiling with a cap and scarf), a plastic soldier crouched low (aims straight at my heart it you can believe that irony), and a plaque given to me by a girl in high school (Love Like You'll Never Get Hurt). I have. Oh I do. But this heart like a warrior. I am stronger then you think. I am stronger then I know.

one of the firsts

surprise you with fingertips to dust your shoulders
like snowfall.
outside your window the trains,
rolling in from some other town,
move like our bodies
heavy with winter
slow with cold.
We find each others under these white blankets
burn our tongues
on this skin
freshly peeled of sweaters and stockings

ashes spread across these sheets
your face near mine quiet
as all things melt together.

there's a possibility

2010-01-05T03:33:00.001-05:00

once, once upon a time i was woman of the year.
It was the winter that we moved like old familiar ghosts
down the coastline of the dirty city lake.
A snowstorm bundled us up in wet kisses
and clung to our bodies like old desperate lovers.
You told me in the poem that you had questions
I can't remember you asking, but,
I do remember pressing snow into your open palms
steam rising from between our fingers like a phantom.
I remember that.

come down from the mountain you have been gone to long...

2009-12-31T13:41:00.005-05:00

spending my time with stories. stories and songs. banjo fingers and red wine. building up for buttercup. reworking old words. I'll never make it through this never ending stack of edited words from Saskatchewan.

in a photo, i promised you hope.
a photo worth all my words, words,
words squirreled away in the bowels of a black notebook
a photo that stated hope for finding you
a plane ticket, flight 496, a perfect number *.
I finally sold the ticket to a girl going home to her fathers funeral.
when she spoke her voice was soft and calm, but
her whole body shook and twitched (we didn't know this however at the moment the photo in question was taken. we didn't know that in the end I wasn't coming to find you. she didn't know her fathers heart would just stop in his sleep at 42)

in a kiss, slow coming like waking up, i promised the rest of me,
a person never quite sure of her place,
a body so unlike yours, but one fitting so cleanly beneath yours.
in a moment, like a camera flash, i promised you my heart.
but at this point there is no telling what could happen.

You may return to Alberta.

I could fall in love with someone newer

my heart could just stop in my sleep at 25.

* a perfect number is defined as a positive integer which the sum of its proper positive divisors, that is, the sum of the positive divisors excluding the number itself.

Vidar

2009-12-25T10:43:00.005-05:00

I wonder if all good beginnings must start with an end. Even that in itself is an oxymoron, isn't it? begin with an end? But it makes sense, don't it? They really do follow each other. End to begin. so where to start?

Start with an ending.

unexpected intimicies

I have given all the breath I had.
Pressed my lungs in with my palms,
fingers spread wide like boney wings
I have given all the breath I had.
i've been giving it my all.

under cloudy skies and overpasses a grey wing rests against the curb.
the bird left no blood, no body.
Just the wing outstretched,
feathers like fingers pointing upwards
mid flight.

i have no winnipeg

2009-12-13T23:42:00.003-05:00

I liked the cut of your jib and the curve in your spine like a road. lets pull over here near the shoulder blade where the skin stretches across the bone. I'll trace my lips along the edge, and bury a kiss between the two, a treasure.

I remember what it felt like to move across the country in a train. Bodies swaying like the tide, each one of us part of the greater machine that rolled us home, or away, or someplace all together different. I moved between one home to the city of my choosing. I learned to breathe like a whistle. I learned to pass quietly through towns and only stop if it pleases me. I learned to follow the line. In the cold blank of northern Ontario we rode a train where we could run between the cars, hopping on and off like a city bus. On these trips strangers slept on their bags, the army green seats long and wide like those on the toronto ferry. I liked the feel of the walls, the cold metal sweating under the heat of my palms. Blowing breath onto the window I traced the line of the horizon, spotted with trees. Around us people wrapped tight in thick old coats beat cold with nimble fingers thumbing through the pages of crispy crackling magazines. In the back of one of the cars, supplies were being brought out to a reserve. I pull an orange from my bag and roll it between my hands as Dareck taught me to do in order to peel it easier. I pull back its skin, letting its mist rise from between my dirty fingers and settle on my face like dust.

unspeakable, january 2009

i will give you all my words,
speaking to be close to you.
close enough to see your pulse quiver through the skin of your cheek.
they hang in the air, these words, strung together like christmas lights
illuminating your skin in plans and secrets.
warming your flesh with memories. moments. hands.
I will tie us up in them, these words.
Prusik, cats paw, bowline, grief.
There are a hundred different knots that I could use to keep my body close to yours.
There a hundred different words I could used as rope.

you were burning like a city of electric light

2009-12-12T10:20:00.005-05:00

In sleep, you curl your fingers over mine, subconsciously you tie them up - cat's cradle from the other side of your bed. you woke up when I pulled them free, mumbling something about your dream. Such dreams you have. Mine are much quieter. Quiet and bright and full of colour. In winter I dream of pomegranates in white snow. Reds and whites. Cold flesh and warm mouths. I dream in temperature. The fear in this bed is so thick I mistake it for the pillow and twist my body against it trying to get comfortable. It's kind of timidness that leaves a layer of dust on my skin which hangs on me for days. I move slower and a little worse for wear after, the dust in my lungs making it a bit harder to breathe.

I have spent mornings in your bed watching the walls, I've read the titles on your bookshelf so many times I committed them to memory. Photographs and little origami characters, peacock tail made out of cardboard, empty glasses and socks stuffed under the bed.

I have spent my mornings in your bed contemplating how many scenes like this one I had seen. Will see. How many stories I will make from you, from your sixes and sevens. Your numbers and colours. From your strange dreams. Strange bedfellows are we.

I was once questioned if everything I do was for the sake of the story. To make a pretty statement. I'd like to think not. I'd like to think the story and the statement are an aside . I am lucky for the stories I have received, willingly but unknowingly, from the hearts of friends, from these icy mornings, from the winter sky falls, from these warm hands, from the beds of boys like you.

So for the new year I have made a zine, of moments and memories and stories. from death and blood and life and living. from breathing and tasting and loving and missing.

You will be a part of it, although whether or not you ever know remains to be seen.

Thank you for the stories, they were the nicest thing a girl could ever get.

it gets colder, arms and shoulders

2009-12-10T13:20:00.006-05:00

winter mspaint from dec. 2008

Been skating. Daily. At night Duffrin Grove is full of bold teenage boys who pretend to trip and fall in front of me, blow me kisses from across the rink. Ask me outwardly if I have a boy friend. I am at least 10 years older then them. I look it. I know I do, but still they smile and wave and tumble and call me beautiful. There is something about strangers calling me beautiful that I hate. And always have. You could have called me anything. And you did. and not always the nicest things. But I wasn't always so kind to you either. But boy did I ever love going gliding with you.

I followed your marks on the ice, one foot crossing over the other. You moved too quickly for me, left me chasing you in wide circles around the ice... coming up beside me and then blurring past - impish smile and oatmeal sweater. Oh to warm my hands against your body... Fold my body against yours inside that sweater. You wrote poems about us on ice skates, and i have tried to capture what it was like to have to chase you down, little blond rabbit for this little dark fox. Clumsy on skates. clumsy in love. I never caught up, and eventually we stopped trying. I stopped trying. I'm sorry. My thoughts so often on you as I work through all these old words. I wish you the best in love and in winter. Though we no longer share either of those things.

I am stronger on skates now. I move quicker then I thought I would and leave my own marks. I take no one with me, although I will start playing shinny soon. I am still self assured overly confident, going too fast for my own good. You warned me I would get hurt. And I did . But I'm not so clumsy on skates anymore. And in love, in love, in love I am still clumsy. But I've never been afraid of getting hurt. I don't think I deserve it, but I have no control.

Besides,

Bruises become me.

snowfall december 2008

it came down cold today
soft, lovely,
and pale as can be
cold hands to be kept buried in warm pockets
this another reminder that somewhere theres a boy
with my mittens in his back pack
and my words around his neck
becoming, glow of christmas lights on tree tops
soft, lovely
and pale as can be.

perfect

2009-12-04T23:28:00.007-05:00

"We'll have one" he said, quiet misty voice of hope and night time "Bambino". Bambino, a word that had entered our vocabulary as natural as the animal noises I had begun to make instead of saying good morning. We'd been watching Italian films, and bambino seemed to roll off our tongues and into each others mouths. We were always so good at promising, weren't we?.
***
In front of my apartment on Spadina we sat in his car. Hot air from our lips fogging up the glass and Danny Michel growls from the stereo Nobody move this is perfect. A few dates and countless letters had got us here. We are shy, quiet, and already in love. We kiss, my skin prickling from the stubble on his chin, this strange rambler, his trunk full of books and films. That night I wrote him poems and hung them on the wall.
***
Sitting in his car outside my apartment on Wilson. I am trying to explain my body. The fact that I will possibly never carry a baby to term. The egg more likely to attach itself to the lining of my uterus and without the proper environment, it will just give up and find its way back out of my system. Tissue grows rapidly inside me but out of place. Sometimes i bleed for weeks. I am full of scar tissue and cysts that have to be removed twice a year. There's pain, but i didn't need to tell him that, he had seen it before. He found my curled up in bed, ashen and exhausted. he climbed into bed with me, wrapping his arms around my body so that his hands rested on my abdomen. I am a mutation of a human, I can not function as I am supposed to. I start to cry, my large pink coat fans beneath me, it's bulk preventing me from turning to him. So he simply held my hands, and kissed my fingers, the car humming and shaking beneath us. "We'll have one" he said, quiet misty voice of hope and night time "Bambino". Bambino, a word that had entered our vocabulary as natural as the animal noises I had begun to make instead of saying good morning. We'd been watching Italian films, and bambino seemed to roll off our tongues and into each others mouths. That night I wrote him poems, and put them under his pillow.

excerpt from "kiss could've killed me"

2009-12-03T09:14:00.001-05:00

As a kid, my ken doll had arms that stuck straight out forever hailing, his hands cupped, palms down. I renamed him John, he couldn't actually be named Ken - his hair was molded plastic, perfect and dark, his skin brown. On his left hand he wore a wedding ring carved into his webbed finger. The gold paint was long gone, leaving a small ridge I would pass the tip of my pinky over, catching the edges. I never met John's wife.

