Untouchable

I am a pariah. I came to this conclusion last night while being outside a local coffee shop. Not one of those smooth jazz-playing, $6.95 soy latte with hazelnut drink places. I'm talking about a dark, beneath the city street, dimly lit, throw-back from the Beatnik era coffee shop. The place literally smells of history. The coying smell of tobacco smoke waifs through the air like an unhappy spirit. The shop is where I spend some days to escape the pain of civilized society. A underground resistance to the corporations and drones the work above us. This is where I met Ellie.
I had just finished walking on a cloudy day. It doesn't matter which day. They're all the same to me. I kept thinking that day that I am one of those people who aren't "mold-able". I don't want to be a working man. A bygone relic of the Nuclear Family. I am me. With that statement I realized I need to fill my body with something cheap and legal that can keep me in this frame of mine. Not necessarily nihilistic in my views but more apathetic. So I discovered a small hole in the wall shop.
"Asmodeus". A perfect name to this place. Who knows how many secrets have the walls listened into. I walk down the cement steps worn by the feet of the anti-culture. I move my ten-dollar sneakers down to the cracked, faded brown door. I open it and am brought into a room of silence and quiet anger. A cracked wooden bar painted black lies against the right-side of the room. The shop seems to devour the feeble light. Everything is dark. Moody. My kind of joint. Perfect for the frame of mind that I had painted for myself. I move my legs towards the bar. A blackboard with white chalk lettering tells me my 6 choices. I order a coffee.
I move to the back of the shop to a nice secluded corner. All the corners are secluded. I wrap my hands like a prayer around my cup. Staring intensely at the scratched, graffiti-ed table top. Does RG still love DW? Is Korn the best music? Doubtful to both. I try and think my way out of my box when she came in.
She was neither gorgeous or plain, neither fat nor skinny. She was classical beauty. Her hairy, a dirty blond, was like the after flash of lightning in the thunderstorm of the room. I won't go into more detail. It's best to let you imagine the rest. I couldn't help but stare. Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the coffee buzz hitting me but I knew I had to talk to her. She turned to walk towards me. I froze. Could she be an FBI agent finally tracking me down? She didn't look like one. Her hair was uncombed and unkempt. Her gray sweatshirt was frayed at the collar. Even her blue jeans had tears and rips. She came right over to me. Sat down and started drinking my coffee!
Now, I had seen many things. Monkeys coming out of lampposts. Colors and scents that I can't describe, yet nothing in my world had competed with this...this brazen act of desecration to a mans coffee.

"Excuse me," I politely rasp. Last night must have broken my larynx. "Thats my cup".

"How very capitalist of you" she retorts. I think I am in love.

She reaches across the table. "Names Eleanor Horst, everyone calls me Ellie"

I gave her my hand and my name. This woman was amazing. We spent most of the daylight speaking of philosophy and humanity. Her grassroots ways mirrored my own. We were kindred spirits. If we had a sweat tent we would pass the peace pipe and speak of dreams that the Great Spirit gave us. Instead we talked in hush tones in a downtown, rundown coffee shop. We were on a wavelength that I never dreamed possible. This was my summer of '69.
Over the next weeks Ellie and I became closer. Nights laying on my mattress staring up at the ceiling while watching the smoke curl upwards. Nothing would be said at those points. We were back in the womb. Two people in such semblance that our words would probably shatter this moment. I have felt things in my life but this beats them all. I think I'm happy.
After two months our relationship ended. She became more optimistic. She even got a job. She wanted things out of this life. Me? I want to wander, to search for a higher meaning. To be like a Shaolin monk trying to reach enlightenment. We had to go our separate ways. For about three days after, I maintained a level of buzz that would've killed a lesser man. Then I realized that this was karma at play.
Was this a sign from above that I should make something of myself? Get a job? A wife? A car thats not older then myself? A white picket fence, 2.3 children, and a dog? NO! I refuse. I am a pariah. I need none of these things. I intend to wander this place searching for something that I can't search for. I need to be away from people. That is of course if Nixon doesn't get his grubby hands all over it.
Perhaps she really was a government agent. Sent by the Nixon commies to break me and make me become a lumping socialist. Well, it didn't work. I saw Ellie once and a while after that. Meaningless idle chatter about inane things. We could never get back those months of nirvana. Maybe she was a communist. Or a optimist. Same thing really.
I lurch back to this time period and space. My cup is empty in front of me. Like Ellie and I were. Once filled with steaming energy, now nothing is left but the lingering taste and the dregs at the bottom. I shake my long greasy hair. No, I don't think I will ever find someone like her. She's a good spirit. I am on a different path. Running away from Commies and other agencies that probably want to keep my brain in a stasis pod to be put into a robot in the year 2346 when the world is using cyborgs to take over the last remnants of free society.
I throw a few bills on the table and shuffle out. The place hasn't changed, but it seems my memories have given the black room a whitewash. I leave through the door and enter the brightness.

FIN

A Question on Humanity

Recently, while trolling a political forum, I was asked a question on the nature of humanity. I responded with the following- unedited -for your amusement:

Define humanity. Ironically, that depends on which actual definition youre looking to define. As as already been said [in a previous response], humanity refers to human kind as a whole. of course, there are other definitions. such as humanity (compassion, etc.) or humanity (something that makes us human.)
In regards to this last one- pretty much nothing. It's impossible really to prove that anything physical exists. All science and philosophy is based on the assumption that it does ofcourse, but really noone knows. Therefore to define what makes a human a human you have to prove that a human actually exists. Otherwise you could just say that its a horribally abstact concept created through general interaction with other people. it's-to-say the interaction regarding people in general (or group dynamics, the forces of social conformity) because for all intents and purposes, "humanity" in this definition changes around the world and through out time. If a person were raised by wolves they wouldnt really *be* human. they would not possess humanity in this sence and would be an actual animal (as their "humanity" is now defined by a wolf, or any other dynamic.)

8:03pm sunset

This place is so big, a vast expanse-
and I am so small,

BUT MY VIEW OF THIS PLACE,
IS MAGNIFICENT. orange,
pink, purple, and blue,
radiant and magestic, like-
that noble flock of birds,
winging their way out into it,
soaring out on a high wave of air,
above the deep-green trees,
towards the teal sea, into which the angry,
red sun plunges his seething brow,
as I raise my head, my eyes illuminate,
burn emerald green,
piercing flames reach out and grasp,
this vast expanse,
acsended.

