extreme disturbance - was unable to write - hallucinatory, in that emotional, surreal but totally real, chilling presentations of reality - it was very different - deja thread - wondering what i was gonna do - now i'm much more peaceful - drinking water - strange kind of plateau, not everything has been felt, to my current dubious knowledge - - almost on the nod now, strange - but i'm not gonna deny, willful flange - let lucid be a film

now that i'm over the clenched vertex - i can feel it in all my directories - all that rapidly changing perspective - yeah, i'm over here again, sorry - or maybe it's all for the best --- strange, this old music, i'm really feeling at kinship with vand - well, states of dream can dissolve barriers between cultures, ages, ethnicities, all that jazz -- i don't think i've ever ventured for oblivion, do remember that cartoon with the butterfly though, it wasn't that long ago - certain ideas are permissable after certain emissions - big round world, greasy, i slipped in many spots, found many strange flanges and sacred geographical areas - recent new vantages on the globe perturb me, wonderfully, on those loved lulls in the horror. I guess I'm lucky, the void is allowing me to unwind somewhat, though I would certainly take some euphoriants if I had them. I don't gamble, except with my soul.

even within illicit pentagonal transplants...

>< --{{}}-- ><...

the forever retrograde right sign of a lost and fuzzy cell of mind
{wah} eternally coolifed

would be a wonderful flanged adventure to nod your head to cold gestures of codified pedestrian perusals of the precursors for predicted plundles for pruderfuls of demanded agents for a certain embossed contour of language.

Pardon my levity

So I decided the only sane solution was to comindeer the bottle. It's a hash of things. A mix of things. When you gain the alteration you thought was demanded, when the fade-out began, when it looked fit enough to print, when emotions got ahead of reality, those kind of flanged sinews...

Proud Owner

pride is delicate, expensive, high maintenance, pain-in-the-ass property. for every fleeting ego-trip there is a massive tax on sanity. is it worth it? i’ve been programmed with pride. it’s primitive and sexual. alpha monkey prototype of the modern luxury is now a high nuance, high definition consumer product – every citizen a king, every consumer a television, but what do you do when your neighbor’s screen dwarfs yours? what do you do when your body fails you, and you need to pay someone to help you take your showers?

Banda Bassotti

I love it when south americans sing "El Pueblo".

I've poured entirely too much emotion into that continent. But what do you expect? For fuck's sake, it's called "Latin America". What do you do with that? Well if you're Banda Bassotti, you perform a punk rock version of the Chilean socialist anthem. Music is a good way of dissolving pointless pity. Hey, if I had Cortez blood in me, combined with Incan empathy (oh Jesus, here I go with the grotesque caricatures, oh forgive me, I haven't had my ayahausca therapy, but fuck that, I'm not going to be a chemical monotheist either, there's plural paths, it isn't all shamanism) I'd rage against any available capitalist. Hey, I'm doing that now, except there's always that instinct in me that shies away from biting the hand that feeds me. Hey, it may be peanuts in this ridiculous bling context, but to someone, it's a fortune.

Brothers, sisters... Can't we agree, Chavez fills our hearts with joy? I really hope he doesn't have to get shot. Because that's kind of his shtick. Staying alive. The rascal. Not that I'm considering moving to Venezuela. I kind of like my Canadian citizenship. And the Royal hasn't run out of lines yet. Although, you know, eventually, we're gonna need something worth fighting for. What the fuck am I talking about? Music is good energy. Get your violence out on the mosh pit. That's fine with me. But I really hope we can work out some kind of post-modern revolution. One that doesn't involve urban warfare. With guns and stuff. I got over snuff films years ago. I don't need to see any more blood or brains. Oh here I go, betraying my 20th century delusions. Revolution is so last century. Or is it? Maybe novelty is the great illusion. I dunno, there's a lot of bubbles, and they've gotta pop sometime.

Yeah I know, platitude city. But there are some people who read for the honesty. I appreciate the ears of those people. The eyes. Honestly, I wish I could get deeper into those eyes. And I figure, why not? Isn't it possible? It doesn't have to mean any specific thing. But this particular ground zero is not quite mobile enough, not really extroverted. Although I'm a reciprocal charity case, if that's good enough. Hey - take my cosmic welfare cheque for this month - it's on me. And you know, I'm a good citizen. I'll pay for this postage with foot stamps. Or the drinks are on me. Or I'll hunt some game. Yeah. Tonight we eat well. Jesus Christ where am I going with this? Ample opportunity for interpretation. Nevermind. Party on the glacier - the mysterium, Kootenay style. Be there, or be well. Who wants to be well? What are you, some futurist utopian?! Haha. I spit on your spit!

