Kiss Me With Your Morbid Obesity

Mmm, sweet, soft flaps of flesh –

bunching and rolling down our sides with every shift,

soft and puckered as many lips.

[just felt like posting something...]

The Other Before God

God woke when he felt the stirring of a foreign presence in his limbs. He discovered the paralysis the moment he tried to rise but failed. No amount of straining or grunting helped shift his deadened weight against it.

‘It’? It had been some millennia since he had created the universe, and at that absurdity he scoffed. There can be no ‘it’ unless it was made by me.

But his certainty was nudged aside by the very real immobility his answers fell short of explaining. It did not seem he was paralyzed – there was feeling, uncomfortable as it was.

The sharp tingle and aching stab felt like blood that had ceased to flow, a sleeping leg.

It’s sitting on me, thought God.

The air became cold; he reeled in the idea at once, angry for having allowed such a thought to escape.

There’s nothing there.

He crawled with apprehension; burning, freezing, sweating. He’d never sweated in all his existence, hadn’t known he could. Thoughts thudded in his mind like a bird he’d once watched, flinging itself into the window of its shop cage.

The paralysis only lasted long enough that he couldn’t pretend it was a dream – and short enough that he couldn’t begin to rationalize what it might have been.

The moment he felt it subside, God launched himself free. All around was silence, the stiff dark of the unrisen sun. He felt it was still present.

He called out.

The taught air vibrated with laughter in a voice distinctly not his own, ungendered and mischievous. Where was it coming from?

He demanded to know what it was.

The last vibrations edged their way away until the hush swallowed the sound.

He commanded to be told its identity.

But as the laugh disappeared, so did the immanent pressure, as though the volume of space had decreased as something had left.

Where is there to go? God was confounded. I am everywhere.

God remained still. He felt small with the realization that he was not alone.

FORSAKEN ON VALENTINES DAY

A Poem for Tabia by Marta, Robyn, and Andrea

Your love is like a black eye
And from it tears of blood I cry
They fall like rain from hopeless clouds
And I'm drowning in them.
Where once was flame, has now turned ash
The memory of you leaves such a rash
On my wrist the long red gash
More to the floor, red droplets splash
One more for every day your gone
I fell the sun will never dawn
I live in eternal night. No one understands
What its like to live in forsaken lands
The frosted windows hide your face
I live inside an empty place
Is this how angels feel fall'n from space??
My heart is made of leather, not lace

The Little Shore Maid

An adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.

[Hey guys! I know commenting has been sparse and this is kind of long, but my prose classmates told me I should submit this to publication so I really wanted some opinions. I edited it so it's longer than the one they read; let me know if it's too long-winded, or too meandering. Any critiques would be really appreciated. Thanks!]

She appeared the morning after the storm, draped in seaweed and without a tongue.

The night had been a bad one; the prince had almost drowned as his ship was crushed and sunk by the waves. Despite the exhaustion of disaster, however, he had been unable to sleep, and went for a walk on the beach to calm his mind.

It was as the sun drenched the horizon that the prince noticed her, crawling like a crawfish through the shallow tide. At first he thought it was a dog, but as the waves subsided, he noticed the bald skin beneath the shaggy kelp. He moved closer to investigate and she looked up. Her eyes latched onto his.

They were small and black, lashless, like eels coiled inside her skull looking out through the two gashes of her eyelids.

While he stood, unable to move, she cocked her head and transferred her weight to two tiny feet. The seaweed fell away as she wobbled there, exposing her naked body to the prince. He could not help looking at her small breasts and puckered nipples.

She took a step forward and her mouth gaped open. The ocean heaved and swilled around their ankles, the smell of blood and vomit strong in the air. Beyond her uneven yellow-black teeth was an empty, bloody cavern. She tried to screech something, but it only sounded like the keel of a ship grazing a shallow rock bottom.

The sound set his nerves on fire. He ran back to the castle as fast as he could.

At dinnertime, the court was spreading the latest gossip, which seemed to involve a recent pirate attack.

“What’s all this?” the prince asked his father when they were alone.

The king, swelled with importance and wine, said some servants had found a young girl washed ashore with her tongue cut out, clearly a victim of piracy.

The prince’s eye twitched. “But where is she now?”

His father turned from him suddenly and boomed, “Here she is!” to the court at large, which announced the otherwise silent entrance of the seashore girl. She looked clean now, garbed in a plain beige dress with her black hair braided around her head. She could have been pretty, in a pale, bony way, but a seaweed stench still hung about her, and the prince feared what he’d see if she opened her mouth again.

The women all gathered around her, and the men, after a good look, grouped in clusters of rational discussion. The prince clung to a corner for the remainder of the evening, where the girl’s gaze would graze over his body every few minutes. When his father passed him a goblet of ale, his hands were shaking.

“Don’t be so anxious, dear boy,” the king said. “It’s all meant to be a bit of fun before the wedding!” He turned round to the roomful of people. “Shall we not invite this lovely new guest to the marriage celebration next week? I’ve no doubt she will wish to partake in the festivities of my son’s nuptial bliss!”

The court cheered, except for the girl, who smoothed the dress on her thighs and looked down at her feet.

Over the week’s preparations for the wedding, which was to take place on the largest, most lavish ship of the fleet, the prince felt an uncanny presence around him.

“You’re just anxious for the honeymoon,” his father winked at him, clapping his shoulder. “Be grateful for your time left as a free man.”

As if to emphasize this fact, the king ordered the seashore girl to dance for the prince every night while they dined. She did so with utmost grace, undulating like a sea snake caught in an eddy. The court clapped and shouted their delight, but the prince’s mouth stayed as straight and tight as the girl’s.

She never took her eyes off him until the music ended and the dance was over.

During the days leading up to the ceremony, he tried to stay occupied and keep all thoughts of women out of his mind but he couldn’t rid himself of that tingling awareness of being watched. At times he’d smell a salty stink and look around to see the seashore girl with her pallid cheek pressed against a pillar, body limp and leaning. Her eyes were never in his direction, but he sensed that as soon as he’d look away, she would drink him in with her bottomless black eyes again.

Sometimes the prince would follow her, certain she was part of a suspicious plot. He’d find her tucked away, sitting behind a potted fern or within the closed curtains of a window seat, tears spilling down her gray face as if a summer rainstorm was hanging over her and her alone. The brown boots given to her by the royal shoemakers would lay unlaced on the ground while she clutched at her tiny, bloody feet. He’d watch her, hunched like a crone with shoulder blades sticking out like fledgling wings or twin dorsal fins as she’d wrap material around her blisters and open scabs, and he’d slowly back away.