All a man wants to do it show someone else,
his view.
If only you could see what my eyes,
have be-held.
If only I could be-hold what your eyes,
have seen.
Then we'd see-
Then we'd be-hold-

This place is so big, a vaste expanse-
and we are so small,
BUT OUR VIEW OF THIS PLACE,
IS MAGNIFICENT.

Making Sense of the Jest

Young men ramble with their feet, old man with their words. I've been doing both since the day I learned to move myself in both these ways. A writer's work is an extended suicide note, a piece of paper left behind to explain to those who survive his heart's cessation where he might possibly have rambled in the time in which he took up residence in his transient body. An explanation of how he viewed the swirling miriad of phantasms which present themselves as reality to our beleagered eyes. When we read these words we stare into the empty eyes of the one who wrote them, both become aware that they are looking into a void deeper than their own. When those two perspectives fix their gaze upon each other a connection, that for one exquisite moment illuminates all of existence, assures both rambling souls that even if everything is nothing, they can maintain hope in being alone together, drifting through infinite layers of illusion until they reach the ineffable beyond any of the rubbish they thought they had been able to define with their previous languages. Someday I won't have feet or a tongue, but maybe someone someday with both will understand my words and then use his to respond and perpetuate the lost message I passed on while it was my task, while I was stuck in this land of wind and sand.

Mall World

I escape the downpour outside. I have wandered the streets again in my quest. In an almost Taoist way, I look at the world. It comes and goes. Rebirth and a spin of the wheel. Poverty and riches gone like an egg frying on the sidewalk. Yet I cannot find a place of warmth. Of dryness and of dairy products. I must flee the rain. Everyone knows that the agents of evil lace rainwater with PCPs. I hurry along, my head covered by my cracked and worn leather jacket. I find a doorway. I open it.
Sound. Like a thousand angry lions or an army of ancient warriors waiting to fight their accursed foes, the sound washes over me. I still feel dirty. I lower my head out of my jacket and stare in wonder. Lights and shiny things draw your eye like a pencil. I can almost taste the neon coming off the signs. I say to myself, "Yet, this is only the beginning". Could more adventure be found. Or would I crumple under the pressure. Just lay on the soft mat until the security guards hall me away with their unfathomable power.
No, I decide, I must trudge onward. People around me are moving and jostling like cattle. Wheres the man with the prod? As that thought slinks across my brain I begin to panic. So many people. Who's real? Who's fake? Then I remember it's a mall. Everyones fake. I go toward the kaaba of the mall. The directory. Surely this would guide me like a Merlin to my quest. Whatever that may be. YOU ARE HERE, declares a angry red dot. I'm here? Who the bloody flux is watching me? I peer around and see the dark globes of Big Brother. I must stay calm. Mustn't let them know I'm on to them.
I randomly choose a place to run to. Where or what it is is of no matter. I move my lower appendages towards the destination. Cautiously I look back to see if the brown shirts are following me. Theres many brown shirts. Damn, I declare, why can't they wear a new colour? In any event I arrive in a clothing store. I will be cursed by Jupiter himself if I wasn't in the bowels of hell. Teenie boppers shopping for the latest fads wander the store. People that look like their in the Special Services patrol and fold clothes. I am so very frightened.
"Hi there!" exclaims a small overly-happy minimum wage thrall. I just mumble something. It might have been a greeting or a Tibetan curse. Who's to say? I continue deeper into the jungle of tight jeans and low-cut tops. Music is pounding through the speakers. A blend of pseudo-punk with so much sugar I feel a need to go to the dentist. I finally find my way to a brown leather sofa. I join the poor boyfriends dragged here by their shopaholic girlfriends. As I sit and try to get centered I am suddenly hit by a thought. These people are all insane. Granted I have had this thought numerous times and merely laugh about it, this time I can't laugh. Generally people tend to look at you odd when you laugh at nothing. Wierdos.
I decide it's time to leave before I kill someone or wrestle a manikin. That got me kicked out of a different store. I wander back out into the highway of people. The throng moves with experienced mall walkers racing like their shoes are on a fire to the little old couple who've been there since 9 AM and damned if they don't get their 10 mile walk. I walk with my head down staring at the squared, scuffed tiles. I need to get out of here.
In the ten thousand year history of man this is the only time that we have been completely cut off from nature. We can shop, eat, sleep and relieve ourselves at our leisure. All within the comforts of a room temperature box. Foods from a thousand nations are there for you to order and indulge. Peoples from all cultures and classes come together in this capitalist utopia. The mere fact that you can buy anything blows my mind. I think I even saw a human slave store. I digress.
I continue my meandering path towards one of the twenty thousand exits for those who can't go twelve paces without sucking tar. I head out one doors almost bowling over a old man. He glares at me. I don't care. I need to smoke tar. I light up a cigarette and finally get a clear thought. Traffic rumbles in the distance. The voices have finally stopped. I run a hand through my long, greasy hair. A truck backs up its warning sound getting all but the deaf and dead out of the way. I take a last pull from my joy-stick. I flick the butt to the ground. I'll need to steal another pack tomorrow.
I have no idea where I am or what I'm doing but I know one thing. I hate shopping centres. The idea of people following trends hurts my soul. Bored salesclerks peddle their wares like snake oil salesmen. I have no time for this. I have places not to be. I hitch up my coat and begin to walk away from the gargantuan maw of a mall. It begins to rain. Hard. I don't try to avoid it.
FIN

Snow in March

After a night of fevered anxiety, a torrential soul ripping experience resulting in my dissolution, I awoke to see a gentle March snowfall beginning its blanketing work on the freshly power-washed cement outside my window. I beheld the snow-sprites dance up and down, tumbling head over heals to their repose on the cold hard ground which they longed to make their last bed. I watched as they swirled; I could not tell whether they were moving up or down, it seemed that my music was pushing them every which way, in a confused free-fall. I could not figure out whether I wanted to go up or down. To decend into enigmatic understanding or otherwise to loft my soul upwards to indeterminate spires of knowledge. What goes up must come down, but what goes down must also go up. There seems to be some sort of balancing peace which will not allow for one direction to be followed for too long. In order to save ourselves we must go in circles, but it isn't as boring as running around a lonely sport's-field. It's like the swirling of snow, come unexpected on a late March day, we hover in the air for only a short time and then meet our fate on god's freshly cleaned cobble-stones. I will never understand other peoples' lack of connection with the physical world. Why do we lose our child-like capacity to lose ourselves in a mythology of reality that we are creating with every thought on every step w take? Why do we lose our comfortablility with intimacy? Why do we forget that we too are mythical creatures, wandering down (and up) the strange roads and paths of some long forgotten fairy-tale? How can people miss the snow-sprite for the snow?

zikes

Look at them dance and sway, those fragile sacrifices, how their young eyes dart to and fro in horrid anticipation of the horror that awaits them. They quake at the sight of their peers destruction, dashed up on the rocks of organised systems.