Anchor Watt

hey now. i can feel myself settling into the chasm floor. okay, i'm bored with that metaphor now.

enough isn't enough today. no, nothing satisfies. the game isn't worth the candle. on average, twenty seconds between sentences, that's how long it takes. the rest is a rest. these are the times that drugs are most appealing. these lonely lulls, these gaping holes in myself, these soul chasms. yes i said that. stop the presses: i'm writing about drugs again. no i'm not.

drugs aren't good enough. it's too obvious, there's no free lunch. there's only the naked lunch. yeah, pilfer the classic title, be a tick on burroughs’s ass. ah well, i need iron, i'll feast. been exercising every morning for some stupid reason. wonder how long that will last. it's good to physicalize, cause my mind's a ****ing cesspool, man. except it's not as colorful as most cesspools are. although occasionally we do bump into some interesting calcified research chemicals on the eroded concrete. finally an image. well, sort of. okay, it's a stucco paste of chalky lime, the time i ordered some typtamines from a new york lab - and they delivered, those magnificent **stards! very professional. but what did i learn? i don't know. i didn't do it right. i ****ed it all up. like everything. anchored to the chasm floor, hardwood, smelling of pine sol. a solvent problem solved. can i be a daoist now? is it time yet? the illegitimate watt, the entropy engine, eternally anchored. maybe i should flail on the piano some more.

form a band in 2012. finally. hey, 30 is the new 20. so i'll have my whole life ahead of me. i'll be the new elvis costello. retro retro, until my instrumental deconstructionist finally cracks a tone into a billion pieces, a nano cent, there's a power of ten for you, deoxyribonucleic nuance. we'll play for carbon atoms, our quivering demographic. they look so eerie in that sound. eventually we'll be classified as suburban gypsies in plunging property value residential zones, green icons flashing electrical symbols, out of power, turning into shanty town. will you take me to - shanty town? we're staying alive. suburban gypsies and hippie dippies, hey finally it's time for hippie dip, goes good with tostitos, did you know?

relax, i know it's hard to know what to do during a godzilla attack in a tornado, but eventually the great terraformer will get us out of this mess. into a wire frame, haven't you always wanted to wear a wire? what the fuck else was there about a wire? is it time for the lapse yet? if i was drunk, i'd have no insecurity about lapsing and there'd be no meta-commentary on the lapse, but that leading tone fell right into my lap. someday i'll look back and smile upon this misremembered episode. the welfare cosmos, in its wisdom, does not issue the citizenry its rosy tint until the age of eighty-five, the new retirement, plenty of time to use whatever wisdom you've acquired - ah, retirement from the game, blow out the candle cause wisdom doesn't matter any more - oh, what can you do with it? / put it between slashes /

the entire world will be florida, palm trees and - you know, i guess i got whatever the fuck i was going for writing this, a pinto bean jumping around in my gut - that's what the troops are fighting for - the rights of this echo. hey now.

Waiting for the Miracle

Waiting for the Miracle

I’ve been working on this song for years. Finally finished today. Music, recording, words, and voice are me, some bass was played by Cpt. Orr


lyrics:

perfection speaks of heat-seeking spores
waiting for my dirt nap
the feeding frenzy
fresh meat soil

the planet wants to re-collect my body
thinks my mind is on borrowed time
the only solution is to pay my dues with 50 kis of flesh

but no plant told me where i go
i wonder if they even know
what happens when i join the earth
is it death or a re-birth?

can they calm my fears and claim
conscious continuity
or does that mean anything really?
guess i didn't eat sufficient psychotria

i'll just wait
for the miracle

i'll just wait
for the chemical

i'll just wait
till they synthesize
perfection

be down in down time
while the wind blows
and perfection gestates in a petri dish

chime whines in down time
while the wind blows
and perfection impregnates a Royal Bush

perfection speaks of heat-seeking spores
waiting for my dirt nap
the mundane death
on a morphine drip

i'll snivel from the cradle to the early grave
before they save my ass from the hungry grass
can't put my faith in flora, i'm no flower nor a fruit
and no seeds will sprout from me with
my remainder in the freezer singing

i'll just wait
for the miracle

i'll just wait
for the chemical

i'll just wait
till they synthesize
perfection

kept alive to the final wheeze
the last death wish, then the freeze
cryo-genius clique, genetic freak
securing meek's inheritance

my sectors of service in a
low capacity hard drive will be
honored in apotheosis of organic greed
to each according to his need

why does the world seem a different shade
when i'm bouncing words off my highs and lows?

i'll just
take it for fate
take it for metabolism
serotonin flux
take drugs
never take them into account

i'll just wait
for the miracle

i'll just wait
for the chemical

i'll just wait
for the castle to open its doors

ugly

I nearly drowned in the reflecting pool

can't think of what to do now
so I guess I'll take valium
which I don't have, so i'll approximate with valerian

