Toronto is measured now more by time than distance. I leave at six, get there close to midnight. I still have nowhere to stay.
Traditional News Year’s is coming, as well as another city, and I’ve been considering if it means anything to me. Today as I was cooking my meal for the train, I was trying to tally up my last three hundred and sixty-five days. So far I’ve been instrumental to one divorce and three affairs. Both my lovers this year ran off on me with someone else and let us all find out by accident. I discovered someone else never loved me in return and one that night stands can be frighteningly easy.
All of it adds up to so very little that it hurts me. It used to be that my passions repaid me in kind. I don’t know what happened or how to fix whatever it is that shattered. Where is the bowl I kept my heart in? The one I used to offer in dreams to passing strangers as an alms cup. I want to think that my soul is racing to find me and that all the time in between is time standing still, but I know that it’s crying for no use. Apologies aren’t coming, I’ve been forgotten somehow. I’ve seen this face before in the mirror, it’s unhappy. At least when I’m not in Vancouver, I don’t have to think, “He’s walked this street.” It’s like changing where I live in my head. There’s a hi-hat hit and a deep thump of bass and the place I was forgotten isn’t inside me anymore. It’s in front of me, on this keyboard, and I’m emptying everything painful into the ether for you to see and read and maybe understand. You’re out there, it happens, just like everyone else. Why did you never call me back? Only the musician ever told me how to find him.
I see your picture, all of you, any, and I smile with a sting in my ribcage. I lie down my walls and I let you in again like the best kind of refrain. I love you, yeah yeah, baby, let’s do it again. The part of me that marries people is still carrying you.
Do-wop-she-bop-pretty-damn-bang.
There are some basic elements that pain shares with surprise, but I couldn’t tell you what they were right now. I’m too busy trying to open my unfinished business like a dried flower in my mind that’s going to draw me back to Vancouver. All I can find is a job offer, Creative Director of a Friendster-type website, and maybe that I need to pack my things properly. My dream machine is hiccoughing, refusing to process anything that isn’t movement forward. What I need versus what I get. The end of this story has yet to be written so maybe I can fight my way through the ranks of mediocrity with a pen. Ink my skin the same way some people use school to charm the corporation. Electric glass pages, as many as I can collect, strapped to the back of my night time invitations. Writing like lyrics, writing because it’s what we came here for. I want to feel my hand in the hand of the world, keening with me that things have to change to be better, that what we have isn’t enough to live off. There’s too much starvation and not enough education.
I just might get that tattoo here. Just to carry something with me.
