dirty mind

princes and parties
it never ever stops
fuzz on my socks
gala invitations
crisis interventions
wondering if my meagre life savings will be worth anything when they mature next week
leftover kraft dinner wasn't as bad as i feared

if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is

internet poll

can I love you be a platonic expression?

blink for yes
sigh for no

garlic breath

awake and calm and able to focus. i could get used to this no anxiety thing, though i'll admit that reading heavy philosophy makes me a little unbalanced.

i'll go to bed, but i won't sleep. perhaps i'll just close my eyes and listen to some music...

christmas in september

(Some days I can't tell a banana from a diamond.)

When I was five, my (probably drunk) dad threw all my presents out into the snow in the backyard after I asked innocently if that was it, if there were any more. He obviously thought I was being a greedy little bug, but in my gut I know it was an honest question - Is the party/show over? Can I go play now? Thus my existential crisis was borne - a deep rooting of my sense that the world so often just doesn't make sense.

When I was eight, I wrote my first poem. It went something like this:

Christmas has sun, and lots of fun.
Christmas has cheer, and maybe a beer.
Christmas has snow, as everyone knows.
(and so on...)

Okay, perhaps the beverage bit wasn't it - but it feels like it was...alcoholic dad, and besides, what else rhymes with cheer? Queer? Deer? Hmmm, maybe that was it.

Anyhow, my dad was so proud of me he couldn't stop reading it to everyone, which may be why I still have it in my head. He took it to work with him and kept it on his desk for years (along with the one about Terry Fox, a "courageous man, who ran and ran and ran and ran" - we all went out to stand by the now burnt-down McDonalds to cheer him on as he passed through our town).

There's no doubt in my mind that the memory of the rare smile on my dad's face is the reason I still write. That much about my world has never failed to make sense.


We are who we are long before we have any real choice in the matter.

quiet (again?)

he said
"keep walking in light"

how can the best piece of advice i ever got be tied to so much danger?

the towel with the monkeys is still in my closet.
i will probably never have the heart to throw it out.

is this fog?
or distraction?
his box...so his rules?

impossible
us

damn the interwebnet for making it so easy to go nowhere.

three women / keep out

one plus one plus 13 times four plus 50 minus one = my life has been all about the odds these days

i stood outside the fortune teller's tonight
waiting for the bus
ocean smells and
neon candles,
and me

bound and beautiful
thinking i should have walked
caught enough to know that sometimes it's fine to stay and wait

i wrote this all before you came
before it all changed

take it away, i never had it anyway


a tribute,
a reminder,
on this day of all days.
a warning about regret

"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."

- Raymond Carver, "Last Fragment," *All of Us: The Collected Poems*

work/rhyme

strange,
how I left the place in such a shambles
true, though
it was crumbling in on itself
what I don't know
is if it was my doing,
or simply just my observation

i should check in, and see who's still around...
find the keeper a pasture to tend, now that I know who he is
leave the others to sleep, until it's their time
maybe take a walk,
and see if the river leads anywhere yet...
see if it's safe to come down.