Tag: poetry

when the storm takes over

It’s like waking up next to a lion. A lion who likes laughing.

The fog has been here a week now, so thick that it seems almost possible that if could just reach your hand a little farther, you could grasp handfuls of it to eat from the air. Breakfast was a small paper bag of profiteroles from the bakery next to the laundromat. Cold cream explosions draped in dark chocolate. Breakfast was walking through early morning fog, wondering at all the people who were already awake enough to be beginning their day, as if nine in the morning were entirely a normal hour. (Benn being one of them.). Now, yes, I know I used to be like that. I quite liked my nine to five. However, this does not erase the fact that my mind instinctually tells me that eight a.m. should be possibly banned by law. When the sky blushes, embarrassed to be rising so naked, then you should do it the courtesy of hiding your face in some coverlets. Otherwise, disservice and a pox on your house.

I love for the years he has on me, the time he wears so gracefully in his silver hair.

  • Manic depression scientifically linked to creativity.
  • Flickr claims they are only for photographs, bans pictures, illustrations. …damned yahoo.

    Sara came over after I and I and others went up the mountain, scared for her future. She’s searching for a purpose, just like all the other humans. We’re mammals with opposable thumbs who tell time with blood. In my more empty evenings, I would argue that meaning might be a bit beyond us. There’s people like Katie, who blows stars into being, and I know she’s as lost as the rest of us.

  • Vancouver Rhino Party seeking people with fictional languages.

    This was in my in-box when I got home:

    I walked out, into the cold fog, and looked back.
    I always have to look back.
    And there she was, the Sphinx standing in the firelight, standing in her cave.
    For a moment she was there and then, like grains of sand in the wind, she blew away and I realized that not only had I failed to answer correctly, I had missed the riddle.

    She had lain the opium of her body upon my lap, my eyes and arms drew her into my blood, making dreams of my senses and in the reverie of my answered prayers I forgot to hear hers.

    reminder: KEEP JHAYNE FROM JHAYLE -a party of proportion- #340 – 440 west hastings, Friday, November 25th, 9:00 – onward

    • 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.

    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

    apples cold

    I dreamed I had
    &nbsp a lover in my mouth
    His sex smooth & long & hard
    &nbsp a silk pressure
    I removed it and
    &nbsp kissed the head
    &nbsp as red as apples
    In my dream I could tell that
    &nbsp my teeth were mirrors
    I thought
    &nbsp “Maybe he will kiss me
    &nbsp And break the spell”
    But instead
    &nbsp I woke up
    Trapped still in the forest
    &nbsp where the huntsman threw me away
    Too much trouble
    &nbsp he said
    Too much trouble for soft
    &nbsp pale thighs
    I was fifteen
    &nbsp and
    my mother was queen

    questions that could save my life


    josef astor
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I am not a swan, to beat your body into a prone position
    I am not disguised in feathers
    white, downy, strong
    by default a god

    I fell and skinned my knees
    a long time ago
    someone picked me up
    then hated me
    it was a long long time ago

    this program
    wasn’t asked for
    but created out of flesh

    Tell me preacher,
    explain and denigrate
    tease forth the reasonings
    of why I’m not allowed to like laughter
    Show my holy things, your gasp
    blasts apart the doors of the chapel
    a thousand hymns that make and pray
    to illustrate
    my sins and stay
    in spite of your eyes

    hold silence to me
    house these twisted skies
    the laces in my skin are becoming tight
    I fear my soul is leaping
    no matter your hands
    twisted together
    or your knees
    which sleep in a crowded cloth

    You are not a swan
    your wings are wax

    this is your fault

    Gravity plucks
    the apple from the tree
    easier than any hand
    from flesh to divine
    it’s all memory
    the contest
    the days next to water

    She spoke quietly, looking out a window that was really a sheet of rain, her eyes painted electric green. “We didn’t have to talk at all. This town, the lights go dim when I press the power button. There’s a gasp, a sigh, and the energy inside collapses. You into me, relationships wearing coats of particles over wire. Tonight I miss you. I remember my name from your voice, how the inflection was different.”

    The phone is a bare sliver of plastic, silver and blue-lit from within. “No, I can survive like this. Bare walls aren’t as taboo as an affection lapse. I felt like that bed was a refugee camp, finally I could stop running.” There’s a cup in front of her, slowly being stirred. The spoon is tarnished, antique and ornate with a dipped rose on the handle.

