latest from the DPRK

Here's what passes for front-page news in that dangerous Disneyland of a country known as North Korea. Stories this compelling/disturbing must be shared:

Human Love Fully Displayed in DPRK [North Korea]
Pyongyang, April 29 (KCNA) -- Human love is being fully displayed among the people of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Some time ago doctors of the North Phyongan Provincial People's Hospital and students of Sinuiju University of Medicine completely cured a badly burned patient who had been at death's door, by donating their blood and pieces of skin without hesitation.
The pieces of skin they grafted to the patient five times amounted to more than 9,800 square centimeters and the blood they transfused 29 times to 3,500 milliliters during some 120 days of treatment.
Doctors and other employees of Pyongyang People's Hospital No. 2 also recovered scores of wives of mining workers of the Majon Mine in Songchon County, South, from critical conditions caused by an accident.
For more than 40 days of treatment, they held over 500 consultations, conducted some 20 surgeries, big and small, took over 50 X-ray examinations and carried out over 1,230 tests. A large amount of blood and costly medicines was applied to the patients.
At the Kim Man Yu Hospital, a crippled girl was treated to walk by herself.
Foreigners who witnessed such beautiful deeds said that such warm love for people can be seen only in Korean socialist society where all the people live as a big harmonious family with leader Kim Jong Il as their father. [emphasis mine]

I try not to comment explicitly on politics/current events, but I gotta say, when an entire nation falls victim to its own massive 'Truman Show,' something crazy is gonna happen when the other shoe drops.

back to basics

any others?

Apr30--subconscious

.

We are here together in the opium fields. I surprise your father with the bicep flexed in the waning augusty moonlight and the last thing we decided was to eat fish in the blank moonlight and the only thing we ever decided was to encounter that evening while the descent of man over the bridge of sighs and ketchup never fixed itself in the winter of discontent and the failure of time to end the genocidal impulse, the wrecked hull of this ship where we lick chips. Saviour of the glue factory, empty throne of lies on which Satan Claus sits interred in the log jam of the yellow-fevered ghetto. Underwear frailty and the hegemony of the igloo ayatollah, infer from this I fear I’m ordinary compared to polyp and perforce I propel people populations per capita in painstaking pulpy colonies to sodomy. Lethal intubations of the weal of quail fighters yields no benefits until the June moon comes undone and we glorify the black vault until the sun shines and the cave of Xerxes destroyed reveals the mansion of coral and the violence zings and undulates unspeakably polluted for the rigor mortis of yesterday’s news man. Kodiak bears flaunt the fright of the garish helmeted warriors walking marching off to suicide and the poison of the yellow bark of birch trees, and the janissary of Turkey was always and forever excluded from the reindeer games when the queen of the road offered pizza pockets to the protection rackets jailed in the prison of the Golan heights north of the tagus river. Look out, gargoyle. Harrowing oaf velvet banana and climax of Zen! Mildew centuries wither and the recording of the Inverness database explodes ponderous; heretofore it’s a harpsichord. Magma harpies and the valkyries, the bakeries and fakeries inward seeking praise of the manna of Desdemona and Horatio: I dream of your philosophy it is true too true I love glue and I sniff poo. Jaded fealty and the benevolent mulling of the mullahs and the bacon version of chicken was a decided failure. Kellogg rocks with milk filters through the sandwich aisles of the supermarket without Somali curry and zoological pollutants wriggling without cease into the trout farms and the inharmonious desert. Bath night-times and the failure of tornado and the keeping in tone with the metronome ogles the fairy flipping wrists in midst of the typhoon, gangly and French under duress from the emissary locked in his hatchback pocketbook. Lethal regicide weathers the fried nutmeg motorways cacophony until everglade ibexes chirp intensely looking perversely out at Dolomite valleys. Dream of a falcon, hasten toward eagle flight popularity of the yard wenches faulting the kook lathering the soap quiet and verbose much like Juno the troll of the last ship ever set sail from the coast off Cagliari. With stereotypical Sardinian sardonicism, the tacit trusting look forgotten, dismissed as crooked and lisping, Meinong wrenched four galaxies of scarlet over the toast yard into the police helicopter, expediting the last jacketed leather spelling into the raging ether sunset.

here's something fun!

(once again, I have no idea... comments welcome)

Annual General Meeting of the Ridiculously Positive Club for Fans of Everyone!

(Mr. Speaker to be narrated in Michael Palin's voice. All others as desired)

Mr. Speaker: Welcome to the annual general meeting of the Ridiculously Positive Club for Fans of Everyone!
First off, we welcome to the meeting, the new club Treasurer and all around swell chap, the fabulous Zachariah Pollywog: take it away, Treasurer Pollywog!
Mr. Treasurer: Tit tit, welcome welcome, thanks guvna; it’s an absolute pleasure and a thrill to be among the most wonderful and exciting clump of gents I’ve ever run across in my travels upon this pale blue dot. Furthermore--
Mr. Speaker: --well, thank you Mr. Treasurer for your kind words--
Mr. Treasurer: Yes yes. You know something Mr. Speaker, I was thinking this morning about how I would introduce myself tonight, what words I could muster to convey and impress upon this crowd, just how important it will be that we work together, strive together and succeed together. You all have seen victory, you know naught of defeat, and—
Mr. Speaker: Mr. Treasurer, slow down--you are losing us with this inspired talk of yours!
Mr. Treasurer: Well perhaps I’m getting carried away with the thought of the grand time we are going to be having together. After all, this evening marks a changing of the seasons!
Mr. Speaker: What, you mean it’s March 21 today? I thought that date had already passed
Mr. Treasurer: Well yes, but no, by the changing of the season I mean that the tide is finally turning; not only is the treasury (under my treasuring) certain to yield beneficial effects for the entire Western hemisphere, but henceforth and furthermore—
Mr. Speaker: And on with the meeting then... Up next I would love to introduce a special lady, a real tiger of a dame. Ladies and gentlemen, my pleasure is to bring before you the first ever member of our Dunking and Spelunking Team, Ms. Linda Boyle, of Penticton. Linda is a long-time Pisces, and she was born lefthanded. Quite the talent there, Linda!
Linda: Say, thanks Mr. Speaker. Tonight I am beaming and you cannot know the pride I have to address you all--
Mr. Speaker: That’s enough Linda.
Linda: But…
Mr. Speaker: You’re done—that was wonderful.
Linda: Mr. Speaker, can I ask you a favour?
Mr. Speaker: What is it Linda? Mi casa e su casa, you know that. That’s Spanish, and Spain is a country in Europe.
Linda: Yes Mr. Speaker, I was just wanting to add one thing
Mr. Speaker: Hurry up Linda, I have 65 other speakers to introduce tonight
Linda: I just wanted to say, that as the newest member of the Dunking and Spelunking team, I have a lot of tradition to live up to, and I plan to excel in all aspects of the human endeavour.
Mr. Speaker: Well, it’s just the spelunking we care about in your case Linda, but if you want to carry the load for all humanity that’s grand
Mr. Treasurer: I must say I support Linda—she seems really to be a straight up Sheila, and she wants for nothing in terms of, how shall I say this, bustiness!
Mr. Speaker: Well Mr. Treasurer you have no right to interrupt after your turn. I would tell you to fag off and go count your beans, but you’re such a swell Bobby that I can’t help but forgive.
Mr. Treasurer: Thanks Mr. Speaker, you are a prince.
Mr. Speaker: Thank you, now fob off. Up next is the most outstanding member of the Lake Grove Pine Chopping and Cedar Burning Committee, one Sly Pettigrew. Sly is a lumberjack-turned-bureaucrat, and I’m sure he has a few too many 'tall trees' to deal with in his new office. Am I mistaken there, Sly?
Sly Pettigrew: Thank you thank you, eminent Mr. Speaker, and absolutely. I have just been informed that everyone I have talked to today is an absolute fab-o chap or chapetta and I am thrilled down to my knickers to partake in this service to the community, this the beacon of hope for the downtrodden and the latest example of the long-continuing run of humanitarian, peace-loving-ship of all the eastern half of this local region over which I hold sway in my particular officious duties.
Mr. Speaker: Oh Mr. Pettigrew I am creaming in my pants
Sly: Oh Mr. Speaker I have a firm man-lust for you, and if only I could but express one-tenth of it I would be the most happy lumberjack-turned-bureaucrat in the northern woods of this eastern region over which we are currently holding sway in our club of super-charged positivism.
Mr. Speaker: Now now, Mr Pettigrew I am fond of you too, but I enjoy the fruits of a seven-year marriage.
Sly: Really to whom art thou wedded, if I may ask using a Biblical pronoun?
Mr. Speaker: Well, Mr. P, I will introduce her now as Exhibit X. As in X-X-X! My wife is a well known pornstar and a line cook at Denny’s. Her name is Wanda DeTroit and the only thing negative one could say about her is that she lacks the ability to tie a Windsor knot. And if the members of the House of Windsor ever catch wind of that, she’ll be relegated to dancing at the House of Lancaster, if you catch my meaning there Sly. So please keep that on the ‘sly’.
Sly: *Ahem* a fine pun Mr. Speaker; truly you are a man of words.
Mr. Speaker: Well here she is now, my wife and confidante and the woman who satiates my desires, the one, the only Wanda Detroit!
Mr. Treasurer: Here here, welcome welcome ma’am; we are fanatics for your work!

