Month: January 2006

it’s too late at night for harmony

Hey mister, are you in a hurry?
I have this package, it needs to be delivered.
It’s a matter of life and death.

In the event of an emergency,
we ask you to please remember to
keep both hands within the safety zone.

It was a dozen roses
I did not know what to do with.
So I hung them in the kitchen
until they dried into powder.

Please believe me.
This manuscript is the one
that will change my career.

On transit, she watched faces.
Tired to find someone to talk to.
Sometimes she would smile if
they were reading a book.

Seems the way, the solution
to finding the melody
is right in front of you.
It’s called sheet music.

She sings swing low sweet chariot
when she’s shopping for cotton.

You don’t cry enough.

In his dreams he is a doctor.
He had no business in the hospital.
It was an accident he cut you.

The color of leaves falling
is such a cliché
it’s a wonder the trees
don’t die of shame.

My lover used to be mythical,
I found him in the pages of a book.
Shame when he met me
I wasn’t pretty enough.

The clerk at the shop with the
healing crystals has too much acne.
Obviously, she never listens to
the right kind of music.

Chapter one is brilliant.
It reads like a phone call between
Einstein and someone who
grew up poor in New York.

She walks on the outside of the curb
and tells him it’s so if there’s an accident
she’ll get hit first.

Dear, you don’t understand.
I need to learn these lines by tomorrow.
If I don’t, I’ll be fired.

The moral majority has
declared that you’ve stepped too far
This time we expect you
to relinquish your relationship
with the child.

Prosthetics are too expensive.
Your eyes are beautiful just the way they are.
Plastic can’t replace liquid honey.

My troubles with gods began
when I was very young.
I found a book in a hotel drawer
read it and thought it was poor fiction.
No one alive could believe that.

He just kept repeating
the same haunted phrase over and
over “Please yellow bird.”

The mayor claimed it was for
liberty and honour
that he cut the ribbon on the bridge.
Really, it was so he could drive to work
ten minutes faster.

You lied but I would still marry you.

Skin as soft as gentle spring rain,
that’s what it was going to be covered in.
Leather like butter, like a naked
teenager with no self control.

The postcard of San Francisco
arrived with no name so he left it
on top of the stove
and forgot.

You are pensive and often melancholy.
You are everything the internet tells you
except you don’t need viagra.

I wanted hexadactyly when I was little.
My girlfriend wanted a baby.
We split the difference and sewed our
mouths together with red surgical string.

Grandfather claimed that
junk food was communism,
fine in moderation but
not the a way to win the war.

These wings of balsa wood may
be too thin to hold my weight
If you want, you can have the cat.





“The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a type of animal with a steel skeleton and a polyester skin. It looks as if there is a thick layer of sand coating the animal. It weighs 2 tons, but can be set into motion by one person. It stands 4.70 meters tall. Because of its height it catches enough wind to start moving.”

Watch the video!

There’s more at strandbeest.com.

Itconversations.com has a session with Theo Jansen, the creator of these wondrous wind-powered walking machines, at Pop!Tech 2005 here.

The Machine, a short story by Joey Comeau of a softer world.

I leaned over the pool-table at Joe’s Cafe and while I carefully lined up my cue with the ball, I unexpectedly felt like I was a copyright infringement. That someone more deserving had done this exact thing, but had made it art. Shaken, I missed my shot and tried to shoo away my strange thoughts. I was in the wrong company to be attempting to discuss such ideas away. Robin isn’t educated on the right topics and Shadow, Ducky’s brother, doesn’t even have a computer yet. Instead I stood and looked over the poor constellation I had offered the next player. I counted the balls left and questioned colour as a concept. “It’s lucky all three of us suck at this, hey?”

Katie‘s started to take pictures wearing her holiday present.