Although he never made a sound, somehow he felt she knew he was there the whole time anyway.

The night before the wedding, while the prince stood on his seafront balcony grooming himself for bed, he saw the girl walking back from the shoreline. She was bright white in her moonlit nightgown, and her hair was undone from its usual braid so that it twisted long in the ocean breeze.

He squinted into the darkness at a shiny object that she kept turning over and over in her hands. It looked like a dagger, but the prince forced himself to believe it was his imagination. His servants had been commenting lately on how high strung he looked.

He went to bed, huddling beneath his goose down duvet.

The next day went surprisingly well despite the girl’s presence in the royal audience. By the time he slipped the gold band of matrimony over his new wife’s slender finger and kissed her delicate pink mouth, the prince was beginning to feel calm again. It had been a bad last three days, but things had evidently seemed more sinister due to lack of sleep and too much salt air.

He went to bed with his bride, feeling he was the center of the cosmos.

He awoke a few hours later to the creak of a floorboard and a shadow moving towards him and his wife, who slept softly on his chest in a pillow of her own flaxen curls. A seaweed stench inundated the room. He cracked an eyelid open, and was blinded by moonlight for a moment before he recognized the seashore girl. Gripped bone-white in her short fingers was the dagger he thought he had only imagined. Paralyzing fear tore all courage from him like a riptide.

As the prince watched, the girl shifted, leaned forward; rank fish and saltwater stink filled his nostrils, and he had to force down the ball of panic punching at his throat. The blade moved towards his chest. At any moment he expected to feel a sharp pain and the warm spill of his own blood. His eyelids flickered as he squinted, straining to keep the dagger in his sight. Up it went, tip pointed at the skin left bare and vulnerable by his wife’s head.

It came down. He squeezed his eyes and ceased breathing. But there was no blow, just metal clattering to the wood floor. He was still expecting pain when instead he felt the seashore girl’s lips press down on his cheek, just beside the corner of his mouth. They were moist, cold, and tender.

As she pulled back, he opened his eyes. They looked at each other. Her black pupils were empty and soft. She dropped his gaze and shifted with slow, deliberate movements to the direction of his wife. For a heart-stopping moment he thought she was going to harm her, but she only brushed his bride’s bright cheek in another light kiss. Their faces shone in the moon glow for a moment, one thin and sharp as fish bones, attached in a pucker like a remora to the other’s soft, round face.

And then she was gone, running from the room, fluid as eroding sand. A moment later the prince heard a solid splash, and knew she had thrown herself over the edge of the boat. She would certainly drown if he didn’t get up now and sound the man-overboard-alarm at once.

He let out his breath and reached toward the curtains, gently so as not to wake his wife, to drag them shut against the moonlight.

Body Painting: The Writer

Hey guys! Sorry for not being on lately - I promise I'll get better once I've settled in Wollongong and read everyone's stuff. I never thought I'd be so busy these last few days, but it seems no matter how hard you try and get everything done early, there's still a shitload that catches up to you.

Anyway, I thought I'd share some visual pieces for your viewing pleasure because they're the only creative thing I've done of late. It's in honour of all us writers. Enjoy!

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.

Penumbra

There one day appears a dull ache
in the form of a cold vertical burn
running the length of the windpipe,
as though autumn air was filling the lungs
after a long run, as though autumn
was filling the body with the frost
of a promised but not yet present winter.
It appears, settles with nettled spokes,
drags skin and hair down to mingle with the silent fall
of maple leaves and brown staghorn branches,
littering the ground under the soles of summer shoes
with a halfhearted reminder of cloudless light
and sun that did not just blind but warmed,
and a body that did not just walk inside of coats,
but inside freckled skin that, until sunset, lay on grass
to watch the purple bruise of darkness seep,
knowing of the ache to soon set in,
trying not to think about the darkness as bad,
because really all that nightfall is
is a shadow cast in slow motion.

Breathing August

I need help with this. I can't figure out how or where to edit, but know that it needs polishing. I've been ruminating on it since August.


i.

“You made me love myself”
I say
though not to you
because you’re never here
to hear my words.
I store it instead
in the ossuary for words,
for my words to you,
for the ones that never grew
strong enough like the bones they should have been
to give a skeletal rendition
to this thing we call –
or rather that I call –
us.



ii.

I perpetuate this perfunctory business
of making these words for you,
out of air and flecks of sunshine
that float around my room in bits of solar radiation,
because I need to extract these words
through the slats of my ribs,
and have no choice
but to curve my existence
along the circumference of your
gravitational tug.



iii.

I store these words on paper,
file them away in neat rolls
(rolled because the only place I have
to store them is a Payless shoebox).
They coil in fetal positions;
words half-baked, premature,
and wrong
in some fundamental way,
because I realize that the truth of it is
I have never actually written
a love letter –
to you or anyone else –
and I then become obsessed with understanding how.



iv.

It makes no sense to me
to deconstruct along the feral cracks
of feeling
to quote platitudes exaggerated
to a cosmic scale
while in the meantime
our circumstellar selves rotate
around the star of our burning immediacy.
There is no way to trap that emphatic necessity for nowness
itching raw red skin
beneath which cells fight the fever infecting humanity
because it turns out we were never
supposed to feel this way.



v.

Imbued with biology for feeling sensations
but not for feeling
and even then the feel is obsessive in its need
and gored by the horn of some mythological beast
leaking roses and moonlight from the wound.
How to transfer, then, that acquisition
of a caught ephemeral thing
to paper with the tired keys
of a punch-drunk typewriter.



vi.

I try and bind that feeling to my fingers
so that the only way that it can escape is
through the ends of the mechanized alphabet letters
where it is pinned, pressed, stained
against the inked ribbon
to leave its mark forever
before it leaves to mutate
and infect again
and scoff at all the clever antibodies that finally allowed
for an army of white blood to conquer,
biding their time before they wash said blood red again
with blushes and overflowing arteries
and the rush of orgasm.



vii.

No, the feeling flies,
unbound, never quite managing
to be spoken of with truth, just platitudes
from amourous tongue lips and fingertips
and breaths spoken into displaced pillowcases
in the sleepy haze
of the thumping pulse of release.
These moments are real,
but they are moments
and anyone who thinks that moments justify truths
has to learn that reality cannot rest on abstraction
from a time that can never be preserved
or even proven.



viii.