Barbie and Ken were well suited. Both their arms bent at an extreme, perfect for hooking together or wrapping around each other. Ken could drape his arms around her shoulders at the drive in, Barbie could snuggle up to him at night while camping in the blue canvas tent my sister kept under our window. Bright eyed and bright hair, Barbie & Ken felt right, looked right. ken modestly wore a pair of flesh coloured briefs, Barbie's nudity without detail. John didn't share Ken's affinity for briefs. Beneath his cargo shorts there was an nondescript bulge. It was wide and shapeless, reminded me of going to see Cats with my mother and sister, dance belts creating a very similar look. I think for years I thought that was what men hid in their pants. Terrifying.

John never looked right. His eyes smaller, lips thinner, his eyebrows peaked and thick. He looked sad. I always assumed John's wife had died. She had died young, perhaps in a tragic accident that left him a little distant, a little depressed. John couldn't keep a girlfriend after that. The closest he came to falling in love again was with Theresa, full lipped surfer. Her arms curved only slightly in, like a ballerina, fingers long and delicate. He'd place his cupped palm on her shoulder when they talked, arms length away but the closest he could get to touching someone. He couldn't, however, pull her close. Sleeping on his back at night with his arms at his side he would stare at the top of the tent. Theresa on her side would drape one curved arm on his chest, brown hair stretching across the pillow like a tidal wave. She eventually left him, one can only love someone at arms length for so long.

Almost a full moon.... almost a full moon..a

2009-11-30T21:49:00.004-05:00

Tonight, I will sleep with the window open. I wish to use the sheets covered in winter characters - skating penguins, cardinals (birds, not religious men), fleece and fur pulled up to my chin. Tonight I wish to sleep beneath the tiny lights, above my bed, a little trail of stars I'm afraid I'll never get to show you. Tonight I had dinner with a beautiful woman, finished another bottle of red and wrote little words on little magic. I am inspired and cautious right now. i am drunk and overjoyed and enchanted. I have a Christmas tree and I have a story full of all the things I love: ghosts, mirrors, snow and fulls moons, facing death and facing life and facing love. All the best truths. The only truth worth anything.

It's 10:00pm, It's a full moon. Snowflurries in the forecast. I am learning christmas songs to play in the snow. Has it snowed in Montreal?

Next time I will have part of a story. I'm sorry I have been so secretive with my words. Soon, soon, soon... (ps: hi Kris...)

from the letter writing series

2009-11-26T08:30:00.004-05:00

Spending lots of time reflecting, drinking, saying goodbye, saying hello. I am pretty smitten with you, but I am focusing on old words, fixing old words to make room for new ones. Don't think that i don't write about you. You have some pretty nice ones.

I have been watching my window, watching the folks with their fingers stuffed in their pockets, cigarettes glowing, little red specks. Drinking wine, bottles of wine and keeping my fingers warm with typing. A story, a good one, is coming out. I have made money off both poems and stories at this point. i am scared and cocky and unsure and full of it. So for now I'll keep it to myself.

an open letter to my hands pt I
he's fading
into the folds of blankets rippling over the edge of his bed like water
my memory is kind
he is dark and musty, skin textured like bark.
slowly hands,
Spread yourselves like moonlight over skin.
find every hidden curve, every hidden agenda.
Spread yourselves wide because you can take in anything.
Slip between covers, slip behind backs, nestle
yourselves between the mattress & the man...
just move
slowly.
You can't rush things like this.
i will forget
what hue the skin you touch is,
but I will remember
the texture, the temperature, the taste.

perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

2009-11-23T00:33:00.001-05:00

Yes, I heard you the first time. The whisper sliding over his bed, i know what i'm doing, i know what i'm doing this time.

*******

Trains rush in and out of tunnels, headlights bursting like firecrackers out of the dark. The air hits my face and slides down my neck where my coat gaps. A whisper "Here it is, here's the moment. are you ready?" I remember Andie told me she had dreams of falling sideways into those streams of light. Not jumping, never jumping, just tumbling sideways, but not striking the ground. Along the west wall the man plays Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps on a classical guitar, his voice slow and moist with Spanish. I let change run off my palm into the case. I shouldn't because I'm broke, just not making the money I should be off these city stories. He nods quietly, fingers rough and dry, nails curling under the strings and pulling them out towards me, each note ringing: "Here! No here! Here it is. I'm just what you've been looking for" My face burns crimson and he lowers his gaze, his hat hiding his features although he keeps pulling those strings towards me. Back away slowly till I'm out of sight, his voice bouncing off the grimy walls and billboards advertising cell phones. I wiggle my crooked finger inside my mitten, letting little shots of pain tremble up my wrist. The whole arm aches, but I'm not thinking about it. Spent the morning with a boy, wanting to be a knight. He works out his mythology with a personal numerology. A story to be told under different names. There was another morning in which he mapped out my body with the story of an old woman, using his fingers like shadow puppets traveling over my stomach. Another story I've already told. I was full of ghosts this morning.

****

Here under this grinning moon, here under these stars, small and sparse and wide set like freckles along our arms I make ancient noises. Lie flat belly and warm, wrapping my arms around the tamed wolf my parents call theirs. Lie flat belly and breathe in the autumn dirt, the grease on the skin beneath the fur, the smell of winter that clung to his shirt, now rests in my skin. All these ghosts of winter, I wonder if at the end of my days i will have any of the season left for me.

two faces have I

2009-11-21T08:13:00.003-05:00

Been thinking lots about road running lately. This country so full of things I have yet to touch with rough fingertips. Don't you find this city feeling small, lately? I suppose not, to you it is still new. Fresh and barely smelling of winter. I find the air is thick with memory.

In New York he felt bombarded with an old version of himself, a strange sort of missing. Someone who remained when he left, and now he can't find him again. In the streets things from a life that he doesn't quite fit into anymore. His own life now someoneelses, phantoms of ourselves to haunt dark corners.

I am missing parts of myself, right here. Passing by places that are familiar, should be more so, but seem like something I've read, memories that feel like watching a film. I know how it ends, but I'm having trouble remembering. I don't wish to haunt anymore city's. I want high ways and mountains and flat prairies. I want oceans. I do not want gridiron and gridlock. I am no longer that kind of girl.

Natchez Trace Parkway Slideshow
for Sandy

I'm washed out in this one
wide eyed and windblown
crouched in the back of a flat bed pickup.
Holding on to the sides, gasping.

We sail on a sea of tar and asphalt
your smile something secret
my road weary road warrior
my mad max with a better hair cut
the best kind of trouble.

In the back of your loved old stationwagon we hold hands
too tired for anything else
although the moon is a sliver over southern highways
leering light over these lovers bodies

I want to photograph of you like this arms crossed like the dead
brow furrowed-asleep.
This image of you I keep
my arms wrapped around your middle.

Here you are.

Mississippi becomes you.
Your taffy pulled limbs and hair like your name.
In front of the yellow February grass you blend into the countryside.
Everything here is oatmeal coloured.

Here I am.

In front of the magnolia tree, red haired and shy – you made me look taller.

Here we are, bodies close, glasses in hand.
We look older then we are
out of place
but comfortable.

Your hand on my back, my arm at your neck, leaning in for a kiss.

For those who asked, the poems posted here are ones that have in fact been accepted into publication, have been published, or I have no interest in ever submitting therefore - they're free agents - I bare no responsibility for them or you.

it was hard to love a man like you

2009-11-18T06:50:00.001-05:00

Take to the streets, the weather is mild for November, and we only have so long before the snow starts to tumble, slippery soles and numb fingers stuffed in pockets. It has been an autumn of accidents. Unfortunate and otherwise. Health coming and going in waves, bodies doing the same. In a film, (now lying under piles of things on a foreign desk), Townes Van Zandt speaks of a constant "alonenss" he feels. My collection of stories, slumbering in hibernation, inspired by this notion. This idea of aloneness.

He still ends his conversations with "i love you". My heart gets weaker, and I am losing where that strength was. Music, making noise, i have the terrible habit of falling in love come the winter. I must try to keep my heart close.

My heart rushed out my body yesterday morning under the wheels of a broken down sedan. The sickening crunch of metal like bones as my bike disappeared underneath. My arm the only evidence of this assault, a smattering of blue and pink, gummy and larger then it should be. My shoulder blade tender to touches unexpected. It already fades. The bruise and the touch. So no more music for at least a week. heartbreaking. It felt good to be playing music. I like challenging Matt to sing as loud as he can. I like challenging my voice to sit somewhere different, push through and over. Break all the rules, blow out my chords pushing air out of body with a violence unlike any other. I don't know when singing began to feel this way, like an attack. I don't know when I started finding that place where I allow myself to hurt. Be hurt. I have had too much violence since the autumn began. I am looking forward to winter, leaving behind romantic notions of crunching leaves and bright colours. I am looking forward to the white. The quiet. Sound and flesh sinking into snow. I have been reminded, over and over today, how distant I feel this season, that there was so much potential to be lost. I am not sad. I am not lonely. Just, suffering from aloneness. I think you are too.

winter eastside 2008
surprise you with fingertips to dust your shoulders
like a snow fall.
Outside your window the trains roll in from some other town
we move like them-
heavy with winter
slow with cold.
We find each others bodies under these white blankets,
burn our tongues on skin hot from all these layers.
Wool sweaters and thick stockings, peeled back like skin.
Expose the muscles, strong hearts still beating
though faster now with spark on flesh.

ashes spread across the sheets,
your face near mine as all things quiet melt together.

little, tiny, things.

