This is going to sound so whiny, but

why do all people suck?

FOLK FUCKING MUSIC FESTIVAL.

My life is complete. And Feist is hot. Hott.

Worms In Your Hair

This afternoon I went to the Chinese Cultural Centre and bought the most charming tea set in the universe. It was twenty five dollars on sale. If the tired looking gentleman who sold it to me hadn't packed it so well in preparation for its trip to Victoria, I would take pictures. You'll see it in September when I have my first tea party. It serves six.

With any luck, there will be a poem later.

Horizon's alive with electric light.

I haven't watered my plants or mowed the lawn, and my kitchen smells faintly of something decomposing, though I'm not sure what, or where it is. This is largely due to the fact that I haven't bothered to look. I will be a terrible housewife if I ever become one. There's something vaguely romantic, though, about living in squalor. I'm less lonely with mess. If this is the way of all single people I'm clearly doomed.

'No' is the saddest experience you'll ever know.

I've been suffering from spells of nausea all day. I only have two explanations for this: it's either the scary tuna sandwich I was served last night for dinner at the Lazy Loaf and Kettle, or that I'm so, so homesick.

I love Margaret Atwood.

Our problem, I thought, was that neither the world around us nor the future stretching before us contained any image of what we might conceivably become. We were stranded in the present as in a stalled, otherwise empty subway train, and in this isolation we clutched morosely at each other's shadows.
- Hair Jewellery

Maybe I'm not a confused human being with problems, maybe I'm something altogether different, an artichoke...
- Under Glass

Yes. She is my hero and I really would like to work on sleeping with her before one of us dies.

I can see your bed and make it, too.

I want you to call, but you won't call. I'll pretend the only reason for this is that you have no idea what my phone number is.

Eastern Glow

Half an hour out of the city and
these are the prairies
where powerlines hang low
over the highway
and hay bales pimple
the countryside
where the only signs
of civilization are brown aluminum
and simply illustrated
food...lodging...restrooms
sprouting weedlike from ditches

we are three girls
and if the sky wasn't melting
all over the road
we would do like the cliches
and roll down the windows
let the wind rush at our faces
whip hair into our eyes and mouths
as if it's our last chance
because it is

I understand now
how I hung time
like a threat.....thick and heavy
over your head
until you cracked
under the compromise
and suited yourself
I understand now

and when bruised clouds bleed
blue and orange into the horizon
I imagine I am sitting still
defying Physics while the earth spins
backward beneath the tires
I imagine this is when
I'll let things slide

One day moves into two and I'm losing everything...

Today I have Girl Blues and called work to plead a stomach bug over voicemail at 6:45 when I was supposed to be showering. The cramps are gone, but I still feel like I could cry face down in a pillow for hours over nothing, or everything. This is no state in which to sell people flowers.

The kind that you find in songs.

It's going to rain tonight. I've felt it in my bones all day and this wind is proof. I'm lonely and I have a feeling I'm not going to sleep very well.

I guess that makes me the jerk with the heartache...

We're all looking for gold here.

My body is telling me things. It's telling me it's about to get plagued by some variety of summer sickness. Thus, tonight is a night for Kraft Dinner with ketchup and horrible MTV programming. The only problem is I actually have to make said Kraft Dinner. *Sigh.* Effort.

Short Story

You are a tool.
The end.

Afterthoughts

The art of languishing is a fine one
one I've mastered in the lonely quiet
of dusk and summer
my head at the foot of the bed
a tiny orange triangle
floating in my fingers
like a specter
through this room of blues

this is where my breath gets clouded
as the logic of a lover
who aches for no one
for someone she can't love

this is when I prophesies
my lungs catching fire
upon inhalation
my body's slow burn to carbon
from the inside out
while gravity sucks it earthward

I lied when I said
I regret nothing
I should have kissed you that night
when the moonrays shone indigo through the window
and I felt like a phoenix

but in the mean time
I've forgotten about the cigarette
the saucer slides off my thigh
when I twist out of these afterthoughts
to find it and I wind up
smearing ash all over the bedspread

I cross my toes, and that's how it goes.

I've been in Edmonton the last couple of days, hence the non-posting. It was fun times. Events included Dashboard Confessional live, ordering pizza and Chinese food at midnight, eating it all, and squandering my entire life savings on clothes I can't find in Calgary. Well, not all of it. I came home to a cheque from the Canadian government for fifty-eight dollars, which cancels out... Er, the turtleneck bow frock extravaganza. In other words, almost nothing.

There will be poetry soon. Lots.

Registration

Waiting is, by far, the worst part.

My life is not over.

I've somehow managed to fanangle myself into a full year of Poetry with Carla and Lorna Crozier. This makes me extremely happy.

Also? I bought the new Look-Look.

Me and Margaret Atwood

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

Something must be done.

Ten Days of Perfect Tears

My body aches with half finished poetry and all these storm clouds Calgary has been seeing lately are starting to hang low in my head where my brain should be like a grade school weather pattern diorama: nothing but grey painted cardboard cutouts hitched to the inside of my skull with fishing wire or dental floss and all this air... I'm so tired. I need so much but there is no one to ask these silly favors of, so I lose myself in the negative space of my fantasies that run to the soundtrack of the Such Reveries mix in order to stop thinking about the petulant stasis in which I currently find myself. The daylight these days is funny. It's not helping. It makes everything look like a scape from an old technicolor movie. It makes everything look plastic. There is nothing much I can do during these hours except peel the sunburned skin like sheets of rice paper off my chest until it stings badly enough to remind me I'm alive. Something is blocked, brewing, and soon it's all going explode like thunder and rain down...