This is the day I was hit by the truck three years ago. I had killed the hot seed of a child in my womb a month before and where I stained my skirt when I skid along the road, the blood from my bone bare knees mixed with blood from that left-over wound. The snow, that sensation, was so light and soft that it felt like it wasn’t real. My arm was fire and my eyes had met those of the driver a disturbing fraction of a minute before I turned and jumped into the air. My intention was to slide along the hood of the truck, but the snow, that delicate snow, it caught on my shoes. I slipped.

kissing’s for fictional weekends


two well dressed boys
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Nudity invalidates marriage.

&nbsp I forget the generation gaps in behavioral intimacy. I am lucky in people, they put up with my unusual etiquette. “What planet are you from?” I remember that. Raised away, brought away, none of it mattered until a star fell into me and smoldered there. Ah, yes. This matters, this is language. I speak it differently. I forget. I don’t repent. That would imply that I am contrite to such a degree that I am willing to change behavior basic to me, but no. I am merely sorry. “It’s been such a bad year.” How do I explain discarded? Everything believed in, shed as ruined unwanted skin. A strange theory of relativity twined with honour like snakes on a caduceus stick. What I mean, that everything’s been burned up. The light flared up and devoured everything that used to understand these ripples of meaning. Now I’m learning from scratch. What I know is simple but not inherent.

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Click into shiva system. Welcome to paradise. We are now downloading a version of eden compatible with your system. Any delays are due to the complexity of chakra recognition. Please ignore the tingle you may feel in your third eye. The karma wheel corporation ensures that your stay will be fulfilling. We apologize for your previous life.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp If you have troubles accessing your pineal gland, stay on the line, open yourself to guidance, and you will be spiritually connected to a qualified elemental who will appear to assist you. This may take up to three days of personal growth. *

&nbsp Hands like electric lights are not bright enough. I require fire to invite me back to the encampment. Until then, books will do. They’re the one armored thing I can carry without burden. I do not bend under the weight of scientific knowledge, only need. See then what I leave behind to continue. Skills, the charming impotent vision of memory. That television perfect embrace. How he startled when he saw I was there. How he startled when I announced our engagement to the room. The day when I opened my in-box to three deaths. The things found in a heap some time last spring.

*I carry special thanks in me that I found no-one I knew in that entirely beautiful compilation of photographs.

watching the princess and the warrior

Part of me is hoping you’re thinking of me when you’re lying in the middle of heaven. It’s the part of me that thinks of you in terms of precious lost cities half buried in sand, an archeologists wet dream, someone to explore with eyes wide with wonder and conversations in the kitchen. Here I think a line about apple-pie and hamlet which reminds me your flatmate reads this so instead of typing it, I suppress the urge to wave. The look on your face when you were looking at the ocean, that’s what I see. Half open eyes and a look of almost surprised contentment. The outside world, so beautiful and something rarely visited. The impression you gave, “I like you too much, I’m so sorry.”

A vast pool, you said, of clear blue. Shallow from one end of the bay to the other, it never goes past far past your knees.

It sounds like the sky.

The part of me that lets my fear die, it knows better. It sings to me that you leave to forget this place and possibly the people in it. Lying in such clear water, I know that I would let the architecture of Vancouver drown underneath me like an unwanted cat in a bag. I would close my eyes and listen for new people to fill my life with and then I would find them. You are unlikely to bring me a picture, unlikely to stand at the side of the velvet water and focus a camera, my name the plane of your chosen angle.

This won’t stop me writing you. I still want to illuminate your life like manuscripted letters. Until there is a cease and desist, I will try to convey what you seem to me, faded love or no. Nature or nurture, I look up to your window when I pass and I’m always sorry when the light is off. I blew you a kiss before you left, thinking of the glitter when we sat at the top of a dry water fountain that looked like a stepped pyramid and talked about lock-picks.

Happiness is one of those permeable things. I was happy then, though I didn’t know what I was doing or what was going on. I didn’t care. It’s been on my mind lately, how different I was this time last year, how my life was more important to me. Thoughts preying like a fever on my loneliness. It never used to be something I would consider. Time passes. Either it happens or it does now. All I carry with me is in me, a basic understanding that escapes every Prometheus moment of victory I embrace. Thrown from the mountain, bones were broken and I’m not sure they’re setting. I feel I’ve lost my liberty.