2009-11-13T07:45:00.001-05:00

Autumn is flying by, the weather warm and soft. I am squirreling away with words & music. I am missing my friends. I am looking forward to December, when my hands will be open for holding. One of my very oldest and very dearest friends returns to Ontario. Kindred spirit. I know I may have indicated some nervousness for this winter, but I retract. Nothing can scare me now. I have my ice skates sharpened.

I am reorganizing my thoughts, my apartment. I am kicking old perceptions, keeping old photographs handy. My novel has all but died, but I don't feel so bad... so much writing has come out of these past few weeks. New stories, a script and the editing of many many many poems! I've been eating really poorly but compensating by reading my roommates cooking blog Rapinista. She honestly cooks like this all the time... our house smells amazing and the couple always look glowing and healthy. Its nice to live with a couple most days. I feel like I'm their difficult antisocial teenage daughter who eats nothing but home made soup and listens to country music.

made up of other words

love, i am earthbound
skin of dust, spit, memories, dirt, and grass.

fingers (nails green from when I tore clovers out from the ground - your fingers snaking up my thighs like ivy.)

tongue ( a taste of what could be, what was, acidic and sweet and overwhelming. Curry on the tip)

heart ( this heart is cleaner – i work hard to make me mine – then it was)

skin (this skin – tougher then it was - sings psalms to an autumn sun)

her bare legs
dancing

I read today that floating is, in a sense, a slow falling.
when you float, it is your body falling
away from earth.

baby, baby, baby you're out of time

2009-11-11T08:20:00.000-05:00

Music sounds better, sometimes, when muffled in from the next room. Like eavesdropping, secrets through album choice. Next door they listen to slow & soft blues. It slides through the cracks, thick as molasses sliding down the walls where I press my fingers. I try to feel the tremors behind it. The room bleeds with the blues. I want you here. I want to press your palms against the plaster. Press your palms to my skin. Tell me if you've heard this one before...

How much have I shared through music? First was cautious conversations with friends in cars. Dance breaks bobbing with girls, long trips to camp grounds in which we are buried under bags. One song from me: I pick the Kinks. One song from Jody: she picks Nick Drake. Me: Wu Tang Clan. Jody: John Mayer. We both slept soundly with earphones in, side by side quiet notes on dirt floors.

A fevered conversation about Timothy Findley is what began mix cds from Evan. The first had his address stamped boldly on the disc, one of those little return address stickers your grandparents used at Christmas. After my grandmother died my grandfather put a neat line through all the Mrs' in pen. I suppose it was the easiest way for to tell people that she had died. Evan's mixes were wonderful because they spanned a decade. He put on songs that came out when he was in high school, like a soundtrack to a John Hughes film. He put on songs of bands I had never heard of, snippets of new voices. The best songs were the ones we had in common. Hawksley Workman's voice, wet and low, slipped into his bed, pushing bodies to the brink, cautious unfamiliar movements for me at that time. sometimes, we send each other a message. All it will contain is a song.

Sandy arrived late one night, back in my old apartment, back in my old bed. He was fresh from work and I was slow moving with sickness and sleep. He put on a cd and climbed into bed fully clothed. We lay very still listening to "If I Needed You" by Townes Van Zandt, first time I heard it live, his warmth next to me and winter all around us. Listen, listen to the breath...switch.

In January, in the middle of a blizzard in high park that song found it's way into my head when someone found his way into my arms and we found our way into each other like a slug to the stomach: Quick, painful, and a low down dirty trick.

Now, now what songs to share. what voices. Sometime there is no meaning to the music. Sometimes its just sounds and bells and whistles. Sometimes it's just how the skin pricks and the heart leaps from chest to throat. what stays and what goes.

For me, music always remains after the bodies leave and the season shifts. Music to mark the seasons. Here comes winter, give me something to keep me warm.

i guess that autumn gets you remembering

2009-11-07T21:59:00.005-05:00

I keep working through old words, today wrapped up in covers thinking old thoughts for old loves. So here are old words, for that old love, still fresh, sometimes still fresh.

According to googlestreet view you still live here and it's springtime. Your bike locked up to mine. 2 winters ago you were my only resolution. This year, who knows what I will promise myself. But it will be great.

Auld Acquaintance

It's New Years, I need a new camera
and a new heart.

I need more photos
of your mouth
more secrets to frame
under blankets
where I can develop
more excuses to give
when I come home late.

I need a soft focus lens – like the glasses I fogged with heat
and then wiped clean on my stockings – to make me look my best
so you'll remember me
as a soft outline in the sun from your window
leaning over to kiss you good morning

I need a negative
a mirror image of myself
you can have it, make as many copies as you need
to give away as a guideline to other girls.

er Mental health Awareness month she is commited for monthly bleeding.

2009-11-06T08:44:00.008-05:00

They found me in the fetal position, curled around a broke down dress( 37 inch bust, 31 inch waist gray & beige), Fantine's lovely lady costume. I'd been missing for half an hour, and the last thing I remembered was thinking "It's hot, its very hot" and the next thing was my boss shaking me. I remember waking up, my skin prickling and tingling. I remember heat rushing through me. I remember feeling embaressed, realizing I had passed out. Thinking of the time Zoe passed out on the subway and I dragged her onto the platform, her head in my lap
"Is the subway stopped?"
"Yes."
"Is everyone staring?"
"Yes"
"Ok, I'm going to keep my eyes closed."
On that occation the paramedics questioned about drug use. I guess in Toronto, thats the first reason for almost anything.

I remember feeling dizzy. I remember the somewhat snarky EMS guy asking me if I took any drugs. I remember everyone saying I was acting very strange. I remember feeling very strange, the only way I was able to describe it was "Do you ever feel like your breath is coming from the wrong place?" and "It feels like my body is working harder to do what it's supposed to do." They drove me to the hospital. Silent and staring. Sat me in a waiting room, put the blue bracelet on me and a nurse led me into a different waiting room, away from the others. In this new waiting room George sits in pajamas and a hospital gown in front of a finished meal, his feet curled around the arm of his chair. Watching "The Vampire Diaries" from a small glassed in television in the corner he absently thumbs through the issue of Vanity Fair in which Tina Fey is on the front, all stars and stripes and legs. everything is glassed in. The nursing station around the corner is glassed in, staff silently speaking, no noise coming through. To my right Robert talks on a phone with no dial tone. They have taken his cigarrettes and his lighter. He's been there 5 hours, he really needs a cigarette. He overdosed again. He's sorry. He's so sorry. He needs a smoke. He likes my scarf. He hates those fucking fucks.

"You're too smart to use vulgarity. You look cheap. You sound cheap.."
"Sorry George. I'm sorry.. There's a lady here. I never swear in front of my parents."
"Your father's a police officer Act like one. Have some self respect. Behave yourself."
"I'm trying. They lied. They lied every last one of them. That nurse is the devil. I want a smoke. Its smoke time"
"It's time to quit Robert."
"You ever smoke George?"
"Only when I act."
"It snowed back home."

George and Robert and Me. George tells the doctor he told the social worker she was dead. A dead Woman Walking. He knows he shouldn't have but he did. She doesn't work hard. He trusts doctors though, he knows they're doing whats best for him. She is not. He feels safe right now. He feels safe here. He is not hearing any voices. He is not feeling threatened. He'd like to sleep tonight. He'd like another pineapple juice. He'd like to sit down in the lobby again. He does.

Robert and George and I. Robert has a house, he won a house in a lottery. He has two dogs that are going to die. He needs to go home and feed his dogs. he needs a smoke, he's anxious and annoyed. He needs a smoke and you promised. You promised you'd take him. And they had. For the 5 hours I sat with them, nurses, doctors have been telling him in a few moments they'd take him. or they were asking the head doctor if they were allowed. or they were trying to find the box where they put his things. On his wrist a red flight warning. Pacing George doesn't understand why he's there, but he does, he took 2 bottles of pills. He didn't mean to overdose. He wasn't trying to kill himself. It's just the mind is a terribly lonely place to be, ain't it? His father had a heart attack. His dogs are going to die. The cops showed up at his parents house, said he tried to jump off a bridge. He was just standing there, listening to music. I get dark thinks sometimes but it doesn't mean I want to die. i was just listening to music.

Myself, George and Robert. I passed out. I don't remember. No my breathing is fine. No food allergies. No prescription medication except birth control. No drugs. No, none. Yes I drink. Last night. Last night I had whiskey and beer and watched a film with a friend. Yes. No, no drugs. Never. Well not never but not in years. Yes that's the truth. Yes I've passed out before, once years ago. Highschool. first time I got my period, right in sience class. Pretty funny. Embaressing, but funny. Yes I am. First day today. Could be. Dizzy, really dizzy. And funny. I don't know, just off. No sir, no drugs. Peder on the television telling me howrealtorshelp.. isn't that funny. of all the places to run into you, i find you in a locked psych emergency. I retake my seat. I want to go home. I'm done now, please send me home.

They were condescending. They treated us like we were stupid. Robert knowing their game. Me knowing their game. Can I just sign myself out? I feel fine. I feel fine. Ok Ms Sweeting, let me find a doctor to talk to you, you're next

my parents, robert, george and me. My mother is livid. My mother whispers if i know where i am. I do. She asks me why. I say because i was acting out of character. My father is pale and sombre. A fever rising I am cold and sweating. A nurse brings me a small juice. One for George. Robert needs to get someone to come and get his keys to feed his dogs. They're dying.

Maybe she just hit her head. Hey, you probly hit your head when you fell. Tell the doctor. Yes? Yes, and lodge a complaint, its important that you do. They don't believe most of the patients who come through here and complain of mistreatment. They'll believe you.

Robert. Still sitting, waiting for something. I have a big family, I'm the only fucked up one. I'm a good person, I just have a problem. even the best ones get problems. The mind is a terribly lonely place to be, ain't it? My mom agrees, smiling, tells him she knows what he means. Robert gives her his seat. She's just like his mother. Robert allowed to smoke if he changes into his gown & pajamas and takes an IV. Then he can smoke. If he stops banging on the glass. if he stops yelling at the nurse. Take that addiction, use it for all that its worth.

