theatre

There I was:
day four, horizontal --
but not in the good way.

Legs half in/out
of blanket
but not a good way.

Eyes on my body
but in a very serious way,
about to be opened
but not in a fearless way

No bra on / lip piercing out / nail polished removed
not in the usual way --

They put me in a blue room
dug something in my arm

the highs and lows crept in
then I woke up hyper-
ventilating.

"Possible, impossible."

"We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?"

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale. 

bite

if I could just un-sting myself,
pull that little
vex out of my forehead
to see a bit
clearer..

but the obtuse remark
sits firmly into the night,
inhibits the words
that were meant to go out and off

so that they must be unveiled
tomorrow, instead --
and then tomorrow instead
will come
on Saturday
on your day
and then I will feel guilty
about feeling guilty

flatsomnia

We're each as bad as the other at sleeping
except I've got nowhere to be in the morning.

pettifogging

Some impossibly ochre light 

has cast itself over,

setting the trees olive-khaki 

against the city-navy sky

6am, last of streetlight-elder

casts itself my very own insta-filter

my very own 

matte kaleidoscope --

my psych-thriller mise en scene

ambient with morning's cues

the slight possibility of Phone Call

sugar-rimmed with Tramadollusion

things I realized while walking the dog

eye in hand of hand's eye

and I, and 

by and by

bylines and by-sights, by chance

(sharks in both sleep and swimming)

two lines of time, sign of concentration, beautiful edge

mark the other eye:

number three --

three with three and twice three,

the third three mine

and now -- in time -- yours too...

threes in signs and avian divinations

"sign of the times" he says, says she

but three deliberates

three's unsure

three necessitates thought

eye gravitates towards the hesitating; hesitation being

the crux in which feeling fluctuates

in and out of time; the

eye opens and closes, flutters it's lashes

voraciously against the hand, occasionally

lashing out in love but still will

retract and sigh, the eye

skyward as if we should all 

gaze upward

but little occurs there,

mostly it's all here with the

Earth

nesting in the valleys

sleeping at lake edges

restlessly meandering

certain of chance and change. 

quite hilarious

Quite hilarious
to see the businessmen of Hamilton
standing urgently
importantly,
constrained in their perturbedness
'gainst the mannequinned
windows of an
Adults Only sex shop.

scall

I'd like to drink you with my palms,
press the heels of my hands into your eye sockets
and hold your forehead for a while.
press the edges of my fingertips into your veins,
I'd like to catch all the fluid
I would

take it into my own
bloodstream, siphon it through my
heart-thing
round and round
all sixty two
thousand
miles of me. Until I felt
purple from the
red-and-blueofitall

then I'd have a
crooked-er smile,
I'd stay in the water for longer.
I'd speak dog and
bird and
I'd speak.

jack white

"Give and receive fearlessly."

Dale

half your life ago

was one-third ago mine

you cross your legs to pack your pipe

rolling your spliff with concentration

you take my clothes off 

outside on the deck

with classical music accidentally 

and a view you photographed earlier

you buy me jellybeans and beers

you say you want to live here

you check in that I love you, 

"eh?" 

You know.

and you Admire me,

very seriously --

you sit legs all tucked up under me

like I've never seen any others,

with me

entangled in me

you save the last chip for me

You stand in line for me.

you hold my hand across the passenger seat

you keep your shoes on 'til the last minute

you let me drive.

you push me off the jetty and

into the lake 

you put your underwear on immediately 

after sex, you go for a walk 

alone

you pour me a glass of orange juice

every time you have one

without asking if I want ...

you talk to me in a 

concerningly compelling French accent, you send me

photographs of yourself with swallows

you talk to me during sex

you touch me in public

-- and refrain from touching me in public

you bring me acid on your 

tongue, while I'm playing 

volleyball with my friends

you do the dishes

you cut my hair

you soap me up

you dry me off

you worry about your hair

you sit a bit too far away from me

to eat your bacon

in the morning

we fall asleep to Deftones

holding hands

/not holding hands but

touching feet

you buy me a silver key and a

rainbow robot

you carve 

slightly incoherent messages

into my notebook

amongst my ambitions

you tell me I've

Changed you. 

I lead you around the supermarket,

semi-blind, half

seeing

I play you music

I tell you things

I wear my hair up !

I omit "I" from your poems until the last moments

I wonder --

and I feel: happy,

about us.

We are now.

We are present.

We are here.

We are love.

We are 

here, now

memories 

in action. 

poem for fuck-ups and the fucked-up

We've all
  seen it
    said it
      been it
        done it
          do it
have it
  want it
     need it
       want it --
we all want it

but nothing ever
   comes
   came
       will come
out of nothing, never

we all
       try
  and try
  and try
  and try
  and try
and
   fail...
try again, and
      try
 and try
 and then we
die -- if we're lucky

You might get lucky,
   you might
or you
  might not.

You might get lucky
or you might
die.

hiatus

All the words have gone and
made themselves heard:

in the vacuum of
Neverland, where skies lie
violet-indigo
and fire.

They've all tripped off my teeth
(the words), they don't
melt so easily off my fingers, these days
and it saddens me

because I need to be talked to, too,
for all the listening that I do