I too stand and watching this promiscuous scene, thousands of unwashed souls fit for the Seine, it isn't to long before they become outright, institutions of money grubbing greed for the control of peoples' souls. They deal in salvation, pay the stern man with the greying hair, he is the leader of your community. But who gave him his authority, did it come from God? Is it passed down by heretidy, no, by democracy, no, by any other sort of machination known to man? No, it is born of posturing and magic tricks, leading people along a beautious goose chace from which none of them will return. Deep into the nothing of an unrepresentative life.

I'm not so sure that I've made myself clear, are you all aware that I am stark raving mad. can you not see that I am a fool, a foolish piece of sausage just waiting to be fed to dogs. I am not even glorious in my downfall, I'm doing an ungraceful nose dive into a place far more wonderous that here. A place where you forget to fall when you trip. To just simply disattach your connection to the phsycial world, loom into a different place and find out that there are so many more perspectives on life than buddhas on bodi tree. I'm not talking about salvation, I'm talking about wandering, wondering about. I love the clean clear road with mountains and valleys, trees, rivers and towns. I ramble to these places in my mind. Take trips to places no one has even heard of, so that I can tell people a story that is really unique, not some half baked notion that some historian somewhere is holding the magic piece of the puzzle which makes it all make sense. No, there isn't one, no saviour of our aesthetic design for the unknowable G-D's blasphemed face.

Things got hairy back there did they. ummm yes, i do believe they did. well then, we'de best get out of hereI should say...but what are we to do about Tommy, we just can't leave that savage puke behind like that. i forbit it, I will find your mother and tell her that you are a little ninnie, if you do such an obscene thing. Now then, onto the killing fields of Cambodia, i rather like the right to that name. It is marvelous there in the spring.

Now I sit, all alone by the keyboard once again...hack...

Whose other coloured face is this in front of my knee-

leanin so far back he got cut by a lean mean fighting careening donut...

And that kiddies is why you don't talk to communists

fin

The sun sets during the sunrise

Time flies like a bird. It skips and hops and rises on an air-stream, and pecks in the mud.
It grows like a strawberry vine, flat and fragrant, snaking across the field in waving rows.
We walk through a paradise of green, and admire the statuary; we imagine moving picture shows- morphing dolphins and great apes.
Trees muscle and claw from their hidden upside-down world, a very gradual anchor or great gnarled fingers. Such such huge organic lives, 125% bigger on the bottom than the top, and stronger pound for pound than steel, we casually walk past enormous beings as casually as we do a mailbox or a do-not-walk sign.
Music makes me float away; have to bodily rip away from it to keep from dissolving, a glittering crystal reaction dissolving into pure space.
I can see so deep into the rationalizations, the subtleties of everything around me; can feel the pressure of the air around me, can feel the urging, surging wave that pushes me along.
The music becomes a completely organic part of what I’m seeing and experiencing- a natural soundtrack to reality. Shrubs and bushes threaten to overtake the sidewalk, and I smile.
A neighbor has left a small wooden ladder feeding into the inside of the plant. It’s been there for months, and has grown into the bush itself, a ladder into another world, a teleportator, a true door to perception. I duck my head into the scratching blackness of another world, but am pulled back by Lucy, and her 15 foot leash.
I find my way home and I see an inclusive nothing when I look in the mirror.
We’re not honest enough with ourselves or with one another; we deny our feelings until they cannot be controlled. We’ve lost the instant communication of feeling enjoyed by animals. Filtered through our ego, our fear, and our social grooming, we haven’t the constant banter of a pond full of ducks and mallards, with great flashes of green ripping across their wings. Crying from one end of the pond to the other, there is instant reproach or reward for every action. Breeding rights, access to food and recreation.
We make noise about such different things than ducks, you think?
We’ve been conditioned to live so far away from ourselves; anything that brings you closer to yourself brings you closer to everyone else.
The world around you breaths as we do; in and out, distorting and waving like flags in uneven breezes, colours squeeze and pull into a painters palette dropped on a hard floor, swirling down the grout lines, scooped into the sink and combusted into dizzying patterns, snaking through our plumbing.
Sneaking into other houses, miles down the road; a wave of colour and dizzying reward crawling through the storn drain.
Colour is a refractive experience of reflection into the eye. Rejected light beams, caught by our eye, which is assumed to constitute reality. Only a human being could formulate a reality in which a known distortion of white light perceived as colour, could masquerade as fact.
Perception and thought have died a sloppy death.
I realize how little people usually observe- we look at everyone around us, and see only a perception of ourselves. A reality created by comparison.
The forest exarts a great pull on me, something about it is so evocative, to me, it has a hard, very heavy vibration to it, a swaying force in high wind.
I feel spirits in wood, affinity with the trees, kinship with wild animals, at home in wild places. Cities are more foreign to me, and hold that certain foreign excitement and charm.
But which seem more intolerable for their charm, when conditions go bad.
Any learned behavior or idea must be impressed into us, and it invariably leaves a mark, which is felt more or less based on ones sensitivity. To teach a child shame at their bodily functions is one of the deepest seated and difficult repressions in our psyche. It rips through our lives, with an irrational fear- we don’t usually recognize it, but at its most basic level, our lives are dictated by the whims of our bladder and bowels.
A thought or motivation that begins within is an outward explosion of inner energy propelled with violent force, and is the opposite of being taught or of learning, which is a force applied to you, a rape, a beating. Why allow learning to be associated with shame, pain and guilt?
Now the sun starts to crest the edge of the horizon, and throws its bulk against the earth. Under the new light of the sun, the walls settle into their foundations and cease to melt like cheap candles into a puddle on the floor.
A quietness and completeness is left to settle into an oil slick rainbow on the back of my brain, and I set beneath the horizon as the world wakes.