(unfinished of course)

Necessary cruelty

Tony Poshnik felt awful about kicking that dog into a sewer, especially in front of his girlfriend. Katrina was an animal activist, a true lover of poochies, and so for Ploshnik to plow into the dachshund’s belly in her presence was most inopportune, at least from an 'exploitation-of-affection-for-animals-into-romantic-conquest' point of view. But it had to be done for safety’s sake of all pedestrians on the street--that dog was an exploding dyno-pup, a creature engineered in the labs at the eastern end of the city, where, it was said, genius terrorists were at work turning man’s best friend into man’s worst nightmare. Someone evil had lit a fuse under this particular dachshund on this particular day, so Tony had no choice but to apply his punting skills.

The dyno-pup was an indirect product of the late 1980s, when people would spend thousands frivolously on fleeting, often perverse fancies. One fanciful notion, conjured by twisted billionaire Drew Finnegan Clontzburg was to wire open the jaws of a Yorkshire terrier and insert strike-anywhere matches. Another pastime was to fire chihuahuas out of slingshots at passing streetcars from high-level condominium towers, to see whether the mexicali critters would go splat or merely crunch a few bones. Needless to say, Clontzburg and his ilk were dangerous, sadistic assholes.

(unfinished of course)

Spoken word seduction

What makes me so different? Than something you cut and paste off the net and stare at? Well, perhaps it is the worldliness I exude, or the incomparable way you can wield me, mother tongue: my sweet syllabic concatenations, elisions colliding into vowels—the consonantal drift. Movement of tongue together with saliva between teeth, rude touch of the velar fricative, the overwhelming buzz at the bridge of the mouth; your moist alveolar ridge, where the ells and tees and the zuzzes dwell.

Tips from the Daddy-Wack:

How to make Wacky Wednesday™ wackier than a wiggety-wacckountant

Follow these instructions, and a truly fulfilling Wacky Wednesday™ will undoubtedly unfurl:

In anticipation of Wacky Wednesday™, don't shower all week.

As midnight gongs and calendar flips from boring old Tuesday over to Wacky Wednesday™, go ahead, jump in the shower... fully clothed! Now strip naked beneath the spray!

After you exit the shower, stop breathing, for a full 4 minutes: you will begin to see wacky visions, ie hallucinations-- this is already pret-ty wacky you might think, but in fact it's just the beginning!

Dry yourself off (you can resume breathing now)--not with a towel, but with a wacky coonskin chapeau!

Get dressed (wear what you like, but hopefully it's wacky, or made of coonskin), then 'wack' outside into the street, shouting aloud, 'sleepy-time's over, people; time to head over to WackDonald's and order up a Big Wac!'

After mowing down the whole Big Wac, head over to your place of work (your place of 'wack', for today).

Start building a Wacky Wall™! Even though your office might not open for another 6 or 7 hours (it's still just after midnight, remember), think of all the wacky papier-mache edifices you could construct, to dazzle and amuse your co-workers. They'll arrive and, seeing the Wacky Wall™, get caught up in the infectious wackociousness of Wacky Wednesday™!

As the 'wacking day' winds itself up, be sure always to mention to your co-wackers that, on Wacky Wednesday™, they should be looking on the wackier side of life! If anyone gives you trouble, or tells you to shut the hell up about being wacky all the time, just say something like 'Why don't you wack off, you slack-assed wack-hack!'

Remember to mutter to yourself throughout the day, 'My religion is Wack, and I'm on the attack!'

Above all, have fun. And remember, when one Wacky Wednesday™ is over, it's just another 144 hours til the Wackpire strikes back!

Wacky Wednesday™ catches on around the world!

After yeoman efforts on the part of this blog, and thanks to the incredible power of word of mouth, I am happy to see that Wacky Wednesday™ is in full swing at the following venues:

West Edmonton Mall

Wild Horse Casino

William R. Riley Elementary School, West Richland, WA

The second graders at J. T. Waugh Elementary School

Northland Rolladium Skate Center

some girl with provocative cleavage

Christview Church, Bossier City, LA

July 07 at the Holland Speedway

All I can say is that, where there's a wacky will, there's a Wacky Wednesday™!

Next: how to make your Wacky Wednesday™ its absolute wackiest!

Antonella

.

Antonella

‘her grandmother and my grandmother
were cousins
that makes us cousins’
third-cousins
you just called us friends
but I never met anyone
like you
I’m sorry
I was too mortified to
tell you
I was sort of
innamorato but
I’m sure you could tell that
anyway; after all
We are family.

blast from the past

(the folllowing sentences were written sometime in 1998, when I was a wee 20-year-old. I found them lying around the ol hard drive, so I figures, why the hell not--if not now, when?)


I was reading a book today. You were talking to your neighbour. She was doing her toenails. He was eating Zoodles from a can. That guy was pissing on dead rats in an alley. These sentences--do they represent some sort of descending moral scale? Or is that some crap I thought of halfway through, to rationalize the meaninglessness of my words?

Hey Tony, why do you talk with your mouth full? You are spitting out lima beans more successfully than syllables. At least a portion of what you spew is edible, if not conversationally incredible.

Hamburgers have no limbs--ignoring mutant hybrid burgers with dill-pickle appendages, of course--thus they have no means of self-propulsion. Even if beef burgers could walk, would they? I mean, where would they go? They have no family to speak of, since the cows they once were a part of have been slaughtered and their remains are fertilizing hayfields, presumably. I think the overall hopelessness and stifling atmosphere of being stuck between two buns would render even the most self-sufficient sparkplug of a patty inert and apathetic. Especially when you consider sesame-seed buns.

Considering the nation’s dearth of zoologists, the outburst of Jumangi-ish animal movies (e.g. Jumangi) leaves this critic anxious and susceptible to psycho-rashes. How do we vouch for the biological credibility of said films without the proper intellectual authority? Elephants don’t live in the city man! Where would they forage? Ok ok, assume herd animals did populate urban areas (and groups of annoying little kids playing “dirtball” don’t constitute “herds”, at least not in the Aristotelian sense): needless to say the Parks Department would be displeased by the chaos, destruction and general lack of civil respect incurred by even the most casual of stampedes. Anyway you slice it, I’m gonna end up with one wally of a psycho-rash.

Psycho-rash, for the illiterates out there, is an epidemic of biblical scope. It is caused by an insidious bacteria, cooked up by our friends (but not, oddly enough, our enemies) at the local A&P, wrapped in orange gauze, and sold at low prices to naive “dirtball” players who wouldn’t know a biblical epidemic if it bludgeoned them across the face. My lab partner Jesse gave me psycho-rash when I borrowed the Water Works and Ventnor Ave. from his Monopoly board. I was trying to sell phony properties to land-hungry immigrants. Instead I got a batch of psycho-rash that would make your nipples bleed vinegar. Needless to say, neither I nor Jesse has played “dirtball”, or Monopoly, for some time.

Like most males my age, I had thought ‘angina’ was some smutty slang word. In retrospect I cringe at my foolishness.

She ripped my hairs out of my head like an Idaho farmer prematurely unearthing the midsummer harvest. I would prefer even rotten pototoes to the present leguminescence of my shorn scalp. So I offered to kick her ass all the way to Boise; she said she was more comfortable taking the train.

‘So cupcake man, you want to push your liberty on me, well it’s an unproven tactic’…

It’s true. Sometimes I hit but mostly I miss, and it’s a bitch trying to figure out how or why. Who can guess what will work? Billions spent on focus groups, and it’s the teeny boppers making us or breaking us. So much power, and they can’t even vote. Yet somehow they do.

But that music you hear, it’s buzzing Lou’s hacksaw, the master wielding the blade, little regard for surrounding tissue--he is the maestro waving a guitar pick. I never knew a one-note Charlie like him could have so much success; it’s obvious he’s got talent, but I don’t know where he hides it: the man can’t sing worth hickory sticks.

Me? I used to repeat myself, but I realized it is a very bad habit.

We are far-flung naifs congregating at a database, gathering on the web to exchange the currency of our innards: raw, hilarious, uncompromised--stripped of trappings and become pure light speed. They say you can never defeat the physical urge, but we have a new technology: the warp of desire. And it’s here on display, finally, for our minds only, and only for our minds.

I never know who’s going to show; I have three men inside: the Blade, the Buffoon, and the Baby… You and me? I don’t think we’re much different. But you are 3,000 miles away.

If there’s one thing you need to know, it’s that I haven’t forgotten. I hope to see you soon. Perhaps we could discuss what came over us.

