12/31/06

romanza

She captioned a picture of her and her neice zoe:
"free spirit and free spirit in training"

the kind of aesthetic unit i've grown attached to
sometimes severed in moments of forgetfulness
sometimes a little jolt to the CNS makes me remember

romanza zeppelin, floating for business, blimpey boy boiling into the stratosphere
let's not make it too feedbackloopy
no, there's plenty of novelty in the air, anyway

12/11/06

bank deposit

today i lent my card to my girl
so she could make a deposit

money is something i can give, defines ability, makes
things happen, sets creatures dancing
for me on that non-magical monolith, an executable
for my extrovert activity in economic ecology, dead president clout
is my epigenetic expression, british columbia money is now
kansas money which will be old money decades from now
having passed through laundries of luxury
as the automatic tellers foretold
in plastic prophecies, my progeny
will know me by my money

but today i'm looking for meaning in a trident gum wrapper

god help me, i'm american beauty, how disgusting
a dimestore paradox peddled to self-dubbed
“discerning connoisseurs” of swill, let's make it a movie
documentary, series in perpetuity, game of
copyright leapfrog by the studio, iron fist grip
on the gilded age of cinema, pyramid reaching for the sun
through my millennia-long wander off script, audience gypped
true but better left unsaid, dead, that's
true too, no break, and thinking of steak incidentally makes me
think that image would beef up this stanza more appropriately than
any other assonance that could drift hypothetically through this
obnoxiously-named concrescence of true noxious thought, better
dead than never, named, examination table like a lenticular fable, like
the hyper-plausibility of a saucer out of fake fifties photographs, the one
that abducted me and stole the most precious portion of memory and
implanted me with verse that rhymes but is not intended for song
or beat with fatty sides of slab-slang, angel claws
man-handling me up the escalator steps
lit in ham-fisted christmas colors
entry to the cowgod’s estate, welcomed
with open teeth, tasty payment in adrenal currency
for her slaughter, we'll work out the most vital semantics
in post-apocalyptic crucifixions
set of twenty-two
that being the number most crucial
to spacely sprockets’ numerology nexus

cosmic, man
like the sawfigure mystery hanna barbera
could never animate, that amplified feeling
through lack of meaning, unholy mix
of hallucinations and comments on hallucinations
and the occipital ocular allocution intervening
in matters of immediate metabolism and
monetary digestion that grumbles and groans
audibly when i wake barely catching the
gurgle of rhomboid bloodcells down
the drains of my dreams, like
whatever, like
sin sex and sarcasm, like
finally the words form the mint-flavoured mortar i was looking for
that smooth menthol medication for scratch-throat glossolamentations, like
finally the spaces seem to work for these lines and twine
cuts between each line, tastes like vintage wine with the floating
cork of blood-engorged metaphor, vigorous like when i would
sniff my reaction to quasi's quackadero like my fingertip, like
i couldn't stop even if i painted my nails with correctional fluid, like
holy fuck, i can't hit a wrong note until review, the dark magic
that shines in every mirror’s silver, finger fucked
with the monkey’s paw and straight on until unstern

my bank-girl said i knew better than to deny divinity

this thing she said feels important, it's how i feel
where feelings connect to semantic sinews, i've marked
the spot, made it my own spraycan logo, my trademark
traveling railcarts, talking to trees, telling them of my
folk-heroic exploits, trading bits of bone for ashcan rants
buried in the woods, slipped on a hobo piss puddle and
wound up seven hexes ahead of annexia

what did alan watts teach me?
does my bank-girl know more than me at this juncture?
are those her teeth marks on my copy of the necronomicon?

most of my words feel empty
and my words are who i'm supposed to be
over-sleuthed footprints of myth-tainted syntax veering
into that mesh of tracks, distracted, that's what wrings out, stream
of conscious thoughts together in image, adam and eve's tree, trying
to feel it in music, a hand-cross and an arpeggio identifiable
as me with the earmarked missing eighth note and
a sour flattened D

right now i'm more interested in death than anything, death
is almost as weird a word as anything, another
semantic trap because it's what happens
to a human when his heart stops its beat and
his neurological lattice loses most of its
electricity, but his flesh takes flight, whether
under the ground or in the crematorium it’s
almost hyperkinetic, the rot or the flame and
the “end” is too geometrically precise
and theologically cloudy