I sit in front of my yellow paper
curled into the protective lip of my typewriter
and I imagine it as being the thing to expel my words
a separate being from myself
speaking these words
that aren’t actually
- I swear they’re not -
my own.
A mechanical scapegoat
that gives my soul absolution
from this writing, this art that I can’t help but which fires
down my bloodstream like arrows or cannons shot from embrasures
to break down the flesh of my body from the inside out
with these words
all these words
that die before they reach their destination
because I destroy them even as I create them:
filicidal desperation
to save me from your eyes
your bitter twisted flash of judgment
knocking in my teeth as I smile
as if you’d smashed in the true source from which my words had come
spuming madness in the form of a carefully crafted alphabet,
along the paragraphed lines that aren’t love letters
but rather the breakdown of their inherent theory
as if they were a science
and I their pitiable moon-bleached lab technician
growing specimens in agar
and prodding the Petri dishes for authentic poetry
finding only the petulant bacteria
and mould that grows on disused emotion
and stagnant ossuaries of words.



ix.

My crumbling carpal bones find themselves
failing to find what it is they strive to pry from my mind
since they can’t even pinpoint if it exists
and all the while trying to understand the form of love letters
and their purpose
because in the end,
I decide, and so do they,
love letters don’t make anyone happy,
but rather entomb a feeling that should never be contaminated

with perpetuity.

Worm Song

[Something a bit different, not too serious, just thought of on a whim on my way to the bus stop :)]

No one writes about September worms,
those poor flesh strips undulating out of the grass
and onto asphalt roads,
escaping the inundation of autumnal downpour.
They wind themselves around puddles and cigarette butts,
much like their cousins,
the April worms,
but instead disgorging ululations that pulse silently through
their many hearts and stomachs –
an early lament
for the grass that is soon to be sheathed in frost
and their collapsing earthen labyrinths
pressed stubbornly through roots,
around voles, and moles and dormice
that will succumb to the sedative of sub-zero compounding.
September worms pull themselves out of wilting weeds,
animated Singapore vermicelli crawling from the takeout boxes of manicured lawns,
inching across concrete curbs,
between car tires,
and the boots of students on their way to their natural habitats of scholarly
enslavement,
just so that they can feel the air
on their naked ringed segments
before their soft-beating hearts slow
in the cumulative chill
of October snow,
preferring the brittle drying of dehydration
to mingle among the yellow maple leaves,
and leave behind crumbled bodies
with the promise for winter’s fall,
heavy as an eyelid,
to segregate the worlds of song and silence.

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.

Pathology

[Poetry in the form of prose (it was meant to be another prose poem, but sadly not everything can take that form and I shifted it into paragraphs in the end)]

I see a meteor burn a line in the atmosphere above the smog smeared city, stranded for a few lonely seconds among the skyscraper sentinels watching over the wild streets of sleepless Montreal.

“A shooting star”, I say, eyes wired wide from lack of sleep and my first few drinks in months, excited over the fact that I’ve encountered an astronomical phenomenon more than anything else.

“You get to make a wish,” you say, sipping your special French liquor that I’ve already forgotten the name of, and laying the icy rim-chipped mug against a segment of your sunburn.

“Yeah. Oh yeah. Forgot,” I say, even though I didn’t really because when it comes down to it I could never forget, and doubted anyone ever could, this wishing business having been burned like infection or a cancerous spread deep in the psychosomatic human race so that when something as rare as a shooting star should shoot into the range of vision for that split atomic moment like a flamed fleck of ash from a campfire sparking up into the air, or sometimes onto your knees, you have to fight the impulse to make a stupid on-the-spot request from the cosmological space above to try and remember to beg for something worthwhile for once.

I wish.

I wish for that stupid on-the-spot request because there isn’t anything else I want anyway. Or at least I tell myself that, because I wish before I’ve even finished telling myself not to wish.

I tip my glass against my lips to take another drink, and decide, as it hits my tongue, that I really don’t actually like it, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings since you’ve spent a good portion of the night gushing about how it’s your absolute favourite drink and I told you I thought it was good before I’d really made a judgment call, so I force it back, feel the warmth and grit my teeth against the gin-licorice-Bengay sensation. When it comes down to it, I’ve had worse combinations. I’ll leave it behind for you to drink after I’ve gone home so as not to waste it on a non-appreciator.

Meanwhile you irrigate the lines between constellations, looking for your own piece of luck, but only find airplanes, the metal frames denying their gravity like a father disowns the responsibility of his fatherhood. “If only planes were shooting stars,” you say. “I’d have so many dreams come true.”

We sit and stare out the balcony, the words settling like a thick-shagged dusty carpet across both the night sky and the concrete wall that is our view from these chairs.

She Kind Of Dipped Her Toes Into Murder

She knows the verge of bug-ridden summer is cresting across the span of springtime because there are ants in her house again, spread out across her walls like a pointillism painting’s pinpoints dismantling themselves and drifting out of the frame to run amok. Her eyes find them in her quick paranoid glances about the kitchen. She regularly hallucinates spiders around two-fifty-nine am behind her bed’s headboard, so she usually would ignore the wandering dots itching her peripheries – but she’s felt the smug of thunderstorm heat crawling under her epidermis all week. These dots are real, proven by the shudder rippling through her shoulder blades that she isn’t quite able to suppress this time. She finds a tissue (not Kleenex, she can’t afford name brands anymore) to squish the nearest ant and hunts her butternut-squash-coloured cupboard doors to cripple its sestet legs. When she works up the courage and works out the angle at which to strike, she presses her fingers hard against the ant (the size of the full length of her split and bending thumbnail). A muted thump. There is a moment of panic that sucks the breath from her alveoli because she’s terrified she hasn’t calculated the right spot to attack; the ant could crawl out from under the tissue at any second – run up her fingers and wrist and arm and neck and into her horrified open mouth to attack her from the inside chewing with its devil-black mandibles. She twists her pressure point and presses ever harder until she hears and feels the microcosmic crack that could be called akin to a tiny human spine being snapped under the weight of a malignant god’s pinky. She hopes it’s dead, afraid to look, because the truth is the thing that’s under that Kleenex-not-Kleenex could still be as alive as her mother when everyone thought she was dead but really she’d just gone to Greece and come home with secondhand travel guides to Guam and Madagascar that she picked up at a used book sale there (because they were the only things in English) and read on Rethymno without getting a tan. But just like getting that postcard she sent to her to confirm her life was indeed carrying on beyond the deadweight of motherhood, she has to confirm if the ant is still wriggling or if it has been bruised into pulp. She pulls the tissue away slowly and it reminds her of peeling away the first bandage she put on her shin after she hit puberty and grew leg hair, the real reason she started shaving it all off. The ant stays still. A black and broken corpse unraveled from the sterile sheets in the morgue of her fingertips. Her mouth remains unmoved, since she never bothers with facial expressions when she’s alone, but inside she feels the thrill of success fornicating with a flutter of repulsion. She swings the garbage bag out from under the kitchen sink. The deceased ant disappears as she thrusts it down into the trash, beside metal tins of sardines that she suddenly decided she would now eat every morning for breakfast. The edges of the cheap yellowed tissue turn transparent as the soy oil the fish swam their last marinating swim in soaks into it. The ant becomes visible again, its tri-segmented body smashed in like skulls dug up from a Mayan sacrificial site. She tries to look away, but the spines she peeled from the silver sardine bodies (she can’t stand the way they crunch between her molars and feel like grits of sand) add a halo of horrific gore and glorify the massacre in such a macabre way. She’s mesmerized until a whiff of that summer breeze blows in the window like a moist exhale and she smells the stench of life gluing itself together again after the ice-shattered winter. The sun burns between her bent venetian blinds and she can see the unfurling leaves trying to get their photosynthetic fixes before the Earth teases and turns away yet again to make their vivid greens go red, go yellow, go brown. She looks out the horizontal slits with her characteristic lack of expression plastered thick across her cheekbones, then back down again at the tangled legs of the ant pushing up from the tissue, trying hard not to remember the way it crunched beneath her fingers, or to think about the possibilities that could have arisen should she not have killed it on the first try.

