Tag: flickr

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

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.

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.

this is an oldest story


sarah boyer – freshmeat
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I have found my laughter from where it was hiding. This time, for the very first time, it’s allowed out of the closet with tears still in its eyes. When I grew up, I grew up in a strange canadian cultural vacuum. I would stare out the window of the truck at all the houses gliding past and wonder what real people had inside thier houses. What was on the other side of so many doors? I lived in hotel rooms and on some basic level, they’re all the same. Clinical transiency. Fake flowers, soulless bedspreads that match the thick ugly curtains, television remotes that you either find next to the miniature fridge or bolted to the table. Cable is an option, but there’s always an ice machine that clunks in the middle of the night. I used to pad out into hallways and sit against them sometimes, because it was a light I could read by. Anonymous. The trick is that they’re always anonymous. The furniture is not your furniture, the life you live within those walls belongs to no one. I grew up being not real people.

My body jerked me across my bed when I woke up this morning. An unfamiliar hand had touched me on the shoulder. Left over reflexes I really should work on controlling a little better. I was up late, reading, unable to think about my tomorrow. Too many things. I have a livingroom picnic this afternoon with Brian. We’re putting down a blanket and making sandwiches. If I was a better person, I would suggest we pretend we’re on a beach somewhere, but I’m not. So I won’t. Breakfast today with precious friends led into a pleasant walk up the drive and some actual grocery shopping. It’s like my world spun around. A smile has been affixed to my face. Someone I don’t know stopped me on the street on my way home with my bags, “I see you all the time on the drive, but I’ve never talked to you, but today I felt I had to say something. You’re really pretty when you’re happy”. He was my height, with dark brown hair and a slightly crooked baseball hat. I wouldn’t recognize him again.

dreaming is ruining my appetite for sleep

he didn't know I was there until the very last second

I watched the clock today with the intensity of a dysfunctional bird trapped in a beige-tone plastic coated cage. The sale descriptions on the boxes for latex underwear have the closing line, feel the forbidden sensuality of its stretchy caress. I wondered briefly, when I noticed, if that’s a technical term, because why else would anyone be attracted to the term stretchy caress? This is the same store that sells an item named someone’s Salsa Pussy. Every one of these tawdry products was made by people. Multiple people. There were entire meetings and production facilities and conversations at three in the morning involving asset pitches to different time zones. Whenever I think of people bringing home a product as banal as Inflatable Fat Fanny, something shrivels inside my glands. My conclusion is that working in this love shop is strange and deadens my soul to random desire like hammered lead. People ask if anyone ever buys some of of our more extremely large dildos and I tell them to look it up on-line. Every toy in the store is likely in a video somewhere, and no, women can’t use that, our bone structure won’t allow for it, suckers. Take that. All twenty by nine inches of it.

then I told him to point the gun at me

A highlight of the day was sitting alone and writing in my black book, my feet on the counter between the tiny packets of silicone lube and the love dice, (place and position), while the other employees went to point at Al Pacino across the street. They were thrilled, but my personal moment of well being came from hearing R.C. on the radio orating poetry like the rumbling of a chop-top hotrod with candy pinstripe detailing just over some mythical hill of mocking english majors. It was like a light of sanity in the new glo-in-the-darkness. Right, I thought. I know this man. This wonderful intelligent man. I know him enough to want to hug him when I say hello. Suddenly my life wasn’t as bad as reading a magazine in a waiting room. It had been upgraded to sitting like a mannequin on stage, listening for my next line, remembering that I’m scheduled to be human soon.

Flirting with me was a slight fantasy about going trick or treating. Putting a sheet over my head with holes cut out and hitting up all my friend’s houses. If I had a vehicle, I might have done it. Gathered my courage and knocked on doors to say “Trick or treat, I haven’t seen you in awhile. Happy birthday in case I missed it. Do you have chocolate? I’m hoping for chocolate.” then laughed and hugged them, pulled them close to kiss them on the cheek. I could have dragged as many people as possible over to Main and fourteenth for the maze and fright houses set up by the local gods of spooky and collected treasure heaps of candy to live off of for the next few months. (For a sugar hound, I have an admirable habit left over from a dirt poor childhood of hoarding my rare and precious sweets.) From all reports, it’s not like the local kids went out to brave the neighborhoods for candy. I suppose I should have stood up to my psyche and run with it. Ah well, regrets and hindsight. The movie was pleasant enough and the company comforting. Graham came as some sort of proto-goth, Beth was a string fairy, Herminia was a preppy, and Eugene might have come as a straight boy. I couldn’t tell.

