My Useless Memory at Work Part/Chapter One: Rico's Serenade

(I'm working on something a lot longer. So long that I'm dividing it into chapters. Here's the first.)
Chapter One:
Rico's Serenade

I stared at the brass bell of the trumpet, ringing stings to latin music in a lounge somewhere in downtown Montreal. I got lost in thought, wondering what it'd be like to shrink myself and go spelunking in the horn. My daze was broken by the trumpeteer (or is it trumpetist? Whatever. His name is Rico) lowering his instrument and bowing while the club was taken over by the sound of palms colliding repeatedly. I had been here before. With Mari.

Marianne Duhaime was my girlfriend at the time. We were both two years underage so we snuck in. Nobody seemed to mind; All we did was dance. Neither of us had jobs, so we couldn't buy drinks, but the owner was a young Italian who was a sucker for young love.

However, Mari and I weren't in love. In fact, we barely spoke: We let our bodies do the talking (they say, "We like how we feel when we get touched."). It was more of an infatuation or facination, like most of my relationships.
Mari was a special case though. She was my first. The fact that she was beautiful made me quite proud. Also, her last ex was a girl. I had been the man virile enough to entice her back into the wild ride of testosterone. At least that's the way I chose to look at it, which also made me proud.
But I guess the only thing we really had in common was our love for women, because she left me for another human with a cave between their legs.

Speaking of caves, I had lost myself in the bell of Rico's trumpet again, still waiting. Mari should be here any minute. I heard she's been dating a guy steadily for about three years, which is a huge deal for her. She'd never been in a relationship for more than eight months before she would find someone new. I guess that sort of made her a passive (or subconscious) control freak. In retrospect, I should have broken it off. But what good is retrospect anyway?

I swung about the stem of my glass. The martinis here are great. I have no idea why she wanted to meet me here. Or tonight. Or at all for that matter. We haven't spoken in four years.

I can still remember her though. Her big, blue eyes and tiny nose complimented her sharp lips. She looked like a cat. Her blond hair was "banged" to cover her forehead for three quarters of the way. Her skin was the softest thing in the world after those lips. Her tiny hands, never weighed down with unnecessary jewelery. And her curves. I choose not to describe those because the gentleman in me won't allow it. But they were fun. I mean, her physique was ideal for any woman (and those who enjoy women): healthy.

She was shorter than me, which was a big deal because of how short I am. It's difficult for me to find any girl who is into me, let alone a girl shorter than me, but she was both. When she looked at me, she looked up and that always made me feel warm.

The band put down their tools and I've become impatient, rubbing the blue velvet armrests of the booth I occupied. She said she had black hair now and would wear a red dress. I raised my hand, my index deciding to reach for the ceiling. "Waitress!" I called, "One more please." She nodded and walked back toward the bar. I prepared the payment and left it on the table so I wouldn't have to rifle through my pockets later. I stared impatiently at the door, curiosity eating away at me like my family eating cheesecake. Finally, she walked in. She neglected to tell me about the red bow in her hair. She looked magnificent. I got her attention.
"Mari!"
"Omagod, Mike!" she screamed in her quebecois accent. She'd been speaking English lately. I could tell. She rushed over and hugged me tightly.
"Mon dieu, Mike, t'as perdu du poid! I barely recognize you!"
"Yeah! I lost the fat. Feels weird."
I pointed to the booth and we sat. I noticed the martini where my money used to be. Needless to say, I won't be drinking that.

"So what's going on with you?" Mari asked, fixing her bangs, "Anyone special?"
I chuckled. "Nope. Nobody special yet."
The truth is, I haven't been with anyone since Mari. But she doesn't need to know that.
The silence between us accented the conversation around the lounge and the latin music on the radio. The band should be back soon.
"How about you? I hear you've been dating a dude for a few years."
I laugh nervously, "After a few girls, of course"
She nudges me. "Heille! Pi j'ai experimente! On s'en crisse." (ignore the lack of accents)
She gets closer to me and leans in. I know why she's here. I know why I'm here.

(but just to be sure...)

"Why'd you want to see me?"
She pulls away and sighs, "I figured you'd just go with it."
"You broke up with him?"
"What?!" she shouts, taken aback. "No! Never!"
"So," I started to drag the O for obvious reasons, "what are you doing?"
She pouted the way she would when she'd lose a coin toss.
"He cheated on me," she said, "with his ex."
I was shocked, but somehow vindicated.
"So why are you still with him?"
She shyly pouted again. "Because I love him." She dropped her voice like a child forced to apologize.
"Fantastic..." I dragged out the sarcasm in the first syllable and fell back into my seat. "But why me? Why not some random guy?"
"Because you're my ex..." her tone made me feel stupid and that her reason should have been obvious.