You and me

(being nice has its limits)

*ahem*

You and me

Goonish, prudish, I was withered on the vine
-you opened me slowly, and we had a good time
I tweezed out all my facial hair
-you took those estrogen pills
I recommended beer, domestic
-you dismissed it as swill
I worried about society
-and you’re an anarchist
I asked you please to feel my lump
-you said “it’s just a cyst.”

You showed me Tarantino
-I was shocked at his mouth
I asked you where’s your moral compass
-“always pointing south”
You took me to the pervert opera
-“assless leather is the bomb”
I sang the naked arias
-you got your freak on.

You and me, we got on famous
-my love was sacred, like the bible
Hosea and his wayward wife
-you played me like Delilah.

Shazak

Hey diddle suck my ass in the middle of the fiddle season. Mercantile lycanthropes (wolfmen) and the murderous stylings of Silo Sid. Anwar Sadat assassinated in Egypt, the floating pillow thrown out to float baby Moses, raised in King’s court until he was thrown out; he led his people cross the desert, through the parted waters, fleeing the flooded banks and escaping horse-drawn armies. Cataclysmic vitality, the energized theory of life; Jesuit Loyala and his hated systematic schools, spreading fear through South America, converting native fools. Holbein and Hobarth and the mad cow in the sun, Logan bespoken and bespectacled. Overrun. Deacon Brodie was a follower of the mighty Chairman Mao, philosophizing nightly he’d incite the drunken row. Bellowing and mad, the flame was never lit; yellow scabs began to fester where the rusty blade’d made its slit. Looking glasses, hairy asses, serious masses where prayers pass rigourous standards of accepted decorum; the forum for lies is expanding and the reprimands retreating in efficacity so the tendency is toward leniency, frugality and expediency.

Spencerville Wayne blog!
check out www.spencervillewayne.blogspot.com for a continuing history of the hoax music pioneers.

more fun

(sorry)

Decent and lovable, and so we gave him a chance to prove himself. I tried especially hard to offer support. He was new to the office; he maybe stuck his foot in his mouth too early into the software development season, but heck we’re all human so I didn’t punish him for it. Instead I offered him a bag of corn oil, dripping and gooey, yet effective under intense pressure and steam flux. Even sparrows, a lot of throws, a wigwam convention, and it all came to blows. A lack of vision, too trusting and insane, it leads to the draining of the swampy everglades of the mind, the head, the brains of the dead, I walked and I paced, the dread grew inside me. I take the bait and I sight a wagon; the trusting never stops. Even, alone and the milky canine bone, doused and extinguished and slathered with foam. Out like a light and never again to brighten. In the dark, things are a little murky you see. I have a cataract anyway so my vision’s obscured. I can’t see, it comes from far off. Myopia ruins, yellow violet and ochre. Assachaar. And Sampson and the toad, Delilah took his hair. Mini Wheats are tasty, you cannot deny it. A breakfast fit for monarchs, a delicious snack to boot. I am in thralls, I am in a 5x8 cubicle. Fluctuation of the tawdry, the yellowing of the sewers. Ursine yet bovine, canine and feline. Logarithmic, insidious and cathartic. A chattel, a catheter, a cathedral, and cancerous collagen collages of college. Populous and perverted, dribbling and fusty, millions of the cut-throats are lying if they’re lusty. Policed and fire-proofed, it is the century of the trout. I am hefty and I’m stable but I suffer from the gout. Lubed up and dried out, it’s Easter for the elves, but I can’t seem to reconcile the sofa with the shelves.

hoax music archives dug up!

Discover them again for the first time:

The legendary exploits of Spencerville Wayne, those pioneers of hoax music and cutting edge non-musicians who not five years ago were busy tearing apart the boundaries between art and metaphysics and then stapling them back together--cannot be summarized easily. Suffice it to say SW (as they like to be 'acronyzed') have had a 'big fake' on from the beginning. Unfortunately, due to web-hosting conflicts and threats of internet piracy, all traces of the band were lost to online audiences for the past two years; finally, however, they are back on the web: the Spencerville Wayne Archives. I have stuck a sidebar link to this group of famously demented liars, one of whom is actually my brother (whose newly inaugurated blog is in a sad and sorry state). Check out the band bio--yours truly was involved in the formation of SW and played a part in hoax music's seminal philosophical justification. And for a stirring lecture on the place of hoax music in the modern age, click here... NB some of the site's internal links don't work anymore; nonetheless what remains constitutes an impressive foray into a ludicrous musical underworld; as an archaeological finding, I venture to say--with no hyperbole whatsoever--that the SW Archives may one day surpass the Dead Sea Scrolls in theological portent and lasting cultural influence. Enjoy.

wtf

Consider the rose—a fruity and colourful flower, full of intrigue and trepidatious to the smelling. A man of citizenship might fain try; a pig can belch, yes he can emit the loud and gaseous tremulous rumblings from the inner intestinal ovens of his corpus. And thence will fall the most odiferous rotten stench that could ever be imagined. I am a man of gustiness, a real fop of a delinquent who asks for butt slaps. And you, you trollop, you donkey’s wench, you crenulated finger food, you fjord dwelling, troll smelling, toll belling, roll swelling, hole jellying horse pig! You are the reason I am a trout. You are why I tie figs to my ankles and emit the harshest cries of woe. Victoria Day cometh and who do I celebrate with? A real tiger of a dame.

And you with your face of plaster, your teeth of titanium, you crack your jowls and reach for your sharpened saber. You really make me sick! A man must not fight in a duel without making sure his shoelaces are tied, and you what do you do first? You rub cream into your cheeks, butt and face, and then only when your skin is moist enough do you fight—not like a man, for you are not a man, but rather like some effeminate goat. That is how you fight, you stellar dweeb.

worlds of wonder rip hearts asunder

the generals don’t play fair

Genghis Khan and Alexander sit down for a match; Alex protests, you can’t employ your horse in diagonal slashing patterns--but Khan has learned to intimidate, 'I curse your bloody rules, and I’ll best you in the manner of my choosing.' 'Ha remember I murdered Darius in front of his troops and I can do the same to you Mr. K…'

The Mongol and the Macedonian Greek, bickering for a week, juggling cavalries and castles, the questionable value of the bishop vs the necessities of a queen; hey look the pawns are almost gone. Finally Khan’s queen knight to king bishop four and so much for the phalanx--Alex smashes the board in an epileptic fit, and the empire’s diced up by his minions.

Nonnessence Unlmtd.

in a disastardy warnerly boggins, a nipple fran down from the sky
as nardex kalmanity struck at my garden, the flit-fladdock maced out my eye
skittling to town all a-yolping, my choice was raddished in twain
'whirlpools will thrillsicle funk-wart,' I zang
'but they shad never diminish the pain,'
and 'jally is fretch for the troasting, but the vintner requizzles some rain!'

but the townsfark were drooning and clumfy, salviciously drunk to a man
soon as a vinskin was hoopened, 'twas a-guggled and sluzzled again
and francid and flooming fenductively, I rang up a quopple o' frassatorts
euphonic agreeding deloreans, they smirkled and glabbed at my cash
and as night festooned larchward and wastened the boardsnorts
I zed 'remember mammarious moon-ages; dump your dustlets in their detorminories.'

But, oh, it was catastroxic from the chromancement! my frassatorts feebler than gust;
alarums instaneous, vlaring, the frassatorts shapped without klass--
the townsfark avoke in the moonlux, snurfling my snootfuls of dust!
fortuna destrooging my meticuloid prandle, I woggled to pressy pedge
'my garden's a nardex kalmanity,' I gloomed, 'my loof's been razened in half,
to Dog Almighty in heaven--I woosh you would kuss me thumb slaff!'


--for Mary, who is a wonderful writer
(and at the lady's request, check out Edward Lear)

Copenhagen

Jefferson and Madison, the capital Wisconsin. Trucking goods up to Alaska, eat frozen swanson dinners, like blue collar lotto winners or them paint-thinners slim kids splash on stained overalls, for summer pay checks not worth beans.

Niagara Falls? is too tall, wide, deep and scary; few survivors, wishing for scurvy, scream Hail Marys going over jetsam; thunderous spray, pulverized into the clay, resurfacing on labour day.

Admiring spires in Copenhagen, through the Christiana haze and the existential mania of Scandinavian brains: too many blondes, men wanting bigger schlongs; it’s beautiful, prosperous, tourists throng, the picture-book city--nothing possibly wrong.

No?

Whaddya know--xenophobes, the socialist load, big tax burdens, no births, the country corrodes, thrown to the dogs—ie, EU in-roads—by great Danes, navel-gazing in ignorant bliss. (You reveal all of this with sophisticate pith, demographic analysis, and a delicate flip of your rose-scented wrist.)

roasted chestnuts after midnight

(wisdom from the fly on the wall*)

The death of the big family and the kids we raise now as mercenaries. And the pressure we put on them. Falling births means overparenting, and now mothers and fathers act as agents for their kids and act as their servants.

Linguistic revolution and the meaninglessness of a secret—JRS

More we understand the more we belittle the object of our understanding. When puzzled we are silent. You can tell when someone doesn’t understand something—he refuses to ask questions.