Sandman

I went to sleep at exactly 1:25 am. Well, I went to my mattress at 1:25 am. In my shoe box apartment I wandered in from an unsuccessful success. I wandered the streets with my cracked leather jacket pulled tight around my frame. Staring at the cloud gray cement while the cement gray clouds poured liquid on me. I was like a barge ship. Every passer-by gave me a wide berth, for reasons I can't fathom. Maybe it was the growth on my face or the dirt on my twelve dollar jeans or the fact that I was mumbling about government Nazis. Such a rat race life we lead.
I got into my shoe-box apartment at 1:02 am. I pealed off my shiny, damp leather jacket and carefully hurled it to the floor. I then stumbled into my living room. Strange. I live in an apartment not a room. I lay my aching and weary body upon a couch that I found. I eat some mustard and apple sauce. The staples of my diet. After stepping into my biological experiment/shower, I rinse off the day and reflect. This has been a good day. I got nothing of worth accomplished. Such is my way.
I then bring my carcass into the bedroom. A stack of cement blocks serve as a nightstand and my mattress is my princely bed. I lay my weary head down and...
I am instantly thinking thoughts. My mind is whirring with endless possibilities. I get up and pace my darkened apartment. I can't sleep. The sandman has been lay-wayed or killed. I try to think of old wives remedies. Although, I myself have no wife. Old or otherwise. I drink warm cream. Does pass due milk heated in a can count? It's all coming together. My little mendula is now too much in the wind. Thoughts, ideas and conundrums collide like an Los Angeles free-way.
Perhaps its my apartment. I decide to go out into the hallway for a brief time. Maybe that will cure my insomnia or insanity. I walk out in my twelve dollar jeans and red-checked shirt. I run a hand through my long, greasy hair. Best to look presentable before one goes out. I open the door and step out into the dreary, barely lit corridor. I then slouch down right outside my door. I close my eyes and try to get my head straight. If it is indeed crooked.
The young couple are arguing again next door. A TV in a another apartment flares up in response. A baby squalls in the distance. A slamming door, a rushing footstep and the thumping of a fist against a wall. Is this what people dream of? I look up to a sudden creak in front of me. Its old Mrs. Leave-me-be. She peers out with a look of terror and/or anger. She sees me slouching by my door. Thinking I'm either too drunk or high to get into my apartment, she snorts like a bull and slams the door. That's not what I am. That was yesterday.
So this isn't working I decide. So I get up on my evolutionary advantage and walk back into my dark apartment. I quickly cross the dirty floor to the window. It takes a few tries but I finally manage to open it enough to crawl through onto the fourth floor fire escape. Good thing the Nixon commies aren't after me today. I go out into the cool night. I sit with my red checked pulled tight around me as I exhale fog from my mouth. I sit on the rusted metal and just listen to the sounds of the city.
A distant siren screams of danger, hurt, or death. The constant roar of traffic is like sitting near the ocean. The orange streetlights give somewhat illumination to the street. An airplane flies unseen in the raining clouds. This is my world. I fear silence. I need to be constantly assaulted by noise. Noise pollution some call it. I call it safety and sanctity. Being out in the woods alone with no noise but the wind frightens me. As a modern man I have been bred over the last two hundred years to avoid the wild frontier and enjoy the civilization around me. I don't want to get away. This is my vacation.
Suddenly as the thought came, weariness hit me like the butt of a pistol. I heaved myself slowly up and crawled back into my shoe box. I close the window without the same amount of effort as before. Strange. Damn Nazis. Always have to fix everything. I then tumble into my room which has a bed in it. I lay my head down and close my poor dead lights. I almost fear falling asleep. Will I wake up? What if some historic event happens during the time of rest? If I close my eyes will they be stuck like that forever?
This is no time for paranoia, I tell my brain. We can worry about that tomorrow. As for now, I need to recharge, re-energize, re-misfit. For tomorrow is a new day. I have two hours to sleep before I need to be up and in that alley. The early bird gets the worm. Worms do not have protein. It is exactly 3:12 am. I cannot sleep.

Sandstorms

The other night as I watched a clip from Monty Python's "Life of Brian" a strange thought occurred to me. I was watching the scene in which Brian is fleeing a fervent horde of prospective acolytes. He is being chased because the crowd believes him to be their long awaited Messiah. As Brian flees he comes along a naked old man with a long flowing beard sitting in a desert culvert. The man waves him away and after some confusion, once Brian has caused him to break it, explains that he has been adhering to a vow of silence for 18 years. It struck me as insightful that a man would hole himself up in a desert not saying a single word for 18 years and suddenly all of his rigour would be upset by a man whom others believe to be their god. And not only that, but the protests of that man then lead to further misunderstandings about the divinity of Brian. It occurred to me that anyone who has anything worth saying can never articulate those things. It seems to me that understanding must necessarily remain uncommunicated, perhaps this is a quality inherent in real understanding. What then do we make of these blabber-mouthed mystics, these figures who unlike Brian, stand up before the multitude and profess to understand the answers to the question that no one in the crowd has even discovered needs to be articulated yet? They are devils of course, manipulators who are themselves manipulated!

What then does this mean for someone who feels the compulsion and dares to have the pretention to write down his thoughts and communicate his own experience to the world? Am I yet another prophet who seeks to channel the eternal into some limited grain of sand so that I can hold it before others and cry with great exhuberance, "LOOK I'VE FOUND IT, I'VE FOUND GOD, AND GOD IS YELLOW!" No! I will not do this, and this I think speaks much to the controversies which are sometimes conjured up around my writing. I often find myself accused of arrogance, of course I'm arrogant it stops me from evaporating, but I'm not arrogant in the sense that the word is being used, I am not attempting to assert control over people with my articulated perceptions. I am attempting to give something to the world, something of myself, but of course it is a selfish exercise too, I am desperately trying to weave together a fabric which I can wind about myself to stop my dissolving self from disappearing into the relentless march of time, into these torrential desert winds.

But, I am not trying to create some sort of post-modern relativistic art, some shlock of brickolage, a haphazard tip of the hat to chaos. I seek to go beyond that chaos, to breech the gap between oblivion and infinity and spread my arms wide in the dark abyss of shimmering eternity. I seek to say something firm amid this mire of watered down art I see around me. (As an aside, the reason I admire Helianthus' poetry is her audacity to put her swiven to rhyme in a generation of artists so desperately attached to irresponsible method and form.) This is not an absolute, or a weak absolute-for-only-myself, it is an absolute beyond perception, a deep understanding which really just brings me to silence. Am I then also a blabber-mouthed mystic, a fool who dresses up like a decent human being and dances his own sick pantomime infront of this crowd of people I think are before me? Can I reconcile mysticism with art? It would seem impossible as of now, since nothing I have hitherto written could possibly be defined as art. If a saintly hermit is seen by another, or even more, written about, are his experiences made void? I have a tentative answer: understanding must necessarily be complete, but the representation thereof must be acknowledged to be inherently partial. I am neither an absolutist nor a relativist, I see those extremes as rather the same thing, for when we perceive the world around us, we see that through to the nothing that everything is, to the oblivion existence is, and the unity that is apparent in that, this can only been seen of course, if you look deeply enough, past the layers of sand swirling in this raging storm. It is perhaps my task to represent with words all this that I see around me in partial form, but I must also be wary not to lead people to those amongst us whom I have seen residing in silence in their own desert culverts.