I froze. "No, I-" I stammered, "I mean why not another ex? One of those girls, maybe?"
"Pfft! Il s'en calisse si je fourre des girls!"
"Right. So, you've had other male exes... why me?"
(I wanted compliments)
"You were my only 'real' boyfriend. We dated for a while."
"I'm confused," I tell her bluntly.

I watch the band get on stage. I turn back to her.
"Okay, here's the deal," I start. "I won't help you cheat on your boyfriend. I don't even think you should." (I got a little preachy) "Or that you should even take him back and stay with him," I watched her disappointment when I paused. I felt her excitement when I said, "But...I will dance with you."

I got to my feet and extended my hand. Putting hers in mine, we reached the dance floor and relived memories. It was then I realized that boys and girls can't just be friends.

ten years from now

I will have a vague recollection of
sitting on some rock
in the middle of the Rideau river
where my drunken kinsmen came at night
to disturb contingents of ducks
with cell phones and beer
(or so I was told by a French man
I kept meeting)

and I will remember
the tiny waterfall sloping the torrent
across the birds who waited
until they were fed

and then the ant that I saved from drowning
after brushing it from my leg

as I try to recall the year
whatever I was doing in Ottawa
and why i was trying to write poems
and I will sit up like Purdy on his dirty promontory
slouch back like crinkled paper and whisper
to hell with poetry then
to hell with poems

Reconcilliation for a Widower of Life

When I get stuck, sometimes I rewrite lyrics for songs I like. This piece is greatly inspired by the song "For the widows in paradise for the fatherless in ypsilanti" by Sufjan Stevens. In fact, it goes to the tune of the song as well. I find my title a bit too dramatic but I couldn't think of another.

When we live for ourselves,
We tend to disappoint.
When live for oursleves,
We've truly missed the point.

There's another life for us.
There's a better life for us.
There's a different life for us.
Find it if you can.

I've been living lonely.
I've been living closed.
There answer to my questions,
Arn't said; they are shown.

There's another life for me.
There's a better life for me.
There's a different life for me.
It's about time it began.

Show me selflessness and,
I will fall apart.
I will begin again;
Begin at the start.

Of another life for me.
Of a better life for me.
Of a different life for me.
Of a life completely free.

The Bus to Sofia, Part 3

But first, some news. My essay "On My Shelves" has been published! See it here.

This, thinks Adrian, must be true love.

Her name is Natalie and he cannot help but stare at her. She is thin, olive skinned, and shy. Her eyes are dark and deep, her hair is pushed back and held within a scarf (she dresses somewhat like a hippie, with braided hair twinned in string and a peasant’s skirt and that tight tank top, worn without a bra — he can see the gentle poke of a nipple, here, and here), revealing the delicate curve of her neck, the tight purity of her jaw line. Beside Adrian, Simon is no doubt staring at her as well, thinking the same thoughts, ready to jump over the bar and be with her. Every so often they both whisper in unison Natalie under their breaths.

Natalie is the barmaid here, where Simon and Adrian ended up after having left the restaurant. They gawk at her and she sells them 4 leva rum-and-cokes (this much rum, this much coke, Adrian will later say when he recounts this evening, showing with fingers stretched like square brackets just how potent they were) and they drink them down, barely feeling their stomachs lurch and contortion. In French they comment to each other on her beauty and their admiration for her, in English they try to get her attention with questions and woo her with compliments, which must be given sparingly because she is humble and will run away like a shy doe if you overdo it.

There aren’t many people in the bar: two Australian men who are, apparently, retired from some kind of army work, and now live in Bulgaria during the summer; an old, alcoholic looking Bulgarian (“Watch out,” the Australians say. “He likes to dance with boys.”); a young couple, nationality unknown, making out in one of the dark corners.

The Canadians tease and taunt Natalie, gently. She blushes, smiles, embarrassed, and they fall even harder for her. Soon, a hairy, burly man enters the room and walks squarely right up to the bar (as if he owns the place, thinks Adrian), sits down. Natalie frowns seriously and becomes very agitated. She walks over to the burly man, bends over the bar to listen to something he has to say (giving Simon and Adrian a nice view of her lithe butt). As he whispers something in her ear, the man stares straight at the Canadians, who turn away, feeling their hearts sink deep into their chests.

One of the Australian guys comes up to them. He has a tribal tattoo snaking his way up from his elbow into the sleeve of his t-shirt.

