Roughing It In The Bush

This is experimenting in voice. The Rumi and the Szymborska are spilling out, and I don't know how it works. Help!

This is the morning,

this is the hunter,

this is the forest snow.

Walking behind you, I wonder why

we are the only species

with the capacity to ignore.

Were we birds

on the wing of some migratory path,

there would at least be salutation.

But for now I breathe quietly

and try to match

the rhythm of your feet.

You are looking for something

beyond my understanding,

so I don't focus on 

following the path

so much as the bootprints.

I begin with myself

step before step

and only the crows note my passage.

If you look behind

and find me gone

when you arrive,

it is because I finished before you

and took to flight

for other hunts.

The Dalai-lemma

I no longer lose any sleep over those who suffer.
I have come to terms with the world's impermanence.
If you truly want to know what it is to be awakened,
think of the chair you sit on today.

"24 seconds you'll be comfortable
24 minutes you'll shift
24 hours you'll start to feel pain
24 days the pain becomes excruciating
24 weeks you no longer have control of your limbs
24 years you deteriorate
240 years we are dust."

To bring vividly to the mind

[As requested by Andrea. I feel like it's stronger hearing it aloud than reading it off the page. But anyway, you tell me. Also I hate the way that blogger distorts the sound on videos...so sorry about the quality, it's not my fault...]

The moment of Realization
isn’t ever of a single particular realization –
people try to classify it, label it,
stick it in a really boring paragraph
in some overpriced psychology book
(or, like me, rant about it in a really boring poem)
where it is disregarded, undervalued
skipped over so you don’t think about it –
but whenever that moment of Realization comes,
it comes hard.
(That’s what she said.)

Kind of feels like you’re going through an anti-birth.
Pressing against mother’s womb,
banging with tiny purple hands begging to be let back in –
entirely disoriented
except for the deep down feeling that something’s wrong,
perverse, distorted, distended,
and you don’t know if there’s something wrong now,
or if there was something wrong before.
You reevaluate, reengineer, recalculate your view of reality
every second;
every time something happens,
it changes everything.
Every time you realize what you thought was untrue,
history is rewritten –
like in 1984
except Big Brother is that pained and pruney heart
and doublespeak is flirting.

The laptop is open at an angle
the one where the screen is always too dark or too light
and there’s nothing you can do about it.
You keep adjusting the slant, the brightness, the dimmer,
hoping to see right,
but you’re honestly just killing time
until you think of what it is online that you’d rather kill time with.
And meanwhile the screen bears the brunt of your boredom
and your obsession with an ideal
that you won’t even bother to define.

You’ve not been healthy for a long time
and you’re in a hole.
Remember that.
There’s nothing down here,
just like the refrigerator or the pantry
– junk and sweet artificial factory packed machine bred snacks –
and no matter how many times you open those cupboard doors
you’ve seen it all already and it bores you.
You can’t help but think about it in metaphorical terms,
relating what you see to your own state of being
because of course there’s meaning everywhere
– being an English major, I know that now –
especially when trying to find a sign for the direction of your love life.
The jaded cupboard doors open and close
with the familiar dull and empty clunk;
there's nothing for you there
but junk and the breaking of a self defined integrity.
You imagine yourself peeling plastic off an overly sweet and fat free cake,
that feeling of soon-to-set-in queasy.
Pointless to begin, you tell yourself,
looking at food and thinking of lovers,
but you don’t really believe it
because you’re starting to realize just how alone you are
and you’d rather begin futility than never have started anything at all.
That’s the way it works.
Because as you hit Realizations
and shed realities
from perceptive layer to layer

(talking about layers gets the taste of onions on my tongue and I always get thirsty
and need to take a water break)

you realize that you’re just too unique to conform
– especially not to the standard of relationships -
that conformity is stupid
that individuality is stupid.
You wish you could shake society by its blond shoulders and tell it to “Stop being so stupid! Ignorant! Insensitive!
So vain!
Society, stop looking at yourself in the mirror of the cosmos
you don’t exist there!
You just want to.”
And it goes ahead and overanalyzes the patterns and numbers anyway
to come up with answers that it doesn’t understand,
just to see the way it works.
The grand psychosomatic dissection.
Everything we do is to our minds,
probing the phallic rod of hard science
in cerebral gray matter to build the scar tissue,
make us uncaring, non-lonesome machines,
because if we’re kept busy enough we won’t notice
we’re all scientists
we’re all cyborgs
the amalgam of our fleshy existence
and who we see in the software of our mind.
We pretend we’re unaware of our growing inhibitions
when it comes to contact
that doesn’t have walls and likes and commenting
because then we can’t live in a society that promotes “company”
as the number one commodity –
we push into small virtual worlds
abstracting ourselves
like money, the concept of value,
the assigned meaning that only exists in thought
that used to exist in accountants’ books
but now stores in zeros and ones in memory banks,
coats six billion human lives
with an economical proclamation of the importance of numbers
and people in relation to them.
A network of theoretical concepts.
Somehow it exists.
You try not to think about how,
how an entire world was raised on such intangible mental fences,
but figure an educated guess
that blaming the Internet sounds like a credible claim.