Raising your kids in this place would be a crime.

Leaves rustling in the wood is all I hear.

The perfect nose on blondie. Red’s got a new purse to talk about. Why do I feel for these? God help the middle class.

And the folks you choose to surround yourself with. Marnie why are you so angry?

‘The pen is mightier than the sword’—I guess those with pens would benefit from this truism and its attendant moral weight.

Be wary of those who say everything can be reduced to just one thing. They are bitter and have no imagination.

The Daedalus inventions to get us closer to the sun, and it was Roosevelt in a wheelchair, and Churchill in his big fat top hat that saved our asses, and how do we repay them, by making Kennedy/Clinton our new god and it is the image’s victory over the word, and the end of reason except as a provider of another false image... and to fill the void we make reality shows ha ha whatever that’s not reality, nothing could be more controlled, like rats in a cage, a controlled experiment, and experimental television follows so soon after experimental science, and neither can replace the power of the imagination.

It is not power that scares us but awareness of power on the part of the possessor; our uncertainty over whether it would be abused.

But why should anyone punish the powerful? Those with power to punish will rarely punish those with power. That’s why Slobodan won’t go to jail. And Adscam. And etc etc so why are you surprised at injustice when really it's just a system defending itself. Relative to the system, everything is the way it ought to be.

Too big to control, and those who say everything is fine are of course all doing fine, so they aren’t lying, but try to step out of your shoes and into the shoes of your friends for a minute.

I miss the big donut shop. I’m missing out on a thousand hugs every day. Oh where’s my love?

We're not lacking in victories, but the ability to exploit a victory--that's what's so unreliable.

Write something in a way that is memorable. Like to be or not to be. And we mock it now because it seems so obvious. Successful wisdom retires retires so so tiresome.

*semi-inspired after re-reading sections of Voltaire's Bastards

Wacky Wednesday™ -- feedback requested

Wiggety Wack!

I have decided that from now on, every Wednesday will be a Wacky Wednesday™. No longer shall 'humpday' come and go without the fanfare or 'fooforah' that it deserves. The time has come for Wacky Wednesday™; the time is now.

What's it all about? Well, it’s different for every person, but Wacky Wednesday™ might involve things like tying brightly coloured bowties to your wrists, swallowing large quantities of household kitchen spices like chili powder or vanilla extract, or making impulsive and irrational purchases at the pet store (think giant squawking birds from some Pacific island paradise, or a wild and wacky Texas armadillo). The possibilities are infinite, the domains of wackiness (wacky clothes, wacky hairdos, wacky things you say to the crossing guard on your way to work) as all-encompassing as the colours of the rainbow… btw my pick for wackiest colour ? A tossup between tangerine and aquamarine; how bout you, what's your wackiest ‘rainbow flava’?

Regardless, I expect all of you to pick up the Wacky Wednesday™ torch, and follow my lead into uninhibited wackiosity.

Wacky Wednesday™--not just a day of the week; it's a plastic bag with nifty eyeholes that you wear over your face while out walking the dog, and then at the intersection you take your shoes off and sniff the insides while singing the theme from ‘Showboat'...

So, in addition to your usual FIAC exploration check here every Wednesday for some seriously wacko wackiness!

Coming up next week: tips on how to make every Wacky Wednesday™ its absolute wackiest.

Convenience store diaries

Jaywalking teens have candy coated dreams, make it to Mac’s Milk for licorice swizzles and Big Foot chewiness; the man behind the counter has three bullet holes in him, and the camera watches sphinxlike in the upper corner enclave: Popeye candy sticks and Bubble King for a nickel, and Caramilk cream shakes and a clutch of flowers, sneaking glances at the porn, and the cigarettes are carcinogenic and the pepperoni sticks aren’t much better. And the coffee's grinding and percolating, whistling thickly in our nostrils and the musty cloak of old woman coming in for milk and peas for a soup she’s gonna make her grandkids. And degenerate vandals and spraypaint and the oversized cars parking illegally at the corner and the holdups at 3 am and you barely escape with your life; ah the eternal trickle of customers not even a rainy day can stop, and food for super pets, and we came to pick up the paper but why not also the enquirer, and maybe even Jesus would come here looking for some fish or five thousand loaves of wonder bread, so you’d say to Him, ‘a party tonight so why not grab a bag of charcoal while you’re at it, for the bbq?’ It’s always Wednesday evening when we’re walking off to storefronts, and the lamp-pole is grey and tilted and the van drops off another load of sugary treats and 'I haven’t even seen you since you moved to Bathurst and Wilson. Ah right there’s the 7-11 there and they got everything you want there...'

poor little wallaby!

Giles Phinicker didn’t expect charity from the Salvation Army; every time one of their trucks passed by he would chuck a small- to medium-sized roadside herbivore, such as a wallaby at the side of the truck. The driver would hear the wallaby slam against the vehicle; he’d stop, get out, and brief scuffle would ensue, where Giles would proclaim ‘a Queensland curse on anyone who pretends to save people in the army’. The truck driver would shout ‘you’re real messed up mate!’ and would spit on Giles’ boots, and get back in the truck and drive away. Giles would laugh and laugh for the next few minutes or half hour, until his medication wore off, at which point he would break down crying and spitting into his own hands, to wash away the grime and stink of the wallaby (for he carried no soap, and saliva is an effective solvent). Wallabies in his region were known for being particularly filthy, and this was a bit of a shame for the residents in that part of Queensland: in Australia taking good care of wallabies is considered a marker of civility. ‘Oh well,’ Giles would think, ‘at least our GDP per capita is higher than in New South Wales.’


Wacky Wednesdays are on their way...!

crunch time

maybe if I lived on a farm

...I would write like this:

The continual drone of the countryside combine, the buzzing of the refrigerator at 5 am in the dark before dawn before work, the footsteps soft on the staircase of the home where you were born. The toaster clicking and the turned heads checking for singed edges. The licked lips anticipating honey covered morsels, loosened with butter, sucked on succulently before the sensuous chew, the mouth meld into liquid washed into itself like a glass of crisp white milk. The gentle screech outside of the bus driver’s door, as the children come home from school.

p.s. I live beside a 16-lane highway.

another paragraph

Dreelix Volvano walked into the room and was stunned at the sight: a six-foot Lurian beauty, with eleven eyes and gigantic pink buttocks. Dreelix asked her if she drank sherry; she responded with a bleeping mewling sound that cracked the crystal on the shelves and near popped the eardrums of everybody in the place. He swooned, he wished he crooned, he half-mooned the bartender, and started crying aloud, “Five hundred pence to the cavalier who bests me in a match of sabers!" He said this hoping to impress the Lurian, and hoped there weren’t any cavaliers in the bar (why would there be—it was the 23rd century, he thought). Saber-wielding was in fact not Dreelix’s forte; duck-snorting was actually more his thing, but he didn’t think Lurians went for that stuff. Unfortunately it was ‘Get in Free if you’re a Cavalier Night' at Pub Goulash, and Dreelix’s challenge was met by dozens of eager and upraised iron-clad truncheons.

(shades of hitchhiker?)

threeminute throwaway

.


love drugs n sex n sad
wunnaytee seconds till it
ends up bad
chorus zips
zaps me clean
big fad momma is a
beauty queen
catchylil mambo
dirtiosbcene
you know what I know is
u no what eye mean?

what should I write about? (inspiration)

Your chalkline cubism, your cigarette ash soufflé, your dogshit consommé, your Miles Davis sneezes, the classical car horn cacophony, that’s what I listen for; like chewing gum wrappers plugging leaks in a dam, it rescues blind billions--it’s that black sheep glam. The opposite of wisdom is also wisdom; the rubbish tin glimmers if the lighting is right; the underground rails will take us from the night.

to heal a shattered back I&II

(for the bad days)


to heal a shattered back

take five years of agony
add five years of therapy
swim every day mind you
practise deep breathing
and long stretching
distract your soul with
light reading while
your body wages a
grinding war of attrition
on itself;
whatever’s left intact
is a bonus.





to heal a shattered back II

whatever you do,
don’t fall asleep
or
sit down.


(for the really bad days)

leftover Siena angst

Bad colds and sneezes and the dust from the garbage trucks, and the pigeons who get annoyed when I walk below, and so they conspire to poop all over me, these I hate. Leaving class today there was a strange feeling, and the American girls don’t look so happy. Their boyfriends are going to war. To fight a war for oil is bad.

Let’s just do what we can to stop it.

We dream in our own minds, and I wish you could see what was inside. I have never been so close as I am right now. But I have a few reservations, I have a little bit of a doubt. Let’s go now into the night, with eager friends and a fancy flight, but we dribble water from our mouths when we are little. The ones I left behind—I hope they don’t forget me. Je suis nais pour la chaleur.

Baby I called your name, but didn’t answer when you picked up the phone. It’s such a hard thing, coming back from where I was; it’s such an awful thing to be needy again.