“Hey, listen up boys. I’ve seen the way you’ve been looking at the barmaid. How you’ve acted around her. I know what you’re thinking, I know you feel like your something ‘cause your young and you’re not home and you don’t give shit, but you start behaving. That man there, he owns this place. You don’t give the barmaid any kind of suggestive look or say anything inappropriate to her while he is in here or you will end up in some serious Bulgarian shit, and that is something you do not want to be in. You get what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The guys cool it after this. They are watched carefully by the bar owner. Natalie has become even more polite and distant — she takes orders and makes drinks and smiles icily. They talk to each other, Simon has a plethora of travel stories which get more bawdy as they both get drunker. They talk to the Australian guys, they get somewhat pissed at the ugly Bulgarian man who likes boys — around midnight he leaves the bar. Meanwhile Natalie, when not bartending, is spending time with the owner. One time he calls her over on his side. She slips across the opening in the bar and stands by him and he grabs her by the waist, whispers things in her ear with a dirty smile, sit her on his lap like a strange woman-child. She responds to all this with a polite, emotionless smile. Her eyes are black as coal.

The Sweedish guys from the hostel drop by for a short time. They spend most of it standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, discussing whether to stay or to leave. Finally they each buy a beer and sip it silently. Simon, by this time, is staring dreamily at Natalie again, Adrian attempts small talk with the Swedes. It turns out when football was over they went out for drinks at another bar, where they met American girls who left early, for another the bar. “We are looking for American pussy,” one of the Swedes says, smiling benignly. Then the American girls left, supposedly for another bar. Confused, the Swedes ran out after them, bar-hoped around town, and never found them. “This is the last bar. The American chicks are nowhere.” Adrian speaks a few understanding words on the unreliability of hot American girls. The Swedes finish their beers, nodding gravely, and head back to the hostel.

*

“Do you smoke?”

“No,” Adrian answers automatically. He has been so aware of his status as a non-smoker in this country, where it seems to cheapness of cigarettes makes even non-smokers smoke, just because.

Natalie’s eyes glow intensely, forcing him to reconsider, to weigh her words. She came suddenly to them, intently, straight from the groping hands of the bar owner — as if sent by him — who looks at them, now, with an amused smile.

“Well,” adds Simon. “We don’t smoke cigarettes. But we smoke, you know… Other things.”

Natalie nods seriously.

“Follow me,” she says.

She leads them out of the bar through the back door, where there is a kind of terrace overlooking the valley. The night is balmy and illuminated by the full moon, which filters everything — the terrace, the valley, Natalie’s olive skin — in an otherworldly, silver hue.

Natalie produces a fat little joint, which she sticks into her mouth and lights, sucking delicately. Thick, luminescent smoke sifts out of her mouth and the lit tip of the joint, pulsating red hot with every intoxicating inhalation, swirls around her face, shrouding her features like a ghost lost in mist, memories. The peppery smoke drifts in long tendrils and clears up, dissipating clouds through which the joint is passed carefully, like a holy torch through some stormy chasm. Some bond wrought, some youthful ritual completed, some tentative feelings of communal belonging cemented in the herbal air — like sex, but deeper, harder even to grasp in its intricate potentiality —, some signals to the gods lie in these fumy blooms blown at the clear night sky, and the Gods answer the summons and come to dwell there, among them now.

Implied

Your back
Faces me
Like the backs of chairs
In a schoolroom

I wait
(Not wanting to ask)
For your attention
I appreciate your discretion
Obviously
But
You could have worked on subtlety

I wanted—
But you must know
The feelings
You provoke

Your back faces me
Like a blank wall
I know my departing shadow
Won't make an impact

These Bones

These bones lie still

in graves dug out of

Pity.

The bones they shake

in shallow holes

meant to cover up

Dirty secrets

They shutter and break

Bones made of brittle

My bones lie still

in shallow graves

meant for another

These bones

they lie on solid ground

as the earth crumbles

swallowing them whole.

To Auden

I sit upon the doorstep
of this intermittent age:
an eye for every shimmering light,
a hand in every page;
and cannot help but notice
my own body wearing thin
with the entropy of ages
like a river on my skin.

I know I am eroding--
it's a fact that I can tell
like every kindergarten schoolchild
who has heard the churchs' knell:

it doesn't matter that there's heaven
or that Jesus never burned--
the death that he's been teaching
will undoubtably return.

We're chipping at a mountain
but we're been keeping all the stones
and putting them in pockets
so as to weigh down every bone:

if life is like an airwave
we cannot help but transmit,
then the body is its tower
and I cannot help but sit.

The Bus to Sofia, Part 2

Bear with me, this piece is going to be longer than initially planned.

There’s only one restaurant worth eating at in Veliko Tarnovo, the hostel guy explained carefully to Adrian, and it is called Pectopaht. He wrote it down carefully on the map of the city. “That means restaurant. This restaurant has a balcony where you can see the valley, but you won’t eat there — the tables are always full. You will eat on the terrace at the front. That’s how you will recognize the restaurant, it has a terrace at the front and the wall is yellow. The food is the best.”

