I See a Darkness

We are worn out and wondering why. I love you in the movie with the big blue African sky.

Oh, the little we love and can do. Unfortunately that music doesn't sustain a two hour spurt. You can't keep rhythm on the screen, you describe your day, like an insect colony production schedule determined to shovel as much dirt into the readers' eyes to make them grit and wince.

There is something you oughta know about the grocer down the block, where people in a hurry get 1L milk for $4.59: He has a room full of heat lamps in the back where his kids teach Vietnamese to strange truckers who have a thing for small-waisted cashiers.

You have to lay it all out there and hope, knowing of course that someone suddenly can't stand your guts and everything you keep bubbles up in the way you post photos, leave witty comments and even by the speed you answer your phone. I can't believe I haven't sat you down in years and told you all about those songs that brought me tears. I think there must have been a hundred.

That way that you were, I remember  it well, I think you are the same in my mind as the day at the airport, I have always just wanted to be near, to stay and not leave. I say prayers in the morning when you go to work and when I turn my first thought is 'did she drink her coffee'.

Oh great people I see you on the street, I see you on the sidewalk, my soundtrack in the car; you are a necessary part of the scenery, each wading through your tiny dreams, your big lungs and loud wails your pissing children your glorious christmas mornings when everything is even steven.

It's me, Andy, I haven't seen you in a while. Like he said you're going to wish you talked to me more when we were alive. I have the recording you made when we were kids, I remember I just laughed in the background; I think I remember everything you ever said. I don't know if it's a photographic memory but I'm certain it's a curse. You can't ever doubt my heart. I am still trying to start.

A neat little almost sentence

Ever dwelled, we wooden walkers, we warm bell men, we loud tent men, we proud pigpen ten, then sent to Sendlak with no sendbacks, mac truck and bent backs, lent to scrap, sold as a mat in a maze with a rat in a cage buying all the bars back. 

Second Floor Ryerson Library

Potent pizza is a perfect pestilence possibility. I was screwing a large caboose into an onion bun and it occurred to me, shall I shallot a scarecrow? Shall I shimmy with slimy murk into a bodum of unfair frothery? Things are piglet-worthy and mucusmaking. 

If ever a cylindrical cullulent pigeon did unman a masked mysterioso then surely sixteen succubi could collect an unemployment cheque from a red-faced postman. If a college degree meant anarchy then the streets of Quebec would be swept with sweaty pit stains and colander-cudgelling jesuvants. If a jesuit, I mean, did quaggle and fleck then surely his hysteria about the biscuit was just another knottleneck? Poor pissed pachyderms, prancing without the ability to jump, large elephantine fairy queens dusting rhythm guitars like so many Ron Wood replacements uttering magic passwords in the basement of the Rivoli, lacking hot heat, lacking fresh feet, drying wet wit with looks of loathing and curled lips, eating too many tofu tacos in an underwear commercial's catering van restroom.

Can I quell a Cosbyfest? Could Theo ever drive a bus? We waste what we waver, we waive all rights to disenslavement that is emancipation if we neglect the ballot box out of jade frustration. I was warm to the world but cooked like a log, blackened charcoal in my nether zones and soggy from the bog. If a klepto took my tethering hooks--how will I climb a mountain? I shake like Evgeni Malkin, he of fame, of mispronounceable name. Twagger your digits like a disapproving simpleton sloshing about in tens and twenties from hours vending Bingo cards at the bingo place on St. Clair, where chain smokers don't care and lives wind down like the west wind, and a win is a win and a loss means it's time for a smokebreak.

Have a cup of ice-cold gelato. It's after 1pm; I'm drowning on my tip toes in Arizona heat, killing strangers with stares and oozing blackheads from my feet. We ooze proud, we yodel ever loud, we will publish or perish or perhaps both at once, going on vacation for 72 months. Can I call you in the morrow? I need a ride to the Scarborough Zoo, my driver has the flu. He was not reliable like you.

Hamish Macbain trolled for hours in the wild, eating dried skins from the tree whose name no one has written, taken tidbits of misfits and missed facts and complaints and loaded them all onto a server in a closet in a hallway of an office in the suburbs of the capital city of a minor province in a confederacy of future lands locked down under empire struggling for solvency due to solar flares interfering with economic growth models fashioned by 19th century professors amid the dust of a chalkboard.

Sulla sua cattiva strada

I was working on the railroad, I was toasted by the fire, like a marshmallow man, sitting on a toothpick. Out and out we shouted, we wanted more motions, less thought. We need another round of whiskey to numb last night's gut rot. Why not sit and swig with us? Why not crash and stay? I know, you could never act that way.