Titling Lies At The Heart Of Pretension

[Not sure what this is exactly, form-wise. It was supposed to be a prose poem, but I'm not sure if it's too prosey now, lacking too many of the elements of prose poem conventions. Anyway. We're here to break conventions right? :) Just that's why it's all in a single paragraph. Also help me find a better title. Couldn't think of one.]

“Fuck the world”, you say, because you like to sound melodramatic. I watch you through squinted eyelashes, wanting to tell you to shut up because I’m bored of your philosophizing but I’m too morbidly absorbed by the fact that the cigarette between your fingers is burning devil red dangerously close to your skin. You haven’t taken a drag for almost ten minutes, as you stare into the setting-sunlight and blind yourself (metaphorical, you no doubt will think and mention in a moment). “No, but I mean really,” you say again, “fuck the world – fuck the goddamn shit out of it as if it were one big cunt begging for a banging.” The burning tip drops some ash onto our Harvest-Cheddar-Sunchip encrusted carpet. I don’t take my eyes off it and you don’t take your eyes off whatever it is your mind is grapple-grasping with. “It’s not too bad. I mean, it’s going places, this world. But where that is is fucking driving everyone who thinks into the same tar-tanged mental pit. That’s going to be the downfall of humanity – we thinkers will all be picked off one by one and then the world will see just how sorry it is that it didn’t try to come to our rescue, just lying back and watching our brainpower get raped. Just watch, my friend,” you say as if we really were the closest pair of intellectual and emotional companions that ever walked this horny pussy planet rather than pitiable weaklings juxtaposed as roommates out of financial necessity. I should take it as a complement that you’ve categorized me as one of the doomed thinkers of the world, but all I can think of is my college professor giving advice on essay writing and saying, “The word downfall is for losers.” So I give my roommate a failing grade at life and continue contemplating how long it’ll take for him to notice that his fingerprints are about to be burned away and the only thing he’s left holding is the ash formation of what could have been a handy tension release. “I want to fuck this world, man. God that would feel so good.” He taps what’s left of the filter and I see inches of the ex-cigarette fall down. He grabs the lower half of his face with his other hand and I hear the scratch of his stubble resisting affection. “I’m hard for fucking this place and fucking it all the way so that I come so hard I can’t see anything anymore. I think that’s the only way I could ever forgive it. If I couldn’t see it anymore.” There is a moment of silence and then, as predicted, you note the fact that you can’t see anything at the moment because you’re being blinded by the light of the sunset streaming in through curtainless windows. You nod and blink, and run your hand over your crew cut excuse for hair. You smile, as if you’re being so witty, as if you’ve found meaning in this moment, as if the cosmos is aligning to give you this instance of insight and patting you on the back saying, “Well done you’re on the right track – keep going and you might just get the golden moment of epiphany one day!” But all I smell is burning flesh.

Information, The Kinetic Image

This is dedicated to Bruno

[Gratuitous apologies for the length, but this was my final piece of my prose fiction portfolio that I actually managed to finish. So this is for anyone with mad concentration/procrastination skills. I would appreciate comments, but I understand if you're all too busy to read such a headfull :P and as a note on commenting: sorry for not being able to lately but check back to your old posts by next week and I should be caught up!! :)]

The brain was sitting there, beside him, in a pool of its own viscous fluids.

Kyle had just walked languidly down the endless escalators to the belly of metro Namur, and had sat on one of the orange benches feeling mindless and dizzy-sick from a bad mixture of beer and rum and cokes and a half a joint. He’d taken out his phone to check the time and had been about to text a friend when he saw it in the corner of his eye. He glanced over, assigned it the offhand subject of a lost hat, and turned to his phone again. On seeing a void of service bars in the top left hand corner of his KRZR, he snapped the phone closed, frustrated, so that it echoed around the tunnel. He shook his man-bangs out of his eyes, and as his head turned, his attention fell once more on the hat-brain.

A moment of blind numbness ensued in which Kyle was too drunk to truly see what was in front of him. He squinted his eyes, certain his contacts had scratched or, with his drunken logic, decided they must have somehow fogged. He was positive his high had been overpowered by the alcohol, so he was fairly certain he wasn’t hallucinating because of that. The weed his friends got wasn’t exactly laced with acid or anything else either. He was pretty sure.

His brain sludged a few stupored moments computing the odds of this possibility before he realized how silly his paranoia was. The corner of his mouth sagged in a smile at the irrationality of his imagination. He would have to tell his friends as soon as he got out of the metro and they could laugh at his stupidity – although not too hard; just thinking of laughing was making him nauseous. As was the fact that the brain wasn’t disappearing. Its continuing presence was making his foot tap in nervousness, as though the seconds going by were actually hands turning a wind-up toy in preparation to let it loose and go berserk. The faster his foot twitched, the more he needed to know.