  • A prosecutor claims that a dominatrix dismembered and disposed of the body of a client who died of a heart attack during a bondage session in her makeshift dungeon.

    Today was a write off. Seems I’ve caught up on all the sleep I’ve lately missed, but that doesn’t help me find employment. This hunt is beginning to fortify my thoughts of being a write-off.

    • Superkelvinfragilisticexpialomotionless

    Think a lost letter of the alphabet. Imagine it, what it might look like, how it might sound. Warp it, turn it inside out then wrap it around your tongue. That’s what the book I’m reading is doing to me. Contriving to be passed off as a novel, really it’s a textbook on logica, obscure knowledge and languages filtered though the mind of someone frighteningly like certain aspects of myself. Frightening, because though we know that we are all alike, we try to preserve some illusion of only sharing very basic desires, not the complexities we intricately engrave into our personalities.

    I’ve just read a passage that explained how to eradicate my most implacable problem with learning foreign languages from text. To counter-act this multifarious half-pound of intellectual evil, I have been catching up on the incendiary livejournal cartoon napalm-bombing that is the Trendy Bat-Girl Meme Of Illustration Doom. It’s been a genius way to discover new journals full of delicious art that I’ve never seen before. I swear, the list of contributors is accruing exponentially with every slick professional comics artist, (plus a few who aren’t. crayons, anyone?), who has made one of these bloody things. At last glance, there were well over 300 pictures counted, though it looks to be maybe 400, or more likely 500. I tend to be slightly rabid anti-fandom, (if that’s not too much a contradiction of terms), but this I really recommend checking out this awesome event. Open a new firefox window and have at it.

    If you are licensed and experienced. The company is currently in search of mature individuals with degrees in. Requiring two years financial management. Minimum qualifications for this position are completion of at least four years of. Drivers license, minimum wage, flexible hours, swing shifts, send resume to, please fax, only fax, if you have no fax, you are not serious enough. Fear of death not an option.

    took bloody long enough

    f( x ) = 4 ln(x +2) walks into a bar.

    It’s elementary that there’s no shadows after midnight. Stating anything else is merely setting the mood for an unsettling story, but that being said, the certain lack of them in my life is messing with my circadian rhythms. Conceivably, I should be able to get to bed before our sun tries to break free of the clouds. However, Saturday was going to be my re-set and I royally thrashed that idea until it practically bled. Now it’s close to three in the morning and I feel if I were to look outside, the sky would be stained with mid-evening instead.

    and

    poster

    Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
    The Conclusion to Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy
    Monday, January 16th
    Doors at 8:00pm
    Film starts at 9:30pm

    The film will be shown in widescreen on a projector at the psychic lady building one block west of Commercial on Broadway, (knock on the lower left windows), and refreshments* will be served.

    *The offerings shall include a selection of certified organic camembert wheels, including ash-ripened, herbed, and traditional served with tamari crackers. Water is available and donations of certified organic beverages such as lemonade or wine (white preferred) would be appreciated.

    the bartender says, “we don’t cater for functions.”

    turn the lights down low, it’s just it makes me feel like I’m in a spaceship

    I want an end to my unpredictable crying.

    The air is full of tiny birds, wings fluttering too quickly. The tips of them are creaking against the stress like lungs choked with down. A cough and they scatter. There’s nothing to show where they were. Wind does not keep drawn lines, the beloved parabola exists only in our minds as a memory.

    Unrelated: walking across a field, a thick flock of seagulls let me walk into the middle of them before taking up into flight and circling me perfectly. How callous I am, I thought, that I have too much science in me to experience this as a holy sign. Instead, I understand the way flocks stay together, what leads them, guides them. I know how to spot the lead bird. I’m not fool enough to pray.

  • Prove Christ exists, judge orders priest.

    I didn’t sleep from Saturday until noon Sunday. I have done more clever things than argue the socio-technological implications of ancient politics and family units until the sun has risen, it’s true, but I was in excellent company and the sun always rises.