You can’t help but think of the Internet spreading like Ouranos
as a blanket over Gaia
tucking itself in at the edges of humanity
blurring the lines of what is accomplished in reality
and what feels like it’s been accomplished
staring at the loading bar of Firefox webpages.

On that line of thought, you feel you ought to complain
about how Facebook never gives enough notifications,
and you don’t know how you feel about the fact that
you find yourself getting way too excited
upon seeing a number in a little red box
spring from the tiny planet Earth icon.
You have to stop from clicking right away sometimes
just to prove that this digital life hasn’t consumed you,
that you still exist
as a separate entity from your profile picture.
It isn’t worth bothering over though;
you’ve been brought up to feel that waiting makes you itch,
you just want to read what that notification says
which invariably will be to let you know
so-and-so has commented on so-and-so’s photo album
that you commented on three months ago.
You feel empty and you say you don’t know why
which is ridiculous because it’s clearly so obvious.
(Refer to the end of this poem,
if your neurons are so clogged with
Facebook quizzes
YouTube videos, overly furious YouTube comments,
Snorgtees, TeeFury, Threadless, Zazzle,
cyanide and happiness, lolcats, DeviantArt,
The Oatmeal, The Onion, xkcd,
FML, MLIA, MDT,
Vevo, MegaVideo, Memebase,
Troll Physics, Twitter, College Humour,
Hotmail, Gmail, Torrentz, Demonoid,
Chatroulette, Seshroulette, Redtube,
Post Secret, Failblog, Pirate Bay,
Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Wimp,
World of Warcraft, Wikipedia,
eBay, Craig’s List, Amazon.ca,
even MySpace [though that was so 2006]:
refer to the end of this poem
if your neurons are so clogged with all of those
that you don’t know what the answer is
or even what the question was to begin with.)

Still, you can’t help but look through Facebook
in pursuit of elusive comfort
always forgetting to realize that Facebook friends aren’t real people
just good intentions.

So much time combing msn lists
scanning Skype and Adium
for names to hit a chord of interest
to speak
to grow friendship
to love from a distance
safely between typos
from tangled fingertips
swimming across a keyboard
through the waving water sways
radiating from the smoking ends
of tight rolled joints.
Maybe drugs are just a way of finding interest again
in this world of jaded sculptures
static preserved moments
that had meaning once
before artists tried to capture feelings
and got it all wrong.

Sometimes you don’t know why
people like artists
or believe in their profundity,
they’re less sane that anyone you know
– especially goddamned writers -
and the fact that they define the world
through the abstraction that is culture
is unnerving.

That doesn’t stop you putting your iTunes on shuffle
in a 21st century last ditch effort for fate’s intervention –
for Apple to find you that one song you need
but are too lazy to really put your aural finger on.
You know there’s something you want to listen to.
You know it would take that edge away
that smarts and burns like that slice of pseudo-cake
if you get a corner piece
when there’s too much icing
and your stomach tightens in biological protest
reminding you that what you’re consuming isn’t food.
Leaving you paranoid with glossy sugar crisp lips,
your iTunes shuffles
giving you songs that make you wonder
why you have so much crap in your library
trying to remember where you got it
vowing to delete the useless albums –
but never getting around to it
just like that book you were going to write
and that letter you were going to send
and that phone call you were going to make.
You’ll do it all after the song on your playlist is done
but you need to let it reach the end
so it can add to the play count.

Sit at home alone
beside outlets for easy plug access
to charge phones and iPods and laptops
with screens that never hit a good and proper angle.
Maybe you can charge your brain one day
and eliminate the need for coffee
that is overpriced and undercaffeinated.
Have this thought meander
while feeling lost and aimless
in the Ambien zombie land of limbo.
Look up random directions on Google Maps,
zoom for street names, drag for street view.
How navigation used to work is beyond you,
without global positioning precision
the sense of self dissolves
in a Wicked Witch of the West puddle
melting into a panicked pancake batter
of general confusion.

