Cotton dress

She does like a good girl should
She doesn’t drink at the town well
She just watches the boys pass by
Filled with aching want for the heartaches yet to come
Each heartbeat sending waves across her skin
And she falls apart but does so with carefully
Desire explodes inside her chest
A blood red carnation flower
She’s crimson satin, she’s impure
Her lips are not strangers to the taste of temptations yielded to
In the grass covered in midnight dew
On a black night, chastity crumbles
She lets it happen, lets them take her apart right there
And the way home is solitary
But the fields know her deeds
Whisper them to her, tying her stomach in knots
A confused, mysterious smile dresses her mouth
The bonfire burns behind her now
Surrounded by rowdy, drunk, town boys boasting.

Wandering

I find a lot in what I write (not so much as I’ve posted here but the pieces I scribble down to fill the gaps between moments in my day) a reoccurring theme that shows up. Nothingness, abyss, void, something like the suspension of any notion of reality or space or time. I use it quite frequently as a dump, discarding emotions and characters to the oblivion but I also enjoy thinking about being at the brink of this unreality as well. Either boldly toying with catastrophe, standing at the brink of existence or being driven there by some force. I believe that the fascination is partly to due with brinksmanship, as I had learned was the popular strategy during the Cold War and the cultural response it elicited in American society which involved in one way or another, and quite ambiguously, both of the notions I’ve just explained. On one hand the opposing sides were seeing who could get closest to the edge as if the future of mankind was a novelty and, on the other, being pushed by political posturing and nationalist sentiment to the precipice of existence.

But unconsciously, I wonder how close we get without ever knowing it, how many times our lives have been a fraction of a second away from certain doom before being pulled back to the realm of the living by the complex and indiscriminate calculations of fate. I was thinking about this while crossing the street one night without looking, and wondering if in the instances where I had thrown caution to the wind I had been blindsided and killed and just not known it and because I didn’t know it had just gone on living as if nothing had happened. Much like the voice that sits in the back of your head encouraging you to jump off the LRT platform as the train comes rolling through, or the visions that race through your head when you’re far above ground level in a tower or skyscraper or even completely unrestrained on a roof and you envision yourself free-falling towards the ground.

And then perhaps the oblivion isn’t really an oblivion, perhaps it is just another reality we fall into much by accident. As if the moment before you hit the ground or before the highway tractor demolishes the vehicle that you foolishly pulled out into his path you’re just changed over to another someone’s life. I think it may have been Borges or Kafka or one of those lot who wrote about living every single life that has ever lived. So that through these little lapses in judgement I have been all the different people that I see or read about and at the same time, the people who see me are actually me and don’t recognize the circumstances that brought them to their particular position in the world as we know it.

Haikus

The lion roars so

Lesser beasts might know that he

Is so insecure

 

Take another pill

Escape your boring life to

False utopia

 

Start talking to me

Let me know what you’re feeling

Then I won’t listen

 

When one goes so does

The other to a brighter

Place with swimming pools

 

I don’t like my things

I used to like them, but now

I want some new things

 

Everything you want

You buy so that you’ll become

Everything you’re not

 

Someday we won’t think

That the economy can

Tell us what to think

 

Save the world today

Save trees, save fish, save air, then

Someone else wrecks it

 

My mother told me

It really wasn’t that bad

But of course, it was

 

Twinkling in my ears,

Saturating my psyche

Releasing my day

 

Not once have you called

While all day I spend here

Staring at the phone

 

Too far back a thought

Remains in my dusty soul

Awaiting a spark

 

My eyes sparkled bright

But my heart knew much better

As it turned to ice

 

It’s not all so bad

You are not really dying

It just feels that way

Vistas

http://music.cbc.ca/play/artist/Pistol-George-Warren/Front-Porch

I’m patiently waiting for the day

when I will jes’ set out front

a lil shack on the patio as

some may call it, or a deck

regardless.

 

I see myself, mouth full of tobacco,

eased back in a chair, feet up,

on a makeshift table, actually,

a spool, from which come three

hunnert yards of steel cable

at one time or ‘nother,

wore out ol’ boots been

many times patched,

been many times slipped int’a

stirrup slung o’er the back

of some rank, young, green

caballo, gone snortin’ ’round

the pen.