She doesn’t seem to care about the feast. Drawn and quartered, savage love. Killing words with your kisses, spilling worlds in between. I don’t even know how to get to the nurses tent. My blood is running out; I have to get there, but it is far. So take me down, to the best Irish pub in Siena; I will pay too much for a whisky and soda, and you can protest when I insist on the bill.

Put me away from the men on the left, who hustle along when morning rush hour roars. When the rope drops, the horses race, and it’s thirty seconds to make yourself a champion. And the bass thumps into your eardrums, and the light from the kitchen fades into soft hazes, and you rub your eyes as if awakening, in the world you know well enough to know you know you know it all too well.

Clean clean clean, because the candles burning in the cathedral leave so much wax on the walls and ceiling. And in just a few centuries your beauty fades and gets covered in soot… I saw what happened to you. The way you crumpled when they pronounced him dead. Your own husband you buried without a tear; when they shut his casket you let out a sigh. But this time you dropped the glass from your hand when the radio told you Kennedy had been shot twice in the head. You drove to the school and took your children, and brought them home without telling them why. Because you didn’t want to be alone in a world that didn’t make any sense, without its smiling Johnny. Without your first handsome president.

And you are on the highway. And I am still sitting in the street.

the weather is nice, and I'm thinking of you

.

urbs aeterna

I never saw you so green
as the first day on the train
from Fiumicino to Termini
after interminable journey
by Canadian plane
to the world’s belly button,
holy living coffin
of
prehistoric colour,
six inch stilettos and
telefonino
fever.

I was afraid of you then;
your sixteen degrees in
January
made me discard
my jacket—me,
the victim,
sheepish in
your fashion kingdom.

But
after the first bite of
carbonara,

the first lick of
fragola

I forgave you
your bambinos, your
motorinos,
even
what your churchmen did
to my marble Coliseum.

I was afraid of you, Roma,
until I breathed your air;
after
the kisses
you blew
in my cappuccino

I never saw
a better-looking woman.

A pointless day on public transit

Today I took the subway down from Yorkdale to Union Station, hopped a streetcar (they're calling it LRT now--light rapid transit) to Harbourfront, ate a hot dog and drank a bottle of water ($4 total); it was a lot of acqua, so I went pee in one of the restrooms in York Quay. Then I walked around the water's edge, staring at newly constructed condos on Queen's Quay West. Then I got back on a streetcar, returned to Union, caught the subway to Queen, where I took a streetcar (one of the big accordion ALRVs--articulated light rail vehicle) all the way to Kipling Ave in Etobicoke--what I thought would be a pleasant 30 minute ride took more than an hour, as Queen Street traffic from Yonge to about Dufferin is a nightmare (streetcars mixed with automobiles = slow as hell). Anyway at Lakeshore and Kipling I caught the bus north back to the Bloor subway line, which I rode east to St. George station. From there I interchanged to the University-Spadina line, going north back to Yorkdale, where I picked up my car and drove home. Total excursion time: 3 hours, 32 minutes. Total cost (exclusive of hot dogs): $3.80.

The question you are asking, no doubt, is don't I have anything better to do? The answer, at least for today, is no, I do not. If you'd like to know more about urban rail transit systems around the world, click here.

Ugliness of thought

.

*ahem*

Ugliness of thought

No ego
No influence
No acknowledgment
No dedication
No excuses
No author bio
No publicist
No agent
No head shot

No context, just words on a screen

No waste
No residue
No fodder for biographers
No ‘mail me here’
No relationship wanted, and
None given

Nature abhors a vacuum? Well
she can
blow it out her ass.

The repulsiveness of purity
and
the ugliness of thought
are one and the same

What’s that?
on the tip of your tongue?

(The monstrous arrogance of your monolithic abstraction)

It’s nothing, nothing at all.

The Barometer of Evil

(whoever finishes this gets a pretzel...)

I was running along, pretty carefree all things considered. I flipped a shiny coin into a sidewalk violinist’s casket. She smiled. All was right with the world.

But then, then—I saw it and I yelped like a schoolgirl character in some bad Japanimation show.

I saw the ancient Barometer of Evil thrust itself from the crust of the earth and begin to denounce the Tyrants of the Land.

It had come, finally. I suddenly felt naked. I was in the street; I had to run, hide, find shelter. I was sure that at that moment the Tyrants were in their bunkers, stabbing at political prisoners with plastic toothpicks and shouting angry threats.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I banged at the gates. They swung open slowly; I forced my way past the guard who put up a feeble protest. I threw him the chicken wings I kept wrapped in my pocket, dinnertime treats I usually saved for hoboes in the bus shelters. The guard picked a wing off the ground and gnawed gratefully. I sped inside.

I whispered in the hallway at an approaching shadow, “Which way to the nearest lavatory?’

I spoke in a British accent; I liked pretending I was a diplomat.

“I am sorry, sir,” the disembodied voice replied, “but we don’t allow just anybody to urinate in this building.”

Dismayed by the shadow’s lack of hospitality, I felt like pissing all over him.

“Also,” he continued, “I don’t even work here.”

“What?” I asked, pretending I didn’t hear.

“You shall have to ask for a requisition at the main desk, which is now closed of course, since it is the hour of the Apocalypse.”

The Apocalypse; of course--in my rush to use the bathroom I had forgotten my reason for coming.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Just minutes before I had been sitting in Bar Albicocca on Thurman St. sipping a raspberry frappachino; I was listening idly to the programming on FM radio, KROK 102.5:

"Well, here's an update--the Apocalypse is upon us. The tyrants in their bunkers are about to be overthrown! All humans are advised to take shelter before the eternal judgment begins... thanks to Eric from Gainsville for phoning in that update! Now this next tune goes out to Lance, it's 'Dude looks like lady;' Happy armaggedon!"

Shit, this was serious. I telephoned my auntie Beamish in the countryside. Ring ring ring. No answer. Dammit, fuckin' Beamish. I swore into the dumb receiver and retrieved my quarter from the slot.

I was irate. Helpless. But then it came to me: I hopped a barge to the Consulate.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Oh wait,” I stopped the shadow as he was about to disappear, “I need to see the viceroy—I believe I may have a solution.”

“Like I said, I don’t even work here.” Stubborn chap, but as I rubbed his bald head I realized he was just a senile old loon. “I am just somebody’s grandpa,” he said with a pleading smile, “touch my goiter if you like. Say, do you like playing chess at the tables in the park? How ‘bout feeding pigeons?”

It seemed I was mistaken about this man. Indeed, I would be mistaken about a great many things.

I decided to just look for the viceroy in his office. I looked over the consulate directory and after finding the appropriate room number I took the first elevator upstairs.

Before stepping into the corridor, however, I decided to relieve myself in my pants.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Come right in,” said a voice behind the office door. It was the viceroy--sitting in the one exact place I had expected to find him.

I entered, shut the door, and began to twitch from my benzodiazepine medication.

“God Travers, you smell like somebody pissed on you.”

Sharp as ever, even in a time like this. He was right about one thing—in crisis situations, I, Hiram Travers, tended to piss all over myself.

“Sorry to intrude, Viceroy, but this is an emergency.”

I looked down; a puddle was collecting on the floor. I blushed, continuing,

“Viceroy, the evil is upon us, have no doubt! But it is a cleansing wave of evil, and with it will be washed out all tyranny as well as good. I have in on authority from a radio phone-in show that the tyrants are in their fortresses at this very moment, and they are acting quite irrationally.”

“What’s that? Tyrants acting irrationally? How do you know it?”

“I heard it in the café near the river barge, sir.”

“I don’t follow you, Travers.”

“Turn on the radio if you don’t believe me. KROK 102.5. The great barometer has thrust itself on top of the world, sir Viceroy sir!”

“Travers, get a hold of yourself.” He reached into the 'munchies' bowl on his desk, and began to throw pretzels at me. It really must be the Apocalypse, I remember thinking—at no time before had he been so cavalier with his snacks!

“Sir, I beg you to listen. Lay aside the pretzels.”

My protest seemed to calm him somewhat. He nodded, I continued; my damp crotch was beginning to chafe.

“The prophecy is being fulfilled; the barometer of evil has returned. Let us take to the mountains!”

“Mountains, Travers? But this barometer is a mere molehill. In fact, what is a barometer anyway? I believe it’s pronounced ‘thermometer’. And I think you have a temperature….”

The viceroy, always trying to be clever. But, moist as I was, I wouldn’t budge from my errand.

“Sir, I need you to clear the ambassadors and the attachés to the mountain retreat of Lake Cybill. There we can seek refuge until the evil has done its job.”

He was perplexed. “But why, Travers? Can’t I finish my game of Minesweeper? I’m on level 15.”

Fool, I thought—nobody can pass level 15 of minesweeper. But when would fools learn?

“But viceroy, the evil, the tyrants, my pants—I want to seek refuge in the mountains, and thereafter we can reclaim the earth and all its serfs when we get back, after the barometer has left, of course.”

He turned a blood-shot eye to me. He squinted, then scoffed.