I just want to stay down
dullened, sleep
I'd rather dream
life is too real and ridiculous
dreams make sense to me

in waking life i'm hung up on ego
which shreds in dreams, allows me to be completely other people
it's really quite extraordinary, my thoughts and words are polluted
with ideas like "consciousness" and "unconsciousness", but there is some
interesting process going on in that dissolve
to think of it as mundane is to be asleep, in waking life

i need a vacation from myself, i hate the oppressive gravity of the ego
and i'm sick of ground zero

radiant voices fill the cracks
i type into a box and add another scrap to the canon
for no other reason than to do something

dry meat pie... i ate most of it
drinking water
not threatened by flying leaches

wish the snow was gone, i don't enjoy being stoic anymore
i just want to walk in the woods like i did in the spring and summer and autumn
it heals me, re-casts the putrid self-stinking thoughts
i feel a part of something bigger and better
than that silly and sad world i've become attached to

nature is my religion, yeah, when i have one, which isn't often
but i'm like any stupid human - i'd sooner kill the ugly bugs
than the cute ones

*

so i'll sutrize this... and say i settled for cyclo
it may be morally wrong, but it's not the first time i've done that
a precurser to soma, they said
but they didn't really know

i'm going to be soporific today
it's the only way

blank the slate

buyers remorse creeps into the initial dosing period, it always does
wish i could fast forward until i was well into the cruise
i can't savor the changes
unless i'm on the upswell of some euphoriant

i'm acting like an addict today, embracing it
the aesthetic of addiction, the addict's ethic
even though it's not really me

listening to astral projection

vaguely depressed - is it alcohol withdrawal, is it cause the trams wore off, or is it because i feel like a loser? who cares, it's what i'm trying to run from, through chemical modification, and sleep - the unconscious, conscious but not, it's sexy to me, i lust for it - no, that analogy doesn't really work, it's not lust, it's love

astral projection is lovely - i need more weed - such an easy mod, barely feels like a drug - i want to keep drifting - i'm not happy, i'm dissatisfied and dejected, but in a drifty way which is nice - somewhat aloft - that's why i want to keep taking downers and beatific techno - astral projection can do no wrong - in heaven, the isrealis are the DJs

still got that weird tension in my teeth and joints - it's probably the pot

*

Fuck everyone.

It feels so good to say that. I don't know why. Anger is arrogance is energy is a rush is a high. Depression externalized. Not really, but sort of, in obscure tensor equations. Well I am dissatisfied, dissaffected somehow. Nothing's changed. I ran out of energy here. Nelson is a dead fucking end. I want to abandon it. The charm wore off. We subsist on the pale glow of Unstern.

I have no plans, no goals, except sleep. Until then, I'll drift. Wish I had more fog-generating inebrients, but I mainly just have cheap and blunt downers, they'll have to do. Blue sky at 3:42, viewed through brown blinds, in a dark bedroom while listening to trance. That's the happenstance.

The sky is beautiful. It's like an old friend. I feel such a personality from it. But I haven't gotten used to the white vista below. Apollo and the Ice-Queen. It's possible I fucked the skygod. But I forgot to personify her properly. But then, mixed metaphors are appropriate in those reveries. I could drink cough syrup right now, I'm that commited to being fucked up. The friendly fuck-up. My only friend.

freak flag at half mast

About a month after Timothy Leary died, Wilson received an email from him that said, best that I can remember, "Hiya Bob! Heaven is nothing like I imagined, it's a lot more crowded. Be seeing ya!"

He always figured it was a prank easter egg that Tim had put into his computer. I guess now he may know for sure.

- urbanagora

Robert Anton Wilson died yesterday. He's the man who turned me on. Found him, my last year of high school. Didn't know anything about anything. Then I started reading his books. Illuminating to say the least, very influential. A lot has happened since then, but he feels like an old teacher. Instrumental in my intellectual foundation. "The Earth Will Shake" is still my favourite of his novels (and books). Before that, I had no real passion for music. The story of Sigismundo Celine supercharged my interest, kicked off an obsession with classical everything, literature, philosophy, but particularly music.

Rest in peace, RAW. Or not. Whatever you feel like doing.

well, then....... (boogety boogety}

was the game from the rubric or am i still channeling...?
no, not even any rip-off tipped off some poor porn houses
we're all in this together and itis a wild fucking ride, slide, beautiful hell
is yourhula caught on your torso?

anaes, ah god get that e out of here, fucking hell....

yaw yaw the flanges and the fringes my imaginishards destroy your gathering magic cards today, this shwal on the paisley, first turn on a swurn of a gotback lacking daisies... jayseees eyes,,,, where did dems go? wow? that place i liked to talk at. sit right there - i don't know what i'm doing, but i will attend you - i know my place, i've been in insurrected corridors before, the bilge, the branches offa that treetamalee, where are they, where'lls the flow you, jenn. do you rem, ever gosubick?