Work

At secondary point
alone I sit
With nothing to ponder
and little to keep my mind a lit.

This job is grueling,
tiresome at best
Pushing me ever so greatly
- this physical test-

When shall they come and relieve me?
I cry
That I might leave this desk
- for but a moment -
not be left here to die

They wait there, they stand
in that line and glare;
For I shan't help them
- I just sit here -

For us both it is not fair.



Two days in a row
at this second point;
At first it did greatly me irritate
I know idleness here
would soon drive me mad
with nothing to do
I'd fast be irrate

So I sort cards through the day
to occupy time;
I won't wholly use taxpayer money
to linger here,
composing rhyme.

I recommend this choice
as you sit here too;
It will make the time go by,
your hours seem like few.

Cockroaches

"Fuck"
Said my bus neighbor. "Fuckin' cockroaches". As I sit idly or ideally, by him I begin to inch further away. My fears are unjustified though. Why would this lumping proletariat riding the chariot of the people try to harm little whacked out me? These fears are inconsequential though for in that moment of time I thought like a rabbit in a snare. Minus the screaming and kicking. Although that did come to my noodle.
"Pardon?" I ask hesitantly. Pardon? Is that damn judge after me again? I digress however. After getting on this busing vehicle at a street that has no meaning or consequence in this story I went, naturally to the back of the busy. Don't want to hob-nob with the driver, a grumpy baby-boomer who wants nothing more then to let teens not beat the living Matlock outta him. I pay the man. Capitalism is still running smooth. I move my ten dollar sneakers to the back of the bus. Near a sketchy looking character. We are kindred spirits he and I. Shady, unsure of what we're up to. We mostly hang about in darkened alleys waiting. For what, you ask? You'll never know. WE don't even know. Or do we?
"Cockroaches, man" The raspy slightly drunk/high voice of my new found soul mate explains. "They're all cockroaches. Scurry around their pathetic lives and when they see the light the hide from it, Man." I am unsure why he thought I was the Man. I dressed much like him. My red checked shirt sheltered underneath a cracked leather jacket. These questions are meaningless however as I have seen his inner turmoil brought up.
"You mean these people?" I ask, fearing for not my life but the life of...well actually my life. These people who tend to rant to complete strangers usually end up on the bell tower wearing a viking helmet singing John Philip Sousa while popping off passers-by. Oh, wait. That's me. My friend, whom I will name Bob, nods his shaggy bearded head. His look of utter disgust and slightly vacant stare put me into his state of mind. We are one.
Silently I think that he's right. People are afraid of the truth. We hide when the great light of truth goes on. Shy away from its blatant oppressive staring eye. We run around putting on airs of superiority and strut like roosters in our proverbial roost. Kings and queens of all we perceive. Except as far as we can see is the plank. I look with a new found respect at Bob. He has uncovered what most never do. Granted, he had some chemical help but nonetheless he is at the apex of thought.
I stare in new vigor at this new Plato, this peon Socrates, this uncouth Aristotle. Hoping for more of his deep, Buddha like wisdom I eagerly await his new statement of truth. To which he promptly passes out. When I left the bus at a stop that was not mine (although I'm sure that someone has it) I walk with a purpose to a place I don't know. Bobs ramblings could be put down as nothing and I could carry on with my little messed up life and not ever think these things. Too many things rattle in my brain. Too much story, too much narrative, or maybe just too much.
I doubt if I will see Bob again or indeed if he will remember that fantastic Wednesday night. I'd like to think he will. As I lay my head on my mattress in my shoe box apartment I smile a smile of contentment. No cockroaches do I fear. People will be people until that orange ball kills us all. Its just the government Nazis I fear. Cockroaches some may be, but they are cockroaches needed to be turned to the light.

Scientists- the new prophets

I've been seeing posters around campus advertising for some environmentalist get-together. Besides the innitial irony of such paper advertisements posted by folk who care about the trees another more perterbing detail has made me awaken from my long silence here on the blog. The get-together advertised is called "Smells Like Green Spirit". I couldn't help reading this without noticing the irony dripping from the organic ink of its grainy recycled paper. This title is an obvious reference to Nirvana's anthem for the early 90's, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", a time when people had become so disollutioned with the decadence and horrid gaudiness of the 80's that they began to proclaim en mass that they didn't give a shit about anything. The spirit of this song invoked images of raggedy teens swaying apathetically back and forth, arms akimbo, maws gaping, eyes vacant, all embrassing the utter stupidity of life without once cracking a joke about it. Why would an environmental group that obviously cares about something invoke the image of one of North America's most apathetic moments, or perhaps that is it. Perhaps they do not actually care about the environment, perhaps they too are merely wishing to be entertained, standing before their wizzened dildo David Suzuki, painfully aware that he has no capacity to perform anything but intellectual debasement. Incidentally, David Suzuki walked past me on campus last week. I felt to ashamed that I didn't tell anyone. Why didn't I at least do something horrendously strange to make hsi day a bit stranger. Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate he environment, I rather wish that trees and grass would grow over our cement prisons, but I just don't see any life or passion in the so called "environmental movement", or intelligence for that matter. I see politics for sure, people lobbing arguments back and forth in imagined public spheres, but their words mean as little to me as the vegitables thrown by the Paris mob.

Perhaps my issue in this circumstance just goes back to my loathing for isms and ists. If history shows us anything it is that the pulsating wave of human activity moves up and down the beach regardless of the puny humans caught up on it, desperately clinging to driftwood and if they're lucky, a surfboard, or maybe even a boat. Either way the wave will break, dissolution will set in and a new ideal will be set up for us to prostrate ourselves before. We will find a new entertainer who will be both our god and our slave, and we likewise will fullfill both rolls in reciprocation. And so we will find ourselves caught once again in a fruitless attempt to control history, to stack the blocks of each moment, so that we can achieve a dream we had about the future before we were born.