Overboard I fell, overlong we dwelled. I was lifted up in the arms of that strong one, lifted up into his cape, too tired to thank the man, I spent a month harvesting his grapes. When he let me play with his children, when he let me sit at his table, I gained a position, small bit of dignity in the household a go to child when a salesperson dropped in from town. "Please sir sit down and let me pour you green tea." Please sir, I would think to myself, can you tell me what happens in town? I was thirteen and heard of the glass fountains in the main square, covered with lights in spring evenings.

Radiation release valve activated

Semiotic rifle, spoonful of trifle, we carry our cups to the dishwasher, rinsed, tossed, sealed, it's a cutlery holocaust. Tempers flare, totally tequila, bees in bonnets, nightmare sonnets:

Of his soul, it is dead, he buried it quickly with strokes of lead.

Bottle vapour is tough, but you'll be so high when you dig this stuff.

Be careful what you write: it might come true. I've been thinking about that since 2002.

There's no conspiracy - just fear and apathy. The stats are gnats; I count just fine. You can't predict a series in time.

Distrust what you know. You'll thank me later. Defeat him now - a reluctant debater.

Invisible hand removes the deadwood. Capitalism, man, it cuts down redwoods. Public institutions full of private people, bowing hypocritically for posts of unimportance? Inequality erases over time. My neighbour is starving, reeks of slime.

Oh yeah, still here

Big burly buckets of beans in a soup canteen, asking me politely if I still was a has been.

Slow silence and sound screams, not knowing whether to dare or dream.

Minus my magic, married by logic into a silver blue suit, never ask Noah if he packed your flute.

Obvious analogies, fitting fallacies, tautologies, originalities, all the third-world nationalities gathered baseball bats in a banana tree and launched hysterical bees at a satellite tv, laughing so rude and scatologically.

Find me foolish, drink my wine. I don't bother to dress up swine.

Heaven men, best of 10, nothing to compare when we have no when.

I miss that season, the meaning, the simple dimension, when I got excited at a media mention. When running water's everywhere, do I give my friend a drink? When information is the air, well, don't ask me what I think.

Apart from the art

A loud cow, a lowly blow, she lows, she knows what into her stomachs go.

A sombre sonata, dove named Renata, driven away by lout in a Mazda Miata.

A Celtic shrew, witches' brew, believes in the Ark and two by twos.

A proud man, totally tan, trips, unplanned banana peel rips dignity from his twisted hips.

A festering welt, karate belt, repeating dropkicks until after the April melt.

Aspirin(g)

[powered by pure wind]

Breathe what is better, borrow a letter, I knew Eddie Vedder's second cousin Bert Beethoven, massacred outside a 7-11.

Dramatic inches, Sidd Finch, the April Fool's Buddha, could throw 168 miles per hour wearing a hiking boot; could have had groupies in Bermuda or diamond-leather suit. The punchline: he didn't exist, but boy what a beaut.

Old guy with hot dame on arm got game, nobody remember his name. Crusade men, long swiss in leather, armed with big sharp spikes: we end up liking whatever they like. But I don't conspire in my spare time, which won't please the Dragon lords. We stood in back of church for Easter, punished for being bored.

We, like you, will pass, I don't think you mean to try. I'd shill like a midget on reality television; their happiness makes me cry.

Watered down in Twittered unison, nation known for barrels of bitumen, barnacles manifold, fructating cows, living like larvae on the cover of NOW. If Sid the Kid was a silver-haired Swede, I'd still love the way he leads; when we pot through five-hole those magic gifts from hockey gods the devil's eyes will bleed.

Overroasted toasters and sixty year old east coasters remembering their youth through the corner of a cover of Vogue, flattening wrinkles on foreheads 'stead of worrying about hospital beds -- we were lied to by the Mad Men, so I say AMEN - those merciful lies make life worth living; how else do we explain the continued employment of Jeremy Piven? [ok... stop]

Today's random insults

1. I am witness to a horrific belching trend.
2. We are undone by pitiless boinkery.
3. Woe to wicked! They have seven extra toes.
4. Shall I call you Shasta, or shithead?
5. Your brogue is a vulgar shrieking thing.
   
6. I have often considered you a leech-pig. I am proved right.
7. Swim in my pool and I will forcefeed you a mutton bazooka.
8. You are a man of hardened cheese.
9. Your Swedish-princess tickler is now in the mail.
10. Oh, Mr. Sludgemuffin - your hair's blown away in the wind!
11. I agree the coastal towns should sell more butter! But you've absconded with my churn.
    