i feel music and poetry, enough to think that the only thing
i can call myself is an artist, having my artistic moment and this
day isn't empty, and i don't know where to break these stupid
fucking lines, and i feel a little bit of self in that masturbatory reflection and
i don't much like the looks or the sound of it, mostly free of imagery since
i'm not a very visual person, my brain teems with arabesques
in arabesques, but when i try to grab them with my sweaty angel claws their
contours squirm out of grasp and escape to alternate lobes
that demand i point to the synesthetic picture in pentecostal seizure and
that is what we call the END
of sense, a senseless
tragicomedy, finally presenting
the trite two-face, coal-blasted mask of
dull and dour dao, how unoriginal, ugh
but an accurate transcription of some pedestrian layer of mind
i can cognize and reflect with crappy words under the banner of
meta-poetry in arial 12 point

the unexamined life may not be worth living
but the examined life under examination... ugh

the moment, that's what this is

another gratuitous tense-shifting stanza:
looking back, if i was to keep one thing
it would be an escalator step
with unstated electric rhomboid veins
tangled under a metal bridge, a modest
souvenir that would change everything
if it ever escaped the bubble it was chained to
something to cling to
in the alphabetic translation to
the ivory tower severed
from all temporal interest rates

12/07/06

Fahrenheit 13

Snow is snow, whether you’re up north, or down here. It crusted to diamond dayglo this morning. It’s not melting. Not moving. I kicked a pile on a Parsons’ road and hurt my toe. 9 AM, and the real winter persists, far ahead of schedule. Mixin’ it up. Of course, changing my world view based on this is succumbing to state-bounded delusion, but what fun would life be with a fixed point of reference? I’d be happy to abandon my tenuous belief in global warming, even though it would severely fuck up my world view. It would probably shift my whole philosophy to the right, just because of the loss of credibility it would inflict on the coalition of ideals I’ve signed on for.

But I never really committed to the idea, though I always saw the right-wing reaction as noxiously self-justifying. Hardly anyone comes off objective in the back-and-forth. But fractal agnosticism trumps all politics for me. Preachers don’t feel enough for me, scientists don’t reason sufficiently. “Consensus” could be an Aristotlean cosmology, that was once consensus too. I can’t make policy based on mathematical models, as prudent as they may seem to be. But I strongly suspect the “conservative” bastards are bullshitting about the effect climate-change prevention measures would have on the economy.

I wandered around the neighborhood – strange word, community is about as retro as fuedelism, the present is kinetic, the new paradigm is subversion of paradigm. Still there is some sort of collective vibe, a crunch of wavefronts, an aggregate of peaks and valleys, though there’s no practical way to be conscious of it. A mess of victorian houses, modern condos, condemned shacks, strip mall sprawl, connoco, four lane, two lane, alley, plowed snow-glaze and bare trees, seniors apartment the tallest building in the area, nine stories. I wandered past the college, passed a few cuties, couldn’t help notice, one in a sweater, shivering.

I crunched back down Broadway, did some involuntary ice-capades, remained on my feet through the alley, arrived back home. Home. Yeah, feels like it to me. Desiree inside, sleeping. Bright morning but fucking cold. Her car, conveyance, Derby. I understand what it is for her, after all this time. If I had a car, I’d name it too. Cracked windshield, defiant political bumper stickers, metal investment, blood-red, still rolling. We make use of it.

From far below, in our driveway, I looked up at our little balcony and saw the door décor. I’m grateful for Desiree’s wreath. She is, among many things, a decorator. Art spills out into a lifestyle, into what I would leave blank and vacant. I can never go a day without cracking at smile at her cute and handsome blend of convention and whimsy.

Caffeine demons still scream little life-hating obscenities at me. Fragile ego demands to know, in trembling inquiry, where do I rank? After all these attempts to forge a rationale for myself, a place in a relationship, in a community, what worth would I really be, if it was all on the line? What do I really have to offer? I never fortified myself to be a solider, nor did I ever fully commit to being a warrior with words, nor even a healer. I can’t accept modesty, because it seems to me the majority is so much higher than me. Standards sink me. Snow is snow, in Nelson or Parsons. Nationalites, they could fight for their country. Me, I’m sunk. Shivering, northerner out for a walk, barely fortified with two shots of vodka, mixed with fruit punch, fruity, cold, pathetically warm-hearted, parasitic, boomerang from Walmart, bought in but attempting to retain anti-corporate ideals.