As Adrian plunges into a plate of grilled eggplant with nuts, baked potatoes, and large meatballs stuffed with cheese and pickles, all washed down by Zagorka beer, he can’t help but agree with the hostel guy: this food is, indeed, the best.

Adrian stares at the restaurant’s waitresses, an attraction unto itself, as he enjoys his food. The waitresses, all alike, are beautiful in an Eastern-European, extremely done-up way: hair flattened and styled with precision; nails long, perfectly shaped, painted with care; makeup applied thickly on the entire face, retouched often. They send flashy, faux-happy smiles to the majority of male customers. They all wear short, tight black dresses and constantly mix up their orders.

Good food and beautiful women, thinks Adrian, this country is indeed the best. Except maybe for the transportation system.

From what he can tell most of the restaurant’s clientele is local. There is a strange looking man at the table next to his, however, who is clearly foreign. His English is as poor as his waitresses’, but he tries to communicate with her in good humour, laughing a thick, loud laughter very often. Overdone, thinks Adrian. The foreign man stares at the ass of his waitress as she walks away, he is cockeyed, chuckling. A pervert’s laughter.

Soon the waitress returns with an appetizer, some kind of white soup, and clearly she has made a mistake in the order because the foreign man gets very angry at her. He starts to scream, first in English, then in what is most certainly German, and then he spits. His face becomes a dark, veiny crimson. The waitress runs away meekly with the soup, comes back a few minutes later with a salad. The German man has calmed down, but he doesn’t look at the waitress when she brings him the plate. He stares at her ass again when she walks away, and then eats his salad, indifferent, every once and while sipping some kind of honey-coloured alcoholic beverage from a tiny glass.

*

Stuffed with the underpriced, delicious Bulgarian food and pistachio ice-cream grabbed on the way back, Adrian has returned to the hostel. He heads for his dorm to relax for a while, perhaps make plans for the rest of the evening. Four tall, very blond guys are sitting in the lounge, gawking at the football playing on TV. Adrian exchanges a nonchalant “Hey!” with them.

In the dorm Adrian comes face to face with a tall, bearded man folding some clothes on the top bunk of his bed.

“Hey!”

“Allo!”

The man brings out his hand for Adrian to shake.

“Tu parles-tu français?”

“Oui. You must be the other Canadian guy.”

“Yes. Tu viens-tu du Québec?”

“Ummm… Oui!”

“OK. Mais tu parles Anglais?”

“Oui, mais je parle français aussi… pas très bien, mais…”

“OK. I speak English too, but not very well either,” he says with his heavy Québecois accent, and then laughs heartily. “I come from Chicoutimi, that’s why. My name is Simon.” He says his name the French way, without pronouncing the n.

“I’m Adrian. I come from Montreal.”

They shake hands.

“Nice to meet you, Adrian.”

Adrian turns to his own bunk and starts to pull out some stuff from his backpack, takes out his toothbrush, towel, shuffles some clothes around.

“So, how long have you been here?” Simon asks.

“Well I just arrived in Veliko Tarnovo today. I’ve been in the Balkans for five days now.”

“Just… going around?”

“Yeah, just visiting places. I plan on visiting the Balkans and then heading north into Eastern Europe. Hungary, Prague…”

“That’s really good. They are beautiful places."

“You’ve been there already?”

“Yes. I was there a couple of months ago. We’re doing the contrary. I started travelling in Russia and made my way down into Ukraine and Poland, Slovakia, République Czech, Austria, Hungary…”

“Wow! You’ve been everywhere!” They laugh. “I feel like a wuss, now. My trip is only five weeks long! How long have you been away now?”

“Almost five months!”

“Wow! That’s awesome. Don’t you miss home?”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Well, same thing for me!”

They laugh again. Simon has been sitting on the floor, taking off some sturdy hiking boots and replacing them with sandals.

“Well,” he says. “I’m really hungry and I didn’t have supper. I’m going to the Pectopaht. Do you want to come with me?”

“Well, I’ve actually just gotten back from the restaurant—"

He studies his current prospects for the evening: reading some Hemingway and hitting the sack early, watching football with those Sweedish guys and hitting the sack early, exploring the Veliko Tarnovo nightlife alone, coming back early and hitting the sack. Simon is friendly, he’s an experienced backpacker, probably has tons of tips and tricks.

“— but I’ll come and keep you company if you don't mind.”

*

The strange German man, of course, is no longer seated at the restaurant when Adrian and Simon get there. The waitresses are still all gorgeous, but strangely Adrian doesn’t recognize any of them. It’s as if they’ve had a change of shift.