Neurotic as Hell

I slowly wound my way around the 11th floor of Buchanon Tower, the 1st level devoted to the history department, a somber and stuffy precursor to its nexus on the 12th floor, the lofty perch of cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking historians and their horn-rimmed secretaries who don't like to be asked questions. I walked down the dimly lit corridor and rounded the corner, but upon raising my eyes from the boring carpet I noticed her, my professor. The one whom I fear and loath more than a thousand devils dancing around a fire in the depths of a haunted forest. I saw her, at the other end of the hallway, packed up for the day, clearly headed towards the elevator. This struck fear into my heart as I too was headed towards the elevator. What was I to do? How could I endure such an awkward ride in a confined space with someone that I had laughed at the last time we spoke. She'd told me that I didn't matter in my writing; I opened up my mouth and laughed in her face. Now I was faced with riding in an elevator with this malicious bitch. What indeed was I to do? I broke out into a sweat! What could have happened? my bowels clenched tightly! The first possible future is that we could have reached the elevators at the same time, exchanging awkward head nods and muffled greetings followed immediately by a polite scuffle over who should press the button to call the elevator. What could have endured in those long moments while the ancient elevator rumbled up to the 11th floor? What sort of terse comments could be made, what awkwardly school-related questions could be uttered? This awkward silence would continue as we - on pins and needles- entered the elevator. "Oh you're headed to the ground level too, what a coincidence!" I would press the big G, my salvation from this tiny prison, I would hit the "close door" button to speed up the process. I would divert my eyes, look around at the floor and ceiling, the many luminecent buttons on the walls. Are these walls getting smaller, is the nauseous lurching of my coffin decending into death and redemption trying to drive me mad? Will I explode on her in this cage, will I go over the edge and tell her that in an objective study it was deduced that 9/10 orphans would prefer to have Ebenezer Scrooge and Michael Jackson as their gay fathers to one day in her company. I probably wouldn't say anything, just do my heart a little more damage. Finally, after painfully stopping at every other floor we'd reach the end of our painful decent, I'd allow her to get off first and then I would bolt, run, hide from this insane power structure. This is only one option though...what if, what if she, while waiting for the elevator, did something infinitely more awkward and asked me to take another elevator, or perhaps less severe made up some excuse that she forgot something in her office or had to use the washroom or had decided to take the stairs for a change. Would she make that awkward sacrfice to save us both from the even worse fate of that elevator ride? We would both know the reason for this last moment cop-out, we would both feel the lead weight of true hate buffet the bottum of our guts. We would both understand that hate was reciprocated, a relationship from hell, a feeling of intense loneliness.

What actually happened, in that dark corridor as her back was turned to me while she locked her office door, not really her office, she was a sessional? What did I do, I thought quickly, all of the awkward possibilities stood stark infront of me, and I like a brave young warrior lurched into an alcove in the corridor, I hid, trembling with the fear of so many horrific possibilities. Obfuscated my soul from the devil who lurked the hallways, trying to push us into hell's gaping maw. How could I let this woman ruin a day that I wasn't obligated to listen to her blather on for an hour and a half. And that is what I did, I avoided the impending disaster on my mood and found hope for the future on the wall. I found an advertizment for a class called Philosophy of History, the class I have been seeking for my entire degree. I enrolled that evening. I also got a B+ in this woman's class, how very odd...

First Thought Good Thought?

If nothing gets done on December the 12th there'll be hell to pay and no one will be able to do anything about it. It'll pass by without a sound, without a thought, without a being. I'm not denying that it was ever there, just that no one will remember it, comfortably numb as we are. I think there's a show on the tube tonight, maybe I should watch it? Bother, bother, bother, what's my brother got to do with it? If I don't make an impression something dreadfully wretched will happen. Something like the skies will open up and angry monkeys with terrifying black eyeballs of pestilance will come scampering out like so many third graders onto a playground. Full of wrath, full of envy, full of pride, slothful and gluttenous lust- a slow kind of debauchery. There's nothing new under the sun and it's all getting less and less new, stained-tarnished like a rusted out toyota, but when someone does figure upon something new and unique, when life is created spontaneously from the most sorrowful depths of some poor mutants soul, it is magnificent, like a day that no one remembers, that slipped by on the calendar, undetected, a blank virgin piece of paper...

Sesame Seeds

I sit in the old, tattered booth at a Denny's. Yes, Denny's. Cheap, on the slide food for seniors and poor folk. A gourmets joke. A horrible bastard offspring of well-to-do parents. Yet, here I sit. Listening to the masses around me as the gorge themselves on $9.95 eggs with some sort of shredded newspaper. Quietly, I watch the people. The old couple in the corner sipping coffee and not looking at one another. A young man looking like he either just woke up or hasn't even begun to yet. A harried woman trying to coral 3 young blurs, which I assume are children. All mingling and mixing around me. A cacophony of small talk. I sit with my five dollar coffee. Its 12:12 pm. This moment only happens twice a day.
A brazen waitress with a smile as plastic as the menu covers asked me if I'm ready. Ready? Am I ready? What's going on? Is there some sort of execution going on? Fearful of my response I stall for time by pushing my chipped and almost disinfected cup towards her. She slowly tips the vintage 1972 classic coffee pot and pours a large gallon of what could be warm dishwater or bad diesel. Then finally she leaves me in peace as I croak "Just a few more minutes...please". Please? Why do I have to be polite to her? She's in the service industry. Should she not be treated like a washing machine or coffee maker? Just tell her what you want and instantaneously she returns with steaming piles of "food"? These questions run trough my head.
I stare at the menu for the first time. Amazing delights that would tantalize the palate of any patron. Strange adjectives float off the page to me. "Sizzling", "Fresh", "Spicy", "Delicious", "Bold". My hands hold the greasy cover. What are they protecting anyway? The amazing paper menu of a lower class diner? It startles me. Then there are the pictures. Blown-up photos of food that looks like Zeus himself eats here. Too good to be true. I finally decide on a burger. It doesn't matter to relate what kind because they all end up tasting the same. It just matters what kind of mammal, reptile or invertebrate they used for the meat.
"Decided yet?", the suddenly appearing waitress asks. My eyes gaze up at her. Feeling like a minion in the presence of the Overlord. I look at her beige uniform. Its almost like a sack but a feminine sack. Her age range anywhere from 20-45. Hard to tell with the peroxide hair and make-up. She could be a goddess who merely has this form to ridicule us mortals. In either case, my time was up. I order. A risky way to go to be sure. What if I chose wrong? What if the highly skilled chef in the back is also my assassin? Poisoning every other burger in a sick attempt at world domination. In a Denny's. But there's no time to worry about that now. I can't stall anymore. I don't want to appear as the tripped-out, jean clad, red checked shirt wearing psycho who worries about the CIA. Although I'm sure they have a hand in this.
I forge ahead ordering my almost meal. She snatches the menu away and trots off to whatever hell they get the substance they give us groveling peasants. I sit waiting for my meal. Giving up on finishing the Che Guevara specialty coffee I start listening. I close my eyes and try to feel the sounds around me. Safe, quiet and work productive radio plays in the background. So PC that no one would even dream of complaining. Heartache, heartbreak, happiness, hairspray. The music washes over me like slimy pond water. I need a shower. I open my eyes. T
The old couple has toddled out. They'll be back. Every week until they die. They're just speeding the process by coming to Denny's. The young man is staring at me. Why? Is he so tired that he's asleep without knowing it? Or is it something malicious? I stare back. Neither of us breaks contact, knowing the first one who blinks knows the game is up. For what seems an eternity we stare. Then "WHAM!".
Startled out of my self-willed mind game a burger lays before me. The waitress looks down her imperious nose and asks if theres anything else. No, i say with confidence, begone wench, I think. My meal looks nothing like the picture. Disappointed? No, just saddened by the lies this world has told me. Then I see them. The seeds. Sitting atop my sandwich . Laying almost perfectly like a synchronized swimmer. I knew that at this time that the young man was trying to kill me. What are the purpose of sesame seeds? Decoration? Digestion? Disintegration? I had to act fast. I turn in my booth to look behind me. A trucker is sitting there. Wearing his traditional garb of jean jacket and namesake hat. He leaves to go to the washroom or the kitchen, I can't say which I stealthily place my poisoned food on his table. Hanging precariously over the booth seat trying not to disturb the plastic plant I slink back to the booth and make my way to the door, duck walking.
The young man is now trying to shovel eggs into his gaping maw so he's distracted. I reach the altar of the great hostess while remaining hidden from view. I reach into my pocket and place some bills upon the altar as an offering to the Denny's god. I scuttle like a crab out the door. Safe and sound. Sound as a pound. For now. For there will always be Denny's like cockroaches they will survive. I just can't wait to return to where my madness began. Medication be damned.