We’ve tried to raise a male, but he turned out too sensitive, not strong enough for the job, what job? He used to pack bread, but still he took a sort of pride in that, it paid the bills, it was manual labour. He has fast and dexterous hands, but not agile enough to play Liszt with any fidelity. He has his own spastic improv which he likes in moments of arrogance – tools, manipulation, manual dexterity, his ego can wrap around that sometimes, he can cock rock, feel like a man, as musician, masculine art, kickass.

Where does my fruit punch red tongue fit in? I mixed vodka with fruitpunch for a little buzz, take the edge off the strong coffee dez made me, it was making me think in twisty ways, self-garroting twine, rather suffocating illumination.

Bright day today, but I’m too brilliant to call it clarity. How soon will I groan at these lines? Winter splinter. Sometimes rhyme is all a folk’s got.

I want to give her a little lick to start the day. I’m just transcribing, that’s my excuse. A piano roll, rolling along.

12/03/06

gosub

I'm in the bedroom that is sometimes mine, with my good headphones on, fumbling ownership of a chaos to coltrane. And sometimes I don't think about what it means, what mine means, what hers is, where things lie when every botched thought is a piece of puzzle schlock, registering a shock of binary blotch...00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Back from stackheap overflow when we gossubbed 2000 and returned from the edge of the earth, sanity slack, civility hacked, cracked to pieces of smacktalk and square braquetext and dexhex gibs that sounded fine, sublime for real, when life-force congealed balletic ballistics on the entry wound to entry-level living, decasyllabic meal, too perfect to conceal.

Raz is throwing nag champa at me while we listen to lorena mckennet, lovely lilting celtic harmony is what I label it.

We played kings in the corner, three rounds.

The first felt dull, that kind of gloomy dull, like life forced fractional smiles at the one half-joke uttered during the game, the only words said, like the night is truth, the darkness at the end of everything, our light so sad and small, i see through the modern façade of the kitchen fluorescent, and we're shuffling around the old 52 cards like 52 weeks of differing point value, 52 familiar sounding horoscopes in another planetary revolution, one more round.

I think I won that round. Then she said I should smoke a joint and I said I didn't really want to but she persisted. Finally I gave in and smoked and after that first taste and a bit of buzz, the room began to flow with more electricity, and kootenay memories crept through me, stealthy, with the reverbed choir feeling of west-coast dreaming, and I was glad she'd suggested the joint, and I finished off the well-rolled bomber (more of an F4U Corsair) but I became nervous that my inevitable trancing out would create tension, create an addition to that long series of lovers' quarrels, but the cards were looking psychedelic and I had a hand of seven reds, how odd, and raz was telling me about what her mind does with the tarot deck, and then she moved on to the subject of ghosts and said there were two that she had let into the room that wouldn't bother me if I left them alone, which was fine since I didn't notice them anyway, and a little part of me started doing the calculus on ESP, which is a lost cause since I don't know calculus, and the paranoid end of that started fitting slight anomalies into a pattern that would justify believing in the idea of poltergeists meddling with my life in symbolic, but banal ways for reasons just beyond the fringe of reasoning, which caused an even smaller part of me to realize that a much larger part of me would rather live in a world sans ghosts and suggested that if I needed to, I could make rationalizations for why ghosts were absent, indeed impossible even if there was an accelerating rate of unexplained anomalies and coincidental data, not that I've ever been faced with enough strangeness to need to make such rationalizations.

And the rest of me played kings in the corner with something like muscle memory, using about half of what I needed to use of my brain during my stint at the bakery, and I felt like playing this game was psychedelic and hyper contextual and a routine I could do that felt good, like playing tori amos' “winter” properly.

So now I'm selecting from a playlist that is an amalgam of raz's digital music collection and an archive of pitchfork's 200 greatest songs of the 60s.

I switched back to "the dark night of the soul". I'm not really "into" it, but loving it as ambiance, because I couldn't deal with king crimson. I could go with yes, but I’m nervous about the possibility that I'm foisting too much in this communal space, out of place, and besides, novelty is better right now, and raz has some cool music I haven't listened to.

I just put a camel cancer stick out, and into a coke can. The air is thick tonight, alcohol makes my roommates smoke like chimneys and I’m starting to dislike second-hand smoke, but I think breathing a lot in for a month or two isn't really a big deal - and some might call my metabolic pulses of piano improv "noise pollution", unless we're in a more communal music making mindset.

I was very sensual with raz just now, casually, sometimes cluelessly so, a sort of quasi-erogenous oblivion phasing in and out of awareness as synesthetic counterpoint to socially dense thoughts, bright billowing patterns...

