In a rather excellent mood

Yes, let's discuss this mood I'm in.

I feel like a horse who has eaten his fill, like a porcine beast dripping with swill.

I feel like two crackers slathered with gold, like a pink banana finally accepted by all his friends, who are yellow, and cranky.

I feel like a magician named Chris who has his face on the one dollar bill.

I feel like honey mustard after sweeping The Condiment Awards (the Condies).

I feel like 12 seesaws shipped to Papua New Guinea, where the children appreciate you dammit.

I feel like Lou Reed's own drug dealer.

I feel like Beethoven did, before he went deaf, except I don't have that sort of talent. But hey - at least I'm not deaf.

I feel like a mahogany oven that bursts into flames. Sure ovens shouldn't be made of wood, but hey imagine the glow!

You know that awesome feeling when you discover radium? I feel like that! (NB this item is addressed only to you, Marie Curie).

I feel whiz-bang superdelicious with a coupla wango-wangos thrown in!

Yeah, pass me the space bar, cuz I'm dancing, I got my elbows flarin and I needs my space!

Do I need this?

Hey there is enough to do that you don’t have to write, there is more magic in these fingers than can be spread out like dark film under a fluorescent light. Suggestions of ideas come to me, word combinations that won’t let me be, I work hard for a month but that backlog won’t let me rest easy. I sit here and ponder, or meditate, I could self-pity, or self-medicate. Write without thought, while you write to express I write to undress myself so I can sleep; I’m in a hurry unpacking these useless clothes, hanging em here on a wire to let dry, it freezes in strange patterns that the angels must have wanted - it coalesces of its own volition, I don’t bother asking why. I discharge my duty and cook my dinner... ever since I moved out the frenzy endless, bending, thanksless has made me hungry and thinner.

Please pass my condolences to your former self, he died a lonely death and is there, on that book you wrote two years ago on your mind's eye's shelf.

I used to measure myself

91.8
90.8
95.0
97.0
96.5

Top 6: 98.7

2 of 180

91.8
93.9
90.5
89.0
85.0

Avg 90.5

2 of 1100




Seems pretty stupid now.

Souvenir for P

Green and geckoed and stuck in a bottle, mottled and rotten, wrinkled and musty. I remember that moment in my drunken archives, that liquor that made my stomach my enemy. I swallowed fermented lizard and my tongue has never forgiven me, that insult and dangerous panacea for anxiety. Al cohol you later, I promise I will, pop another pill, knock back a shot glass full of Vietnamese or Czechoslovakian swill. Wander into a party at 4 am and get naked, impromptu photographs rapidly become legendary, etched in anecdotes for posterity, posthumour fame and an irreverent name, but things don’t last on the internet, no one can hold a grudge online because we never know who’s next in line. I am eminently blackmailable, one of 7 billion swine, so what? Fifteen minutes is all I need, countdown to become ordinary again. Liberate me with the threat of extortion, I have skeletons in my inbox but no no no I don’t believe in abortion.

Ogre Slayer in the City

A tall ogre sat grimly in the internet bar around the corner from the 24 hour copy centre where I worked. I was employee to the Man but I was also ogre slayer in my spare time. I had killed 15 ogres in May alone and it was not the end of the month yet. Indeed I was hoping to collect a bonus. I went to my boss and asked for more money explaining my good work in killing ogres, but my boss Jonas Hogmass said “You are nor paid to kill ogre, my friend - you are required to sit at the till and deal with customers.” Clearly my talents were being wasted, and so I quit the copy centre that day, exited onto the sidewalk with my dagger to find ogres to feast on.

There was one at the internet cafe, bar CyberNutz, and he was a big ogre. The ogre was downloading new software into his memory stick and I thought it a good opportunity to disembowel him. I entered the cafe and attempted to plonk a dagger into his buttocks. But his ass was too sturdy, and the metal of my shiv clattered into bits. I was agog at this ogre’s buns of steel, and in order to survive I hastily apologized. "My man, there has been a mistake,” I said, “for I have tried to insert my dagger into your rear, but you still sit happily and download your shareware.” And he looked at me crossly. I continued, “You must be a great man, or an ogre at least.”

The ogre was magna cum laude, or so said his laurel that read ‘Harvard Ogres 2004.’ This was no ordinary stupid cave ogre. The ogre was eventually forgiving as he looked at my broken dagger and recommended a good metalsmith - in the central business district. “There is a lore passed down since the centuries,” the ogre said, “right at the corner of Dundas and King." I nodded but inwardly thought him a fool - those two streets did not intersect. Although perhaps this ogre possessed a greater wisdom: His ass had already proven to be tough and turgid.

Towad the central business district I discovered a whoring parlour. I thought it politic to ingress and fetch myself a wench. I needed help fluffing my daggers. As a freelance ogreslayer I had many weapons and I need help carrying them all. But the parlour was vacant of wenches; it was filled only with radio broadcasters and advertising executives. Hmm, I thought, perhaps one of these could carry my standard, and also give me advice for jazzing up my CV. It was employment I also needed having quit the copy centre. So I approached a marketing vp. “You there, you shall be my metal-wench” I said to her, but she talked about quarterly earnings. I was frustrated at her insouciance and so tried to disembowel her. Alas my dagger was still in pieces. She scoffed and said “There are metalsmiths at Dundas and King!” Now, that intersection again! This wisdom from the Harvard ogre was proving a bit pedestrian.