In an inebriated process of common sense, he decided that the only way he was going to believe it was there was to touch it. He formed a weak fist and protruded his index finger, sailing his hand toward the foreign object like a sloop ship to a new world. The uncoordinated momentum resulted in a kamikaze finger dive-bombing into what was unmistakably a genuine jelly-rough texture. In a heavy clunk of realization, he was forced to come to the very obvious conclusion that he wasn’t so wildly drunk that he had started seeing things.

His first thought, on accepting that the brain existed, was, of course, that it must be fake.

A second later, however, he noticed the smell. Nothing on earth could fake that, he was certain. Not that he knew what rotting brains smelled like, the tang of their slow decay in being exposed to humid subterranean air. But, like when he encountered spaceships and yetis and ghosts (and he had), he knew the real thing when he saw it; it wasn’t some imaginary force taking hold of his thoughts and perverting them into crazed fantasies. This brain was real.

The next thought was nearly obliterated by revulsion and horror. Something out there was dead. This brain was the functioning organ of a living thing and it was here, beside him, leaking and oozing white matter onto the mid-80’s style tiled floor, stuck all over his finger from where he’d touched it. He felt the gray matter and dead skin cells creeping under his fingernail and seeping into his pores, infecting his body with secondhand death, racing up his veins so fast it felt like everything within him was rushing to his head in a mad clamber-dash to escape the repulsion that was now infiltrating his insides so –

He vomited.

His body bucked and released curdled-looking liquid all over the floor. Sixty bucks just to spew, he thought as his esophagus burned, and remembered why he hated going out to drink.

The next thought, which he immediately realized should have been his first thought, was where was the body?

As if it would manifest at this presumption, Kyle looked around with mad-wide eyes, wiping his mouth and sweat-droplet nose on his hoodie’s sleeves. No one was there. He hadn’t even seen the corpse-eyed nightshift STM employee in the ticket booth when he’d passed by. He’d assumed that had been in protest of working, though, because there was so much red paint thrown at the plexiglass window to the point that you could barely see in or out anymore.

The metro was dark and musty. It was a quarter after one in the morning; he was catching the last train. The stairs led upwards ominously toward lightly glowing geodesic domes defying gravity that cast square shadows like he was caught in a cubist version of reality. His heart beat in rapid smashing knocks shouting the mantra Get out! Not safe! Get out! Not safe! He tried to calm it by wrapping one arm around his stomach and one hand around his throat. It was his version of fetal position.

How long had the brain been here? What if the killer-mutilator was hidden at the other end of the track – on the tracks, ready to spring up with a giant bone saw and eyes crazed from a fresh kill? The blood had barely begun to dry and it had felt somewhat warm when he’d touched it.

For a painful few seconds, in which his heart suddenly grew spikes and began to violently swing around his chest cavity like a mace, he thought that the zombie invasion was finally here. He jumped up (or rather staggered to a troglodyte stance), wondering why he’d put off buying a chainsaw for so long.

Then he shook his head. No, he told himself in a desperate, enforced calm, zombies would have eaten the brain. Yes, that was true. He closed his eyes and breathed out, laughing a nervous laugh at how he clearly was getting ahead of himself. Not only that, but the murderer was without a doubt gone, had likely caught the metro he’d seen pulling away just as he’d scanned his Opus card and slouched uncoordinatedly down the stairs, unable to run for it. There was no one here – unless you counted the person trapped in the convolution of cell structure, locked in the no longer functioning organ beside him.

Unless…was it still functioning? He frowned at the brain, squinting his eyes and giving it a suspicious sidelong glance. Was there a person still in there? More mind sludges considered this prospect. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed there had to be someone in there. Dormant and maybe writhing silently in pain, but beyond-a-doubt-bound to this hunk of flesh, scurrying, scuttling along electrode neuropathways.

He began to feel sick again, and leaned back to let his stomach stretch out. What he needed was to distract himself from the nausea. He looked back at the brain and tried to imagine what kind of person it had belonged to. What was its name – was it male or female? It was a pretty big brain, so he figured it was male, but he imagined one of his feminist friends slapping him and decided to be diplomatic and give it one that was gender neutral. He tried to think of the names that he’d happily escaped as a helpless infant when his parents were bent on giving him one that was old-made-modern and could go either way. Constantine (shudder). Jessie (meh). Emerson (maybe).

He paused, pressed his lips together and ground his teeth in thought. Emerson was good – inferior to the name “Kyle”, but he’d always felt a twinge of jealousy whenever he’d met someone named Emerson. He looked at the brain, like God, and saw that it was good.

“HeyyyEmerson,” he slurred (smelling his stink of post-puke breath in the process).

Emerson just sat there, stewing and growing continually more fetid.

“Thassssokay. I don’t talk mucheeither.” Kyle listened for the metro coming in the distance, but there was only the insect buzz of the florescent lights, so he tried to think of something else to say. His stomach was settling slightly; he had to keep talking for a few more minutes and then he knew he’d be fine.

He wondered what the last thought in this brain might have been before it had left its body.

“I wonder iffffyou ‘member whatchoo were thinkin’ of,” he said. “Musta been scared.”

He thought about the scene that might have taken place. There must have been running and screaming and blood, so much blood. Fear, pumping away in an adrenaline rush through the veins, making up for the fact that life was about to end by giving you an extra dose of vitality. Then that life had rushed out of those veins, spilling on some alleyway, or backseat of a car, or cruddy apartment in some basement of a building. Blood, blood, so much blood.

His head was spinning again. His stomach unsettled once more as the Leviathan of sickness stirred in his belly, breaching its dormant waters and prickling up his throat. He didn’t want to throw up again, and threw himself in an almost entirely reclined position against the wall and the seat, gripping the edge with one hand and putting a clamp-like hand across his eyes to squeeze each temple. Black. He needed blackness and numbness. Anyone who says it’s fun being drunk is retarded, he thought. Why do I do this to myself?

Just as he’d started to achieve that transcended space of quiet, the sound of hollow chimes suddenly rung out in the air.

“Attention,” said a clear and extremely precise-speaking female voice. “Un accident cause un ralentissement de service sur la ligne – ” (ever so slight microsecond pause just enough to get his hopes up) “ – orange – ” (Damnit, he thought) “en direction – ” (another fraction of a pause as he once again puffed with hope) “ – Montmorency – ”

He slunk even lower in his seat, both hands dragging in frustration down his face, accidentally ripping his new snakebites in the process. The taste of blood was exactly what he couldn’t handle right now, and he vomited again, finishing just in time to hear the woman calmly say, “ – Merci pour votre comprehension. D’autres messages suivront.”

Son of a bitch STM lady, he thought, squeezing heave-tears away from his eyelashes with his knuckles and feeling chunks in his throat. He forced himself to swallow them down.