George. The actor, who doesn't believe in smoking. doesn't believe in his social worker's opinion. doesn't believe in swearing. it wasn't even his real name. George is going to play King Richard. I ask if he's read "Year of the King" he has. He has.

Theres lots I do not understand about how one is trained to work with the mentally ill. But what I saw and experienced tonight was not humane. Who's going t look out for George and Robert now. On the outside looking in, who's keeping them company. The mind is a terribly lonely place to be, ain't it?

Stumbling through the day

2009-11-02T17:13:00.003-05:00

I'm writing a novel. I have been given one month, to work from scratch to make something. I like the challenge, I like the idea of making something out of nothing. I have painted my typing fingers blue my desk is a mass of papers and sketches and notes. The first chapter is long, it is a sweet streamof consciousness. I am afraid I will fall for the character however, he is just my type.

A Glosa for Chad Vangaalen: Written for Sage Hill

"you've been dead for years but you never knew
the rabid bits of time have been eating you
no one knows where we go
no one knows where we go when we're dead or when we're dreaming
from “Rabid Bits of Time” by Chad Vangaalen"

In the dream I tore my skin off
in long strips, each curling
like the peel of an apple
around my grandfathers knife
you've been dead for years but you never knew

There was no blood,
no flesh or ligaments
beneath was something else
something waiting
the rabid bits of time have been eating you

when we walked across the lake
I pointed out fish,
frozen beneath the skin
of the water, eyes wide
no one knows where we go

they are not dead,
just waiting, forced to wait.
I woke up scratching
my legs until they bled
no one knows where we go when we're dead or when we're dreaming

damn trick or treaters

2009-11-01T11:05:00.006-05:00

when i grow up i'll be a kid again for you. i will hand stitch you all costumes, cursing your creativity (because i know you all will be seeming with it). We will take to the streets, I will even dress up the dog, and little shoes on autumn pavement... you will make me a kid again.

when i grown up I will be everything for you. i will tell you secret stories in the tops of trees, we will have rituals that no one else will share. We will write adventure stories, tearing through the tall grass. i will help make the world magic.

Is it unhip to admit that I can't wait to meet you? It seems that I shouldn't talk about you, that it is an unattractive quality in a honky tonk girl. I am not afraid to admit that I sometimes dream of you. Your hands dipping into the batter when you think I am not looking. I will always pretend I saw nothing.

Nobody knows, but I am making myself into someone worth loving whole heartedly, the way that only you will be able to. I'm making myself worth it by making myself known,as clearly as I can, to myself.

The Night of My Conception, Florida, 1982
written for Sage Hill, 2009

Chaos was made from nothing.
The flicker of life
spontaneous, made
frenzy
and from nothing came the beginning.
Everything.

Chaos – through oscillating chemical reactions – made Earth,
Love,
and the Underworld.
Darkness and Night followed
and when those two bodies met,
forbidden, black and sinewy,
they birthed Brightness and Day

My parents, looking out over Sea –
the youngest daughter of Earth –
met not like waves, but
like weary travelers
movements slow under Night's body,
Darkness sliding his cool fingers through their hair
urging wordlessly, everyone frightened of waking the baby –

My sister,
in the crib across the room
was too young to know what was happening , or
maybe was just young enough to remember,
that quiet chaos.

on tuesday I'll be back for my things

2009-10-31T07:30:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday I will get on a plane wide winged so often now identified as an instrument of death although you still insist it is the only way to travel but I have found you other ways dirty bus rides where traffic pulled me to a stop and I watched a family of geese amble past us on the gravel those tiny feet beating us to the 30 minute rest spot with cling wrap sandwiches stale coffee and fears of who sat beside me a boy killed on a bus so my method of choice was by metal bullets that welcomed me to Via Via Bonjour the seats rainbow speckle and a maroon pillow so I can rest the head and look out the window out the window where there are no geese to race just crows on the telephone lines one black blur after another after another after another like a Neko Case song whose voice seeped through my head as I kissed him in the door way of the Portuguese record shop black midnight windows although the sign flashed open open open and following him to his apartment where we molt and leave our clothes in heaps above his hip bone a word burned into his flesh so it left a scar i'd have truly loved him if he was marked less purposefully like you with just skinned knees and dirt under your fingernails.

Things that make the world a bright, bright place.

2009-10-29T17:17:00.001-04:00

- my favorite ladies & my wonderful gents. I am lucky to have even the tiniest corners of your hearts
- baking
- rainy mornings that turn into pleasant fall afternoons that turn into rainy evenings
- meeting new folks
- chilly mornings with tea and blankets
- impromptu dance parties - bare feet on kitchen floors
- bukowski, cummings, eggers, de saint-exupéry, greene, o'connor, munro, keret, cohen.
- books in general
- making joyful noise with Matty P in "Butcher & Baker".
- Creating something that I have never created before.
- sharing records, sharing books, sharing kisses
- All the big bad love in my beating heart.
- A desk covered in ideas and bread crumbs - proof of a mind full of stories and poems rapidly reaching completion
- van zandt, nelson, luedecke, stevens, i'm from barcelona, vangaalen, springsteen, timber timbre, niblett, hinson, waits, cohen.
- music in general
- adventurous hearts crawling through the underbrush to find the light, or something just as perfect
- fingers tracing circles on skin
- Dance
- reconnecting to old lovers through literature
- rocket shipping from acquaintance to friendship
- whispering stories so not to wake up your roommate
- remembering life, celebrating hearts, saying goodbye in a sea of candlelight
- holding hands
- walking to work
- the never ending love of my family.

Thanks Ashley for reminding me to remember these things.

hello nostelgia, meet autumn

2009-10-22T06:18:00.006-04:00

I made you three shirts on the Necchi & Omega
fed thread into spools
spinning like whirling dervishes
my stitches erratic, unreliable
jutted across the landscape of that fabric
looking for windmills

The first one I cut too small
the shoulders causing you to hunch
the cuffs hitting you mid forearm
leaving the mechanics of your wrists unprotected

You left the second one on a patio of a truck stop
somewhere between Lethbridge and Drumheller,
took the brunt of the summer on your freckled skin.

The third one tore
while reaching up to adjust a light
the fabric surrendered and came apart at the seam,
exposing the pale underbelly of your arm

I have abandoned sewing
I can not weave straw into iron or gold

but under these ordinary sheets,
skin wrapped tight around muscles and bones
we wore each other like armor.

This poem, completed FINALLY in Saskatchewan with the aid of a most feircely talented and lovely mentor, is ready for public consumption (nomnomnom?). It started with a very rough old favorite from the beginning of a relationship and became about the unraveling of the same one. How funny. I am still working hard on old poems -harder lately as nights grow longer and I find myself less likely to sleep, more likely to dream sitting up. Wide eyed and breathing.

Today will be long. Long and sad. Long and sad and essential. I am breathing. I am thankful for breath. I am thankful for the return of music to my everyday (even as quickly and as overwhelming it came flooding in, and continues to do so).

An old man outside a Legion Hall, while sneaking looks at my thighs, told me the only thing he learned being a soldier is that he didn't want to be one. That we are on earth to make it better for everyone else. That it's our job to be kinda to each other. To be good people. We may not ever change the world on the grand scheme of things, but just be kinder to each other. Be kind.

There are good things, there are good things, there are good things, there are good things everywhere.

no story or poem today, just regret and saddness and quiet words

2009-10-21T00:31:00.004-04:00

you would've been a wonderful father. a loving husband. you would've been a wonderful old man - still boisterous and passionate and genuine. you gave everyone a run for their money.

the news made me feel so funny. like i had failed. failed to know you better. failed to remain close to the friend i met you through. failed to understand how dark and dreary and evil this city can be. how sick the people in it can be.

you were wonderful. from what i heard from those who knew you best. from what i saw when I had seen you.

i'm sorry. i'm sorry it had to end that way. i'm sorry that people can still surprise me with their violence and the evil of their actions. i'm sorry that you were surprised too. i'm sorry for whatever fear and pain and panic you had to experience. I'm sorry I can't make it better. I'm sorry i can't change anything. i'm sorry i can't make it to your funeral. you were too bright, too alive, too handsome and young and happy when I saw you last.

I wish I could make sense of this.

you would've been a wonderful father.

your still my favorite, sweet Autumn.

2009-10-20T04:01:00.006-04:00

Brendan takes apart his camera with ease. All slides and pops and clicks, it's an instrument I don't understand and can not play like him. It's an extension of his fingers. It sees all the tough spots. It finds the prettiest things in the muggiest marshes.

On Monday adventures in city parks i feel almost as faraway. Almost as far away as I can without leaving the comfort of my neighborhood. Good friends and crunching leaves. Kicking through with ease. The soundtrack to autumn is that rustle.

It was a weekend full of such perfect little moments. Of holding hands with strangers on darkened dancefloors, taking about what art pushes us to the very edge. Sitting beside the prettiest girl,my Fran, guzzling giant juice and jointly falling in love with the cute brunette waitress whom absently reads out what she writes down as a question. Hot tea and lots of water...laughing with my lady over the blackout night pieced together with sloppy text messages. The idea of my favorite pair of lovers exploring Tibet, taking on mountains together. The second time out of the country for him, the first adventure for her in which she goes with someone she loves.

Their kitchen tap dance session makes my heart melt.

I am ready for November. Don't get me wrong October, I still love you, and I think you have some bright times yet to come..but I think I'm about ready for the November Novel writing challenge. I think I'd ready for the first winter alone in a long time. I think I'm ready to approach the idea of a New Year. I think I'm ready to spend my evenings in ice skates again, following other people in circles, their coats a blur.