“we’ll cook our food in a satellite dish”

Our mother, a cessation of time. I stand alone, watch the clock, wanting the minute to never turn forward inside me. She is a music box full of the beating of hearts. Patches and sound, sewing them on stitch by stitch with second hand strings. Her skin is written like a music video, split clips of what I used to want when I was younger. She’s a stranger with brightly highlighted eyes. Her skin is as white as the walls. Electric arc, her nails on the tips of her fingers, her nails that hold up the timbres of her voice. I move in slow motion, snagging my shirt on the seconds that are training their sights on the pupils of my eyes. Advertising. My gun is her hair like copper lights, the bullet moves at the speed of dreaming. Her sighs are dedicated. The lights are off.

Two dusty coins fall from my lashes when I blink, holding my tongue between her teeth. Two payments I didn’t think I’d made. I’m staring at rivers turning into I loved you, I’m dry. I could think of what I’m doing, but that would be the end of it. I would have to pick up my mourning shroud and don it, torment children, die before morning. Chords lashing me into a smeared black bit of making up. My palms are sweaty. She is the firmament, marker letters on her chest. Hello, You Have Never Met Anyone Like Me Before. I had a name. I’ve forgotten it.

  • hallowe’en to download music: devils & dead friends

    • continually attacked by space pirates

    this one's for those who didn't show upthar?another name for pirate treasure

    The ravers, upstairs, they dressed like goths for hallowe’en. The goths, when they dressed up, dressed up as a body politic. The room was a black sea of costumed bodies, everywhere PVC and devil horns, fake hair in fantastic formations. There will be pictures up on various websites soon, I’m sure.

    Now I’m eating pez for breakfast.

    someone outside is yelling “fuckers, don’t leave without us”

    Mirrormask, Sunday, seven o’clock at Tinseltown.

    And, HERE! Bloody hells, people, see? Posted proof that I have seen the singing chinese students already. Yes, you’re very kind for sending it to me. I feel appreciated. It’s delightful. I love how the one on the left moves like a warner bros. charactor. I adore the fellow behind them who ignores the entire proceedings, but please, no more. This is old for the internet, mark that time passes faster here. Please send me new things. New beauty! Like this sort of nifty or this. What about the Victory Day video by the Nazi Olson Twin Clones?

    related: archie comics attempt to be period.

    In every direction, people are screaming drunken syllables. Hallowe’en has hit, and delightfully so. I’m sitting in front of my computer, hearing all the crowds in thier houseparties. Imagined or real, I’m too tired to care. I should have stayed downtown, the costumed crowds were a balm to my scratched life. I felt like I could have stepped off the bus and been enveloped into the shiny masque crowds lining outside almost every club. Instead I went to a meagre house-party. The smooth story of never knowing how to celebrate meshing well with my over-all lack of positive focus. I know in reality, I would have paid cover, been unable to properly dance on my twisted ankle, and been relatively ignored by everyone present. I tend to feel affinity for the old idea of the wall-flower. A passing ship, she’s probably spoken for. I don’t drink and this adds to my apparent unnaproachable aura of being in dance clubs, excepting the cliche sleazy people. It’s slightly deadening, like bubbles of lassitude are being forcibly pushed into my bloodstream and making me dizzy.

    There have been so many moments leading to nothing in particular lately. I feel like I get nothing done at work, though I am thanked for being so specially fantastic every day by at least twenty people, because of the minor war currently occuring between the manager and the owner’s panic-attack neice. There’s a dichotomy there I don’t appreciate. This place is so full of strange drama. Every time there’s something wrong, I want to whistle past it, get on with finishing the tasks at hand, but this majestic battle of thiers is eating at my life. When I’m not at work, it doesn’t effect me, but it’s constant as the stars inside the shop I’ve been spending full time hours in, and it’s killing me. I need a better place to spend my days, one with tiny ladders to climb. My happiest moments are when I’m thinking of a stolen afternoon that’s getting on too many weeks ago. The memory will be wrung of blood eventually, but until then a smile creeps into my body and I lean into the glow.