On my way to the promised intersection I alighted at a meadow. A long meadow filled with gigantic trees and also video games from the bygone Epoch. There was Super Mario Bros and Bubble Bobble and even Excitebike, blinking at full squeal. I was filled with a sweeping nostalgia at the glories of a bygone age, and how bittersweet were the times knowing the peak of VideoGame Genius had been achieved and real-time first person shooter could never be more stunning than it was right now. But enough head-in-the-cloudery I thought and I continue to search out my wayward metalsmith.

At Dundas and King stood a wizard, robed in velvet, blue velvet, and covered with enchanted symbols such as the legends have described. The wizard was selling instrumental cds out of a case and asking for change. This wizard’s name was Dirkwald the Dirigible; he was of a blimpish countenance, for which reason I nicknamed him Zassy the Zeppelin. I asked Zassy the whereabouts of my metalsmith, and showed him the pieces of my dagger. He said, “Son, put down that weapon and enter my trailer.” For he had a trailer on the roadside; it looked welcoming and emitted the aroma of 100 per cent angus frozen beef patties wafting off his easy-clean George Foreman Grill. I stared at the wizened wizardly face and he began to incant, “uhmah, laga, the shazakl and the threwr” This man possessed secrets from the beyond the mists of centuries, I thought, and I should acquiesce. This was not the result of a narcotic hallucinogen, I assured myself, being stuck with a wizard in his trailer in the business district of a great North American city. No, it was not drugs. In fact everything was all too ordinary.

It has been 17 months since I had been given my charge: to rid the world of ogres and cleanse the universe of all overbearing ghoulishness. I was sent on my mission by the great sage Margot the Mad who had entrusted to me his silver shiny shimmering shiv. I was the Knavish Knight who would call down the wrath of the righteous and deliver justice to the arms of the innocent, or so it was written on my email signature. I was honoured to be chosen but I also desired some sort of pamphlet, online tutorial, or primer to explain which enemies exactly I was to disembowel and which innocents I was to spare. For I was a recent graduate of an east coast school and was nowhere accustomed to plunging daggermetal into the obstreperous buttocks of a loathsome ogre.

[unfinished of course]

Agincourt - lost notes from the Toronto Guy

(remember www.TorontoGuy.net? oh he's coming)

Agincourt poem
(July 05, on Peaches)

Agincourt in summer burns you to the skin, it is a thin layer of nothing that coats suburbia and underneath lie secrets buried. In Scarborough north of the 401 a winding patch of streets, over 60km of sameness, a botched escape from middle class bleak. Parks and churches dot the scape with lush green lawns, flowers chopped and manicured and immigrants sing their dream song.

At Midland and Sheppard is the old Knox church from the 1840s or earlier, a stone face for a place to be proud. Agincourt, named for a battle at the whim of an MP, for the sake the first post office in that area, well there are funnier things in history.

The nations congregate and eat dim sum and halal and pakorah, but an old guard enclave exists still and directs a secret aura. The name smacks of respectability even though it’s a bloody battle, now it’s not Henry the V or Shakespeare but the rat-race L-train rattle.

From McNicholl to the 401, from Kennedy to McCowan, I wandered streets on Peaches blue for 7 or 8 long hours. I didn’t meet a soul who smiled except for one here and there, an occasional oasis of humanity in the stinking July air.

So much religion
Chinese churches, Hindu temples, anglo bungalows
Everyone knows but will never admit it
Sometimes you have to visit
just to confirm your stereotypes

Kennedy roars in the afternoon,
And Brimley roars in the morning

Sweat stains on my tshirt

Fear of a heart attack on the road
The sunset over the 401 and the two towers above the Scarborough Town Centre like hope for Siberia, the STC has got a great food court
And I had chicken ceaser salad

Remembering to arch my back
Brimley woods recall the Blair Witch

I revert to the bicycle sidewalks of my youth.

I broke my back on the concrete
and July was thick and soupy.

It's a Start

I'm done looking for the beginning to this poem
for what sets me off

-is it those thousand kisses last night
her soft face, body, heart melting
brown eyes and dimple and for how many hours did we...
(and I felt like Catullus)

or stuck in gridlock and wondering
about my dad’s hometown
and he's in Italy and
I break down

then honking short-short-long 'cause the Leafs won
or the Tim's commercial that sets me off
about the immigrant father and son

or Roy O's ghost and high notes
making me dizzy
or Johnny Cash giving his love to Rose, singing
"take her all my money, tell her to buy some pretty clothes"

or slave in a kitchen to feed a homesick man
or sit and make the most
fantastically esoteric jokes
just to prove you can

or liver and onions for the landlady,
“hey I made too much food”
and
"I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea, if you’re in the mood."

I rhyme til Sunday
to keep you glued
-so you’ll listen-
but I know what is proper and
what is sneaky
and I will begin this poem at the beginning.