He and Simon throw appreciative looks at the girls while perusing their menus. Adrian, having eaten already, orders only a beer. Simon orders an all Bulgarian meal: Tarator (a kind of yoghurt soup with cucumbers, garlic, and dill — Adrian recognizes it as the soup the German man sent back), Shopska salad (similar to Greek salad, but with softer, grated cheese), and Pulnena piperka (green pepper stuffed with spiced, minced meat and rice) — topped off with a glass of rakia, Bulgarian brandy.

Over the meal the Canadian backpackers discuss their travels, their aspirations, their loves, lives, and losses. Simon works as a gym teacher in Chicoutimi, but his mind has always been wandering. He has taken a year off to travel Europe, get off the beaten track, meet new people, experience things he couldn’t anywhere else. His girlfriend left him that winter — he feels elated and free. He talks about a Spanish girl he slept with in Prague (“It was the most intense experience of my life. You know, I’d only known her for a few hours, but we were so connected. We spent three complete days together in the most beautiful city, it was incredible. We did not even speak the same language, but it was like I’d known her all my life. We had so much sex. I didn’t know I could have so much sex. J’avais la libido dans l’tapis, you know!?”).

Adrian starts to open up to this friendly Québecois. He talks about school, about the undergraduate degree in political science he knows he’ll never finish, about his girlfriend back home (“I know I love her, I really do, but it’s tough… Knowing she’s over there, and I’m here. What happens if a hot girl starts flirting with me? What am I gonna do? Say no? No thanks, I have a girlfriend waiting for me back in Montreal. You know what I mean? I’m conflicted. It’s like everything is on a different planet over here, everything’s in a different time zone. Well, I mean, we are in a different time zone, but it’s like, deeper than that.”)

“How old are you?” Simon asks.

“Twenty one.”

Simon flashes him a knowing smile between two mouthfuls. He orders another beer for Adrian and a refill of rakia for himself.

“I’m twenty-nine. That means we’re opposites. You’re just starting to be twenty, and I’m almost done. The party’s almost over for me. You know, all those French songs. Charles Aznavour, Serge Regiani, and all those singers?”

“Not really…”

Simon starts singing a few lyrics under his breath, looking Adrian straight in the eye: Hier encore, j’avais vingt ans, je caressais le temps… La bohême, ça voulait dire, avoir vingt ans… Votre fille a vingt ans, que le temps passe vite… Qu’avons nous fait, au fil du temps, de nos vingt ans, de nos vingt ans?... La femme qui est dans mon lit n’a plus vingt ans depuis longtemps…

“All those songs just talk about one thing,” he continues. “They say that being twenty is the best thing in the world, and it goes by so fast. You can never have it again when it’s gone.”

“I know that…”

“No! You think you know. You know what I’m saying, but you don’t feel it yet. I would give anything to be twenty-one again. You’re very lucky to be here, travelling, when you’re twenty-one. And about your girlfriend, ben, j’ai rien qu’une affaire à dire: What happens in Bulgaria stays in Bulgaria!” Simon shouts this and drains his glass of Rakia, calls for a another emphatically, grazing the waitresses’ ass. He continues: “The backpackers in Europe, especially here in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, it’s like underground, you know? It’s like a, like a communauté secrète. Everyone knows everyone, you make friends like that and then the next day they’re gone but it doesn’t matter — it doesn’t mean what you had with them was, you know… it was deep…”

“It wasn’t superficial?”

“Right. It’s real, you know? It’s the real deal. You talk about real stuff, about life. Like this, what we’re doing now —“ He points to the Pectopaht, the town around them (it has started to grow dark, now, the terrace is filled and noisy, the waitresses are as beautiful as ever, the street beyond is filling up with scantily dressed, high heeled women). “I would never talk like this to anyone I’ve just met in Chicoutimi.”

“I felt it the moment I entered the first hostel I slept in,” remarks Adrian, suddenly feeling a burst of appreciation for everything around him. He understands, somehow, what Simon is getting to. He is immersed in waves of delightful exhilaration, of frightful excitement: he feels in every fiber of his being his exact location on the planet, his displacement from his home and his existence here, in this moment, as if by magic, on the terrace of a crowded restaurant in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. He finishes his beer in one swig, barely tasting it. “It’s like you share something with all the other people who are travelling with you, in other places, at the same time. A great movement in which you take part, like a migration. A mass wandering.”

Simon looks at him, eyes sparkling. “It’s strange because we come from the same place — at least, for people here, for Europeans, we come from the same place — and yet we are so different. But right now, I understand you completely, and you understand me. You are like my brother.”

Self-Admiration

I want you to show me around the house you speak of that's painted a bright red and bordered in white. I want you to show me how to open the windows and stare at the trees in the front yard. I want you to lead me to where you keep the rope so I can "tie up the hammock". Between two trees, I'll lay and watch the sun awkwardly inch away from my view. I'm watching you, sun.
I think it's time we made a little something to eat. I cut myself "accidently" to prove my "vulnerability". I want your trust.

