And I thought the tower was on fire.

This whole stupid day has been a long series of retarded mistakes and almost-crying jags in the bathroom. I want to stop thinking about you for one single second. I want you to love me.

Listen Hard

I'm planning
an escape route
out of this room
where your voice echoes
your words still spinning round on
the turntable of clichés
you needed to make yourself feel
honest.....real

the thing about figures
of speech is they're just shadows
in the night
flick the switch
and they scuttle off
into corners.....cracks
in the molding
like roaches
they'll outlive us all

these walls have been scrubbed down
painted Fresh Air White
injected with newness and still
they are resonant
a steel cage full
of old sentiments
rattling relentlessly
at the bars

I'm a prisoner
in here
out of self-righteousness
babbling Freudian feminist existentialist
theories.....apologies
guards against your words
that only ache
themselves inward

but leaving is simply
not an option
because I'm still waiting
I still half fear.....half hope
you're listening hard
your ear pressed to the door

Niccotine and Jitterbug Perfume

The longest day of the year is coming. The longest day of the year is coming but it's been raining all week and the sky is murky and coloured charcoal by six thirty. On nights like this I pretend I'm infinite: I've been here so many times before. I pretend I'll outlive the rust and concrete and trees. I pretend I'll see the rivers run dry. I pretend I'll walk around the world, the ocean floor parched and cracking. I also pretend that I'm impervious to geological and sociological decay, that I'm untouchable. Untouchable except for one thing. Except for you. You, of course, will also be infinite because this will take an eternity. You will live through thousands of years of global tragedy before you see what you've done. You will see the slow decline of the American dollar and the next great depression. You will witness natural disasters and epidemics and the fall of the capitalist system. You will stand on the sidelines of the third world war and watch as George W. Bush wipes out half of the world's population in one fell swoop with his secret stash of Weapons of Mass Destruction. And while your eyes are glued to the television set, BBC will inform you that the rainforests are all gone and the icebergs have all melted and seventy five percent of the animals on this planet are extinct and monocropping has destroyed every last inch of fertile soil and now whoever's left living is doomed to a fate of starvation and dehydration. I will wait for you while you learn these things. I will wait for you. We will be Alobar and Kudra, conducting what we can only deem in the present to be a completely futile search. We will live until we find the secret essence of the universe, and when we find it, we will be perfect. We will be perfect for one instant, and then everything will be over.

I couldn't love you if I tried, and I've tried.

I feel like I've been a bad blogger lately. I don't really see what I can do about it though. There's not enough going on in my life to make for interesting and/or amusing stories. There's too much going on in my brain to blog about without giving me away. There are too many of you reading and you all know too much anyway.

I don't know what this means.

Straight Line

A guest at this party
I'm watching the sun
drunk in the exosphere
spill champagne all over
the white cloud tablecloth
of a gathering
storm.....from a park swing
shards of old car tires
in my moccasins.....stuck
in the bottoms of my feet

for now
everything sparkles gold
and my mouth is full
of fire

it's a good thing
you're not here
or the words would burn
your skin would grow hot in the face
of the flames

I always contemplate
foreshadowing after the fact
when it's easy to see
when time has eroded
some route of understanding
back to the situation in question
its newfound poignancy reddening my eyes
like cigarette smoke in the wind

tonight there is no use
for retrospect.....there is still time
before I need to run inside
wind my windows shut
so my brain builds elaborate dialogues
from sticks and grass
while vertigo explodes
in my gut
during the split
second between
rising and
falling

and I do this.....wishing
for the momentum it might take
to catapult myself into these dramatics
of other-worldly social functions
until there is only a filter
in my fingers
and the ash has carved a trail
beside my feet
in a single straight line

A Picture of Your Face

I'm not talking much right now because I'll get myself into a lot of trouble if I start. So I'm keeping my mouth shut.

You know, this is it, you fool. You're going to be with this one 'til you're dead.

Crush

There are only stars and sirens
and me in this house
silent but for the floorboards
whining.....wanting attention
during awkward hours

in my empty night dreams
you take me
my thick ankles messy hair
crooked pinky strong
will thin skin
wearing thinner.....my half
finished metaphors that leave you
grasping for meaning

you'll take these things
watch your ethics fade
with the sky color
and we'll live only in
the soundscape of our whispers
subtle as shadows
in dark corners.....and stealthy

this room.....like us.....will know
the imperitives of quiet
or would it
our secrets betraying us
for the sun.....first period

but I'll wait
I will write you some verses
sloppily printed with broken
sentences thick with purpose but
weakly excecuted
and you will take them
into a summer dusk
where there is just enough light out
to read

What I learned today:

It is an extremely bad call to spend as much money as I just have on clothes you think you need when you haven't done laundry in two weeks and everything you own is sitting crumpled in a wicker basket. I have no more closet space.