  • Stardust capsule lands with comet dust sample.

    Now you’re gone, leaving echoes of somewhere I used to feel at home. You walked away and I felt such a pain shoot through me, as if there was no such thing as mercy. I know you’re trying and that gladdens me a little, it seems a better place for us than that dire muck of misery that you’d put me in so carefully. I’m scared that when I see her, this her you’ve written about but carefully did not mention, she’ll be wearing something I gave you or I’ll have to see you love her. As serious as rain, it’s the only thing I can think of that could continue to ruin me. It’s stupid because I’m grown enough I should know better. I insist on it. I should be a better stone. You don’t know what to do with me. I hand you the pulsing ball that drives my blood and you drop it. I fall apart inside.

    Delightfully, I had some especially kind partners on the floor to distract me last night, the sort where we take hands and whirl into something highly inappropriate for industrial music. Liam teaches me swing dances, for example, and Jonathan tangos with me in his kilt and big stompy boots. It’s gleeful when he lifts me up above his head and spins. I can feel him laugh through the music. (Note to self, call the man already). See, I’m everything shy of vices, so dancing is one of my only ways to salve this years constant and irritating sense of loss. I feel like I hang myself from my bones and when I move, it might even be with a heavy sort of elegance. Every twist of joint a kindness, a violent whispered argument in the dark behind my closed eyes, sounding like lovers who don’t want to wake the neighbors.

  • Male birth control pill soon a reality.

    Course, my body feels like holy retribution today. Everything aches and spasms. Walking without limping has been a proven impossibility that I’m counting on a deadly hot shower to repair. In fact, I think that’s the next step. Hooray for adventure.

  • Warren’s graphic novel FELL #1 online for free.

    • parsley and vitamin C can induce miscarriage without too much sickness

    Oh world, I can’t get back into my own heart. I used to think in high-hat hits and long pulls across strings, lines of hasty love letters and joyful peeks into a wonderful immediate future of visits and living with me. Now I’m dragged down into a strange bitter sea of praying recrimination and I don’t know how to write a ladder out. What I need is practice and enough trust that I can begin to give some to other people, but though I’m watching, I’m not finding. A half-price muse is no muse at all.

    Page 10 of Jesus Monkey Pants in Space is up, wherein I am a righteously angry school-teacher.

    “What colour are your eyes?” he mused aloud. Granite, flakes of shale, sea shaded amber, petrified tiny stones, glazed over, delicate, pale, green. An acoustic colour, reminiscent of charm bracelets, her chrome charming laugh. Her head bows, dropping hair into her face. She doesn’t want to contradict him. He’s too kind, this place too bright. She has had gray eyes, she has had soft blue. When they are green, it is easier. When they are green, they understand the subtlety of what she needs. She doesn’t have to ask.

    To look at him, he is mild. Slight of build and quiet spoken. To look at him, he is quiet. A smile like beads dropped across the strings of an open piano. His posture is peaceful, his gestures gentle. It’s amazing how little he displays. Don’t judge him until you’ve looked into the eyes of his conversation or the swan necked lullabye of his teeth on your skin. There is nothing weak in his heart, he is calm not complacent.

    Together home is nothing. Only this moment, no more than that. Myth is where they meet, inside urban hosannas of grace and memory. Brickwork songs of sly desire patterned underneath the footsteps of dragons and young princes. Fate is banter, destiny a debate of flushing skin and wondering about regret ahead of time. Home is before morning. Darkness is not so much a refuge as a place, an insidious time characterized by a mutually seductive skill with words, the gratuitous prancing display of modern day courting.

    She’s not that kind of girl, but oh, she is. Shhh. Don’t tell. She’d die of shame.