    “I don’t know what makes you beautiful. When you reflect off my eyes, my heart eats you as shadow, intrinsic but ethereal, to live off later. Every moment with you feeds me, satisfies hollows inside me which say, ‘we have gone hungry long enough, there is no turning back’. I can’t help myself. Your eyes shone with a light that was devastating. It was converting, a religion of only you and I together in a little nameless room.”

    She smiles, a new expression. She looks cut out of time. A glossy magazine spread featuring smooth lines and gray.

    “I don’t know if I can explain. I knew I was flaunting something when I came in, that I was changing rules with my behaviour, but I continued onward. Before there was you and I feeling awkward, admit it. I was pushing past and forward. I was right on track until I was derailed by your eyes. Crash and burn and this is love in a manner I’d never encountered. Suddenly I was your salvation. I was every epiphany in the middle of the night over your entire life. You were the metatron and I the heaviest mote of light to have ever been dropped spoken from your lips. You made me think of fire, of flying.” Her long hair has fallen into her face and she pushes it back with one hand as she leans back in her chair, adjusting her skirt and crossing her legs at the thigh. Her stockings are black.

    “There’s many nameless rooms, I know, I’ve lived in them, but they were not that one, they were not right there. That was a flowered wallpaper sheath for power in the middle of the night, that was a terrible fire that blazed in the softest little colours. You want to know what I thought? ‘This is permission,’ I thought, ‘for anything I want to do with you. This is something I have never seen before. If I am lucky, I will see it again. There will be no furnace falling from the sky to consume you, there will be no front page accident hurling metal like rain to dash brains into the pavement.'”

    My love has come back to me. It flew on hard wings, Icarus free and killing me.

    I walk the earth
    and leave footprints
    like molehills
    for experience to divide
    into towering mountains

    Dreaming time like memory.

    Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

    – Erica Jong

    I always feel as if I can’t create, as if I bring nothing to the world. Then I meet someone who shines to me, a holy fallen thing of desire who sings to me with just a little glance of their eye, and I’m lost. I want to give them something with a smooth sweep of meaning. I start believing again in every little thing that I thought I’d forgotten, that I was certain was a fallacy dreamed up be a society that couldn’t find its own worth.

    Claw me to you, keep me dry in this little piece of solid rain.

    There’s something in me which still needs figuring out, the sums don’t add up completely. I know too many things without reason why. I know that I like the fierceness of belief, that I want to burn with something hotter than the space between stars. The rotation of the earth is secondary. Tell me stories, my loves, my lovers, my people who hold me and fall into step when I dream. Breath out of your hearts a song for me, something to remember you by when I’m leaving. I don’t need to think in braille to see you in spite of my eyes, because I can see you. Your eyes are lined in silver and your hands dipped in gold.

    The time of year is marked down again, the sky blue and heat rolling off the street in ocean waves. My birthday’s coming up, my personal time of reckoning. This will be interesting as it never meant anything before. Grace is ending, grace and one more shot to find in myself the patience to come second. Right this minute, I’m in the middle of a petal burst like a storm of pink broke right where I’m sitting. They flooded down from his fingers to bury my eyes in wonder. I expect this, I expect this for always like old easy listening rock on scratchy old radios on every single stretch of highway in middle american movies late at night, flat tones and single star rising, early career and never gave a thought to past history. You always wanted to be James Dean moments aren’t the ones that I know how to connect with. These are, these disappearing I can close my eyes and taste you on my tongue without thinking. I know what you look like on the inside of my soul’s skin. You feel integral. You talk to me in poetry, with meaning. You hold me to you as if I am air and you are drowning. I feel calm in the face of the fear, in the face of you and your needs and this moment, this makes it right. Metaphor as teeth, metaphor as chromed pieces of bone from your fingertips to make myself a necklace. There is no way to repay this debt.

    Once upon a time, there
    were fairytales
    princes and
    strange iron shoes
    what meant honour
    Once upon a time, there
    were childhoods
    we believed
    in gold and
    thought being good
    was winning

    Tell me a story, they said
    explain to us why we crave
    towers
    why we crave pastel dresses and
    happy endings

    Tell me what matters
    when everything is beautiful