“I’m beginning to worry about you, Travers. What do we have to fear? Isn’t the Consulate a force for legitimate good? Am I not a man of courage? And are you not a whiny pants-pisser?”

He was right, in his way, of course; there was no use trying to convince the viceroy. I thanked him for his time, stuffed a couple pretzels in my mouth, and left the offices.

I hailed a cab—the streets were empty from all the fear. In fact most had already been imprisoned by the tyrants. There were very few free citizens left in the downtown. I had been one of the lucky ones, but now I had to act to save it all.

(unfinished of course)

Tippy toes cats eat the best ice cream—rocky road—from the bottom of the one litre tub of the gooey good stuff.

I had the best intentions at heart when I stole all your baseball card collection and then burned your house down whiling gleefully snattering a laugh of demonic proportions and eating raw puppy legs. Best of intentions, yes.

The way he talked it was like his vocal chords were on fire, and his throat rumbled with urgency. Insurgency. Psychic salsa is what would make my throat water and sting my mental appetite.

Get off the boat and I’ll clear my throat when the captain says I’m a city slickin’ jerkoff.

I think the only solution, really, is for you to smile even as the bullet from the firing line tears through your head.

I told the woman who was selling the coffee to give me extra sugar. She said ok, honey. I thought whatta sweetheart. And the saccharinity corroded all the way through us both.

LCD poll

raw eggs broken, indigestible omelette (too many cooks)

Sorry ma’am but killing your son in the afternoon was an unavoidable eventuality I’m afraid. His destiny lay in that abstract manipulation magic, the mediocre medium of fog of war board room dominance is the message, the only thing apprehended was the managerial depravity, apparently necessary ignorance of inconvenient reality. The relativity of the situation, the ethic conflagration inundation, mortifies a million zipped up lips massacring mouths making conscience-breaking remarks, vainly shaping circumstance to fit the perfect recipe.

man in mirror

.
I am good

I know this is true

you are also good

I hope you do too

What's the hell's happening over in Fotsdam and Fizzleland? I mean, that's two places going to the dogs in a hurry I say; I never knew such stinky crap havens. Fie fie on those obnoxious jerkmongers, those weed-munching horse crazies. Let's face the truth about these goddamn Fotsdammers, and tie their legs to posts so they can't escape and act all rambunctiously like they do--high time we slapped them about the knickers or sawed off a few limbs if you asked me... And has anyone seen my little aardvark, Gustav? He's a cute innocent aardvark wandering the cold pathways of downtown, T.O. and I know there's all kinds of dangerous loons who'd just hanker at the chance to cuff him or steal his licorice money and see him whimper in defencelessness because he really loves licorice and is a trusting dear soul, and so it makes me super sore to think of lil Gustav going without his favourite aardvark snack. And another thing, speaking of sugar treats--doesn't anyone have change for a nickel? I gotta pay the convenience store dude Huang for all these one-cent candies I wanna buy, but all I want is 3 one-cent candies and so I wanna pay with three pennies, but don't wanna give him a nickel or nothing and get two pennies back because I hate hanging on to spare change so much it makes my toes curl. And that's one stance I won't 'change' from. Heheh. But what else can I ask for--you get what you pay for right? But I must say I need a big fajita, or else I will die from lack of mexican food, which I consume like it's oxygen!! I swear, fajitas are to pitas as Jekyll is to Hyde--so don't 'hide' the fajitas on me or I'll turn into a monster! You don't want that I promise so cough up that mexicana smorgasbord (is that how you spell that delicious word?)... And you know what my favourite colour is this week?? MAUVE!!! That's right, I swear this is not a lie. Mauve is the fave--ha ha I'm a poet and I don't know it. Ok 'mauve' doesn't rhyme with 'fave' but so what--I think you are a horse-munching ankle-licker so shut up and pass me the licorice... And another thing--the picnic I was preparing for the Boy Scout committee that parks their bus on my front lawn for all their field trips to my backyard (they go on field trips near my backyard because it's in the Rocky Mountains, which is a perfectly good spot for boy scouts to learn all those wicked outdoor tricks like tying shoelaces into unbreakable knots)--anyway that picnic has to be put on hiatus because I have better things to do right now (like 'write now' in my blog! HA HA HA). So forget the boy scouts--I hear they're all pervs anyway; just get me three pennies so I can mow down on my candy pops!

Passionate verbiaged curmudgeonism

(to be read out loud, if at all)

It started at Edwards Gardens on Good Friday afternoon, where I couldn’t make it to the park for—and this is ironic—lack of empty space to park, so resigned and laughing quietly, “won’t this make for interesting opening,” I head south, to meet my unexpected meaning. Now I’ve told you the beginning, I’m the fat boy in the skinny, maybe words can explain the rest:

Cherry Beach with its shimmering renovations, how bout that, circulating cars pass alongside wild-goose waterfront escape-chasers, a warm cloudless day for l'esploratorio, amid masses of useless industrial residuals, bundled up apologetically behind predictably suicidal springtime pedestrians whose overblown exhilaration expressions have seen the shining sun. Broken glass collects in a roadside ditch, but roughly rides a tall blonde biker chick undaunted, all spandexed lower half with killer artificial calves, sipping a sport drink for two bucks, and her better half, sexy boy ‘Rich Mitch’ Goderich and his slick-trick ‘twinkle-toes’ cutting-edge calisthenics--they’re all bang-bang, clang-clang, diggety-dang, superman goggles, water bottle in hand, while I’m laughing abstractly; how irresistibly her dimpled nine-to-five butt cheeks sag despite Goodlife subscriptions and protein-pill grab-bags, I’m thinking.

I’m just as helpless and stubborn though; I’m a caterpillar crawling across someone else’s interstate; I won’t make it to my butterfly days—my fate is squashing by rubber tires, I expire in my furry red-black coat of ire. But mellowing by afternoon moonlight, I groom thoughts for the later-on scripting session, my signed confession of a wasted day’s inactivity, the stenographic justification for my lifetime of pleasure, this verbal leisure unceasing on the horizon, I hope. But I missed the last bus leaving the landfill spit, so in my Nissan it’s an Andretti fit of amphetamine creativity; the bike path can’t contain me, it’s off to shoreline, searching for bloated and bobbing puppies, hiding from prepsters, yuppies conspicuous in Prada leathers, bellweather gentry friars claiming the city’s last pristine beach site for their god—it’s a postmodern nonsense conquest for cold and cruel carbon-copy meritocracy leech logic; it’s madness I tell you, it’s going to the dogs, and they’re frothing free from leashes.

But I’m not really ‘woe is society’ and ‘curse the infidel’—that’s not my style, I swear. On Front Street at least there’s a sigh of relief, afternoon respite from the Hogtown diesel and ‘dodge-me’ blight, and where in this dad-blast pink-car nation can I find a decent peameal bacon sandwich? The old market’s closed and it’s a meat-free Friday anyhow, so my upper lip stiffens on a donut-shop compromise—it’s not fast-breaking if it’s decaf and fat-free cherry cheese danishes, I tell my guilty catholic conscience unconvincingly. I sit, read a bit about spacious vacuums in our stillborn modern cities; I scan curious among downtown red lights for blue innuendos, expecting ‘suck suck suck’ but it’s all these tough-luck losers just rolling up rims to win, wiping sour milk moustaches with nasty-cuticle fingernails, scraping out livings and scratching at lotto tickets; it’s sad sad so sad so I’m gonna please try again next time—I am definitely not a winner.



(ps happy easter)

blog-land-mines

I never met a pig I didn't like.
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They say that man-eating sharks can never stop hunting.
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I wonder what my brother is up to...
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and the winner...

see what happens when only 11 people vote?

Want the meaning of life? Go read the dictionary...

Colon flips, a sonar blip, tasting ratatouille; logs in the Lincoln, Beverley Hills Hilton, the ash tree threatened by a little Asian bug, pewter mugs and the war on drugs, fried bat wings, the perpendicularity of things. Orthogonal, diagonal, high pot in use. Wembley stadium, Mississauga Playdium, the knack for the wiring and the electrician I never hired. Eglinton and Avenue, the need for venue, retinue, the feudal dues, the poverty of Chad. Big band went bad, too many strings play original things, Britney, Christina, an Oscar Meyer wiener. The drama in a teapot, a tour of Islamabad. Rock Jakarta and you’re joking, the prohibitiveness of smoking, the technology for cloaking, it fascinates my aunt. Lionel Hutz, cosmic klutz, a skater’s triple lutz, it’s like robbing all the banks. Toned firm calf, a subtle bit of cleavage, knighthood for Sir Burbage, let’s burn all the garbage. Yodel on the boulevard, take a tour of Scotland Yard, root out all the evil, bleach kills pesky weevils, teetering but stable like a mountain trolley cable. Wiggins and the bum show, bombarding all of Tokyo, reasons I don’t like Yoko. Pickles in the ozone, quirks of clowny Bozo, gyrate through Yom Kippur. Assiduous in meaning, with difficulty gleaning, a need for dry cleaning, the juice tastes like chicken pie. Venerable and withered, Mr. Weatherbee and Grundy, something pops into mind and so I write it down.