12. Vicious meadowlarks defy my every ordinance. I shall torch the mountainside and begin anew.

What are the alternatives

What are we, drawn into ourselves by chiseled time. Sketched into stone by self sustaining repetition aka conditioning, sometimes conscious and sometimes, I dunno, deep, unknowable, maybe geothermally leaked, carved into an impressive pattern, our body bed, space for the universe inside his image, supporting Niagara Falls effluvia through the persistence of a rivulet [tilt]

Overly deep, the madmen creep under the waves, poking never a head above, they drown without oxygen where there is no love.

Of awesome powers plenty, men to admire too few, he said "that's why I worship nature, but won't shake hands with you."

In fifteen minutes of not doing it only one reason stands reasonable enough: to kiss the missus, yes -- that's a good alternative to spewing this stuff.

Waiting for the furniture to sell

Bodacious cutlass cuddles crowd pesky moray eels. Fashion fish fisticuffs gurgle to crescendo, raucous rallentando when your legs begin to go. Eek on mean streets, drag snow to sidewalks, talk hours to your mother on a walk around the block. He who was toned? Thrown in the clink. Outlaw maverick dries fruit inside a sink. Vishnu drank in shame, inside outside, that's how he earned his fame. Now it's Meebo and twitter, everyone too busy to hire a babysitter. The Mexicans are mild, Plaxico drove them wild. I'm from New England so I'm like a whining child. Oh you bugbears, sellers beware, hooking plastic drums to the tips of your hair - please learn to share. Now what to do with Friday nights? Explore alleyways with flashlights, place bets on fistfights, check my skin for parasites, awake my inner luddite.

Halifax café

Halifax on Blowers street in the afternoon, by George you come here too.

Goulash grammage and first past the postage, loco, no locus of control, soul sold - crown to soles. I was swooning like a big baboon. Sweet as sugar in a carrot cake, freshly baked and iced with all the fixings of a fake.

Insert a guffah, laugh at the almighty, sing sad sugar to outshine Aphrodite. Opus magnum, drink me a gin. I was quick with my wallet and pricked on a pin.

A typo turned my mind on something unthought and worth a speed bump, like pixie swill at a vegan cafe and translating from the French 'cafe au lait' suddenly I have a headache today, how little I am, shriveled and fearful, a hatful of feathers and belly of beer, stuck somewhere in outer nowheresville, crunching my gears.

Pass out fridge magnets on the corner to pump up my band, we play five free shows on the sidewalk this week, hear us, pity us, fill our hats as we weep.

Okay bean bag bean burrito mocha man sits and steals a wireless signal, down looking at the downtrodden waltzing past with squeegee rags and cigarette drags, I have huffed and puffed my poverty away - I took a day job and jumped into the bay - relief from desperation struck me with dismay

Sideways I touch this. Never a straight line, a direct line to your soul, downward digging devilish mole. Stream no filter no filtration such frustration we were first for elation digital pagination, same topic as every other, remembering how I was in awe at the Smothers Brothers. Turning off the monitor in disgust, looking for a pink thermometer to measure my distrust, then burning all my albums (protects my memories from rust).

More pelican notes

If I ever get old I want to be like you.

I just listened to you sum up the meaning of life, in under two minutes, and I want to listen again and again

Pure feeling wells, cannot dwell or oversell – let’s call things as they are, so we can be sure of just one thing, the fullness you find feeding hungry people, there are those in particular who ask me for just a little more, and there is always more.

If I have to start the conversation well I’ll tell about my appreciation for the sun. If you ask me anything I give detailed replies.

My head aches, I’ve been soaring. Can’t make sense of an old man’s epiphany, expanding to include the dawn of the century.

Full of
and overflowing
So thankful for what I’m owing

Fear accusation of triteness; I don’t express my love for you simply out of politeness.

O'Hare airport

(4 cups of coffee into my trip home)

This is not a good idea

O true worship, O man of length, the strength I gave was never spent.

If persons black were lent a noose, so I could I clear my name, the effect was cursory; I never was the same. Poems black as clouds, shave the faces of the proud. Othello was my cousin, I carried his sword and dagger, I walked in shadows until I reached the cliff of the great green adder. "This is Sunday morning showdown," and the walls shook like spiderwebs. I heaved at smoke and breathed in cellar dust, wrote encyclopedia entries for acid and rust.

She wore a cloak of silk atop her oiled golden tan. A frog and a gazelle traded jokes in Hindustan. I would calculate with simpletons; they crowned me Foxy Beast. Now insomniacs contribute to my pot of charity, it was explosive death I traded in — it was mindless liberty.

