Month: November 2005

he said, I dreamed about making out with you. It wasn’t even sex.



Originally uploaded by folkfestfan.

It was a tiny alarm in an unfamiliar gloom that smelled like honey. I picked it up and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so I nudged the priest next to me, and put it into his hand that wasn’t trapped by my body. He mumbled, I was serious when I said the bit about the nipples was about you, and shut it off.

It sounds like fiction, but it’s true. I sat up, did up some buttons that had been undone, straightened my stockings and kissed him on the forehead. Go back to sleep. His shirt was open, so I put my hand on his chest to feel for his heartbeat, and smiled. Some mornings I know how much of this holy book was made for me.

I’m usually intimidated by sacred things, but instead I’m still okay. I am blinded by halos and I fear for my vision. Don’t let me burn like a witch scalded by a writer’s rejection, I want to say, but I don’t, because in my heart, we are family. I’ll call him later, and laugh a little, and I’ll make him happy.

I passed the cenotaph today walking home in the rain. It’s our Remembrance Day here. Veterans were lined up in black capes with their heads down. I stopped until they began talking about Jesus. It makes sense to me that soldiers would have gods, but I woke up next to my rabbi, so I kept on walking.

Home is a shower, maybe. Home is downloading my videos of the last night’s proceedings and uploading them for you here. Home is this keyboard and listening to Shane, knowing that he’s still content to be left in bed because I tucked him in there, because his rings got caught in my fishnets, because one of these days we’ll have time for each other, but not just yet.
download these

“This one’s called Finally.“

“I saw some cows and it got me to thinking about love.“

“If your lips were crayons, I would like you to press them to the colouring book of my face… and scribble.”
(You can hear me murmur, oh no, on the video when he began talking to me.)
Video II, continuing the same poem.

A bit of crowd banter. New rule: you must be that beautiful to ride this ride.

“For the woman who told me to fuck off after I told her she was beautiful.”

“All you need to know for this poem is that a lanyard is nothing more than a glorified keychain.“

“I’m sorry that I keep saying I’m sorry.”
This is where the band kicked in.
Video II, continuing the same poem.

“I don’t imagine you saran-wrapped in black latex or seeping out the edges of something tight and red.“

“I’m going to shit books so bad-ass that they’ll be banned for trying to define bravery as walking into a biker bar wearing a pink sweatshirt with a picture of a unicorn being tamed by a gnome.“
He used to scald me with this from stage. He knows a little better now, but he stills whispers it at night. I like the BrickHouse, I said to my friend. Whenever I go, I leave with Shane. I don’t even know you yet, but I’ve been sleep walking towards your kiss. Shh.

In his own cunning way, my friend tells me about his girlfriends oral sex habits.“

edit: I’ve also got two videos downloaded a long while before.

World Slam Finals: Help Wanted. Every day my grandma would come into my room and I’d hear her say, “Rise and Shine. The world has a window that holds a sign there’s help wanted somewhere, young man”, so I rose and I shone. I put on my shoes and I was gone.

CBC: People Get Better.

I cursed myself for forgetting my place

I found myself unexpectedly in a pub full of familiar theatre people this evening after rehearsal. As it’s been close to three years since I was regularly working shows in Vancouver, there was a tacit agreement that I belonged, but hardly anyone could place me. Jacques arrived, and when he finally noticed me and said hello, I caught several people relaxing. They’d been worried that I was some strange mis-perception, a mental twitch of a stranger who only seemed familiar. I collected a few e-mail addresses of people I’ve missed talking to. I’ve got to remember to send them an appropriate hello before I go to bed.

“Then she sank down to her knees, grasped the cutter by both hands, took a deep breath and plunged the long blade through the middle of the package, through the middle of the masking tape, through the card- board through the cushioning and (thud) right through the center of Waldo Jeffers head, which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun…“

My teeth feel sweet now. Rose gave me a black to smoke while we stood outside socializing after. I accepted, forgetting that I don’t smoke, never have. The tops of my lungs are now complaining, reminding me that it’s been six years since I’ve lit anything up, but I mystified myself by having all the proper mannerisms. I suspect I will either eventually blame the city I live in, as Vancouver is a place where Marijuana isn’t considered a drug by any but the repressed children of the far right, so everywhere there are people with little rectangles of white paper rolled into tubes to be gestured with, or my exes who smoked and so gave me a character to unconsciously pattern. Either way, I was somewhat perturbed by how easily I took holding the soothing crackle of tar and clove.