It took him a few minutes to recover, in which no messages suivront-ed. He stared straight ahead and sighed, feeling slightly better in any case.

“WelllEmerson,” he said after a bit, “lookssslike it’s just you ‘n me.”

He looked over at the silent brain, head rolling against the wall to fall on his shoulder. Here was this intricate train of cells bound together into the most complex organ of existence. Information through organics. Images stored in coils and ready to spring to life with a spark of kinetic energy. The same thing was in his brain.

It occurred to him that all this mind’s memories were stuck inside this jelly hunk of cellular matter with absolutely no means to communicate them. The person inside Emerson was helpless. He himself would be helpless one day, cut apart from his mouth. He could be this brain – Emerson 2.0 – if the killer still did happen to be lurking somewhere close by. (He looked nonchalantly underneath his seat just to make sure that he wasn’t. Safe.)

Still – he thought about his life and how it was bound up in intricate electrical impulses. If no one heard what his life was about, then he was left with nothing. He would be nothing. He would be an empty, lonely brain waiting for a metro that may or may not come.

Kyle no longer felt afraid of the brain, or even all that nauseated. He wanted to do something for it, but he didn’t know what.

When he was young and stayed home from school sick, or tripped over his rebel shoelaces in the playground and got woodchip splinters in his knees, his mother would put him in bed, bandaged or medicated, and not know what to do either. She probably shouldn’t have ever had kids – at least not so young – because she just sat awkwardly by his bedside, flipping through magazines and reading him gossip magazine articles she’d find that were of moderate interest, skipping over the inappropriate-for-four-year-olds parts so none of it even made coherent sense.

Kyle didn’t know what to do for a brain either, so he followed his mother’s example and began to tell Emerson stories. He only had ones about himself, and he didn’t have the energy to edit, so he just started to talk.

“WhennI went to an art ex’bition once, I jacked offffffin front of a painting.” He chuckle-breathed through his nose. “’Twasssa private show sssssso no one saw. I came onto the painting, but it looked like a Pollock and no one noticed, theyyyall thought it was part of it.”

He looked over at Emerson. “Dooonnn’t get judgmental,” he said to the silent brain. “The artisssst was a sunuvabitch. He thrrrrewa rock at me once and said it wasssart. Bastard. Had to get three sssstichessss on my chin.”

Kyle tried to run his finger along his half-inch scar, but missed and poked himself in the eye.

“Thissssother time,” he said, wiping his streaming eye on his sleeve, “I wassssso drunk I decided I really wanted one of those tatoooossss on your stomach, of a monkey’s asss, with the assssshole where the bellybutton is, that I actually asked my frrrriends to shave off all the hair on my chesssst ssssooo we could go to Adrenaline and getit done.” He absently stuck his hand up his shirt to play with his naval. “’Course, I jusssst happened to be with girls that night, ssso they thought it’d be smarterrr to wax. Fucking Chrisssst that fucking killed. Then we gottttooo Adrenaline aannnd they were all, ‘We dooonnn’t tattoooo drunk people’.” He patted his untainted and not-quite-so-queasy-anymore belly, and sighed. “Thank God. I would’ve killed mysssselffff.”

Emerson’s quiet made him think twice about what he said.

“Oh – ssssorrry Emerson, I wouldn’t’ve reallyyy killed myssselff.” He ran his tongue over his lips, mouth feeling extremely dry. “Ssssuckssss that you’re dead.” He made a face that he hoped was sympathetic. He couldn’t quite feel his jaw so he figured the expression didn’t look like much of anything. At least Emerson didn’t have eyes to see him fail.

“I alsssso lit ssssomething on fire once,” said Kyle. After this statement he was quieter, he and Emerson thinking solemnly and contemplating his words. “I wassssn’t sstoned ‘r anything even. I wassss just really angry. It was right after I turned ten and ssssuddenly my dad decided to pickup and leave. I ssstole his lighter and ssset the treehousssse we’d made together onfire.” He paused, then rephrased. “Nnno…actuuually, I won’t lie. It alwaysssounds cooler when I putttit like dat. Thingggis, my dad loved his lighter, so I ssstole it. Then I was hidinggin the treehouse and lightingit again andagain, but I couldn’t sssee what I wassdoing because I was – ” He paused again. “My eyes were tired, I wasssn’t paying attention. I dropped the lighter. The treehoussse littton fire.”

He recalled clambering out of the flaming wooden hideaway. Once he was back on the ground, he’d most distinctly remembered the satisfying curl of the ashes landing on his face like moths. Then his mother had run out of the house, tear streaked, running as fast as her skinny short legs could carry her and the giant fire extinguisher she brandished. She screamed at him for a week after about ‘how dare he do something so irresponsible?’ and ‘didn’t he think about anyone but himself?’ and ‘she wasn’t going to be there all the time for him to come crawling to if he fucked things up!’

Emerson waited patiently while Kyle belched loudly and satisfyingly. It made him feel a smidgeon better. “ThennnI rebuilt the treehoussse a few yearsss later. It was, like, the firssst year of high school or sssomething. I did it with my girlfriend and our bessst friend.”

Kyle paused at that point, and frowned.

“Actually, I should sssay my ex. She jusssst broke upwith me, by the way. Well. Not jusssst. Four daysssago. We were going out forrrover eight years. This weekend we were sss’posed to go camping. But shhhe ended up going with our best friend instead.” He stopped, licked his slimy lips, and scowled. “Now shhhe’s making ssweet, sssstoned love to her for a whole week with the weed I bought for usss.” He leaned down really close to Emerson to whisper, “And shhhe didn’t even have the decency to tell me shhe wasss completely lesssssbian. Apparently she’ssss bi, I’m jussst not man enough to keep her on thisssside of the heterosssexual fence. She’sss too busy wanting to sssstraddle it. Or her, in thisss case.” He burped again, glad there was no one around to feel the reverberations that emanated from it, and leaned upright again. “Y’know, come to think offffit, they were actually the onessss who got all the other girlssss to wax my chesst. Bitches. Bet they’re laughing nowwweh, Emerssson? Well we don’t need them. Lookssslike it’sssjussst you ‘n me. It’sss justyou ‘n me, buddy.”

For a second, Kyle thought that Emerson was rumbling an answer, moved so greatly by his stories that it had broken the binding shell of its skin and managed to communicate with him.

“’Merssson?” he slurred.

Then blue and white stripes shot out of the station’s tunnel led by headlights. It was exceptionally loud and bright. He winced.