You don’t fit into this modern world
because you are a product of it

and that realization makes you a little bit crazy
because you know that you’re just you
and that the chances of finding another person that sees the world with your same “talk-about-layers-and-get-onion-taste-in-your-mouth” way of thinking is on the few-and-far-between side.
So you get used to loneliness
it becomes yet another thing
to desensitize yourself to.

In two thousand ten
two's a crowd.

Superluminal (Version III)

[A redo of my first HeartRape post ever! Original found here.]



II.
It comforts her to say that her life remains unchanged. She wakes on her side of the bed, showers, dresses, eats, arrives at work at the punctual hour. She finds time passes no slower than before. When she arrives at her cubicle she is greeted by her neighbour with the customary grunt; at the lunch table her coworkers speak the same mundane babble without noticing a profound change in her, and so that must mean that there is no profound change to be noticed. Even her fingers are unaware of turmoil, flitting across the touch screen with as much assuredness as the week before, like pistons on a train, propelling her forward. When she returns home, it is as still and empty as when she left it. That these things persist without alteration is proof that past events are no great harm done in the grand scheme of things. The past can be put in the past so long as one slogs forward.

I.
The table was glass and she noticed the flecks of grease across its surface, dried now into small opaque stars in a translucent sky, flung from the mouth of a famished god, starch worm wriggling into a puckered worm hole. She saw also the smears and, looking closer, the minute lines drawn by the ridges of his finger pads, and the concluding whorl. And these were like spinning galaxies leaving trails behind them of their unique existence. And even closer on a microcosmic scale she saw the globules of oil, intermittent deposits through time, sticky and insoluble. And as she stared down at the bottomless glass he took her hand. She pulled away.
“That’s a really long time,” she said.
“I know.”
He glanced down and they gazed into the universe together. They perceived the timeline of a thousand shared meals and a thousand wax drippings from a thousand lit candles, their light overwhelmed by a unified gust, and they saw in the dark of space some remnant flickering until the last flame reflected in their eyes was snuffed out by darkness. He gripped a little harder.
“The irony,” he said, “is that at the same time, it’ll only be five years…”
“For you,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And what am I supposed to do?”
He huffed his chest. Contemplated a spaghetti stain.
“Whatever you want to do, I guess.”



“Then I’ll wait for you.”
“You can’t. You’ll be waiting your whole life – for nothing. It’s impossible.”


“But if you can travel forward through time, can’t you go back?”
“It’s not the same.”



“It’s not so easy.”

VII.
She turns her back to his side of the bed, certain she feels his warm shadow there.

III.
The colony suffers a minor power surge. Artificial gravity offline. She sits above her armchair, legs gently brushing the fabric. She is awash in white light. Watches the news:
“‘We can assure you that this is nothing more than a minor disturbance, caused by a small solar flare, not a warhead—this is not an attack.’”
The framed photograph glides through the air like a mote in suspension. His plump smile turns to the screen. In uniform, he salutes the President. She stares with moist apprehension.

IV.
She has decided to take up knitting. She buys a holo-tutor, scours an antique store for the needles. Cannot find yarn.
“Knitting is an archaic craft,” states the holo-tutor, “sustained by a few devoted hobbyists on and around the globe. However, knitting circles are more commonly found planetside, where the craft possesses deep roots in some traditional Terrestial cultures.”
The needles themselves are ancient. She traces with her eyes the dark brown warbling rings of the wood, the stretch marks of time. This tree was alive, once. It seems so prehistoric.
“A novice may find it difficult to procure yarn at an affordable price, particularly in the colonies, due to high exportation costs. However, yarn can be salvaged by unravelling knit sweaters.”