FIN

Consumerism, consumer, consume

Once you have opened the packing
it will be entirely impossible
for you to suppress
the desire to overcome
such an exciting challenge of your tongue.
However, don't be dissapointed with your repeated failure;
you may continue with your habit.

Takes the thirst out of everyday time,
a pure whiff of oxygen, painting over a monochrome
world in primary colours.
We all know that
is why everyone loves fruit.

If dishes are nice, square ceilings become round.

What everyone can say, TASTY!
It's fresh, so mild, with some special coffee's
bitter and sourtaste.
LET'S HAVE SUCH A COFFEE NOW!

Refreshed and foppish sense,
and comfortable and fresh styles
will catch you who belong
to city groups.

Like smoke playing in the wind

Pavement, hardened by countless days of traffic, clicks beneath us as we walk the vacant streets. The sound is sharp and clean in the night air, snapping from our feet and skidding across the road like a rock across the surface of a still lake.
The heavy brown leather of my boots squeak with the strain as we push up-hill, our eyes struggle to adjust to approaching headlights before they pass, and we slip again into darkness. I have little to say; my mind is weighing heavily on me this evening, so I let you speak. I’m just happy to be outside and alone.

You dance excited, your feet tapping rhythm across the road-- giving voice to your music, you croon and moan, drawing a quivering line to a freedom of compromise.
“They find a kind of freedom of their own”, you slide like a trombone through your idea, raging and stomping with the music of what you’ve seen. “They escape in their own small way, a small personal victory. They just don’t let it take that essential part of them”. You soar into a blaze, your rhythm pounding its beat off the walls of the houses, rattling the windows of cars as they pass us by.

Our eyes turn, adjusting to the shutter of headlights as they pass by in waves.
“Freedom can only be complete, by its nature;” now I speak, mellow, building to a fiery ember, purring and whispering with exhausted fervor. “It can’t live in compromise or limitation. Limited freedom is an oxymoron, it ceases to be ‘freedom,’” lashing the air with my fingers, I build and kick and twist, but this night had taken my power.

“You are all or nothing. You look for the path that is least safe, and you push ahead. Me, I always want to follow safety.” You speak simply, and the words whisper around us like a wind; tugging at our clothes, and hinting at the bodies beneath.

We walk on, the stillness of night absorbing our music, and wrapping us tight in her quiet arms. The cold bites through my thin sweater, but I don’t wish to be back with the others.
I’ve no place in the crowd- I’ve no place in the world. My uncompromised freedom has no place- is not valued, in today’s world. I wander voiceless the peripheries of a time made for others.
The ghosts of weakness and fear muscle my shoulders and whisper that this is stubbornness, pride, that this is the idle ranting of unproductive childishness.

We round the final corner and near our starting-place and destination; recognizing a noisy fountain, bubbling and laughing alone in the darkness.
Pushing aside the bodies crowding the door, we make our way inside, and I again felt alone. Soundlessly, I move to a quiet corner- you can disappear if you want, step into an optical worm-hole, light waves bend around you, allowing your unseen presence. It appears like rippling heat waves down a distant asphalt road in the July sun, marking the disturbance. I melt into the waves, and the world keeps turning, society keeps working, and I can just watch. The room turns, and the people turn and the world turns, so drink up because tomorrow the sun turns round the edge of the world and its back to work.

I can feel the presence of a human being in my worm-hole. Melting into the wave beside me, she takes my hand in hers, and we watch the world turn; watch the sun crawl through the sky on all fours, watch the people rise, scrape and die- always turning.
She leans into my side, and I feel her solid against me, soft and warm; her chestnut hair falls over the brightest blue eyes. A spirit of energy and life, imperfect—perfect.
She is with me in the wave of my worm-hole, a presence, a form to hold and feel, but exists without presence, without shape, outside it.
A ghost of woman.

I sometimes feel a richer, fuller presence, one without imperfection; a shapeless ideal that haunts my consciousness, sliding her slender hand across my back, resting a ghostly head on my shoulder. I smell her hair, feel her presence, feel her dissolve into ghostly wisps of pure idea. Cold, calm, dispassionate, she brushes against my side and settles against me.
Pressed tight to my side, I am enveloped by her energy.
Haunted by the spectre of absolute possibility, I am haunted by freedom.
I am left to lust after her, while I feel her dance about me like smoke playing in the wind.

I leave my quiet worm-hole, and feel the pressure of her hand still on mine, and the force of her perfect blue eyes on my heart. Glass litters the floor, shining cool and sharp in the buttery light. Glittering with the cold, quiet dispassion of freedom, daring us to test inevitability.
Slipping into my shoes, you join me by the door, and we push into the cold.