Yes, I'm stoned again tonight and enjoying it when it doesn't make me paranoid about if I'm doing something wrong, if she's doing something wrong, if we're doing something wrong, if we're going to fight tonight, if we should fight tonight, if the world is just on increasingly fleeting downtime till the next total war that will profit a small elite, damn horrific historical context.

I'm somewhat sheepish about that little shimmy towards political posturing. That doesn't happen much anymore, I wore it in my youth like a lucky hat, found I loved it at times. Well, politics usually comes back when anger does. Most people can't be too politically involved without anger of some kind. Most people can't care. And anger usually comes from local issues that might be global ones as well. Like if you are personally affected by racism. If you're middle class canadian caucasian nelsonite, probably not too much. Classism is more my bzsazg.tygds

Cue catastrophic quarrel. It’s getting hard to deal with it. I SO don’t want to take that trip right now. Maybe I fucked things up, or maybe the situation is just chronically fucked up and destined to fuck us up no matter what anyone does. I'm sure there's some combination of things I could do to make everything alright, but it's obscure, the winning chess strategy, not something I would hit upon through my ponderings.

This situation has led me to radical thoughts, quick fix squirms out of the fire, like saving myself future grief, but I know I just need to get through the moment, finch’s chilling mantra. I haved vowed not to deal with it many times in the past, but when I'm stoned, I feel apologetic when things go wrong and obligated to "deal" with it, whatever that means. And I don't want to throw in the towel, and vindicate people who said it was stupid for me to come here. I think it would be weak. Me and raz, we should be able to work out our problems.

I want to stay here, and help pay for rent and food. Don't want to abandon raz and meth in this adventure, small, humble, but noble, I think, in a way. It feels awkward to attach any weight to it, humour is light and easy and we like irreverence, I like it when I'm stoned. When I try to explain myself, I often just fuck things up further, especially if I'm stoned, or otherwise inebriated, and not able to strategically smooth out my explanations in tactful, sensitive language, although even when I can, it doesn’t help much, usually. I try to empathize, I think I do to some extent, and I see why she feels how she does, I can relate to her insecurities and ego issues, her manias and depression, her desires and her voids.

I’m distracted by kitchen rattles and hoping they won't disturb the sleep of our roommate. He's not merely a guest, the idea is that we're all equal in ownership - that's my idea anyway. Meth is vital, as I see it, for keeping things together, buffering me and raz from the other’s volatile wavefronts.

I can't trivialize feelings, even when alcohol’s involved, the folly of inebriated empathy. Oe thing drugs have taught me is the nature of state boundaries, mind states. I've sworn so many times I would just refuse to deal with it when it got impossible to deal with. But that is a state-bounded thought as well. I don't know much but I know how about the enflaming of bad associations
and the creation of feedback loops, there’s some overlap in our psychology, there’s some buttons we push and understand in our dysfunctional but loving co-dependency.

Meth sleeps deeply, thankfully, might be the result of his anti-psychotic meds, they sedate him – strange, he doesn’t seem the type to need insanity-blocking medication – apparently he used to cut himself and hear voices and all kinds of hard to grapple with intensities, but he seems very chill with us, maybe slightly melancholy at times, but generally jovial with a keen interest in music and art – he laughs more than I imagined him to and he’s often active in our conversations on film, tv, celebrities, snacks, and trashier aspects of pop culture.

Raz is the only one of us who is currently working a job, and she's also in school, and has schedules, and immediate, pressing responsibilities. She returned home from the video store. She is on call, had to go early, through the snowstorm. Stay late. She has to learn everything with lackluster assistance. I feel for her. Not enough, or as often as I should. But I loved her especially today for soldiering through her day, doing what needed to be done, coming back, and actually being fairly sunny in that radiant desiree way, being cute and bouncy and silly and grabbing at me constantly. She even made bagel sandwiches for us all, good ones, monterey jack and cheddar, smoked turkey, mustard and jalapeno peppers. I did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen.

We watched a movie called “hard candy”. It pissed me off in a lot of ways and the ending disappointed me, but I have to admit that I was often involved in the story, it wasn't a bad thriller, somewhat original premise involving a not-so-innocent adolescent pedophile victim. Then we watched the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. Wow, it's seven AM. How did that happen?

The Twin Gears of Cringe and Cling

Donating. Actually doing something - an interaction - over the web - financial transaction, christmas shopping, or sort of gesturing to chri...