You see, I just dreamt I was ready for anything.

stop making sense, an open letter to the last boy i kissed

2009-10-17T21:19:00.002-04:00

image: Egon Schiele

I want to take off running with you. I want to try distances with long legs and clumsy feet. I want to swing from the rafters. With you, I want break into abandoned subway stations. Lay me down, lay me down on the tracks. I want to fish for food. I want to kill to feed us. Fish. Small mammals. Downy furs soft on thin fingers. I used to fish the worms out of puddles and place them back on the grass. I didn't want them to drown. I want to explore the city under sunlight. Magnifying glass to pinpoint the position. I want to kiss your lips from one corner to the other. I want to spend and afternoon filling up balloons with air and letting them go around the room. I want you to tell me about the personalities of all the colours. I want to dance riotously until the record skips. skips. skips. I want to introduce you to every book that's made a difference. I want to read you a story, one about adventures. I want to shake you hard. I'd tell you everything, if you wanted to know. There's more then naked limbs and the noises I make when we get so close we spark.

If that interests you (and I don't know if it does), and if I interest you (and I don't know if i do), then that's that. If not, then that's alright too. It's nice to have a reason to think up all the things I'd like to share, keep them on hand. Like a prayer. Like a promise.

excerpt from "where would i be without wishful thinking? "

2009-10-15T06:55:00.004-04:00

i read stories this morning. Your stories. Your language. much different. then mine. Your words are lovely, smooth and beautiful like the skin in the crook of your elbow, the under belly of your arms - let me touch my tongue to that skin.

I feel rough with you. Unsure in this stop. And start. Me with my ill fitting dress shirts, my words that grasp and choke each other in their scramble to my lips. My stories with their dirty fingernails and hard palms. My words seek to assault.

Not you. Not you. You with your bright hair, thin lips and pale pale pale body. Not that i have seen it yet, but I imagine it often - skin almost translucent. I bet when I peel away what hides you, your veins will glow through the surface. Fault Lines. I will need no other map.

under black water

2009-10-14T10:00:00.001-04:00

Across frozen lakes I followed you, skiis cutting black scars across the snow. I kept quiet feet moving in rhythm with yours, my breath hitting hard against the scarf I borrowed from your mother. I had never taken to the ice on anything but skates.

In a patch of dark ice, fish are frozen in motion. If they are deep enough when everything thaws they will still breathing. Winter fades and the ice will turn to water. Your sister took photographs, have you spoken to her lately? It snowed in Calgary the other day.

There's an autumn chill, but it's still only raining here. Sometimes there is a threat of winter. In a car moving out of the city scenery blurred into greens and yellows against thick grey skies. Did he notice the colours? He speaks quick and often. Music and moments. I like the way his hands move. I like that he can't play guitar but pretends with wiggling fingers and trembling palms. These same fingers and palms find my skin always at the ready. This heat. What secrets we make. On the way back my words were being held back in reserves for stories. I hope he didn't mind.

Winter this year will be different. I am different. I am wide open and breathing steady. Creative, calm and desperately in love with my friends. I am sorry I don't need you anymore. But I hope you will ski across frozen lakes with someone this winter. Be kind to her. Hold her hand.

I'll be gliding about the city on hockey skates, mittens, scarves and short stories.

Pantoum for The End of Winter

it rained the day you left and didn't stop, it just turned to snow
they said it was a record snowfall in toronto
soon after that i found your skis under my bed
all month i trained to use them.

they said it was a record snowfall for toronto
beneath the naked trees i left trails for you to follow
all month i trained to use them
how the skis cut through like steely knives

beneath the naked trees i left trails for you to follow
it was more important to learn to say goodbye
how the skis cut like steely knives
walking the streets was too difficult, steps always slowed by snow

it was more important to learn to say goodbye
when dark, a ghost can move faster
walking the streets was too difficult, steps slowed by snow
I remember your phantom fingers, pale white body long and thin

when dark, a ghost can move faster
soon after that i found your skis under my bed
I remember your phantom fingers, pale white body long and thin
it rained the day you left and didn't stop, it just turned to snow

"You seem like the kind of girl I should get to know..."

2009-10-11T08:22:00.006-04:00

Your fingers keep tracing curves and I feel them for days. Finger tips, like ghost seasons, fall and winters past.

I once fought a snow storm to go see S. on the east end. Empty streets, apocalyptic song lyrics, lost in the Arcade Fire. I tripped and tracked,left pathways to the distillery. Inside it was warm. Inside there were avocados and his beautiful roommate. She thought I was nice. We watched a film and kissed quietly. The snow over the light outside made strange shadows on the wall. I never fought for anyone as hard as I did for him. Tonight S. sleeps by the lake. Sometimes I wish we were the same people we were 2 winters ago. I miss the part of me that loved him.

I am seeking out Big Bad Love. I found it Friday night at a bar with a few boys who shone under candle light and liquor. I found it tonight surrounded by 2 of my favorite men, my father & brother in law, as we began our travel into music. I found it as my sister chased me into teh dining room, nearly tackling me into the dining room table. I found it standing in my parents kitchen, holding my moms hand as we stirred turkey stock. Meat sliding off bone. Quietly reviewing our mortality. Hand squeezes, strength in weak bodies.

My love is huge. My potential is great. I am writing stories. I am making music. I am adapting a filmscript.

If you could see me now. Oh well. For the time being I have your long adventurous fingers. I make due. And I am thankful.

excerpt from "American Skin"

2009-10-02T20:33:00.008-04:00

He liked the feel of her cigarette on his lips, the paper dampened with saliva. Leyla's body near his was a curse, but at 27 he'd already travelled most of the world and he was running out of things that excited him. Sucking back on the filter he released the smoke, letting it rise towards the ceiling and counting how long it took. one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand... It never quite made it that high, smokey fingers spreading themselves so wide they break apart. Hard to keep a grasp on anything.

Side by side their bodies seemed natural, Leyla had one arm curled around his waist, loose in sleep. At least he wouldn't have to share the cigarette, not that she'd ask for it back. She'd give him anything without question. Truth is he never smoked until she started offering them.

Sarie would've had none of that. Sarie in thigh high stockings. Sarie surrounded by violins and novels. Sarie would have hidden her smokes, tucked her cash in the cover of a book and kept her space in bed. Once in a while she'd roll into him, pressing her body full against his, her mouth coming in contact with his skin clumsily. In sleep she seemed softer.

Somewhere in another city, in a different country, Sarie sleeps alone.

Leyla tugs gently on his body, mumbling to bring him closer. Her hair a mess of blond, matted from the pillows, thick with dried sweat. The smell of her skin causes his body to convulse. He'd like to slide his fingers up the silky white of that thigh, but he didn't want to have to talk to her after he finishes. Leyla would lie quietly, body spent with sex and finger the stub of the cigarette in the ashtray. Questions about what he was doing awake. What he thinks about. Where he goes. He can always come up with an answer. A wonderful reason. Dreamy, with a voice full of sleep that will satisfy Ley. Foolish romantic hearts. No, he just couldn't give her the answer she'd want to hear right now. Rolling onto her back she keeps a hand closed around his wrist, the blanket shifting down her torso. The sight of her breasts, the nipples small and pink, exposed with the innocent shifting of weight caused him to shudder again. He lay a palm over one, his hand riding the rise and fall of her breathing like waves.

Somewhere in another city, in another country, Sarie lets her lover hold her in his arms.

starts and ends

2009-09-28T21:08:00.005-04:00

i am happy here, surrounded by papers, typed up neat and tidy. what draft are these on now? I've lost count. These things seem to happen, you know? It's the autumn and i find myself withdrawing, like you used to. You were so good at changing colours. I'm afraid of casual contact, wary of people who show too much interest in me, paying attention to everything said and done. I am constantly taking notes. Never outwardly, but I am squirreling away bits and pieces of conversations in my head. I am trying to make sense of how I communicate. How others communicate with me. I am making you into fiction. Correction, I have already made you into fiction. All I keep is the small thrill, that thing i got in the darkest part of me. The letters, the trinkets, the books; the rest of you fit into a shoppers drug mart body bag. I would compost you if I could, I know you care about the environment and all.

I am seeing these two people. I am fucking one of them so far. The one I'm fucking I keep trying to take with me but he won't come. Well he'll come, but he won't accompany me. I want him to get cold and windblown in the pouring rain. I want him to ask me what im reading. i want him to play a game of fucking catch with me, you know? Not that I don't like fucking. I like fucking, but it makes a guy feel cheap, you know? Makes a person wonder if he can compete. Makes a guy feel like he's waiting to get the axe. Although you should know I've never been fired from a place of employment.

The other guy, well he's real nice and has a good job and rides a nice bike. He likes going to concerts and sitting in parks. He likes that I know something about Dostoevsky. He is ok looking in a classical sense. Good shape, nice bone structure, good teeth. He wants to know how I feel about things.

I feel cheated. I feel like I'm gettin the short straw. I feel like I was never told the rules but was forced to play the game, you know? Makes a guy feel like his only choice is to set up his typewriter, and go through his books. I'm gonna rewrite all the classics of literature so that they feature me and turn out ok in the end.

funny thing is the guys, they got almost the same name. Ain't that a kicker? Well shit.

an excerpt from "Outlaws"

2009-09-21T21:42:00.007-04:00

half asleep he slides his fingers along my ribcage, his words a warning

"this is going to sound crazy..."

his voice at 5am is thick and warm at my face and I struggle to keep some sense, body still new beneath his sheets. He moves his hand over my ribcage, and tells me in that voice between sleeping and sober that his fingers have found an old woman, right here where the skin dips between each rib. "Can you feel it?" When he moves his fingers along my stomach he leaves the old woman behind. The tips slide over my skin, tracing circles, naming each spot of skin for himself, stories and moments in a life. Mine.. his.. the old woman's..each as varied and strange as the wrinkled face of the ribcage. "

"I always come back here though, to the old woman. I feel bad for abandoning her too long.."

Wishing I could wake up to hear them all clearer, I try to at least retain the pitch and tone of this new voice instead. Sometimes only vowels come through, the click of the tongue to form words, other times the only sounds my ear picks up are the ones that are formed when his tongue strikes the top of his mouth. A little bit of morning violence. I focus on that and this new hand which has already taken the liberty of getting to know me.