For All Mankind

I seem to have temporarily dealt with my Ezra sorrows. If spending inordinate amounts of money on a spring wardrobe counts as "dealing." This, of course, has proven ridiculously detrimental to my bank account. And while the jeans are possibly the sexiest I've ever owned, I'm beginning to wonder which one of us should be doing the suffering right now.

I guess I still do.

thinking of you
has driven me to nicotine
and the smoke curls
off the tips of my fingers
like your hair did
but longer
until there are only ashes

Drizzle

She drives you home that evening
through the core and past office buildings
lit from the inside
hallogen cubicle constellations
against a backdrop of sky

you are drunk on your own
news of maturation
your reflection in her rear view
mirror giggling wildly and then
pushing fingers over your lips
a guilty pleasure perhaps
hide the excitement
imitate the friction
of mouths not hungry
for the chocolate fondue in the back corner
of the party

and she can't blame you but holds
her tongue
afraid she'll burble rivers
clouded with silt and sentiment
if she doesn't
keep her mouth shut
stares down a yellow traffic light instead
wishes hard

at the curb in front of the house you realize
she's still wearing your trench coat
so you peel it off her shoulders
like skin in the middle of the street
while the night drizzles down

you kiss her cheek
leaving lipstick she'll find later
and a thousand stars explode
behind her eyes
when you run inside
lock the door

Don't worry about me, I've been starving for years.

There was really no thoughtful, existential reason for it. Honestly. It's just that you're a horrible person and I'm, well, not.

Talking can only give you away.

Mother's Day makes me very, very tired. A ten hour shift at a florist also makes me very, very tired. These things are contingent upon each other. Some things I would have loved to ask in a very exapserated manner to about half the people I dealt with today:
1. How is it that you DON'T KNOW WHERE YOUR OWN MOTHER LIVES?
2. How exactly do you expect us to deliver your flowers if YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE THEY'RE GOING? We may be miracle workers, but we're not magic.

I currently live and work in squalor. Work is a perpetual mess. I am so tired from trying to clean up this mess that when I get home, I can't be bothered to rinse the pot that has been sitting in the sink for the last two days before I go to bed. I do not get enough sleep. I drink too much coffee and not enough water. I spend too much time standing and am giving myself carpel tunnel. I hope, one day, to make millions of dollars in the stock market (BioDiesel, of course) so that I can effectively be an un-starving artist and never work in a flower shop before a major woman-holiday again. I hope.

How do you take your heart out of it?

I am, after just over a week in the city, a working woman again. It sort of feels like I never left. I don't know if that's good or bad. I don't have to worry about fucking up because I know exactly what I'm doing, but I feel myself slipping back into old skins as if they are antique silk and lace dresses in my grandmother's attic. I am not twirling in front of an antique mirror. I am not the same person I was a year ago. I left this behind. I am modelling these dresses for my imminent funeral. Open casket, of course. They are musty and itchy and have moth holes. I hate these dresses. Regardless, I am living like an adult. I wake up early and buy groceries and clean up my own mess and go to bed early. I scrub the counters. I pay for gas. Sometimes I feel beautiful. Sometimes I really don't. Often, I think of you. Usually, when I do this, I feel inexplicably nauseous. Or that's what I like to think. I wonder if you went through with it. I wonder why I care. I wonder how to stop. Caring, that is. I know, I know you certainly don't. When I'm especially bored, I craft elaborate dialogues in my head (if only I hadn't mysteriously lost this talent when I was trying to write a play) in case I might get to use them. A girl guide is always prepared and my entire life, to one degree or another, is scripted. Sometimes I don't want to ever have to do this the dramatist's way. Sometimes I really do. I am incredibly masochistic. I can't seem to do anything to change this. And so I fantasize. I dream of the moment that I can spurn you when love has made you vulnerable even though I know this moment does not and will never exist. I ache for it because my existence is completely based on carefully calculating my own demise. So I fantasize, and I wait, and I am waiting for nothing, because you are gone.

"If you've come here to ruin my life, please save yourself the trouble, make an about turn, and march right back out the door because you've already done a perfectly sufficient job. Goodbye."

Try to Leave

I don't know when the concept of continuing with the rest of my life became so impossibly unbearable, but somewhere between January and today, it did. I try not to think about it too much. Every time I do, my vision blurs and the room pulses like someone's eyes might if they just swallowed a piece of food too big for their esophagus. I've been here one week and I think I'm going to die. This probably means I should give Annie a call.