  • Texas Voters Approve Ban on Gay Marriage.
  • Denver voters make adult possession of one ounce or less of marijuana legal.
  • Kansas education board downplays evolution.

    • don’t be shy because you think what he does is -poetry-


    rabbit
    Originally uploaded by hakkenkrakish.

    Come see Shane Koyczan perform work from his new book. You miss this and you miss a tiny piece of literary history. I can’t think of an international poetry championship he hasn’t won. He’s opened for Ani DiFranco, Spearhead & Saul Williams, and got back from sharing a stage at the 2005 Edinburgh Book Festival with Margaret Atwood, John Saul, and Salman Rushdie in time for a Vancouver dinner with Neil Gaimen.

    VISITING HOURS

    Thursday, November 10, 2005 @ The Anza Club 3 West 8th Avenue (at Quebec) 8:00 pm.

    Admission Free

    Some things to know about Shane that you may or may not know:

    He’ll be opening for legendary Canadian rock band The Rheostatics on their West Coast Tour in November 2005

    He’s performed with Utah Phillips, Maya Angelou & Quincy Troupe

    He cuddles like his poems promise.

    He will be performing solo and with T.O.F.U. There’ll be a DJ and drinks and poetry and it will be a damned better sight than you’d ever found on a Thursday before.

    Check www.motherpressmedia.com for more details

    what’s broken will keep us safe


    lostatsea
    Originally uploaded by avolare.

    we show up on front lawns at eleven
    in the morning
    in the evening
    afternoon
    what could you see in me
    this is embarrassment and some
    pained looks
    they’ll have to explain now
    it’s like a fear of intimacy
    we can’t be their friends
    we might slip up over dinner
    and move them
    their hands and our
    bodies loved but rejected
    we would cry and come inside
    tidy places, these homes
    they hide us in the piles of paper
    and always remember to let us
    straddle them on top
    because that way they get to remember
    our breasts a little
    better than in
    that photograph

    my sweet damaged heart


    michael thompson
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.


    Lithium Picnic, my desktop.

    Escape is four. Walls, edges, connect three and the angles are wrong. Four is compatible with fire. Two places to hold you, for you to hold me. Four. Boundaries make up all the most beautiful things hemming in this screen. // When they speak to you in whispers. It feels so right, but you’re not in the story. Voice falls quiet from fear. // Hush now, cradles rock, it’s picking a fight. I can’t change this. The farther in I see, the less I understand about how I’m pulling. Noticing little things. This is a refuge. I’m not wrong, I’m on this list. I recognize the objects that feel the same from partner to partner. This is where we come to write, all of us, music or language or pieces of memory. Eighteen inches from the computer, everything we need. All our pills. All our letters encased in plastic chunks of communication. We’re so human. It hurts me when I’m lucid. Damn lucky I’m not.

    Tom Baker out-takes from recording a voiceover for a commercial. Many thank-you’s Warren.

    hello to everyone who reads my journal

    where were you

    I am in a room like a small city.

    Katie posted a query today that I particularly appreciated, so I’m going to imitate it here. Her complaint was contentment and mine is sorrow.
    Between the two of us, we span a strange continent.

    Please tell me your names, introduce yourself, you strangers.
    There’s over 100 of you that I don’t know.

    “Even if I know you, introduce yourself to others, and tell me what you’ve done lately.”

    Tell me why you’re here, how you found me, what inspires you.

    Tell me your stimulations, titillations; show me your pretty hidden treasures.

    Explain a piece of your world with something beautiful.

    Share something you want everyone else to know.

    Make something new.

    here we are, like last year backward


    gry garness
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I adapted too quickly to my temporary work schedule and came in an hour early today. Doubly disappointing as Nicholas and Esme are still around somewhere in Ray’s truck with him and Dominique. Lovely people for lovely weather, though here the weather is all wrong. Vancouver in November has insistently dull light as if all the particles have been sucked out. It should have been cutting and bright, warm welcome blue sky and golden patches of sun on all our sidewalks that catch the fallen leaves and transform them from crispy edged mush to blazing transports of colour. That’s how it should have been. Toronto fall, lightning storms on College street and fire falling out of the corner of the eye to scrape the street with an audible brushing of texture against texture.

    Really, Nikky forgot his bag at Andrew’s and we spent out morning after Breakfast driving back and forth in light rain between Andrew’s house and work, getting keys, using them, then dropping them off, then driving me downtown. Not really what I feel like talking about.