He slides his finger along side a hip bone, strained against skin.
"Here, this represents old relationships"
"I'm going to need more hip bones"
"What does that mean?"

but I can't answer. A small wispy smile plants itself on foolish lips, and I keep my eyes shut tight.

I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.

2009-09-21T19:42:00.008-04:00

photo cred:Brenna Pepe Sylvia Kathleen

He flipped the light on again. Funny how although its over his seat it's pointed directly at my face. He said he couldn't read under direct light. That he needed something pale and ambiguous to read by. Something mysterious. I regret sitting beside this guy, but he seemed like he'd be the least likely to brandish a weapon. I know this much, however: I'm not waiting out this rest stop with him reading and murmuring and insisting on taking the arm rest we share in its entirety. I'll get out, I'll gulp some air, I'll follow the other passengers like the good little consumers we all are. I didn't think I was hungry, but with this promise of sandwiches and stale coffee... Where am I? I should pay more attention when the bus driver speaks to me.. Across the street there's Honky Tonk music and men's voices, loud and rough seeping through the grimy windows of a bar. Why don't Greyhounds stop at bars? How fast can I down a whiskey and a beer? One point five minutes for whiskey, fifteen minutes for beer and the rest.. I'll spend the remaining thirteen point five minutes I'll wait for a song Mike would like on the jukebox. He's going to know the minute he sees me. I've got 30 minutes until I'm due back on the bus. The cafe is cute, everything is reflective however, all clean and metal, only slightly distorted images of myself, the bridge of my nose a bit wider, my forehead a bit smaller. I'm making faces again aren't I? Scrunching up my face and sticking out my tongue. Mouse face. Dragon face. Mouse face. Dragon face. The woman at the counter seems perfectly in her element, almost elegant leaning against the old milk-shake dispenser which reads “Out of order. Carton milkshakes available in the fridge.” She's watching those kids by the chocolate bars. How old is she? Coffee seems like a bad idea, “Coffee seems like a bad idea! I'll be up all night!” She doesn't smile back at me. I mean she's smiling but not at me. She's unaffected. I want to be unaffected. To paint my nails pink and long. I want talons. I want elegance in an apron. The tables are speckled green and black, I imagine as a kid I would've kept blowing and blowing at the surface, as if I could knock the flecks of black clean out of the green. I just like things without blemishes. I also like my food hot, but that doesn't seem to be an option here. No wonder Woolworth went out of business with their archaic catalogs and faulty salt shaker, damn you give me flavour! Who made this meal anyway? I don't want to sound like a snob. If Mike were here he'd be disappointed that the city in me is getting out. I'll apologize when I get home. He doesn't need to know what for, just that I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I've got 20 minutes until I'm due back on the bus.

That lady, she looks nice. Is that word appropriate anymore, nice? In high school they beat nice out of you with a thesaurus, but there's no other word for it. She looks nice. I want to be nice one day. Sit by the window in bus stops drinking tea in a crisp pink suit, long in the skirt. Hats. Big church hats, but not too showy. Modest. Modest and nice. I bet she's someones grandmother. I bet she's a librarian. I bet she's never done a bad thing in her life. I can tell by her eyes, gray and soft. I can tell by those weathered hands, I can tell she's never broken someone just because she knew she could and she didn't want to wait anymore. Her fingers have always been ones that weave with patience. I bet she knits. I have 15 minutes.

Magazines with articles I've read. I'm sure I've read this one before. Under that stock image of an impossibly attractive couple gingerly kissing, half naked in a shower... something about pleasing a man in 5 steps. I think every magazine has had this exact article in it. When That Lady read it I bet it was about how to greet him at a party. And how to listen, smiling pleasantly but not speaking. And how to keep your whites at their whitest. And what to have stocked in the fridge that will really wow him. Now it's about just which part of his “member” is the most sensitive. Modesty. Modesty. 5 ways to please a man. There's just one really. One way, that is. I wonder if Mike's already in bed.. 10 minutes.

I left my tray on the table. Is that bad form? I mean the lady at the counter is alone in there. Well she can't be completely alone, Achey Breaky Heart wafted in from the kitchen. I see it in flashes, the swinging metal doors quivering with every new guest that enters the cafe. Rows of white cups, white plates. Coffee canisters. Sweaty cheese and a fan moving slowly back. And forth. And back again. Garth Brooks riding on the scent of grease and dirty dishes, and somewhere in the bowels of this kitchen some with terrible musical taste lives in seclusion. His daughter promised her virginity to him in some sort of weird religious purity pact. Or was that Cyrus? Yea that was Cyrus. That's still fucked up. Am I being a snob?

Its colder now, and darker, but not dark. Away from the cold artificial light of skyscrapers, dark here seems bright. Stars? I guess its just the stars. And the moon. Over at the bar those two seem to be having a right time. Stumbling, two men arm and arm too loud, singing a duet. “In spite of ourselves we'll end up sittin on a rainbow. Against all odds, honey we're the big door prize” one of the men gives us all a big wave, yelling something about having a safe trip and fucking his wife which I can't quite find the connection between. I like them. I like their noise and they unsteady feet. I bet they smell terrible. That lady, she still looks nice, even now slowly hoisting herself onto the bus. I wish I was sitting beside her all rosewater and A535 for the next 2 hours, she'd pull out long spools of yellow yarn and teach me to knit. A hat. A scarf. A little key chain kitten. I wish I sat between her and the window, the douchebag is asleep half hanging in the aisle. I'll wave to the men when we pass them up the road, they'll like that. Get a kick out of it. I wish I sat with them at the bar. I bet they're funny. I bet they're rude and brash. One day, I'd like to be a middle aged man. Drinking hard and fast until I can't see straight. Listening to music, sprinkling my conversation with the word fuck, black flecks in front of my eyes as I stumble home to my wife anticipating the 5 ways she knows how to please

find a sweater, and you'll be better

2009-09-20T10:29:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to put together my weekend through muscle aches and bruised shins. Sore lips and finger prints. How many hands, held in earnest admiration or sheer, silly joy (5? perhaps 6?).

I am trying to put together my weekend through what writing has emerged - expansion of the park adventure with Lit, the one about the girl on the bus playing with order and chaos, poems about exodus. Words about disease and redemption, songs about winter skis and ghosts, a story about my growing gills. Jellyfish. Thinking lots about jellyfish. Less about old lovers. Jellyfish as old lovers?

I found emails, ancient emails from a stranger. In Fall 2005 I knew I was headed for the water and so did he. Strange emails about words and water. We never met, we just exchanged poems and the smallest details about where our hearts hid. In Winter/Early Spring 2009 I made the plunge and my writing focused on birds and glowing deep sea creatures, lake water and deep black oceans.

So here I am, facing Monday morning and it's fall. Facing the sun and the chill and the smell of things changing. Last fall I ran through the leaves stomping and kicking until I slipped & skinned my knee. Beneath the blood and dirt a scar was born.

It is fading, I almost can't see it anymore. I am making new marks, and soon I won't see it at all.

ghosting

2009-09-18T08:15:00.004-04:00

I remember: running leaps off of docks into water still too cold to swim in. I had never felt that kind of violence before. Its the kind of cold that sits heavy against your skin. Wraps so tight, so instantly tight that you lungs beg you to gasp for breath and you have to control the urge, because your head is still under water. I don't mind getting roughed up by this water. Cold like a slap.

***

He said that I had stormy eyes. I told him he should stick to movies which made him blush. (It was a lie, he was actually an incredibly talented writer. Maybe the best I've known. I forgot to tell him). He meant that they are two colours, start small and green and branch out to brown. He said I approach his body like a hurricane -he missed the Neko Case reference, and this tornado did love him - that i made him reckless in his need to get near me. We crashed our bodies against the rocks, skin red and rough. The cold water snapping the bottom of our feet, urging us on.

***

soon after there were no words. But I'll send him a christmas card, and fill the envelope with sand.

i found home. wish you were here

2009-09-17T10:11:00.003-04:00

Thursday came quickly- like Autumn, like the sudden chill. I spent the evening chatting and tea drinking and watching Krissy's fingers move effortlessly over yarn. She can knit silently, no awkward snaps and clicks, just quiet. Knitting as a form of meditation. It smells like fall, no, it smells like Halloween. I am waiting for the leaves to litter my porch.

I wandered about my house in a sweater in cowboy boots, music sifting from my record player, candles lighting up the path. Dancing in my underpants, feet moving effortlessly over hardwood floors. I can move silently. Movement as meditation.

Music as. Banjo finger picking. I can sing loud and quiet and as loud as I please.

I can push the coffee table out of the way and practice handstands in the family room.

I still can't cartwheel. But there's time to learn.

I need nothing and no one and everything and everyone.

Living as meditation.

who would you rather be

2009-09-16T05:49:00.004-04:00

it always starts innocently enough.

dirty hands grappling tree branches, hoisting her body above mine so that she can reach. We are like german tumblers, her being the slight, small hardbodied one, me being the somewhat lumbering, boisterous one. I yell nonesense as I slowly raise her body into the tree, and she is lost among the leaves and branches. Her disappearing limbs are long and lean, they remind me that we had danced together. She liked my "tension" and "expressive breaths", i liked her grace when just standing and how we melded when she put her head to my shoulder and i slowly push my palm against her back our bodies crumpling together like leaves. I never did understand "modern expressionist" dance, but i could do it well. Most things I'm good at I don't understand. Now I love her laugh, and the slightly off way she sometimes looks at me. Her lazy smile. Her manic love of adventure.

We'll get along just fine.

At this point all I can hear is the rustling of leaves, the tree shivering and moaning, but not in protest. I can't imagine anyone not wanting her body on theirs.

I am drunk. My tree climbing for the evening finished, as promised to Andrew, once the whiskey soaked into me. I move slower, I am in tune with my body but unreliable. I am giddy but lazy. I am too many things to wrap my body around anything, so I stay low to the ground, drumming banjo rolls against the tree trunk, trying to spot how high she's gone. But I can no longer see her, and the rustling had stopped.