It's starting to hurt every time I breathe.

We're dead somehow, but somehow we're still breathing.

I'm so tired. Exhausted, really. I haven't even been here a week and it's killing me, wearing me out. All this brown on the ground, like liver spots, like cancerous moles, and these trees, so gaunt and austere and sullen in this May-cold. I am so tired of all this deadness, this dehydration. I drink three litres of water a day and I still never really want to do anything. To be a real person. How can I be expected to live in a city that is so clearly not alive? I'm tired of all this need, my own: the shopping list on the fridge door - MARGARINE, WASHING UP POWDER, TOOTHBRUSH - I don't want these things and yet somehow they are necessary to my survival because even if I wash the dishes by hand I'll eventually run out of liquid soap and I don't care. I don't want to care. I want to crawl into your bed and stay there forever, the issue of this being physically and socially impossible notwithstanding, and need nothing. I imagine your bed to be sparse, with old sheets, the sheets of your adolescence, and mismatched. Your bed would be low to the ground - a futon maybe - with a thick comforter that we would push to the floor in the night, wanting only the warmth of each other's bodies. I would be absolved of everything unnecessary. We would meditate, become young yogis, supercede the limits of the third dimension, forget about the ugliness of this world from a corner of your charming South Calgary home where our lives could be perfect and muted and lovely in all their rawness. Because that's what's doing it. I look at the rivers and they are not rivers. They are massive infrastructure leaks that have etched their way into the crust of the earth and - damn you, Dave Bronconier! - it is somehow my responsibility to fix this, to make it better somehow, cleaner, more beautiful. And I can't do it because the sun is hot and the roads are swimming, the concrete undulating beneath my tires. I can't help but wonder if this is all my fault: if I didn't have to drive my seventeen year old sister to work in the middle of the most fucking awful rush hour traffic I've ever had to deal with in my life, if the air would be fresher and gas prices wouldn't soar to a dollar and ten cents per litre and the neighbor's yappy dog would just shut up so I wouldn't be so tempted to rush over there at eight o'clock in the morning wearing nothing but my decaying moccasins and Ezra's boxer shorts to kick it like a football into the middle of the street where, seconds later, it would be run over by the blue Astro Van that resides a few houses down the road. I wonder all this while I sit completely still through three changes of a light on Elbow drive and think how ridiculous that is. How all I am is one car in all this traffic that is trying to snake its way through the tracts of this city like tape worms, like parasites, and I am so, so tired.

Something harder than the coins in her pocket.

I'm only blogging because I don't want to mow the lawn.

I really have to stop thinking "today would be a perfect day for the Bean and the beach" because every day is a perfect day for the Bean and most days are perfect days for the beach and unfortunately, it's physically impossible for me to visit either until the latter half of August. I have to stop wanting things I can't have. But apparently this is the human condition.

This is pointless. News in brief: Yesterday I bought clothes and cooked real food for the first time since I've been back. Tomorrow will be my Chelsea Flies Solo Downtown photo excursion, weather permitting. I start work Monday. Tuesday I go to the dentist, Thursday I have to stand naked in front of a man I've never met before so he can make sure I'm not secretly dying. The rest of the summer will be spent preparing for my trip back to the coast. But right now I have some grass to cut.

One day you are going to get hungry.

I really want to believe that you're not a completely awful person, but you're not giving me any proof. I want proof. I want proof because I want to believe that you love me, but you just don't know how.

O, Father.

I went grocery shopping this afternoon after chopping off my hair. This was a big and important moment in my life. However, it also meant that I had to clean out the fridge. It seems that my father is incapable of doing this himself before he goes away on business, and usually I don't mind doing it for him while he's gone. Except when I find an almost full carton of milk hidden in the back that was best before February 10.

UnPackFest 2006

I currently feel ridiculously overburdened with stuff. In order to unpack, I have to give away the entire existing contents of my bedroom. In doing so, I found, amongst other things, my poetry notes from sixth grade. I was a crafty little thing with a limerick when I was eleven.

There was a young lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They came back from the ride
with the lady inside
and the smile on the face of the tiger.

There once was a woman with hair
who grew it not quite like a bear.
She tripped on a jar
and went to the bar
that drunken old woman with hair.

There once was a man from Peru
who loved making blueberry stew.
But when it came to the dishes,
he blew up his fishes
that pyromaniac from Peru.

One day in my history class
we were visited by an old ass.
It wasn't on a leash,
so we gave it some keish,
and never came back that old ass.