(Ahem.
"Testing. Testing. Is this thing on?")

I want you to tell me where that little village that you keep mentionning is and if there is a lake to bury you in when we get there. I like playing with shovels and matches and smoking cigarettes, flicking my ashes into my reflection in a body of water.
And if you float, my dear, please know that I will find a way to weigh you down.
Because the moonlight only shines a certain way
and I love the way I look when the light shines on the ripples in my reflection.

I used to see a lot of me in you,
but I realized that,
for the good of the world,
I must be contained in one body.

Paper thin. Paper weight. Paper thin. Paper weight.


(I'm gone for two weeks! So enjoy this piece that I've been working on for a bit.)

As if (alternate title Not Crack)

I crave your ears
I crave your silence
The sounds of my words
Blathering on
As if you all care

I crave your voices
I crave your reaction
Those vibrations in my direction
Validation or token of some affection
As if you all care

I crave your eyes
I crave the attention
Your gaze means I’m not for the moment
Invisible, I’m temporarily important
As if you all care

I crave your skin
I crave the connection
Your touch confirms my existence
Something more than thoughts and talk
As if you all care

21

--Here's hoping
my pen has enough ink /
its holy dance
a hostile hospitality.

Inarticulate plastic
Consumer consumed good /
pure life pure laine
black eyes new black.

O's, X's & mostly X's

Electric chairs
tasers
Computer chairs
razors
Treadmills
paper
Leather
vapour

Gonna' die
gonna' die
All gonna' die
into vapour.
Cop cars on fire
all to witness destruction.

All in good fun--

Medusa Syndrome

The spelunker lives in a cave even when he makes his gallant exit from the slits of the earth, like a gentleman’s hand sliding back out from underneath silken lingerie strips clinging to the deep mysteries of womanhood, and he does so with just as much reluctance. He sees ceilings where there aren’t any and walks as though each step forward might wedge his ribcage so tight he might not be able to escape. If he finds himself on the streets in between moments inside sinkholes and solutional fractures, his exploratory lilt makes the stranger-pedestrians behind him push past while pressing cell phones close to their ears, saying, “Some asshole’s walking like he owns the place”. He then slides to the sidelines to stand under an awning, squeezed between assorted fruit stands outside cheap grocery stores, and calls his partner to pick him up with the excuse that he misses her and wants to talk to her about the new blind fish he found during his last expedition when really he can’t even remember its Latin name. As she arrives, and in the flood of solar radiation that he suddenly can’t help but let soak into his skin in an unabashed rush, he runs to the waiting, muscled arms of his lover and kisses her sun-flecked cheeks as if to douse her freckles with his saliva to extinguish the proof of light’s presence. Then she buys the avocados and bananas for snacks from the stand he stood beside and takes him back home, letting him peel them himself, but feeding him tiny bites between fond smiles as though he were her toddler. Then she runs her nails down his chest and climbs onto him, clamping her knees around his hips, pushing him against the back of his chair until he can’t move, because she knows he can’t resist being pinned. Usually she leaves him with that tease until later that night while she goes for drinks. He’ll stay, cowering away in their basement apartment where the curtains are always drawn to soak the walls in a bruised maroon expenditure. There he fondles bits of excavated rocks he brings back, which he lays on top of the coverlet and his thick pale-hair-swathed belly as he sprawls on their bed while she’s out so that he can pretend that all these different segments of the earth are growing on him in a claustrophilic way. He sometimes imagines he’d been bored into stone, carved and sculpted into an inescapable exoskeleton to clutch him that would give him a permanent position to be in and never change from. The spelunker secretly wishes he had never been born, simply because he would have preferred an eternal fetal existence where a warm womb’s flesh pressed in on him from all sides and didn’t lock quite so solidly lethal as stone did around him. He mourns that he can never go deep enough in any underground fissure to find that fetal fold within the flush of a mother that held him so completely. Not even the arms of his lover can squeeze the same, despite her obsession with weight training, nor do her blindfolds, handcuffs, or bondage knots allow for his contention, although he tells her it’s perfect because he knows she hates when she isn’t the best at things. And so the spelunker finds himself sinking again and again into the ground instead of where he wants to be in hopes that this time he’ll reach that Mecca of spelunking. He doesn’t stop moving through the crevices until his ribs are bent inwards into his vital organs by sedimentary rock and limestone. Every time he finds this grimace of life frowning its set and immovable mouth at him, he wonders if he should stay there, embraced nearly as close and tight as he needs and craves in every moment of human contact that’s just never good enough, or if he should call for help and unsatisfactory rescue. He always thinks about his collarbones, which are ringed with cracks from his cries for escape, and his heart that is so fat with scar tissue from being torn too often away from its mantled cavity, and wonders if he’ll ever be brave enough to stay. But when he feels that sinking crush of the earth squeezing him like a blemish out of an oil bumped complexion, he’ll hear the death-groping-gasp of his own hyperventilation and won’t be able to stand that the last thing his senses will perceive is that of his own bodily sounds which will cling forever to his corpse as he rots in cloistered cavern air, his flesh sagging and sticking against the rocks, and then he screams an echoic scream while breaking his own collarbones just to get out of the chthonic womb that has been contaminated by his terrestrial condition.