Light and shadow

Oily light hangs in the air, settling on the walls and on our skin. Running towards the floor, it bathes in bacchal repose. It saturates our clothes, and runs down bare skin, holding against gravity in shining orbs until the weight of it presses for the low-spots.
Goin’ down, down, down to the floor where I’ll lay still and calm, reflecting blurry light to blurry faces.
Butter yellow, the walls sag and flow towards the floor in the heat of our breaths, warm and wet; the room grows soft.
I push trepidation in, while others watch faces pushed in; screaming and laughing and congealing in the ring, like gory ribbons of sticky maple toffee cooling on white canvas snow.
Laugh. laugh! Stuttered breath from my nose, pulsates with shoulder-humps, smile-- that was a laugh. That feels like walking on broken glass. Electric jumps.
I’ve had this dream before and it always ends with me feeling full and being empty.
Bloated and sick it pushes me to the floor and drags me with carpet-burn through reality.

Pool cue pass-- hop-along-the-frog. Balls go where they want they’re disappearing, dropping into a bowl of soup in Tanzania.
All this is an act, but I’ve no character to play; so smile, and shrug, and feel alone and unknown and close your eyes and feel the music.
Imagination is creation make a void out of space -or a space from void- there’s no stairs or walls or door jams, so moving a couch in will be easy work.

Push the music out your feet to the center of the earth, down where the bits of left-off gods, unincorporated (they get no postal service) hurl volcanoes at your feet, shooting like a ripe strawberry through the tiny holes in a stainless collander—a mass of congealing red viscera, boiling and heaving towards the bottom of your feet.

Vision is giant little straight beams of light reflected off of every object into your eye: up-side-down. We see what is not, what is is swallowed and held down queasy by everything.
As afraid as you of losing themselves, they swallow their true selves and clench shut to keep safe.
I want to see between the lines of rejected light; to see between the colour and the shape, between form and meaning. It’s designed to look pretty, but it makes it invisible.

We slip noiselessly and sit legs crossed on the floor, hurling words at distant planets.
Flying through space at an incredible rate, ‘projection’ crashes into a distant moon, and leaves an aggressive crater stripped from the surface.
‘Breathe’, and ‘stillness’ crash simultaneously into a distant world and bore through it; with an empty, hollow sounding reverberation, the world dissolves into an impossibility of particle and light.
‘Crystal Meth’ diffuses in a thick atmosphere and drifts down particulate onto the thin skinned amnesiacs with no words of their own. Bombarded by our diction, they prattle and gesture, creating vast symphonies with the words we scatter to them, like the music the birds scratch with their claws, eating the crumbs we toss. (Contractions fall like gentle rain)

The crash of shrieking voices drifts down the stairs like a child: clumsy and loud, but careful, on all fours, crawling to your feet and looking into your eyes with gentle sadness.
There is only one desired meet, and there is no presence for them, no shape to fill.
A ghost of woman, chestnut brown- bright blue.

The door slides open dully, and I roughly slip heavy leather past my ankles and press into the cold.
A spectre of purple hangs around us, weaves itself into the void within us, holds, release, bends to our shape and tempts its way around our bodies. A whispered sound and a gentle touch flows like woman around us in the cool night air.
Rows of houses, leering huge in the ghostly blue twilight of the streetlamps, sneer me past them, leaning their bulk against mine.
Who was turned around- you forgot we could both be wrong.
We stumble in the darkness writing the script to be followed in our absence by all eternity. They may miss choice, but will know instead certainty.

24 hours before; “you can take it all apart”, “you can rip this world apart- you have the ability, it is you, you have the choice to begin”.
“Thou mayest”, I say concise, knowing the truth in it, but reluctant to personalize it, to let it attach to myself, wanting to avoid this choice.
It is like choosing death; though one knows its inevitability, even if prepared and ready, the choice, the moment you breathe out, is so difficult to time.
Shoes click on the pavement, and we find our way back; we were creatures of the night, we were comfortable and lively and folded neatly into the blue darkness.

More words crash and reverberate around the room and through the atmosphere, but go astray and swirl faster and faster into a black hole. The words crush together, become a singularity and are quiet.
Quiet becomes heavy and thick, movement slows and thought slows; until you find a character, and find comfort and speed and movement in that.
I've retreated, haunted by the ghost of chestnut and blue- and sit in front of white sheets, waiting to be coloured with black. (The spaces between the black are as essential to meaning)

I stare at the white sheet, and the black words; look at the earth and past the gun-metal sky, and hurl my words into space.

Sea to sky

Bathed in the icy cool, inky morning twilight, grey clouds hang onto the sides of the mountains-- gripping the rough tree tops, which hold this thick cloud cover like a warm comforter, pulled up tight to the mountains ears’, exposing only its snow frosted tip to the cold of the morning. Rough slabs of granite lay bare from the mountain; the cool smooth sheets of rock are in constant dialogue with the rough chop of the gunmetal sea, dipping a silent toe into the restless water.
This is that time when the early morning light bathes the world in grey, black and blue, the wet, misty peace broken only by bright white lights ringing the old mine, crawling up the face if the mountain, following deep veins of copper. At lower elevations, the evergreens cling to the last of the early morning fog, still thick in the dampness of the early day.
Road construction plows under the earth, ripping through felled and splintered trees.
Great rigor mortised logs are strewn carelessly along the road, uprooted and rotting.
The earth will reclaim what is hers, given time.
The collection of rock layers exposed by the road construction-- slashes through the mountain-- shine out black and white like an appaloosa pony in the approaching light of day. Deep gashes ringed by soft moss clinging to the ragged edges of the rock, and soaking in the west coast rain, thrive where soil itself is a luxury, and stand dark against the light heart of the granite.
Brash steel bulldozers rip at the mountain, and she bleeds from hidden arteries of crystalline streams, pouring into the grey sea through gates, locks and tubes; diverting the pressure and force of the water away from the foundations of the roadway.
A single tiny evergreen stands canted, peering over a precipitous ledge, holding firm with precious little soil to anchor it. A lesson in the futility of chance; as it grows larger, day-by-day its roots will find only rock and a winter storm will rip the tree from its perch, drowning it in the icy inlet.
This little tree will never pierce the morning fog, never peer past the sacramental veil of purple and crimson.
It already approaches its final days. Yet it grows on.
Feebly piercing the sky with its stunted trunk, it grows.
Vancouver hangs above the sea below the ridge, and across the inlet.
Piercing the morning softness with grey concrete, its rising light floating into the sky, lighter than air, it sits on the muddy headlands of the Fraser River.
There’s Vancouver down there. All lit up.