there is a girl

there is a girl and her dog
on the sidewalk

(there is always a girl
so the dog just seems
extraneous at this point
but we'll go with it for now)

she is the girl i thought of
when i lay half awake on Saturday morning
expecting her to walk through my door
not knowing she expected
the same of me

she is the girl of my day wasted
looking at dinosaur skeletons
in the Canadian Museum of Nature
hoping for a conversation
about early equines

the day that wasted but did not rot
did not bloat and bulge and burst
like what might be expected
of a dream, but
rather fell to the sidewalk

like the other thousand forgotten days
(that are sitting on piles
in impoverished countries
with small children climbing
looking over the mounds of wreckage looking in
the Hills and Mounds of Bad Days
for what they (as children
who cannot, or so we observe,
do Nothing) consider Days Well Passed)

but this one has returned
this one remains
and as she sits on the sidewalk
and i do not know if
she is there for me

but i can only assume
that the dog was there
to catch my attention

Generation HP

Hey, so I haven't got anything for heartrape this week, but I posted a confessional essay on my personal blog about how awesome Harry Potter is and how potentially awesome the books made us because we grew up with them.

Anyway, I'd appreciate it if some of you took a look at it and told me what you think. The essay can be read here. Thanks!

CAFS

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.

Looking through the Window

I see the pain of a generation

filled with lies

disguised as promises.

I hear the cries at night,

they pierce me and leave me

breathless with despair.

Desperation kicks in,

programmed from within

with time, the cries subside

as the silence ensues

it spreads;

a disease.

Eating up mankind

until only one voice remains

A disorder of chaotic immensity.

Bristol1

It's very wet here —

Although that's to be expected,

From outside one thinks of England as a grassy rock

Thrown against the fog and hail

Moulding there in the cold winds

Like a piece of old cheddar

In the channel.

The humidity seeps through

Thick socks, sweaters, woolen scarves

Looped thrice around the throat —

Any fissure and your pale, tender skin

Will prickle and shiver.

The clammy cold chills through knits

And flesh

To the bone.

Inside,

The kettle whistles

Blows a hot welcome geyser —

A jet of steam around which humans huddle.

Wrap your fingers around the mug

And already you feel the stiffness smoothed out —

Released, knuckles bending/unbending again —

But is it really good, to add more fluid to the balance,

To gorge yourself with more wetness?

Meanwhile,

Windows steam up, blown opaque with humidity —

They perspire, pearls of water forming —

Sliding down the panes —

Clear rivulets in their wakes —

A crystalline pointillist map of droplets and

Cold, warped smears, glistening beads falling

Collecting themselves,

Running down in branched streams —

Creeping, alive —

Wet.

Hand me the towel.

Cliff Jumps

Storm in tableau:
the waves a mountain falling
towad the face of the rocks,
lightning half off the ground--
the immobile sound of
one hand clapping.

wait and

one more step
to the edge of the cliff
with the spray half on your face--
the deafened air still ringing
from thunder's passing.

wait and

you are there with me here
at the edge between open and closed,
stricken and calm--
while below us erosion takes
the fastest ourse
and the sky above shows
no signs of ceasing and
no signs of going on.

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.

Sometimes Lover

It's about these two people who were friends and much more than friends and could be married, now, except they aren't. Their presents are haunted by what they once were and what they could have been and what they could have become. What they are not: together. They would never admit to themselves, and certainly not to each other, but it's also what they would like to be (and what they should be — although these things become unclear when you take everything into consideration).

Life. So many things get in the way. They are resolved to believe it's better this way.

They've both moved on and become brilliant and successful. Yet every once in a while, somewhere in the world, they meet. A quiet café with a scenic view. An elegant restaurant with laughably snobbish waiters. An underground gallery, blank walls. They share empty words, special moments, veiled understandings, little else. Some hope, maybe.

Riot (slowly being rewritten)

Destroy break smash
Just to be a vandal
Punch kick shatter
Didn’t know I possessed
Such a destructive anger
That inside I housed a
Desperate vicious animal
I just want to exterminate this creature

This rage is
At odds with
My usual demeanor
My fingers are itching but
I refuse to recognise
Myself, though these words are mine
This is not who I am
I just want to exterminate this creature

Thanatoaster

You wear
your hospital gown
like a wedding dress
and I'm sorry
there wasn't more
I could do.