The Bus to Sofia, Part 1

A child was sick on the seat in front of him between the second and third pee stop. The dizzying smell of vomit and cleaning agent lingers in the overheated air of the bus, which is supposed to have AC in working condition, but clearly does not. Adrian, with his headphones spilling loud music into his ears and The Collected Stories of Ernest Hemingway propped up on his lap, is trying to ignore it all — the shifting of passengers getting in and out of the bus when it lurches to a stop in the middle of nowhere every twenty minutes, the Bulgarian radio channels with their loud military marches and terrible European pop music, the human smells, and the inhuman, stagnant heat.

Bulgarians refuse to open windows because the draft can bring in evil spirits and make you sick.

According to the woman who sold Adrian his bus ticket in broken English, the trip to Veliko Tarnovo is supposed to take about three hours. Four hours after having left Sofia, Adrian is still in the bus, left trying to decipher the road signs in Cyrillic for any hint of his destination. The bus only seems to stop on countryside roads and tiny villages, or suburban bus stations that look like abandoned communist checkpoints. Once again, the clerk at the Sofia bus station, whose reliability Adrian is now starting to doubt, assured him that the bus would stop in the center of Veliko Tarnovo, near the fortress which is the city’s main historical attraction.

The bus drops off the Bulgarian version of a highway and stops beside yet another cement block bus station. Adrian tries to read the large block letters above the station, but he is stalled by the Rs and Ps and Bs that must be converted into other letters, and more symbols he does not understand. There are three words, however, and one of them is only three letters long, so he is fairly sure that he hasn’t arrived at his destination yet. The bus driver shouts something muffled and runs out of the bus. Another pee break. Soon most of the other passengers also get out of the bus, and Adrian stands among them, drinking from a bottle of water, as the others suck on cigarettes, drink coke, and munch on exotically flavoured chips (prawn cocktail and barbecue chicken figure prominently).

Soon the driver returns and a silent queue forms, the passengers board the bus again. Before the bus starts off an employee from the station comes in and counts the passengers quickly. He frowns, counts again, says something to the driver. Adrian observes all this and feels something hard suddenly erupt in the pit of his stomach. The employee then says something loud enough for everyone to hear, and all the other passengers start fumbling in their pockets and bags for their bus tickets. The employee walks down the aisle and checks all the tickets. Adrian pulls out his own ticket for Veliko Tarnovo. His seat is near the back of the bus and he has to wait, with a growing sense of dread, as the employee slowly scans every ticket. He knows already, somehow, that he is faulty. Yet, this cannot be Veliko Tarnovo: the writing on his ticket doesn’t match the writing on the bus station. Perhaps they already passed Velicko Tarnovo? He knows he should’ve asked someone for help hours ago — but how, when no one seems to speak English in this country?

Finally the employee reaches Adrian and takes his ticket with a stern face. He peers at the piece of paper, anger suddenly flashing in his eyes, and speaks a few words in Bulgarian, viciously, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“I don’t speak Bulgarian,” Adrian says back. After a week in the Balkans, it has become an automatic reply. “Do you speak English?”

The employee’s face lightens slightly. He almost smiles as he turns around and shouts something at everyone else in the bus.

“Where you going?” He asks, looking at Adrian again.

“Veliko Tarnovo."

The employee turns around again and shouts something to the driver, who calls back in exasperation. Heat blooms up from Adrian neck, he feels himself blushing. The employee turns back to him and screams: “This is Velicko Tarnovo! Come.”

Adrian grabs his stuff and follows the employee out of the bus. All the other passengers look at him, laughing and seemingly commenting on his mistake. The driver calls something after him, which of course he does not understand. Outside the bus station employee opens the luggage compartment Adrian points at and helps him remove his large backpack. The bus starts off quickly and Adrian follows the employee into the bus station.

*

The hostel is a very large stone building with whitewashed walls. A young man who works at the hostel came to pick Adrian up at the bus station after he called the number he’d been given in Sofia. He didn’t mention his bus blunder to the hostel guy, who is now showing him around the various terraces outside, his dorm, the bathrooms, kitchen. Beside the counter at the entrance, there’s a small fridge filled with beer and soda bottles.

