Author: foxtongue

I’m listening to people sing who’ve never seen a television


vincent cassel divers (2)
Originally uploaded by BorNv@gabonD.

  • “PATRIOT” Act secret-superwarrants use is up 10,000 percent.
  • Vatican rejects intelligent design, accepts evolution as compatible with the bible.
  • Evidence emerged that the United States dropped white phosphorus on Fallujah during the attack in November 2004.
  • Israelis receive organs of slain Palestinian boy.

    My fingers have grown cold while I’ve been sitting here, ingesting various bits and detritus pieces of news and updates. All of it a few days old and so ancient. Old news, scattered by wind and the constant flow of new information pouring onto the web. People like you and I and us, tip tapping away, quickly, slowly, two fingered or with ten, and always, always adding to the cause, to a place that isn’t real to half the humans on Earth. I live here though, so I don’t mind cold fingers. It’s expected, a side effect of too long with a mouse, too long sitting in one position, but never long enough to learn everything I want to. My eyes almost always give out before my mind. I fall asleep thinking about social equations, how to build an iPod and if I have the capability with my very limited knowledge of electronics, if tomorrow will be the day I hear an apology or tell a secret, if tonight I will wake up in the dark to an unfamiliar body in my doorway whispering, “come”.

  • Man goes mad in flat with chainsaw.
  • Pillow-fight mob in Toronto’s Dundas Square.*
  • Purse snatcher takes woman’s finger.
  • Brian Eno auctioning off some of his personal music-making gear.

    And someone asked how I write things down, how I sculpt my words into being, but really, the trick is I speak them. I silently say them out loud to these imaginary trees that use light like paper instead of falling, cut so directly to cypress knees. And yes, that was a terrible pun. And yes, you deserve better, but the window is open, the air says winter, and I’m too tired to argue with my train of thought. Any two cents I toss in will derail it. Flatten the thoughts like atoms destroyed and release a blinding spasm of I should go to bed please.

    Also, augh, I left the room for five minutes and my ferret deleted my Dylan Thomas folder in a mad dash across the keys that said YES, DELETE THIS BECAUSE IT IS TOO BIG FOR MY TINY RECYCLING BOX. Darling Chrystalene, would you be so kind as to yousend them to me? I’m feeling unfairly robbed. I did, as a matter of fact, only leave him in the cage for two measly days. This exacting revenge seems a stated overkill. Next I will find messily typed notes, telling me that I either walk him more or the roommate gets it.

  • Conservatives oppose HPV vaccine.
  • Bacteria modified to combat HIV.
  • Antibiotics are proving to be a wrong answer.
  • A clip of a thousand-hand Bodhisattva Dance.

    *I’ve danced in the water fountains there in my underwear somewhere close to midnight. One of the best stupid things I’ve ever done. I highly recommend it.

    • winding up in the sort of movie that middle aged women would take me for the hero


    city glance
    Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

    I wish you were here in my empty bed so it would not be so hollow. It’s been filled with clothing to mimic the twisting forms of company, but last I checked, sweaters don’t talk. They don’t try to keep me. I wrote once that my sheets felt like sand, that if I were to turn over in the middle of the night, absence would hit me like a blinding storm. They’re doing it again, right now, with this soft music playing that reminds me so much of your hands tracing my cheekbones when my glasses are off.

    because

    You are small beautiful simple things, like a line perfectly written, the only one in the novel that you’ll bother to remember later, but when you’re away is all the time. It reminds me of the time I missed someone to death. When it happened, my pillows and blankets quivered, shuddered, and stopped breathing. My heart was dazed, dropped from a great height, and I have yet to recover its wings from the wretched broken mess of glass shattered connection.

    because

    The shape of you fills with mistakes when you are not around to fill in. The secondary characteristic of your absence is my dwelling on how much I can’t deal with it. When I’m missing you, your smile bleeds out of my mind, to be replaced by how often I sleep alone and never with you. You right now are someone else. A heavenly creature I don’t know, who sacrifices something that looks like my integrity to an altar I’m not allowed to approach or respect.

    because

    Then it slips out, my joan of arc moment, seeping through the cracks in all my routine and argument. It’s the pattern. You cut here and put these seams together. You prick your finger on the pins that have somehow found themselves between your lips. My fear is a foot on the pedal, the sway and yank of social fabric. I’m uncertain. I can’t wear this dress, it’s heavy and the embroidery’s just tacky. Not already, not so soon, but then your voice is crashing into me. I’ve been tackled by a thousand foot wave of feeling like myself again. You push me up to the firmament.

    Tonight I thought I saw you standing on the corner of that memory, just enough out of vision that I could place you where I wanted to. It was a conversation about skin, about nerve endings. The technology that craves contact. Our first hint of compatible loneliness.

    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.