I dig for hours before I find the straighter line, open cans of worms and evaporate the brine. I wonder 'what will come?' but it's hours late, I looked up words like 'jaunty' 'facade' and 'defenestrate'.

If cobras could combine into a mild lamb, if pomegranates sprang like diamonds from my hand - why I'd spit out choreography and smile at the moon. I'd drink mudslides in the hammock and name my firstborn daughter June.

I call you contradiction I call you labyrinth, I call you late for dinner with an absinthe after dinner mint. I'd drink ovations with a monk and we'd scan the crossword pages, I'd make a pact with Lady Silver, and her first cousins, the Sages.

Collect a few fragments, polish them a bit, point them at the ocean and then be done with it. That's better than most, who obsess with spelling, grammar, father son and holy host.

I'm winding down and that's what makes me glow. I hammer till I shiver, live on love, process grief through my wretched liver. I can breathe now. I always knew this, but did not know how.

I loved many but insufficiently, never a soul completely, until we ate street meat at Queen and Spadina on Saturday evening. Lady, treat me as your lord, slave, lover, knave, lad, brave mad sad king. I have nothing except you - and I will give you everything.

I don't go to pieces without my puzzle:)

(effortless expression, stressless impressions)

Don't feel like incriminating myself
got nothing to write for another two weeks or so.
Besides I can't type when exhausted.

No more censors in this special patch of grass, it is shrinking, too many eyes, who else watching us as we light up in that drug nosed high. I need an artificial barrier, how else can I mix my batter? If you see me in a trance, do your best to flatter, it's better for the blog if we lie to each other. Be discreet with all these secrets which are uninteresting when passed around.

I've been working on my posture, practised deep breathing. I've worked on preparation, explanation, delegation, and no more self denial or flagellation. (btw eco-guilt is the new catholicism)

I've sharpened that sense of humour, yet I'm mostly gormless (great word); I've donated spare change to the homeless. I've never been a borrower. I've lived alone without a loan or begging for a bone but certainly never chose this loneness over any other. I've learned from Bruce Springsteen - the boss himself. "You do some sad sad things, when it's you you're trying to lose." So I've finally arrived, paid my dues. Just watch now, what I will do.

Actual thoughts

(hardest to write down)

Dreaming of six things at once, occasionally erotic, ruing expression as the new running water. "Everybody wants the same thing." When I'm overcaffeinated and drunk I get strange results. Wake up in a thought clot, last night my eyes bloodshot, tearshot swearing and crying. Like a kid with a brand new toy; but I know I'll need a newer toy. I collect notions so I can liberate them.The other day I overheard myself thinking "How smart are we? Slightly less than he who can fully comprehend how smart we are, which means we have a lot to learn." I've been striving for sentences that enforce calmness. I could attach notes to people and places in my life, but thoughts in a vacuum have an obscene grace that make me shiver. Whom do I read these days? Oh no the discrepancy between where our minds want to go and the crude instruments around us. We all want to melt hearts. It's a test: how much can I bear embarrassing myself. If so many words could make you weak in the knees, I'm satisfied, tapping my baton behind curtains when the crowd's gone home, saying 'still got it'. 'Still got it' - but that proves what? An extra gear I've reached, what is it all tied back to neurotransmitters, all this hustle and bluster competing desires in a crowded cafe, flashes of potential for exceptional harmony, and I hear the miracle of the gregorian chant, submission to one note, take all these different people tell them 'sing this note and sing it well' yeah that's tougher than it looks. I don't sell myself well at all. If I did sell you on me I still wouldn't be sure that you're sold. So why bother with disappointment. Pioneers don't have time for applause or to dodge tomatoes. Mad Max in the desert trying to keep one or two loyal friends. Remember in Owen Meany, they practise the jump for the entire book? And the meaning came crashing down? But John Irving cheats because he knows how it will end. Not really a writer but a problem solver working on his next contingency, making lemonade from lemons. If I told you mixing drinks is what this blog is about, that it's based on fermentation and yeast, or whatever. Do you know what beer is? It's yeast shit. It's not something I would ever choose for myself ie expression as an addiction but there we have it.