“This is the bar,” the hostel guy tells him. “You can take whatever you want. Coke, beer, whatever. Just write your name on this line and mark what you take beside it. How many bottles. Everything is two levas. You pay at the end.”

This is one of the best hostels Adrian has seen: the common room has a large TV, constantly turned on to football, the dorm is large and luminous, with clean, wooden bunks, there are plenty of bathrooms and they all have real showers (as opposed to a shower head connected to the sink and a hole in the floor beside the toilet, like most places).

The hostel guy sits at the counter, where Adrian left his backpack when he came in, and starts to fill out some paperwork. Adrian hands him his passport.

“Ah, Canadian! There’s another Canadian staying here. He’s in your dorm.”

Once everything is settled, Adrian deposits his bag in the dorm. He chooses one of the bottom bunks, on a whim. He still doesn’t quite understand why some people have specific preferences about which bunk to choose. It must be about experience: if something sketchy happens to you when you sleep on either the top bunk or bottom bunk, you never want to sleep there again.

As he opens his bag and takes out some of his stuff, two pretty girls come in. They are chatting away in a breezily-accented English. Australian.

“Hey.”

“Hey!”

“You just got here?”

“Yeah… You’ve been here for a while?”

“No, we got here yesterday.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” her friend adds. “Back to Sofia, by the morning bus.”

“No partying for us tonight,” the first one continues. “We’ve got to get up bright and early tomorrow morning.”

The girls giggle.

“So it’s a good place to party, then?” Adrian asks.

“Yeah. The bars are great. You have to go on that main street, where the restaurant is, but closer to here. What’s that place we went to last night called, Tish?”

“Oh! Ummm… Borro something something. Anyway, it’s like, in a basement or whatever. You can’t miss it.”

“They’ve got terrible music, but the people are really friendly.”

“And drinks are really cheap.”

“It’s a university town the rest of the year, so they’ve got loads of bars and stuff.”

“Except now its quite dead, only tourists and the old people who stay all year.”

“It’s still a good place, though.”

“We met a bunch of American guys —”

“They were staying here but they left today.”

“— and there’s, like, an underground community of Aussies who live here during the summer.”

Adrian stares at them, incapacitated by their cheerfulness, their constant flow of talk, their good humoured beauty. He marvels at their tanned arms, their long, sun-bleached hair, the lithe bodies shown off by their short shorts and pale tank-tops.

They’ve stopped talking now. To break the awkward silence he turns to the subject of nationality, the heart or start of every backpacker’s conversation.

“So, you girls are Australian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you? American?”

“No. Canadian.”

Adrian figures they couldn’t tell because he doesn’t have a maple-leaf flag sewn on to his backpack.

“Oh! There’s another Canadian here.”

“Yeah, the hostel guy told me.”

“He’s real friendly! His name is like Simon or something. He’s got a cute accent.”

“Yeah, your English is better than his.”

“He’s probably Francophone,” offers Adrian as an explanation. “Anyway, I’m going to grab something to eat. I’m famished. You want to come with me?”

The Australians look at each other for a moment.

“No,” one of them answers. “I’m not too hungry.”

“Me neither.”

“We’ve got to pack—”

“—we leave early tomorrow morning.”

BLAM.

[This is a "just for fun" kind of post. But the last stanza looks like a gun and that makes me giggle. Teehee!]


My grandpa won the lottery
Yesterday,
Yesterday.
My grandpa won the lottery
And I inherit it today.

I don’t need no court procedures,
I don’t need no will,
The fastest way to get my cash
Is to grab my gun kill:

Shoot down all my siblings,
My cousins big and small,
‘Cause there’s no way I’m giving
Them guys anything at all.

I’d shoot my parents too,
But they’re already dead.
Ain’t got no aunties either,
Just my Uncle Ed.

And now my pistol’s smokin’,
The barrel spinnin’ hot.
Gramps, you’ve really won today.
This bullet’s
The last
I’ve
Got.

Abortion or Late Abortion or Delayed Abortion

I've given this
a lot of thought
and I think
you should.

Keep the baby...

(I've been reading up on serial killers and one of the most interesting ones in my opinion is Marybeth Tinning. She is being studied as the most extreme case of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy ever. The first time I read over the case records and the information I could find, this is immediately what came to mind. Read it from different perspectives and if you know of the stories of the doctors and child service workers, then read from theirs as well.)

Relation-ship (editing in process)

A ship it truly is, salt spray, wrecks and all
Never sure of your footing
Grab the rigging before you fall
The boat pitches and keels
As passion ebbs and rises again

You have the option
To jump ship and swim
Leaving me to sail on
But the seas are unforgiving
Wouldn’t you rather brave these storms together

To whom this may concern,

I laugh because of you, a smile is shed

Tears expired, screams muted

You changed me, fixed me

for that I am grateful, thankful

yet altogether hateful.