"Lit?"
"Yes?"

"Have you stopped climbing?"

"Yes."

"Alright.

Are you stuck?"

"No, just breathing. I wish you had climbed this one."

"Yes, yes. Alright."

I slide my back down the tree trunk until I'm sitting at its base, the bark catching at my dress and scratching my back. It smells of earth, heady and ancient. Funny how the smell of soil reminds me of sex at the worst of times.

"Lit?"

"Yes?"

"I miss him."

"I know."

"I won't love him forever."

"Did you ever?"

"I hope so."

"I'm coming down now, I'm getting cold."

"Alright."

The tree begins to sway and sigh, a few leaves knocked free do barrel rolls to the ground around me. I'm due at work in a few hours and I ache already. My leg muscles are solid from running and cycling, but my arms still need work. On Wards Island, she hung silks from a tree that overlooks the city. She promises to teach me how to tie myself up with a dancers ease as soon as i learn how to support myself.

I am still weak.

love, it's like a hurricaine, happens in florida and it destroys everything.

2009-09-15T07:22:00.004-04:00

moving through the city, wheels on pavement - dark skies and hopeful hearts. the cyclists that bike together, stay together - and these girls can stay with me always. I hope they do. I bought my supplies for the postering project. Now it is finding the memories and words to put on them. Just one more thing to happily immerse myself in.

There are new lips to be met. hands familiar from the backs of smokey bars. there are books to be read and trees to climb. stockings to rip. knees to skin. beaches to explore. careful of the rocks - here, hold my hand. I taught myself to dive in this winter. Its better to simply leap sometimes.

Lie on your back, currents can pull us out to sea.

June2009:

lower the sails and raise the flag i'm drifting
out to sea.
i'm taking on the horizon this hope
a buoy.
this heart
like concrete shoes.

the bird and the fish fell in love but could not build a home.

2009-09-14T07:56:00.007-04:00

I'm making noise. Loud, bold and brass. Tongue in cheek (notalwaysmyown) I am making bold foolish noise. Music with voices that carry, music that travels down streets like streams, i'm moving against currents. words that hold, float, travel over miles and miles and I fight so hard to stay away from you.

Desperate, foolish noise.

I keep my gills. I keep an altered way of breathing this in. I keep my fiction realist and my poetry abstract. I keep my heart open. Focused on holding my breath above water. I keep my body submerged. oneonethousand. twoonethousand. threeonethousand.

The time is coming. Soon the lakes and rivers will freeze and i will look at you from under the glass. No need to hold me under this time. no need to bully me into the water. i will go willingly. I have never quite felt at home on land, and you've never wanted me there anyway. When that happens, please remember that if you ever need to find me, don't.

feeling exposed?

2009-09-11T12:16:00.006-04:00

Been exploding creativity all over my apartment for almost a week. You can thank the unaltering love of my friends for THAT one. Huge discussions with Brendan and quiet comforting hang outs with Zoe. The greatest voicemail from one of my oldest and dearest friends.

After a discussion with someone about the prospect of republishing letters given to me by other people an interesting point came up to why. 2 people told me how exposed they felt/would feel over the posting of something they gave to me in intimacy. Upon discussing this with my poetry mentor she said there is something with me and exposure. I had exposed my whole life and heart and fear and hope to someone and havebeen betrayed by them... twice. So I am keeping with the project but won't be making it public until it is in a form that I would be submitting it to publication, its a book you see...

For now I will go back to exposing myself. Coming soon: love letters to the city of Toronto... look for familiar words on posters. Exposure is a surefire way to make a connection to someone you may have no other means of ever connecting too. Honesty draws us closer.

Sorry to sound like a dirty, rotten hippie - but I have booked a job playing music with school children in the afternoon Mondays. just me, a guitar, a banjo, some drums, some home made percussion instruments and a whole lotta fun. The thought of sitting in a room writing songs about peanut allergies with grade 1's and 2's makes everything else seem silly.

I guess you could say that when I woke up in a bed completely flooded in light this morning, I wasn't restricted to anyside.

In the mean time, I keep writing love poems for no one in particular. Maybe this is a "Do you Want to Be Buried with My People Dear" moment... when everything you write is about them, everything you hear reminds you of them. I'll get to teh point where every story, poem and song I ever wrote was about someone. I just don't think I've met them. Yet. i am proudly showing off my summer skin, heart on sleeve and soon e e cummings to remind me how much love i carry with me at all times. As Brendan would say "Here we go..."

Do You want to Be Buried with my People Dear? Scout Niblett

Sometimes I'm tossed and driven
and sometimes I don't know where to roam
but I've heard of a city called heaven
and I've started to make it my home

Oh soon I'll reach the glory
where mortals no longer complain
and there's a ship that's coming to take me
and the captain is calling my name

Do you want to be buried with my people, dear
was the look in his eyes
we can rest our bones side by side
in the dirt of yonder high
it's so fun to see me being me alongside you
that's how I knew the answer dear
to the look I got from you

I had nearly given up dear with all my fantasies
then you come and crossed my path, and so here we be
and how the hell did I live this long without you by my side
Can I believe it's you I've sensed and sung to all my life?
arms that held me never worked before until I was held you
with a grip so still and charged, oh cou cou cou

Finally it came around inviting us to play
there's nothing as scary as a divine plan,
but I wouldn't have it any other way

The mystery is larger than you and me
and we're drunk on faded heart
but woman, I have a suspicion
you just could be my missing part

but who the hell knows which way
the gods will pull us tomorrow
but honey we're writing our past right now
and fear's only gonna beckon sorrow

Giddy up love whatever is for you
won't ever pass you by
you live and die in you
and I live and die in me
each day for the rest of this life

'Cause I am a prince
and I am a prince
for I am my own salvation
but you're my queen
and you're my king
so live and die beside each other

Do you want to be buried with my people, dear
was the look in your eyes
we can rest our bones side by side
in the dirt of yonder high
it's so fun to see me being me alongside you
that's how I knew the answer dear
to the look I got from you
we can rest our bones side by side

your letters

2009-09-09T18:33:00.006-04:00

your letters will form the finished project. you form how my heart beats now.

You Said in May:

"Ange,

I will not say that I've never loved anyone as intensely as you......I have never loved someone so completely. I have never been so humbly and so arrogantly in love all at the same time. I have never been so strong a person as I was with you. Even when I wasn't really with you.I have surprised myself a few times since I left for Regina, I have learned a lot about myself. I would be a lesser person without you.I want to you find happiness in yourself, find your centre, but despite that, I do get scared sometimes. That when you are open to loving someone else again you will have moved on from me. I'm afraid I will no longer be what you want. You called me a force of nature. My biggest fear is that you only loved me not because of how you felt about me, but because of how strongly I felt about you. I fear that somehow I tricked you into loving me by the conviction of my own love. Like an actor in a play who was never really acting to begin with. My eyes tear up as I write that. Please tell me I'm wrong. Please let it be the truth. When you say you feel me slipping, who do you feel is the one pulling away? I hope not me. I haven't gone anywhere. I've just been trying to respect your need for space

I must be honest, it hurts me when _______ comes up and you speak as though you wish I'd end up with her. It hurts. Even if _______ wasn't seeing someone at the moment, which she is; even if she was looking for a serious relationship, which she's not; even if I had an open invitation to crawl into her bed at any time, it doesn't change the fact that you are my last thought before going to sleep, and my first thought upon waking up. I thought long and hard the other day, when we were talking and _______ came up and you sounded like a mutual friend trying to set us up. I swallowed my pride and I tried to imagine what life would be like with her and not you. I thought about the things we'd do, the kind of life we'd have, I thought about what the sex would be like, vacations, making dinner. I tried to disregard who was or wasn't or is or isn't attracted to me or ready to love or anything like that, just put two lives side by side and see which one I'd rather have. Guess what. You still win. Not because I'm being stubborn. But because the person I am now wants to be with you. And it was so freeing to meet _______ and say to myself, 'Wow, I should be jumping at the chance to be with this girl. It would be so simple, so easy...but I don't want to be with this girl. I want to be with Ange. Cool.' And it made me even stronger. "

I said in April:

i am a wind up bird.
You lift me gently
ruffle my feathers
tilt me sideways
and turn the key nestled under my wing
when i sing
i make the sound of glass
breaking
it's the only song i know
the melody of solids
fragmenting
notes falling from my beak until
all that's left of the song is in pieces
white sand at Your feet.
You sweep it into an envelope
and put it in your pocket
just mix that with soda ash,
lime and heat
and with your breath you can make us a proper cadence.

Flatlander

2009-07-26T19:54:00.007-04:00

Still in Saskatchewan... still in awe of how beautiful it is. and hot.

Shit it's hot.

Still loving how every morning I can lean against the wall and hear monks chanting along with the tipity type type of my keyboard. What a nice juxtaposition .

Still loving the fact my fiction is being called "exciting", "ballsy", and "adventurous". Being praised for "leaps" and "chances". Being recomended authors that will help. Names I love. names I haven't heard of.

Still loving tearing apart old works and finding the meaning behind the language.

Still mourning the fact that I will have to quit posting my words online, that editing is never done and thos epoems are all but fragments of bigger ideas, never explored. If I want to be serious, I have to start treating writing like work again.

Still gaining confidence in what I have to say. How I have to say it.

Still learning, so much, so much every day. And not stopping. Never stopping.

Still, looking westward and thinking of mountains. of hoodoos and dinosaur bones.

Still looking east and craving the water.

Still looking north and dreaming of those green lights.

Still looking south and dreaming of big city skyscrapers. of long southern high ways.

Still plucking banjo strings, and writing songs for murder balladeering.