New Way

same as the old way - same as the eternal peace...

weapons - look at us now - finefine - +

Whatever - bring it on - in this weird hypercontext - FUCK FUCK YTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA - YES = yes - nyx if you want - look, it's just for entertainment purposes right? everyone loves to be entertained with hot tasty licks

I did it again and again - isn't life so fucking beautifully sick?
those poor women , new in town, who wanted to score some coke?
i'm listening to a harp sonata donizetti luci di someting

lllllll fuck
nevermind
dayum
anyway....


brite litesss...

holy grail

It's been hard to be willing to get lost, but it's possible... oh deerie we're subverting the normal chanells that waste sluicies and slices down these granulated.... heh, they've got an explanation for everything, frikkin window craques... catching your gold and silver tears... Mock rock isn't gonna happen here in this self flagellating cage of untercutonous mind expandind psychedelic blisters - oh wee woo we ooo we beyautiful.... cagellating sweet string pad - that's how it's suppposed to sound... the producer got you. What am I doing? Meaning is screaming in areas it shouldn't for fruck sake, slick back into the puddle, dogboy, dover, there's a whole chapter for you.

pranfully aware of a bunt cake cracked and wrestled with wear and tear - where have i come in this new paradigm of cosmic cause? yeah? you there? what are you doing here? do you make me smile? i think so. It's sort of soronary, subject to subdivilations. Harping on accidents. Okay, Iz gonna randomazer.... rawor. Zbeen a while. Nothing's the same. In this contex. Is this what a life is supposed to be. Obviously not. Dabble. But Affirm. Somewhere out there an appendage completes your strut. Illustion, delusion.... or confusion prelude to --- lost chord. We don't have the word. Damned divinity. I'm trying to love for fockery's sake. Artistic mambles. There's tens of pens. Where were they when I was lonelhy without words and skills. Isralis fart around me. A gaggle of bubrling desert farty synthy candy i will giggle gurgle with some day - hey - it's lightly time fine, fine with me - mayne, mainvein, muddy prude in the pud, goddamn, i should be here all tghe time i guess that means i'm....

here, heh

gelicle straight shot from the room of a hed bot... caught in the art scrape - ah, the nape of the dead neck - no - apocalypse is not here, try another synapse - yes - that's what we're looking for - care of the dead and the living - what is this all for? come with me - i love you - phi - ratio - it dries in the sun - i know, i know, for frigging fuck's sake.... what's it all come to?

I love how I'm so aware of how it's all tilted now and I don't care that I am sublimely listened to tilted tunes on outlawed sawteeth of wavelengths, agreeying with frickin frackintasticallashins... oh symptomatic is a symptom of your automatic swayback, it sways into the sense pool in which we all understand and partake, nutricious nutrients rootbulb rootbark hallucination, how am i doing this?

shit meet fan

it's getting scattered
this happened fast
not sure which window i am typing in anymore...

it's been a while, but it's fueled by infected crystal distortion samples, ah, bliss

i remember this type of stuff...

eventually we opened the door, found ourselves locked in a room, eternity,
the poppy pop coldmilk bath of eletric bubble warm narcosis

sorry that wasn't precise enough, the truth is in a critical appraisal

feels comfriggidy though, like my place, the place i've been waiting for...

axle

we pass in movements of felt presences - feels like good ideas at the time, as long as you're not going for that ridiculous shot on the ninth hole of a talamadulous tour

shorn foot with belticles trailing behind...

gotten it all under crentackular crebbles of control. Alt-delete
and smelt the schalter
and you know what?
who cares if you're smoking coke? hah!

alstor pastore

I AIN'T FALLIN INTO ANY OF YOUR DASTARDly traps

Heh. When's the last time you heard something like this? When's the last time the music video made you twist that way? Heh. The boys are back in town with their cantering ways. Canter trucks. Canter berries. Cranfluences. It'll shovel it's way down the respectabably buzzled bluster of a person who finds one node of his life in this dodgy smear castled -- hey, I went further out then you thought I would didn't you YOU YOU, hey ME, I'm on the cover of TIME, to my shagrin... I wasn't going to tell the plebs but mussulini pushed me on to the balcony, but I wasn't quite over, I was standing proud, in front of my crowd, surveying the shapes of undulating pleasure domes, when youth was currency - it's not all your sad sob story, get out of the rain, get out of your pain - remember when we were together, remember what we did???

Buddie, bud makes it go down good.

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

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

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.