    I didn’t mean to write about this. It’s too soon to be so blatant about missing you, not that you read this, not that you held my hand the next day when there were witnesses. I’m in the wrong place, but you’re not. You’re so bloody far away from here and I feel like you’ve stolen something from me that I can’t identify in lonely text, only in kisses. Your name, I put it into the internet to learn more about you, and I feel a certain kind of shame. We had a story, a tale of wizards and date rape, of girls drugged and left for dead, of bodies upstairs instead of a cellar. You taught me to swear. It should have been enough, that’s the way of these things. I’m being selfish, wanting to see you again, needing to know that you know what I left you.

    Let me explain, give myself a way out of this self-effacing maze. This being a female, it kind of sucks sometimes. Some of us, we bleed and our hormones drag us toward the people our bodies want to breed with, no matter how in control of ourselves we usually live. Me, I bleed and my body wants to fly into the sky, reach up and touch the elusive clouds, hands buried in the hair of your head. You used my words, my yearning vocabulary. I wanted to say yes, but you scared me. I’ve been alone too long. My showers are shaded like I’m killing children by swinging their heads against the tiled walls and with every drop I want to touch you. I stand in the morning and feel warmth on my thighs. I stare at the ceiling and roll my eyes back into my mind, telling it that I’m unavailable, stop complaining. At night I roll on my side, unable to sleep for the hope flooding my body. It’s annoying.

    So this is me nakedly trying to rid myself of romance, trying to rid myself of your voice when I close me eyes. I’m awake until morning, over and over. A recitative avoidance of dreaming, it’s what I’m singing into the pillow. I’ve been filling my late hours with people, they keep everything away. There are no delicate urges to lay my hands upon them and watch feathers sprout from their skin. Just yours.

    Here the houses look like they were built for a farm or like wild west shacks, wooden two stories with peaked roofs mixed in with California specials, pink stucco’ed things with pebbled glass over the doors decorated with ghostly Japanese fish, as banal as the soap opera digests found for sale at check-out counters. The skyscrapers are uniform glass towers with outward differences that only involve variations in ghastly shades of feeble green. There are no hidden treasures left, even our natural beauties are rip-offs, watered down with tourist-only totem poles and highly priced smoked salmon in little wooden boxes marked with red and black.

    It seems like an aside, but it’s not. I’m attracted to character and here it is such a rare commodity that whenever I find it, I flare out protective, like it should be put on some endangered species list. There are houses here that I used to visit when I felt alone. It was comforting. There’s one out by the University of British Columbia that looks like it was built of lego and glass. I used to have a hole in the hedge that I would creep through at night and sit inside. I would watch the people inside and instead of trying to make up conversations between the people inside or imagine what their lives were like, I went blank. I could feel my general dissatisfaction drain away, because what was in front of my was beautiful. For then, it was enough. I was fourteen and too small to leave.

    Now it’s only a matter of raising bail.

    You’re my attraction, my moth light in a darkness.You are an architecture that let me in. The night was our plaything and we were cats.

    tell it from the mountain of books that has just fallen on me

  • Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists

    Whittling my bookshelf down is difficult. It’s a heartless occupation for me, throwing out worn books. They threaten me with undefined guilt that changes my perspective on what’s between the covers. The minute I reach out my hand to pluck something from the shelf, it’s like I’m being subtly affected by a villainous mind-ray from an old radio-play. “Well, this one wasn’t as bad as all that, was it?” I’m having to use my potential time on transit as my gunpoint. If I can’t pick it off the shelf at random when I need something to read or recommend the author to a stranger, then I should discard it. Get it out of my room, out of my life, to where it might prove useful for someone else’s future summer afternoon. Unexpectedly, the speculative fiction section is proving about as hard a bitch as the out-dated medical texts.

    Tossing out old clothes, however, not so hard.

    Which is almost a problem.

    Now I can’t find any long sleeve shirts.

    I promised to duet tomorrow at the strangely awesome Veteran Hall Karaoke night, (remember, doff your hat to the Queen or be kicked out), so now my playlist consists of only two songs; Tom Jones with the Cardigans singing Burning Down the House, because it’s something that Bob and I both know, and The Pogues Fairytale of New York because my invisible roommate Ryan is a romantic bastard.