The Sad Bastard

(you posers ain't got nothin on me!)

*ahem*

The Sad Bastard

I am the sad bastard
I’m the loneliest person in the world
No one has ever thought my tragic thoughts
I am the epitome of jade sensitivity, my
every tender eyelash is a redwood of suffering,
casting deepest roots, thirsting in an ocean of salty tears
You chop me down with your callous vulgarity
And I’m scorched in a desert of parched, harrowing doom;
I pose my head down in this decayed leper’s palm
whimpering echo sounds into a blank white sheet
I am the ghost that haunts my own soul in the dead of winter;
If Sorrow were a televised reality show, I would be its mournful host,
rejecting the make-up artist, offering my pocked-marked neck up to
a coast-to-coast audience of unblinking executioners.

My meeting with the inspector

(short tale of a philosophical disagreement)

I shimmied a good length down a pole and landed on top of a police inspector. Draco was his name, a cop from the ninth precinct, a real slob. He was the type who only got into a life of crimefighting because his only alternative woulda been a life of crime. Draco was too stupid to be a successful criminal, but he was just slow and stubborn enough to make a reliable cop.

Draco pinned down the facts of the case—the fact that I was not so squeaky clean, and I ought very well to be arrested—just as I landed on him from above. Now he was pinned.

“You’re no Batman, pole rider,” he snarls at me. But I think then he realized his spine was shattered in eight or nine places:

“Rraagh, dagnabbit,” he squeals, “what will Bessie and the kids think? I was supposed to take them out for wings tonight!”

Wife and kids eh? Who woulda thought. Touched by Draco’s apparent family demeanour, I apologized for any fractures I may have caused, and fling a twenty-dollar bill onto the man’s writhing corpus (at that moment turning an interesting shade of purple). I smirk, “that’s to tip the ambulance, chief; sorry bout spoiling dinner.” Ha, those are the ‘breaks’ I guess. I straighten my collar—mussed from the descent down the pole—and I make to walk out the door onto Thistle Street to meet my associates.

But as rotten luck has it, Draco’s gun’s still lying nearby beneath the pole, beside his not-quite-yet-useless right hand. He lifts his revolver—a standard precinct issue—and groans wearily in my direction:

“Kaplutnik,”—my name, Victor Kaplutnik—“you Ukrainian nincompoop—I’m gonna taste your ass before the day is up!” Shit, he’s really sore, and now he’s pointing a pistol at me. Continues, “let’s see how easy-peasy you sashay around the town square when there’s no kneecaps on your filthy Ukrainian legs!”

Blam, blam. That’s what I’m thinking at this point: blam blam blam.

I make this sound effect in my mind, blam blam, figuring that if a sound existed in my mind, there couldn’t be the same sound in a simultaneous reality, and Draco wouldn’t dare pull the trigger of his revolver lest a philosophical contradiction arise between thought and action (I was reading The Republic pretty intensely that week, and for some reason was hung up on the primacy of the insubstantial mind). No bullets in my legs please, I was thinking—praying, really—as I stare at the barrel. But I was relying on the analogy of the Cave far too much that afternoon: Draco is no Platonist, and his gun, though surely more intelligent than he is (unlike the inspector, the gun isn’t loaded all the time), was quite a ways more dangerous when fired.

I hear blam blam all right, but this wasn’t some idle metaphysical musing; it’s the genuine sound of two actual bullets shredding their way through my kneecaps, exiting the other side, and destined to leave a flesh-and-blood mess on the floor beneath the pole—a pole which no one would want to shimmy down for a least an hour, because it was soon covered by the red stuff spurting copiously from my leg, and was already obviated by a tubby, now-paraplegic police inspector whom right then and there I was wishing I had never met.

Democracy in action

Because this web site isn't about me; it's about YOU, wasting time at work reading this.



other ideas?

mistake

*ahem*

down by the lake

down by the lake
I make my mistake
—opening my mouth
she stares at her
shoes and
love flies south.

The only way to skin a cat... And remember, "some people like to remove the head and nail or tie it to a fence post for display to passing motorists."

I've finally found her

My one true love. The Ukraine is a bit far away, but perhaps Fed-X can bring us together. They call her Nataliya, but to me, she'll always be 'Profile #78'.


*ahem*


Susie and the Tomcat (vigilante justice)

Sexy Susie walks a lot
It’s a good thing she’s wired
Sexy Susie works the corner
Until she gets hired
But Sexy Susie pulls a gun
Points it at the Rat
Sexy Susie doesn’t blink
--fired just like that.

Sentences he wrote some time ago, for reasons unclear...

(100% GENUINE—accept no substitutes)

Truly, we live in the golden age of cutlery!

All my friends were math majors, so there were a lot of calculus jokes flying around ("Hey Tony, your derivative is fourth order!").

I feel like an X-Files episode--you know, the one where everyone is controlled by some malevolent parasite.

It's beautiful today. Yep, nicer than a busload of nuns on Prozac.

I'm going to manage the nuts off this softball team!... It’s my team and I want everyone to come up with a nickname for himself (e.g. "The Hammer", "Speedy", "The Crazy Mexican"--keep in mind these are only suggestions).

I recognize that the internal circuitry of the universe has been wired wrong, by an all-powerful electrician with his thumb up his ass.

I miss your emails, so write back and tell me what colour oranges are on your planet.

Enjoy these Monday evenings; they only happen once a week.

Today’s subject: flank-steak flatulence.

Remember me, the guy with giant bratwursts instead of arms? Haha… just kidding--if I had bratwurst for arms, raccoons would have picked them clean by now, eaten them while I slept, etc.

Are you kidding? I loved the Ice Storm of ’98 (except it was a bit too icy, at times).

Instead of saying "physics" as "fizzics", call it "fye-zics"...you'll live longer. Also, pronounce silent "K"'s. Trust me.

I can cluck like a chicken or bark like a dog, but in all honesty I would prefer to do neither since passersby tend to ridicule me when I do.

Fear not, oh WILTER of DAFFODILS, for you will have your pound of flesh!

One day soon the lamb will lie down with the lion, and the lion will lie down with the lamb, and you can feel free to get in on the action.

Man is by nature a product of his mother's loins, and never of his mother's lions.

…but am I not a man of clemency? And you, do you not speak with the tongue of an asp? Are not your eyes like malevolent daggers?

…you will interested to know that there is a new group of people living in Victoria Hall. They are an ugly, ugly bunch--and that's being charitable.

…Economics was easy and I got really good marks, but it made me want to beat myself over the head with a frozen salmon. Do you know that frozen-salmon-beating urge? It doesn't have to be a salmon, just as long as it's long, icy and firm.

…I am on a ten-minute break. We just finished talking about enclitic pronunciation, so I thought I'd email you! Hahaha--that's philological humour… I am so lame.

Be my valentine, I IMPLORE YOU!!!!

…once you hear the lilting melodies of REM’s 'Find the River', you'll be whining like a crack-baby who has suffered brain contusions after having been dropped on its crack-head by its crack-pipe-hoarding mother, who's just so goddamned messed up by that crack!

When you told me your last name for some reason it stuck in my head (you know, like a big twig sticks into a boggy marsh).

…it's like when you discover that you have a colony of prairie dogs living inside your left elbow, where you thought there weren't any prairie dogs at all!! It's exactly like that and completely UNlike everything else!!

…your friend said she might be looking for a summer sublet and was inquiring about our house...gimmee the dirt on her--does she leave used tampons in the kitchen sink or anything like that?

A woman can talk about shoelaces as long as the lace is long.

…it's always interesting to compare the facial expressions of people who have to go pee, versus people who have just gone, and are swept up in waves of relief and post-urinary contentment.

…Please, by all means bring as many complete strangers into my home as you desire. I promise every single one of them a bowl of candy and a hot-oil massage.

My train of thought is not linear...more like a non-integrable log function.

I feel pretty peaceful. You only need that feeling for 10 seconds a day; it's enough to stop even a chartered accountant from killing himself.

guildwood park and spicy jerk with the right beer

The giving the constricting the empowering urban grid we walk on, taking your cut at the door, five buck a piece for entry into the bar. Federal detention cells fester with soulless criminals and the nearest unlocked door to hell, the late-night lampshade hooligans, the dampened enthusiasms of ornery minorities; how triste and bellicose you sound this morning my love, my grand weird stick-in-the-mud brother-in-law! The things you do for family, the things you do every dawn in the bathroom, the teeth you brush with assiduous circular flicks of workaday wrists, the eternal nonagenarian who bakes a rhubarb pie, who asks you where you’re going, but—thank heaven—she doesn’t ask you why; today is the testing day, today is the only day, today is every day. Have you seen the lights in Paris? Have those brigand raccoons caved in at your door, apologizing profusely, adding to the folklore? Evermore, how many hours--three or four? Spare an afternoon, then ope the door, let’s explore, a Sunday drive, let’s go for it, into the city we’ve never seen before.