20 four-word sentences

(excellent practice for writing headlines)

1) Cuddle peacocks every Tuesday.
2) Waffles bludgeon my soul.
3) Seek cobra venom antidotes.
4) Tarred, feathered, I moan.
5) I crave tofu biscuits.
6) Be smart, eat fish.
7) Revel in word zest.
8) Mormons haunt my thoughts.
9) Who has osmosis exhaustion?
10) Spanish eyes shine mightily.
11) Equal rights never arrive.
12) Club chicks gyrate hypnotically.
13) Polish grandma's copper dentures.
14) Spontaneously combust, then extinguish.
15) Analyze your squeegee budget.
16) Feast upon barbecued rhinoceros.
17) Swedes are prettier, bouncier.
18) Skydiving is aborted suicide.
19) Chickens cluck Swahili sonnets.
20) Ottawa Senators choke, again.

Prospecting for semantics

(what you get when you delete 9 out of every 10 words:)

Throwing

freedom underwear silence Cyril Crosby. Polemicize fissions. happiness is mortgaged the moat hollowed out. throwing abstracts at walls, piling on concrete, dumptruck bricks oh fascinating tricks.

College marvins collect colanders in pots. Stick with me that’s all I’ve got. vegetative, delirious, suckling on sticks, swizzle trouble rum meadow shacks. Taught by beavers and climbing a smokestack.

Mozart was a keyboardist, too many letters loud lengthy staccato beaten by his betters, Wolfgang, undress secrets, expect no applause until you sign upon the line!

symphonic nonsense music words, cymbal crash symbolic trash rat tat tat

young as the day you untied your tongue, numb stuporal syllabic centuries of sssh! Silence in the library , greedy stern mother, gentry mores and clucking crow.

Half a liter more, I’m half the leader I was, I was littering below!

Everybody just say 'ah!'

(lyrical runoff from a glacial gargantumumble)

Oh great Gonga, fresh from travails in southeast Tonga, long on anecdote and rhyming postcard poetry in pastels, delivering that 'oh it's gorgeous' transatlantic rote:

Mood music too singular to digest, too tight and interwoven to appreciate or undress, something so important riven to my chest. And she laboured lonely, but inquisited brief. Too bad her toned tetrahedral sketches can't be curled into a Christmas wreath.

Surrealism insustenant, frustrated by our ancestral covenant, Genesis chapter 1 asks too much, obedience demanded beyond the grave is unfair, rewrite the contract every six months, cuz I won't let a pile of bones make me their slave.

Cro-magnon Mensa, Dinosaur da Vinci, Coretta Scott meets Daniela Carinci. Smug syllables, pillows of thought indivisible, irreducible, repudiate the deuce, twisting the middle abdominal, until spell check and reality check ask me for a truce.

Half-pints for the children, pitchers for the men, peppermint spritzers for your spinster auntie who's about to toss her standards, sick of asking 'when oh when - my kindred soul, my best friend?'. Will everyone settle for less than glass slippers at midnight? (She goes home with the coachman at quarter past ten.)

Jittery teens scream their souls into text, fake friends frenzy feeds dyslexia, and what next: YouTube deliquents torch computer screens, not realizing why they seethe, until they can't find any more mystery in sex.

Bogged in bloggerrhea, Holograph hoaxes, too many performers disperse the audience, diaspora, poor us, so much to say and who will listen? Perhaps I'll build a time machine to impress the 18th century, that enlightened age, me scruffy and stuffy and puffed at my podium. Justly desserted, completely deserted, applauded by my best friend the monkey but oh yeah I'm certainly sage.

A hollow stump...

A hollowed out stump may or may not be filled with peanut butter. The likelihood of this depends on the promixity of the stump to peanuts, the cleanliness of the stump, the availability of a spreading instrument, the effectiveness of such a tactic at hiding peanut butter in the mind of the peanut-butter owner, the existence of peanuts, the availability of a tree of sufficient girth, the continuance of nuclear reactions inside the centre of the sun, a refutation of Hume's unproveability of causation (see Kant), a chemical composition for peanuts that permits butterification, the actualization of abstract concepts such as 'hollowness', the absence of any wolf or wolf-like creature that will devour the peanut butter no matter how well you hide it (cf. third point on dependency), the continued east-west rotation of the Earth, the neutralization of any threat of Ice Age, El Nino effect or rampant Fire Ant plague...

A mini-list:
1) Anyone who has an 'electric smile' should be careful around bathtubs.
2) If Venice is indeed sinking, then I will buy up Prague, gut the streets, fill them with water, and give the big middle finger to global warming. If any Czech complains, I will silence him with sugared pastries.
3) A man with too much time on his hands will never be able to bench-press a grandfather clock.
4) Phone me, email me, or send me a letter if you like. I cannot reply as long as I am locked in this damn mystery, wrapped in a riddle!