    So how many of you have seen the Has President Bush Finally Bit It (let’s all sing impeachment) poll that’s up on MSNBC at the moment? I’ve been checking on it every few days to marvel at the numbers. Last look in, votes were at 203923 responses, (!!), with an 86% of Yes, Most Assuredly, Kill Pussycat Kill Kill. It’s giving me a bit of hope that otherwise I wouldn’t have what with stupid laws declaring annoying someone anonymously over the internet is now a federal crime. What we need are genetically engineered politicians who explode if they lie. Ka-blam and pink splatter everywhere, like an extremely wet ticker tape parade celebrating democracy the way it should be.

  • The Edge Annual Question 2006: “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?”

    • I’m bleeding dye

  • British woman weds dolphin.

    Something about me wants to learn how to sing soul music, that drum machine spoken word that focuses on notes like inspiration and cleverly explains every bar-tab feeling that love ever wracks up inside our hearts. These words aren’t enough some days. I desire chords. I keep being put on the spot next to pianos and feeling entirely inadequate as my tongue searches for something I know all the lyrics to. I’ve lost all my known songs, all I’ve got left are children’s tunes and the thin skin of pop songs that don’t stand up to scrutiny. A man suddenly startles from a couch. “You’re not a musician are you? That would be a shame.” “No, I’m not. Really I’m not. Why would that be so bad?” “I would haff to stop what I’m doing right now if you are.” “What?” “I don’t let myself ever do this with musicians.” Understanding glitters in her mind and her lips quirk. They laugh while the others look on uncomprehendingly. He leans back, settles his head back on the pillow, and she continues to be pleased. I wanted to sing. I swear. Please believe me. I would give up every ounce of hesitation I showed so that you could have had me sing for you. Hands on the keys and I felt like magic was real. I felt like I remembered, the first time I left for the city, the first time I met you. I will never stop wishing you’d called. The phone silent in my pocket felt like a John Cage piece. Four hours and thirty three seconds before I step on a plane marked only by the absence of vibration, of tone, of hello where do we meet. Those hands, so slight, pulling rabbits from my jaded hat. Sound.

  • Second chord sounds in world’s longest lasting concert.

    Does anyone have a scanner? I have a lovely Polaroid of Andrew, Mike and myself that I insisted be taken by an unkempt vagrant downtown who was wandering around asking tourists to pose for a fee. We’re standing in the middle of Grandville street at night looking like nothing better than drunk kids. I would like to have a digital copy of before anything strange happens to it. I’ve never had a Polaroid before and I’m pretty sure I’ve never looked like a yuppie’s girlfriend before either. The novelty is slightly addictive. I want to wear it in my hat like an antique PRESS pass and ignore people who stare at me on the metro.

  • John McDaid’s brilliant sci-fi story Keyboard Practice is now free online.

    Larry called on Friday while he was driving down the highway home. We fell immediately into comfortable conversation. I was glad, still am. I’ve been feeling him as living farther away lately, no matter that Missouri’s a hell of a lot closer than Paris, because the frequency of his posts dropped lately and there’s been less content. My distances are measured in information, not geography. Every letter typed is a drop in a river. I don’t have to close my eyes at night to see it. I can be walking barefoot through cold mud, whirling glittering scarves over my head, and think, ah, so-and-so would like to do this with me. I can tell. They write that way. As I was discussing with Rick, on the bus Sunday, grammar and punctuation can mean so much on-line. The entire language changes to make up for body-language, for visual cues. Sentence structure is suddenly crucial in a way that doesn’t effect speech. Typing the word “like” or “um” every three words is unacceptable, though I’m sure we say them more often than we’d like to admit. Spelling takes on the measure of your education, typos of your intelligence. Code overshadows everything read, as LOL translates to “well that was enough to make me smile”. It makes me wonder how well I transliterate to page. I’m told that I smile more in person than on-line, but that my typos are less. What about you?

  • India is missing about 10 million daughters since the widespread use of ultrasound, estimates a new study.