V.
She stirs pasta in a pot, attempting to break its sticky bonds. It becomes a heavy, entangled mass, a ball of yarn with a dozen loose ends. There is too much starch in the water, viscous and grey. She tells herself that she might as well cook the whole pack, no sense in leaving just a few strands behind, save herself from cooking again later, what if she wants another plate, might as well make extra, just in case…
As she stirs the clock pauses a moment, timid. It quickly steps into the next minute.
“Is someone there?”
A warm, familiar smell. She hears footsteps approach from behind.
“Cooking the pasta wrong.” A rumbling laugh, a deep breath. “Same as always…”

VIII.
She finds, abandoned at the back of the closet, a man’s sweater.

IX.
She unravels.

XI.
“Want to talk to her, Tony? Don’t you have something to say?” – a woman’s voice, garbled somewhere between Iowa and Lagrange Point 3, by a surveillance satellite, perhaps. She hears shuffling as the phone is brusquely shoved into Tony’s hand, clattering against the newest handheld gaming device. She hears the tinny music, the rush of vehicles through space, chasing stars.
“Thank you, Aunt Marla.”
Pew pew pew.
(“For what?” )
“For the birthday card.”
“Oh, you’re welcome Tony. Thirteen is a big year, you know.”
“Mmhmm.”
Shuffling static. The techno-beat of space fades.
“You should really come down sometime, the weather’s great.”
She eyes the unlocked door.
“I’d love to,” she says, “But I’d have no one to watch the house. Who knows what kind of people might break in…”

VI.
“You look different.”
“I’m older.”
“But still the same…”
She appraises him. A little tattered, a little softer around the edges. She supposes she is too. Too much pasta.
“You said this would be impossible.”
“It was. Back then.”
“And now?”
“It’s still impossible, now. But not in the future. I’m…from the future.”
He shifts his eyes. His smile is grim.
“But your ship hasn’t arrived yet. You said that would take my entire lifetime.”
“Time dilation is a tricky thing…”
X.
She finishes knitting the scarf. Or rather, knits it to its logical end. The yarn ran out. That seemingly endless thread…It had surprised her to discover that the sweater was made of one continuous line, looping over and back and under itself. Taking form.

IX.
She unravels.

XIV.
She opens a package and finds a tiny, potted cactus. It’s from Tony. He’s roadtripping across the country with son.
“C. Gigantea from what was once Arizona State. It takes 75 years to grow a side arm.”
It is a small and prickly nugget. It tears through the tissue paper.

XII.
Maybe he was a figment of her imagination.
She sits in her armchair, needles in hand, watching the dusty couch, its indented cushion. Maybe it is the phantasm of her own weight she sees. Or maybe it is like a ripple in the water. Maybe in another time, he is sitting there, and she sees only the frozen reverberation of his existence, like pausing on a single frame of film. Maybe he moves too quickly to be perceived – the Wink of an Eye.

XIII.
At her retirement they give her a watch and a cake. A fruit cake. She notices for the first time that their faces are different, and yet the coworkers in her department have remained the same age: fresh-faced graduates, faces so plump that the strain does not show around their smiles. Retirement, they muse, must be…awesome.
They pat her on the shoulder or back and she feels like a statue, groped and greased over thousands of years by thousands of hands.
“Such a nice lady,” they sigh, and take pictures.

XV.
She sits in her armchair, unravelling. The needles lie on the table and yet she feels them in her fingers. On the finger a ring: it shimmers dully like a star behind a cloud, traveling across the sky. A star that has lived a million years. Maybe it is dead, and we see only the dying burst. Beside the needles rests the framed photograph, fading in the sunlight.
The television screen blinks its eye, searches for her face.
“An incoming transmission,” it coughs.
She nods, stiffly, then hears a shuffling static, an image warps into place.
“Hello...is this...Marla...?”
A living photograph.
“It is.”

Bristol6

Do you remember, November,

the chills we caught

when the days grew short?

Your cold-kissed cheeks

blushed raw —

your hard numb knuckles

which I longed to

suck on

and feel soften in the moist warmth of

my mouth.

We watched the silver-haloed moon

sail through threaded clouds,

behind the lacework of bare, brittle branches.

You said it looked lovely.

(Oh! The things you say

my sweet November!)

I found it rather dreary.

When I finally extended my hand

to take yours,

my fingers grasped only icy night —

and no November.

You were gone, already.

Praying/Preying. (possible Stan Holiday and The Sunshine Six song)

Give me what your body tells me I can have.
Give me what your speech betrays and neglects.
Stranger, Stranger, on my face,
Heed my warning, cry en garde.
(Stay the fuck away.)
We take on decisions, we take off our clothes,
We take on personas, we get off.

I don't need a reason to cast you aside.
You don't need a reason to leave either.

The space in between you and I tonight
subsides when we collide
violently, passionately.
Flesh upon flesh, we are one, again and again.

but I'd hate to be you right now.