“Well dasssmy metro,” he said, now feeling a slight bit awkward. How should he say goodbye to a brain? “It wassnice meeting you,” he told it. “But I guess thisssis goodbye.”

Emerson sulked, sad at being left alone. After all, Kyle had just promised they’d stick together.

“Now don’t be like that,” Kyle said. “I’ll tell you what. When I get home, I’mmma burn down that treehoussse again and thinkof you.”

The metro started to slow. He stood up in a swagger akin to a newbie pirate who would likely drown before he found his sea-legs.

“ByeeEmerson!” he waved. “Take careof yoursself!”

The metro stopped and the synchrony of dozens of doors opening echoed through the station. He lurched forward uncomfortably, trying not to slip in the pool of sick by his converse shoes, and yet desperate to make it inside the doors before they closed. It took two tries, but he made it.

The car he stepped into wasn’t, as he’d hoped, empty. Still, he was able to sprawl himself across the long seats and put his feet up on the single chair in front of him. He caught the other passengers looking suspiciously at him. One man in particular squinted at the brain, and then at him, and then back. But no one did anything. It was Montreal. No one spoke to each other, let alone after 1am, let alone in a metro car, let alone to a twenty-two-year-old with snakebites and a vomit-stenched hoodie.

As the doors shut again and the metro’s take off horn sounded almost inaudible, the STM woman’s voice came on the intercom once again.

“Attention. Service rétabli sur la ligne orange. Service rétabli – ” (Thanks, thought Kyle absently, surprised at how disappointed he was that Emerson was no longer in view. “Merci pour votre comprehension, she finished, as they rushed into the darkness between stations.

Poetry Portfolio

[These are some poems that I want to put in my poetry portfolio. Any comments for their improvement will be helpful in my final grade. I'm posting a lot, so don't feel you need to comment on all of them. I realize it's the last week of school so I doubt anyone will read any, but oh well - Monday is my day. I'm posting :)

Also - for my class's final assignment I'm doing a poetry reading at a bar with a mic and everything. So if you could help me choose poems to read aloud based on either these or past posts I've written, that would be awesome! And of course, you're all invited. Although I don't know when it'll be now - the time, date and location has been changed and my teacher's going to email us. Facebook me if you want to know when/where :) I'd be happy to see you]

Webster Library, With Eye-Circles Like Coffee Rings

[Prose poem]

Between bookshelves, she sits on her sandals, studying and sipping slow sips of similes showing her how she’s not actually unique but is in fact comparable to every other thing in this world. She turns the pages and learns that every breath and sneeze and choke is a metaphor, that her nine-to-five existence is actually an allegory for the greater microcosm of society. She feels sad about this. Emotion cranks like a jack-in-the-box, pushing out tears instead of jesters just at the moment when she least expects. She has to wipe her eyes and nose on her coffee-stained sweater that she borrowed from her grandmother eight years ago and never ended up giving back before she died from hating the public transit system too much (sometimes she felt guilty about not having driven her the places she wanted to go, but then again, she tells herself, she would have died from the stench of the spring worms anyway, or from listening to the FM radio all night, or from sprinkling those peanuts they have in metal containers at Thai Express that are suspiciously exposed to fingers and air and other things incompatible with human beings). She looks around to see if anyone noticed her snotted sleeve, ready to blame the air conditioner that’s on full-blast, installed to cool the frying minds of students and lessen the number of volcanic brain eruptions. A fast glance shows that there’s nobody there except an Asian med-student who’s bleeding his eyes over an advanced bioorganic chemistry book. She looks down again, satisfied that she’s studying English, and that her life won’t be dedicated to helping people. She takes out a thermos to give herself some instant broth nutrition and chugs the cold liquid distilled from what was once the life of a turkey. It’s not as satisfying as she would have hoped; she’s left craving with the sensation of a greasy sheen. I’m like that puddle that’s drying out but leaving behind its gas-leak scum, she thinks without realizing that she just thought of yet another thing in the world that she is indistinct from.




Seven Glasses Of Water Slide Down The Esophagus Pretty Easy, But It's The Eighth You Have To Watch Out For

Microcyte feelings distend through
layers of skin but don’t break:
instead swellingbloatingclusteringagainst
cellagainstcellagainstcell,
pressingthemuplikesardinesupernovas
readyto BANG! and s h r a p n e l everything they’ve had
pooling and swimming and spawning inside –
but for now they prefer to
stay and stick until the only option left
is to prick them with a wire like a cake,
to see if they’re done yet with their overanalyzations
that even Freud would be bored with –
but they’re afraid to bleed
because they don’t like the taste of pennies.




Tectonic

Even though
we can make
the earth s h a k e
we can never quite
align.




An Exercise In Knowing

[Prose poem]

The World swells in your eyes like a socket suddenly plugged with a lightbulb. It glows, bathed in cold sunlight and the sound of your reverent breathing. It seems to feed on it, the planet, a church, commanding and chewing on your awe. I watch your shins begin to shake under the weight of your head. You start to weep the oceans away as it becomes too much, the magma core too molten for a brain to contain, especially impossible for yours. Pacific surges with Indian, Atlantic is tangled by Arctic, and all steam as they drain onto your face, past your chin and down your neck. The emptied World becomes instead a mix of green and gray, like the cement sludge sidewalks we wiped our footprints in, outlined by dying dandelions and ambitions maple tree shoots. But, like the maple babies, the green soon withers and the World turns into a postcard autumn. There’s everything poetic about death, so who am I to complain? I keep watching you as your freckles fade against the rising flush that burns like infection. Your lips are open for an articulation that never quite made it out; they’re chap-cracking and remind me of the slim tentacle sticks of deep fried squid we used to get during our breaks between classes back when we were getting our BAs. I want to press my face against your mouth to recall the taste, but it looks like that would hurt because your face is distorting now, distended red with peeling edges, and our kisses aren’t what they used to be. You’re probably wondering why I’m not helping you, but it would have been fine if only you hadn’t cried the oceans away. Now the cratered, caving planet in your eyes will only ever grow and die. I want to shake you and tell you this, scream it in your melted ears. But instead I whisper, “Blink.”




Smother

Moths flop, on off,
eating holes through my eyes –
batting their brown scaled wings
so that they appear as my own lashes
and not the things that are
blinding me.

My moon-crater eyes stare at
their close up faces
and all I can think is how fiercely
their endless gazes pierce
and how covered in fur
they really are.