Feeling, for the first time in a long time, like an artist.

held on as tightly as you held onto me

2009-07-16T08:32:00.000-04:00

The first time we met I had my arms wrapped around you. I was measuring you for a suit. You had on a blue t shirt, you smelt of soap and home. A familiar dusty city sweat. You were not my type. You were tall and quiet. You let Nick do most of the talking. You didn't say much at all, that is until you came back and asked me out on a date. I said yes. There was never even a need to ask

On our first date you took me to a movie. I walked up to you and said "I think she stood you up". We saw "No Country for Old Men". we drank cheap pints at a bar in which some sort of animal played a fiddle. you walked me home and asked to kiss me. I said yes. So we did. You then walked all the way home, because the TTC had stopped running.

The next morning you called and thanked me for allowing you to kiss me. Like it was some sort of prize. Your voice was warm and sleepy. I canceled my plans with the man I'd been seeing. I canceled those plans indefinitely.

the first time you slept in my bed, there was no sex. We woke up twisted up in the sheets, your hair smelt softly of smoke, as if you'd been slowly burning all night.

The first time we slept in your bed we had sex. In the morning you lay leaned over me and the sun broke through the window, flooding us both in light.

The first time i told you i loved you we were on a couch, surrounded by comedians singing kareoke in my family room. I was brave on whiskey, and you were in pink pajama pants. I rambled on and ran my hands over your hair and face. I don't remember what I said but I meant it. I meant every word.

the first time you broke my heart was in my family room where you sat on the other side of the couch, cold and domineering. I felt small and angry and confused. I missed your whiskey voice, swimming in sunlight.

So here we are, biking through Toronto, meowing loudly to tell the other we're still ok. Here we are running across 3 tennis courts to hit the ball. Here we are drinking whiskey outside a movie theatre. Here we are reading stories on an american highway. here we are in the middle of a leonard cohen concert, hand in hand, breath caught in our throats. Here we are in your car, clothes wrenched aside, breath fogging the glass. Here we are, in the quiet moments when we would wake, still in the sunlight, and you refused to let me go.

Happy Birthday.

close your eyes i'll be here in the morning pt I

2009-07-14T15:02:00.000-04:00

There were lines of manicured trees. Some twisted and gnarled, some straight limbed and leaning - all grasping at the sky and all of them naked. Apple Trees. Snow dusts the grass, black and dead, giving the impression of an old photograph, a sunrise in sepia tones. In the middle of each row of trees, tidy piles of branches, gifts exchanged between neighbouring trees. The dowry for a tree marriage between two powerful tree families. She hoped they really were in love.

You both snowball eastward, missing each other by a few hours: you on a plane, her on a bus bearing the name of a dog. Fast. Efficient. Timely. You are so close to your home that she keeps leaning her head against the window, straining to see a plane coming in from behind. You will reach your destinations within 30 minutes of each other. 30 minutes and hundreds of miles.

"come find me here"

Her scenery is mostly hints of the green that once were forests, now just tall spines jutting out amongst greying greenery. Her eyes roll over to the short fat pine trees that grow between the two stretches of highway. She wonders if anyone ever cut them down for Christmas. Shoving this greedily into the trunks of their cars, trying protesting branches down on their roofs. She decides that next year the two of you will camp out, protectors of this last slip of Canadian wilderness hidden amongst asphalt and pieces of mufflers. this is how it will work: you'll leave early every morning on snow shoe, heading to get supplies at the nearest service station (apples, crackers, tea, chocolate) She will remain behind, keeping a vigilant watch and boiling snow over a fire until it is water. She would keep a flask handy, and when you return she would sit you down in downy blankets, musky furs and colourful fleeces. You will be warm against her bare skin, body wrapping around you in coils of arms and legs. when your heat matches hers she will fill your mouth with whiskey, taking your tongue in her mouth and letting the liquid burn her throat.

She will get drunk

So will you

and together, in that makeshift winter bed, you'll fall asleep to the ramble of highway noise.

the curious jockification of Sandy Carson*

2009-07-13T10:34:00.000-04:00

The first thing she noticed a change in was the sex. Not the sex itself per say, which remained satisfying and interesting, but his reaction after all was said and done and their two bodies lay toppled over each other. The first time it happened he looked at her as he often did, with wide, soft gray eyes and smiled gently. Then he took her by the shoulders, and giving her a violent shake bellowed TOUCHDOWN into her face. There was a pause. Angela waited for him to make an appropriate joke so they could laugh off the unpleasant ordeal. Instead, the clock ticked impatiently in the background, and Sandy raised his hand for a high-five

Their relationship started out as many modern urban love stories do: bohemian hipster nomad meets bookish emo nerdcore, they hit it off, get in pretentious arguments, make out to records (original print vinyl only), make disgusting mixtapes named after obscure quotes and arty revelations, and write quiet lovesick prose to be carried to the other by their good friends at the Canadian Postal service.

He loved the impossibility of her positive attitude because there was no explanation for it. She loved his passions and the most secret parts of him, because they were not hers. The problem then being, was one of these adorable secrets was part of a hidden gene. A dormant sickness that would, without warning, pop up from time to time. His speech would suffer, conversation dribbling into sports stats and scoreboard lingo she couldn't decipher.

Angela decided to seek out specialists in this rare, but devastating disorder. She spoke to former little league coaches("I knew he had it in him! He always held such promise, if only he'd put that ribbon down..."), high school outcasts ("Carson? A jock? No way, its just a phase.. Hey! Carson turned into a jock!" "For real? That guy with the ribbon on a stick??") , soccer moms ("I was devastated when my older daughter Marie -MARIE! GET BEHIND THE DEFENDER!! BEHIND! WATCH - was diagnosed as a jock. But I've learned to accept, and even love the change. I mean, as long as she doesn't, you know, turn gay.")

Sandy in the meantime decided to join a rugby league, sure he was destined for greatness as soon as he could find the right sport. His initial foray into jockdom was simply superficial. His hair, stayed familiar, although occasionally cut too short. His wardrobe had become seriously overrun with polo shirts and pre worn Abercrombie jeans. He even went out and found a pair of tear away jogging pants. He had since the jockening become determined to not merely be a spectator jock, but to immerse himself in jock culture. He participated in all form of sport, both serious and soft. From Death Hockey matches to ultimate Frisbee his lithe frame was becoming a recognizable force at sport meets.

At night they lay side by side, strange thoughts running through their minds. Sandy's brain had become dominated with numbers of players who may be gone as of next season. Memorizing faces that will fade into obscurity, only to be remembered when you see them at the grocery store cereal aisle. He tried his very best to think of other things, but it was no use. There really was nothing to be done. He snaked his arm around her waist and whispered by her ear.."Being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It's not about winning. It's about you and your relationship with yourself, your family and your friends...."

Wandering home one evening one evening Angela ran into an ex lover. He was on his way back from tai chi his round face drawn and sad as usual. He paused and they spoke about their lives. He was doing yoga and Tai chi, a very specific type of tai chi,did you know there diufferent kinds of tai chi, its like dialect right, every area has its own of the same... She was mesmerized. Mesmerized at just how boring he truly was. His forced positivity, his nervousness as he shifted from foot to foot. There were no passions. He had no sense of good sportsmenship (it was he who told her after much nakedness that she liked him too much, which is a foul thing to say toa girl) There were no surprises in him. There were no secret parts. There was nothing to love. Startled by this cinematic coming together of ideas she took off, leaving him to his rambling, off to find Sandy. Sandy was all and everything. He was complex and calculated with sports scores and statistics. He was all soft and lovely with the whisper of retired numbers, great moments in sportsmenship. He valued loyalty in player, determination, passion and love. He loved the greater idea of the Game. She loved him. It was a matter of accepting defeat and getting up to play again. It was returning to the beginning when things were lost. It was winners don't wait for chances, they take them! It was it doesn't matter if she wins or loses its how she played the game! It was never underestimating the heart of a champion! It was that champions are made from something they have deep inside them -- a desire, a dream, a vision. She loved him, and would keep loving him. Through rugby and tennis, baseball and soccer, she would love him because he was the first to fight for her love and it was time for her to return the favour.

Gloves off.

And thus ends the curious jockification of Sandy Carson.

*This story was a challenge given to me by Sandy in the summer of 2008. It was completed in on July 18th 2008. Sandy was my "secret jock" boyfriend. This is the story of my discover of this.*

September 25th, 2007

2009-07-13T10:27:00.000-04:00

photo cred: seth martiniuk

Great escapes, old cars on dirt country roads. the radio just buzzes, my cell phone doesn't work but i don't need any music, i don't need any conversation. when did I start paying attention to your breathing? When did I start noticing your hands? Gravel whispers under the wheels and i wait for it to tell me something important. I've turned to nature to tell me what to do, I don't trust my instincts anymore, I don't trust a body that was built to betray.

We explore marsh lands, ground so soft and grass that shakes and shivers on its own accord. I catch a tiny frog, he's cold and wet and terrified in my palms. I can feel his little fingers, tiny grips and he's too scared to move.

You search out golden moments, sunlight through trees, photos to mark moments with ghost seasons. Our feet talk through crunching leaves and i think I understand, for one sunlit moment, the language of unspoken words.

september 18th, 2007

2009-07-13T10:23:00.000-04:00

photo cred: Mike Roberts

rode until it all looked familiar. re-living moments with people I don't need to remember, just the feelings. Off in the far corner of the city, you said you always wondered where they stood to take those photographs, the ones on all the postcards. The city felt far, a different creature then where we stood by the water. I could feel currents pass between our skin, memories of fingers and hands that had become strangely familiar. Your lips were thin, the kind I don't usually kiss, but you had that smirk down to an art.

Finding my way home is now my art, I'm just sorry it was something that was lost when I knew your lips.

liar, liar pants on fire

2009-07-13T10:05:00.000-04:00

photo cred:Brenna Pepe Sylvia Kathleen

Lets start off with this: i am a liar. It is the truth that I sometimes lie.

I make them into stories and poems. I rearrange my lies until I make something beautiful. Or ugly. Or both. I suppose all lies are both.

Here is my collection. I claim every last one to be fiction, not a speckle of truth in them.

But then again, i could just be lying.