    I seem to be talking to an old best friend of mine again. There was a self imposed hiatus while I put myself together enough to be human again. I get enough phonecalls without inflicting damaged personalities on my more precious people. What I have instead today is an abiding weight. An I-didn’t-sleep-last-night-so-invariably-I-thought-of-you. I was a drawn line against the wall, one of three people in my bed. I watched the sun come up and remembered you beside me. Embedded in the palm of my hand is a photograph of pulling your hair. I have the sound of it all attached. Another beautiful moment encoded under every chipped fingernail. I’m clothed in memory, the fabric of it delicate and blind, the pattern a musical scale like the colour of my eyes meeting yours in the dark. It’s all poetical and very very sad, though you make smiling so easy. Too-easy-there-must-be-a-catch. Ah right.

    Eventually there will have to be a choice. Someone will have to lay down and die. I can’t explain how much I want to write fiction worthy of this photograph.

    new icons when I wrote my newest resume

    I barely know me. I stand in doorways, unblinking, standing and speaking words of conflict. I collapse on the sidewalk in heavy rain and half an hour goes missing. I hold him warmly close to me with a smile in my mind. I put my head to the side and try not to cry. Inside of me, things are changing. I remember compromise. You say this wasn’t your intention, I say that’s okay. You say and I say then they stood up and had too many words to say. Remember, this is what a little bit of love looks like.

    I don’t like that I carry this so she won’t have to.

    Every part disparate. I’m still unbalanced, so much is broken. I’m tidying now, brushing the pieces into a pile for later sorting. Which loss caused this jagged edge, which loss caused that. This year was many. I could make t-shirts. Arrested, Fired, He Lied, They Died. My humour’s the right sort. On the back would be a list like tour dates.

    Which reminds me: support my Jesus Monkey Pants. I have this one. It makes me sexy like Snakes on a Plane would, which is something I meant to mention weeks ago. I have an excuse, I’ve been eating multitudes of candy bars. They’re not very healthy, really, and they’re making my thoughts shake. They popped into existence to fill the space left by the cessation of hallowe’en proceedings and they’re cadbury tasty, which is to say, not as good as pumpkin pie. I miss my pies. I didn’t carve a pumpkin this year, so I didn’t bake. Ah well, the Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible. (Also an ancient thing, I know, but it fit. You want something new, go find out about the underground city in Briton that’s now up for sale. Then buy it for me. I will send you nekkid pictures. Lolz. Now bugger off.)

    I really should be in bed by now, but I’m waiting for dye to set in my hair. My hands are flecked with purple, a nice reminder of what the bathroom will look like in about twenty minutes. I’m being patient, though I don’t feel like it right now. The bed’s empty, it’s all cold tumbled gold pillows and scarlet bands of silk and I feel like the faster I fall into it, the quicker I can pretend it’s morning. Red shift myself into a different day, one where I might be sleeping next to someone. Alone is not terrific for me now, but I can deal with it. Alone without promise of company, however, is bad.

    Nicholas will be here tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. He and Esme are coming in from Victoria for a concert and dinner at Andrew‘s with me and Ray. He asked for Chris too, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I deked out of rehearsal today before I could ask. There were issues with my roommate James that needed sorting, and tonight was really the best time to get it done with.

    p.s. world, send new Explosions In The Sky, Porcupine Tree and Bethurum. thank you.

    took my forever to figure out what that was


    Tattoo by John Lind
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    Circumstance, strange attempts to convey information that isn’t being said. I feel asleep briefly yesterday, half way across town. I fell down later, washed with lead, like my skin was too heavy for my limbs. I wondered if I should have let anyone touch me, if that was the key that brought down the castle walls. I talked with my mother last night, she seems to be doing well. She’s tired, but these days, aren’t we all? Everyone has too much to do, too little to live on. We’re a batch of children, looking up the sky and hoping for something better to come along and pick us up.

    Tiny birds and unexpected candy are the hallowe’en aftermath littering my room. The candy will be consumed, translating well into a litter of empty wrappers. The birds will require more effort. I need to twist their wired feet back into the rail over my window, place them in positions where they might look out at the world. Inside each head, I need to replant dreams. Take tweezers and carefully insert the gleaming ideas like glass beads behind their jet black eyes. I took them out when I brought them in public, so they wouldn’t be damaged from what they saw while riding in my hair.

    Today’s Breakfast at the Urban City Cafe will be held at 1:45. Come one, come all. For those not in the know, this is becoming the new institution. It’s almost daily and a bit like an antique social salon. Breakfast is five bucks for a full plate of mostly organic tasty.