Frost

The streets are cold and empty,

as I pass by a horde

of shuffling people

who mumble grievances

A couple, speaks to each other

without hearing the other

The air is crisp

My hands, cold

find refuge in pockets full of lint

and a forgotten candy

escaped from it’s wrapper

A homeless man shivers

while the rich ignore

He, underfed

caresses his dogs

who fed not an hour ago

I give him change,

nothing substantial

He might buy food

or drink it away,

at least he’ll be warm,

if only for a minute.

Bristol5

That's when it started raining

on our used dishes,

strewn about on gritty counters —

numbing dribbles of November drizzle

at first,

then hard pellets of hail

that shattered our charity-bought crockery.

We were clever, then —

read books,

studied words and symbols

(they would eventually tells us to turn our backs on these and find real jobs) —

but this, we failed to comprehend.

They offered no other explanation

than empty upturned pockets.

The Second Apple

So after First Adam left
and Eve went with him
they tried again

but this time they brought them
to the centre of the garden
and they showed them
the Tree of Knowledge
and said go for it
no seriously
we don't mind

and wouldn't you know it--
it worked
and no one left

So things are okay up there now
Second Eve does the garden and
Second Adam just walks everywhere
like he's forgotten to call some
long-forgotten relative
they're pretty happy
as far as these things go
though sometimes they dream about
the taste of apples or
the breath of another
on each other's cheek

but mostly it's sunsets in lawn chairs
by the garden on the hill
and the feeling of the company of a world
without neighbours    to yell at
or dogs   to let out
or dishes    to break

and it's pretty good
let me tell you so far
it's pretty good

Untitled #?

This world of guilty pleasures
referring back to the same old images
which all mean nothing
It seems I should write about
poor little pigeons
squirrels
cats
and roadkill
Guts of belly
and blood soaked fur
cracked skulls
on the curb side
the important
real stuff
no more serial criticism
the bullshit will rot hot
the rhetoric to be debatable
datable
thus,
therefore,
a lack thereof:
Hope.
Could never commit myself
to the longevity
of a tattoo,
she'd end up a nihilist
another cold, dead heart
Tentacles sucking pores
pouring rain
living by ideals
to accept violence
but do not tell it;
to tell violence
but do not show it;
to show violence
but do not do it;
to do violence
but do not do it too badly.
Do you know where I'm coming from?
Besides my balls
and chain
green in the face
leaving it to the reader
to interpret
to stir it hot.
But,
make it real
ambiguous
he says
not for the benefit of the reader
but to counter all depth
with shallow notions
of shallow ideologies
of mass
market
topic
laden
cuckoo nests,
experimental frameworks
of the NAIVE
NAIVE
NAIVE.
Writers, writers,
call me academic,
intellectual;
I smoked five joints, drank seven beers, ate cake and pizza and it all ended up in the toilet.
Brain fizzling.
Call it excess,
I call it the circle of life
the holy grail
and the fountain.
Can you believe
they have once mistaken me
for a Jesusfreak?
& I have simply
mistaken them all for freaks.

Bristol4

nothing ever really finishes —

you always end up some place new

after where you last were

and somewhere else

after that

my life fits in 2 suitcases and a backpack

and even most of that is superfluous —

i don't need 9 button-down shirts

and 28 pairs of socks

or so many books

i hoard in order to feel rooted

as i move to bigger, better, brighter

i seriously consider

scattering my stuff on the way

like golden leaves in the autumn wind —

shed my leather coat and posh boots

walk off barefooted to see things

instead of owning them

Share the Night

Today, I realized that I'm an angry man.
I tricked myself into believing that I was just
"tired".
But I let myself go for five seconds
and felt the hate.
Hate for being tricked by myself and
others.
Hate for knowing what I want and being
blocked.
Hate for hate being able to get to
me.
Hate for knowing that I still think about the
off switch that everyone supposedly has
for their brains.

Life doesn't work that way.
At least, not in my experience.
Maybe I need that off switch.
Or maybe I need to yell and scream
and beat my chest, jump around,
and aimlessly punch amongst people.
Maybe it'd be best if I took a vow
of silence.

---
---
---

Maybe maybe maybe. Fuck.

I wish I had some kind of clarity.
Some kind of certainty.
But I don't and some tell me
"That's life."
and I don't want to believe them.
Nor do I agree.
Because people who stop themselves
at "that's life" and never question "Why?
Why is that life?" should abstain
from conversation with me.

I need my friends to share the night,
a cold, cold night,
laying in sharp grass in a park
staring at the few stars we can see
in this city,
talking about "Why?" instead of
having awkward silences after a
quick and short "That's life."