Amid forbidding masses of fractured Greco-Romans, the laughably discordant statues in the Guildwood lakefront groves, the 100-foot cascade to the dimpled water down below, April shrieks sizzlingly, a demonic blast from February, with a rusty chain fence separating us from the abandoned roadside inn. They are shut up til spring, those wooden huts where sculptors hide and scratch graffiti on Canadian granite, the heavily subsidized decay of the space they spend their days; oh delay delay delay—can there be another way? We’ve seen it now, we’ve seen enough, so let’s be on our way.

Kingston Road, a widening sprawl, the turnip farmers turned bingo-parlourers, the halting speech, wasted wisdom and the watered French onion melody and daffodil blooms, the wicked denial of the inquiry scapegoat, the ancient gingko tree, the meandering repeatedly duplicated sidewalk jostling, and the squawk-box Fokker pilots shooting Messerschmitts; the weather-vane robber barons and the Scarborough Pantera freaks, MotorHead rascals smashing beer bottles on sacred cemetery gravestones amid sultry Passover bitterness. (The roadway may be linear, orderly, but she blinds her driver in savage chaos.)

Surprisingly strong, the ginger beer, the nip it gives, and I, the wimp, I fear. Can a red and yellow Caribbean restaurant make you homesick? In the case of my friend, yes; it’s plantins not plantains she tells me, but is ecstatic all the same. Jamaica, mon, IRIE, it’s that starchy sleepy afternoon roti, although the waitress was from Trini. But me? Me, I was contemplating the strip club over kitty corner, my salivating glands, wander in to Jilly’s, check out our fillies, hobnob with 905 hillbillies and crackhead hellcats in the Queen-Broadview village. Oh how very very silly I am; now hose me off and take me home, to Avenue Road--I got a load still in the dryer, and Monday morning will be chilly.

MiSC. Piggy*

(a porcine blast from the past)

Once as she was walking in front of the shops on her way back from the supermarket, Esther caught a distorted reflection of herself. Considering what the doctors had told her about her blood pressure, she was surprised at what she saw in the glass. She was smiling. Smiling in spite of what she had done; in spite of all the money she had just spent on bacon. Yes, bacon.

Eating a mouthful of pig meat was, to her, a euphoric experience. Cocaine, amphetamine—Esther would have none of these when she had access to the most pleasurable high of them all: bacon. She had six slices of corn-covered peameal (she liked it dripping with maple syrup) right before her prom; she always said it was the best night of her life. Bacon, her friends cleverly joked, was Esther’s beacon.

Her glutton (lust?) for bacon would be Esther’s ruin. The bacon never lasted, yet the bills from Shopsy’s never stopped coming. She pawned her watch, her Datsun, her 24-inch TV. She needed money to pay off the box boys in the deli—she sold everything except her “Ingenio” fast-fry pan and her grease-absorbent paper towels.

In her more lucid moments, Esther could not escape the dread which suffocated her. She remembered the doomsaying of Franco, her childhood butcher: “Beware the Pig! It has the Demon’s flesh—tasty, yes, but treacherous indeed. Bacon leads to Fear, Fear leads to Hate. Hate leads to Suffering!”

She would change in the future, she vowed, and switch to veal, or maybe lamb. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I spit aside the Demon flesh!” Today however, she would dine lavishly on the base hogmeats; with her belly full today, she needn’t worry about tomorrow. The fleeting ecstasy of bacon (yes, bacon) carried Esther blindly from one day to the next, from this deli to that deli, each one a small step down a slippery slope toward pork-fed damnation. Each rubbery, gristly morsel was an agent of bittersweet self-indictment.

Ultimately, Esther could not give up bacon, a fact she refuted even to the last, though it killed her. Her half-hearted attempts at rehabilitation invariably relapsed into some all-night BLT binge. Tears streaming down her face, she would polish off side after side until vomiting herself to sleep.

But one night the bacon sizzled louder than before; the vomit came early, and Esther never woke up.

The next morning, on the cover of Newsweek the ironic headline ran, “Baco-tine Patch the real deal—Docs go hog wild over cure for pork addiction.”

The good news came too late for Esther though. The cholesterol had taken its toll. Too long had she floundered about in the cesspools of gluttony and hot grease. Her coffin was like a ‘non-stick’ receptacle, claiming innocence for Esther’s overdose; a wooden skillet, which buried her bloated, bacon-addled body.

*appeared in the Queen’s Journal, Sept 28, 1999

A question

All we are saying... is give this poll a chance.

Sass-und-frazzle

*ahem*

Sass-und-frazzle

A banana peels my punch line, seltzer on the floor, wheel I reinvent with ink consistency, even though it bores

returning bottles without caps, the road map for our generation
peddling fish wrap for tomorrow, on board a Chinese jetty
I steal thunder, chop it up—it purrs just like a kitten
I’m an honest wife who loves her man, and I’ve got a sparkling kitchen

I stole for kisses
stole a glance
I ask for John’s head on a lance

ask the black bartender, “sing me jazz”
ask four quarts of sassafras
To get me going, through this poem
To wipe my dirty ass

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This metre stick is plain indecent
It’s going to start a war
I always whisper after midnight
echoes through my pores

I have a robot dog, I call him Sparky
His circuits tend to fry
When he smells a bone he sparks right up
don’t bother asking why

I fantasize of giant peaches, bobbing in my face
But it disappoints me greatly to relate
that there are no peaches
in outer space

Oh wait— here we are at the gate

get out your boarding pass
memorize the Latin Mass
take everything you never asked
take ecstasy and blast off
cuz the voyage is long and ghastly, and it will leave you frazzled

Waltzing Matilda (for TW*)

[*to be read listening to ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)’**]


The morning click of the doorknob as you return from the shower; the muffled whoosh of moccasins on my front porch; the itchy screen door you scrape with car keys; nodding furious your soft, earnest forehead, to follow where you’re going--that’s what I need to make it through another day. But I couldn’t jump as high as you; I wish I could've, but oh the things you can do and I just can’t, and I’m sorry dear; I never did. You didn’t ever stop trying though, with your platinum gold smile and growling raspberry tenderness, until your giant spirit fluttered off into the whirling pea-green river… And before we met, the first hello, the first time, I already knew your name; you took my fingers in hand and squeezed my calluses, asking ‘how did these get here?’ and I just shook my head and grinned and your eyes were so big, and you looked in mine and whispered your secret; time was running out. Now I’m losing my voice every night, with Tom W howling beside me, and I wonder--why won’t sad Lady Matilda dance with her man? Why won’t she waltz with him? Was I afraid of sliding across the wooden ballroom with you, sparkle spin and we spun, out of control we were. I was an amputated sailor once, but you took me by the arm, and I was weak when you led me up that hill; I was starving but you didn’t let me fall down, you never let me fall asleep, even in the cloudburst. But on Good Friday, you left--you left town nonetheless, you left me and now I pace back and forth in my bedroom, pummelling my forehead with fists, knocking myself out in the closets, digging for at least one of your tattered shirts, because I need a piece of something to hold on to, and I bet you come back someday still, because I have something you own. My heart my heart--but my heart is so big and some days it spills all outside, and there is never enough kleenex. And you said you’d remember everything I once told you; you said you’d never let me sit alone in those tired blank spaces, but the footsteps I’m hearing are just foghorn echoes of passing ships, and that night-sky supernova, those feathers, remind me of beach sand and the boardwalks--and hey, remember that time I let you cut my hair, and when I looked in the mirror we burst out laughing? What a disaster we two. But you promised to keep the sofa-bed free whenever I needed to lay my head, and today, boy do I need somebody’s Somewhere to crash--and do you ever wonder, how we’ll look when we’re old? You'd be more stunning than now even; you have those black eyelashes and dimple on one side. And I never say goodbye, because you can’t leave me, and if you leave I won’t forget it ever. It was blinding, how you rushed inside and took me, but just as blinding you brushed past… and do you ever find what it is you’re looking for? Answer me, please I am begging, you--fucking... answer me--say something... I remember, Saturday night was holy when we were together; that kind of waltzing was the only kind: we two spinning madness in my front hallway, back porch, my face flush in the middle of winter, in the upside down world you took me through, your silver horses and magic powers, your morning-after promises. So to get me through today I’m always falling on my knees; I worship those memories and I want to bury myself inside them, naked, dancing in your arms and shivering.


[**'cause that's how it was written]

freedom o' press

(because the public has a right to know)


freedom o’ press

Readers of the world, unite!
your Writers do not right
they cage you in their pens
skinny pale women, sour little men
daily opinion, pundits political, critical hippos, commentators
compensate for friends
with ‘professional relationships’

clique of vipers, insider outsiders
hissing secrets to each other
revelling in their voices
pretending privately for them
what is public
don’t bother them with letters because
they don’t know how to read

how do you spell ‘dutiful eye’?
it’s ego ego, doody-filled ego
mercenary eagles, deadline beagles
but how you spell ‘hack’?
the message, dear reader, is the medium:
so put down that paper--now
pick up your broadsword and ATTACK.