 

On that deck, built

from rough cut lumber

and six-inch ardox spikes

and long cut tobacco,

set back in a ol’ chair

held from fallin’ ‘part by

left o’er nine wir’

in a worn pair of blue

jeans and well crafted boots

up on a makeshift table

‘longside a single shot twenny-two,

watchin’ out cross a yard,

in a very lib’ral sense of the word,

mostly bare dirt and a few

dried weeds, squared up by a

mended barb-wire fence, to a pasture

where a half-dozen horses

compete with one ‘nother

for the choice pickens, pinnin’ back

ears an’ paw’n front of the glow

of early spring sun down.

 

Soon’ll be dark and a short, stocky,

lil, red roan dog, product of countless

gen’rations of unrestrain’t breeding,

comes up from his mischief,

pushes his head up ‘gainst my palm,

smiles. All’s well with the universe

here.

 

Don’t freeze o’ernight,

gets cool but don’t freeze

no more, and green’s start’n

poke through where the ground

ain’t been blowed dry. Tin cup

beside my boots still’s got one more

swallow of luke warm coffee in’t.

 

Sun’s ’bout down now, means I

ought turn in for the night.

Little shack here, wood stove,

table, rug that the dog sleeps on.

My home here, at last.

Hills on Fire

From where I am you

don’t just smell it when

the smoke rolls down from

high above on the

now blazing, flaming,

angry, vengeful peaks,

bringing with it the

smell of disaster.

This is disaster

that we earned ourselves.

Thick,  so thick it stings

our eyes and sticks to

our skin leaving soot

residue as the

great clouds roll down, chased

by wicked, vicious,

hungry flames, wildly

devouring life, claws

of unbridled greed,

hunger, repressed for

decades now unleashed

by a single act.

From where I am now

I can feel the heat

from ten thousand fires.

The horizon glows

ominously, it

heralds the approach.

The flames are coming,

they don’t stop coming.

A hardly worthy examination

A dream world sneaks in from elsewhere

interjected into a structure, free-form,

passion and flow, freedom-necessary,

things can be things that weren’t those,

cunning tricks, the cast of characters

done things you didn’t expect or done

what you had expected, unexpectedly

Your dreams sneak in from somewhere in the posterior region of some cortex filled with the unintentional memories of our lives’ events offering us a brief reprieve from the claustrophobia inducing regimen of our day and that which seems so strange and alien to us in these vivid hallucinations, where the labels we affix in our conscious lives appear to be tossed out at random to characters involved in the very most random acts, strangely enough seems satisfyingly normal in the surreal realm of dreams.

How queerly moves time,

non-linearly, no stream of process

rather rain, drops fall in random

puddles on the ground are sames

but the different too, so that

seemingly we re-enter the familiar

in the different countless ways

Time itself, perhaps the strangest element of the dream world which moves neither forwards nor backwards with any conceivable predictability but only occurs in the most awfully random arrangements of events that we seem to encounter the same situation although rarely do we recognize that it is the same because of the random manner that we are re-introduced again and again almost like we’re seeing it from the perspectives of various others each time it comes around again.

Riding in the bus at night

Waiting for buses in the dark, tedious, in this hard, cold air. Black ocean sky above, black ocean walls surround, closed in, it’s sinister. The bus appears, sneaking through the curtain towards me on the frozen street. All tattooed up with advertising’s dirty gang signs telling me I’m ugly and nobody likes me. Buy something, watch this; see who you need to be. This lumbering, tired, been on this track all day and night, rectangle, easiest thing ever to draw in “elemen-tree” school. Leans over on and rolls up alongside me, over dramatizing its, too-long-to-come-to-a-halt, and then the whole air-lock door procedure, a proclamation, heralding wore-out gallantry arrived. Ostentatious, this chariot coach, refuge at least. An arctic, blue hand slowly constricts, grins at paralyzed fingertips, sore toes. In the clean, black, night-sky, pure, like what space must have felt like. Thoughts of terrified monkeys, their trust betrayed for nationalist hubris. What were the stars to them? They’re all dead though, the stars and the chimps, and this street but for a manufactured, modeled, moded, machine, skidded, crunching snow under clumsy tires. The indifferent gaze of an indifferent pilot, tired, proletariat eyes,. What does he see in the stars? Does he think that he’ll be dead like them soon? Boarded, relieved of the terrible grip of unforgiving, indiscriminate, predatory, climate. Set down with strangers, some of them like stars, died but didn’t know it, their shine slowly draining out of them here on the bus with strangers.