Like Spinning Plates

We rest on counteractive points of reality turning in place as dimensional

cohesions on this tabletop twisting that which we are into something

that is a refracted lie while we are side by side but absolutely blind

as we spin as we don’t notice anything around us as we spin

as we whirl and look like spheres but are only flat in that

our truths are masked by speed because we go so

fast that no one will notice that we move so

completely that we don’t understand

what we are anymore except we

are complete in this bent

image and we only

hope that no

one will

stop

us

.

Yelling Grandly

She looks at him through
her glass eyes,
like carrion smeared against
black-red atmospheres sunsetting
into a wasted skyline,
after the moment when she realizes
that the horizon is only the horizon
and his fingers in her hair are only
fingers.

Yoko Imagined This

Pushing up

out of darkened soil:

the wish trees,

from crumbling earth of forgotten moments

dusting the world with dying skins,

reaching fingers to encrusted skies;

barely exposed,

their leaves of longings expand to sunlight.

They stretch,

they stride,

dancing in the dried dirt,

roots anchored deeply

in bottomless reservoirs

of half-thought dreams.

They stay,

they sway,

wish trees like dandelion pollen,

blown by mouths of dreamers,

to grow into

weeds.

Cubism

[This is for my poetry class - in theory it's going to be the major focal point of my final project. I've decided to look at the art movement of Cubism and their obsession with time and perspective and use this poem (or the final poem from after my editing of it) as the basis for many other poems. I plan on, somehow, rewriting this piece quite a few times, always looking at it from a different angle to gain that sense of perspective and time passing, whether than be by substituting all the words with others, deconstructing it line by line, splicing it up all over the place, making it into word art....etc. Anyway, what I need is for this to be as strong as it can be, otherwise my project will just fail from the inside out. So. Be harsh, throw out suggestions, analyze, evaluate, EDIT! :)! ...I have a feeling my next few weeks of posting on HRC will be school work. So I'm counting on you guys for my grades.]

It turns its face, this dimensional being,
and tries to escape its oil encasements.
The paint strokes – painfully stroking each captured limb – enclose.
It tries to walk down and away but its legs trip
over its movements.
It curses the painter and shouts with a multi-faceted voice
that echoes in the still-framed reverberations blurring its form,
You can’t catch time!
But the painter is too busy trying to
to listen.
It tries to run
and the painter keeps on congealing its motions,
defining nothing to capture everything.

[This is my edit of the poem, if anyone happens to check it over :P]

Cubism

It cranes its face, this
subjective entity,
and tries to break its brush-slacked
cage.
Its form cracks as
the paint strokes –
painfully stroking each
captive limb –
enclose.
It tries to
stride, apart and
away, but its legs just
trip
over jagged stints of
instants.
It curses the
painter and spits with a
multi-sharded voice
that slaps against the
still-shot snaps of
jutted contours cutting out its
exoskeletal structure –
You can’t catch time!
But the painter is too
caught up trying to
to listen.
It is instead stabbed
in its spot like an
insect pin-stuck in a
collective box.
It tries to sprint for
escape
but its shark-straight line is
interrupted as
the painter keeps on
splicing
its progress, defining
nothing to capture everything.

The Plexiglass Girl With A Rewired Mind

[So this is something a bit different. I don't know how well it works as a coherent piece so I'd really like some input. Particularly on the end - should I keep it the way it is or lose the last paragraph? Please please please comment! I know we're all busy, but I'd really appreciate it :)!]

I can’t stress enough how terribly but wonderfully long this endeavored moment took, so that I could find myself within this carousel world. It took half the drugs known to man to get me to this state, but it was worth the burning.

With a wide smile and watermelon gums, I sit here and look at things as if they were the gilded butterflies that sat upon my shoulder and wept as my time in this life ticked and tocked away across the endless chasm of the mind’s void. Whatever that means.

It is important to mention that I didn’t feel my smile. I saw it was there, reflected like a fraction of a human being in the straight smart mirrors standing tall beside my armchair. I don’t reflect, I refract. I break these meaningful moments into a more coherent state so that I can understand them, but even then they start to glow and reach a different part of my brain, the part that has more to do with feeling than thinking.

My hands are starting to shake, which makes the blood start to leak down my fingers in thick rivulets, making maps of the directions I find around my life and never choose to follow. I stare and stare, trying to decode what each of these defined strokes of blood wetting and sinking into my skin are, not even attempting to remember how they got there in the first place, not even registering the sting-sting-zing of the throbbing cut in the crotch between two of my fingers, which is evidently the cause of all the sticky red liquid on my hands. Still can’t remember how it got there.

My body won’t respond to the pain. Which is wise. I never knew my body to be so wise as now. My limbs sit as amoeba creatures, the fingers a draping bunch of bananas reaching over my rainbow-arc knees. My chest rises and falls, falls, falls, falls, expands with new air and then falls falls falls falls….expands, burns, burns, itches, coughing.

In the violent fit of cough-laughter that follows, liquid begins to make its steaming way onto my face from behind my squeezing eyelids. On the desert of my cheekbones my tears and sweat evaporate into the hot blown suns of the ceiling lamps. My tears are the only thing that seem to be reacting to my brain. My brain is screaming, leaking, trying to flee. But not really. It’s not trying hard enough. I close my eyes and imagine the vultures of my face’s desert dipping from the sky in black jagged strikes to pick at the white and gray matter obviously pulsing away within my skull in such a useless manner. If only the world could be so helpful that I could have real vultures.

When I open my eyes again, my vision is straddled by the brightest lovemaking between a kaleidoscope and a meteor that there’s ever been. It makes me exclaim aloud my happiness and rumbling desire for sensation.

Then I look around and see that the room is absolutely empty. The walls seem to bend inwards as a tent or a hug or a net to catch stars in, but one that never fulfills the desired intention. I run my nails up the skin of my arms and look down, unable to bear looking at the vast expanse of ceiling that is now shimmying upwards and out to so many places that I never will see. I feel more stings in my eyes; swords, arrows, syringes shot chock full of champagne dreams. Diamonds fall from my face and onto my knees. They collect and reflect the emptiness of the room with all their shard sharp prisms. I gather them into my hands and swallow them because I can’t bear to look at loneliness anymore.

* * *

We all stared at her, as we came down from our highs, hypnotized by the pathos induced by watching her drink her own tears. I moved closer to her and wrapped my arms around her shoulders, burying my stubble-almost-beard into the crook of her neck. She just kept staring straight ahead, bones compressing, almost shrinking inside the loop of my body. I hoped she’d come back soon, and breathed in some deep burning breaths while I waited.