February 2012
1 post
We show up late to this poetry reading because it is Swing Dance Monday, so we go straight to the bar instead of sneaking in from the side. Raissa orders a wine, white, and I order a wine, red, and she says, “Whenever I order anything other than wine I always wish it was wine.” We take our drinks to the stairs and watch the poet through the glass door. Some man has his eyes closed, arms crossed,...
January 2012
2 posts
Hey. Is it ever about fucking bitches? Or about suicide, or is it not wanting to do something a little bit at a time? There are ways to leave without having to go anywhere. That’s one of the only things I know now that is also one of the things I knew then. You can go away to give us everything, and we will forget that the tallies on your bedroom wall once stood for the number of days I...
December 2011
1 post
I rub my face in the broken person’s hands like they’re a towel. I’m saying stay with me. I’m saying come back. I can only help if we end up getting lost on the same side of you.
November 2011
2 posts
You’ve been waiting a long time for someone to come and release you from that fish hook cast in your mouth. As I hurt for you and mourn my way through non-tragedies for you and wait with an anticipatory eye that makes everything premature. For you we eat crackers and I wonder what is it like to have blood and steel and sea fill your mouth, and don’t you want to taste...
your hands reach for everything trying to compensate for all the space you can’t touch the ones that really matter auto-correct of the soul (time) a wine glass twice the size of dread broken bits of stick the stuff of life feeling music through your guitar is like handling love by gripping dick so just don’t say shit like that ...
October 2011
2 posts
I keep thinking we’re going to give everything to each other at once. The last ten years of our lives, all ampersands squeezed into a ball behind our third ribs, but it doesn’t work like that. How can you pay for everything in ones? The one who made me lose my mind. The one who came too fast. The one who made me so, so sorry to leave. The only one who really understood despair and...
The way you swallow your spit in the dark is unmistakable.
September 2011
1 post
I was in the car and you were still upstairs in my bed. Comfortable isn’t the right word, but it didn’t feel bizarre, either, waiting in the backseat while Andrea ran inside to say goodbye to you. February, you said. You’ll be back in February. Look at us; we’re like those idiots who can’t stop touching things, picking and scratching and peeling at their cuticles...
August 2011
1 post
Pickton Storm →
Last week we drove to the sandbanks and went for a swim, us in our underwear and Paul naked. When it started pouring on the other side of the water, we watched the lightning storm under blankets by the fire. Luckily, some people are better at life-documenting than I am - Weika has a video on her blog. Nature is kind of beautiful.
July 2011
1 post
Remember the six of us holding roman candles and all wishing the water in that fountain was deep enough to dive into - I think I can start at the parts where you stop.
You said the ground was soaked with wet drip imprints of us beautiful and us horribly distorted, and we were flushed against some statue. We stretched our arms out on either side until our hands met, like growing long gnarled barks...
June 2011
1 post
This is funneling toward some pin prick moment when we can see the cast but don’t feel the damage. We fall out of ugly trees, and music pours around us like gasoline from an open tank. This is what happens when the space in between means more than the words - when I say summer, and you picture a palm pressed against hot pavement, opening and closing and gasping for air.
April 2011
2 posts
For five months you’ve used it as a magnet to hold up grocery lists. Buy jam; call for help. A simultaneous reminder to do all the useless shit and forget them.
Listening to Bon Iver on repeat is hard on rotting feelings, but we do it anyway. The next day, we stumble our way down the street to my friend’s house for pancakes, still drunk. I sometimes suspect we’re truly happy.
March 2011
4 posts
talkinbouthowgodneglectedyou:
I’m not drunk enough to be this lonely right now.
There is a thick pile of letters on my desk that grew from nothing this year, most of them the kinds that don’t need to be answered. The one you gave me today is on the very top. I have pages of my own stale poetry buried underneath it all, I’d rather see people make fearless proclamations of love and disaster than my stuttering hesitations at a mirror.
After you were done with the dryer sheet you explained it like, “There has to be something we can suspend ourselves on that is between the hipster composition and the car we buy to get to our job we work at to pay for the house in the suburbs. I hear PBR tastes like shit and I can’t eat cereal on Fridays anymore because of Rebecca Black.”
It became something your chased during your sleep, persistently romantic and distant, maybe even impossible. Poetry and wine did not become your favourite things by accident.
February 2011
4 posts
I’m glad you’re finally going back home to Oshawa. Reading Week returned me back to the stifling loneliness of the city where I couldn’t stop thinking about you - several familiar faces and I couldn’t stop thinking about you and Liz and how little and how much we went through together and alone.
How should I have responded when you’d told me that you had diagnosed...
I know what you are about to do before you know what you are about to do. I work hard to ignore that feeling in my gut, because a part of me suspects that it’s all self fulfilling; but it’s like working to keep the prophets guessing, even harder than trying not to go for that itch on the roof of my mouth even though it’s a little too far back to reach with my tongue. I wish we...
i wonder
if you chose to wait
so he didn’t have to find
you,
the way he did last night
just before
5:42 on your side
choking,
on his birthday.
oh god,
xxx.
for real this time.
did you have to
do it with that
shit they put you on?
i understand.
i don’t but i do.
at least the parts
that make
every
day
feel
bruised.
“Let’s do this right, okay? I don’t know how to say what I need to say sometimes and I miss everything, miss everyone, miss myself […] We’ve all been in really bad places. I want to start a new dialogue. I want to be in awe, I want to show you my very best, no more lies. We’re soft - blowing on our coffee when it’s too hot, it does not have to be anything...
January 2011
5 posts
the best commune in the history of worst communes
I’ve slowly been learning
how to organize natural disasters inside a body
while coming to terms with how sad it is
that we can empty faster
than we will ever be able to fill.
Let’s live inside this
same hollow shape
we’ve known our whole lives;
we might as well make it a
home,
sleep each Canadian winter
away in quinzees. I promise
we’ll have everything we...
There were so many moments last night that I want to keep safe in the room I don’t have inside of me; they deserve a place in all of this confusion and hopelessness, all this exhausting chaos like the sound a person makes in the backseat when their appendix explodes, that makes me feel ancient and naive at the same time. How long did it take me to finally admit to this?
This morning...
Pasty mouthed and having trouble pronouncing his name, you read Burroughs for the first time. “How bitter,” you said, and then repeated yourself, “bitter,” like you had a hiccup of the taste along the back of your teeth. You pulled me over to you, quoted bitterness at me with your tongue on my chest, trying to impress twenty-something grandiloquent endings into my skin. We would’ve spent the...
(Writing entire letters in parentheses lately, it makes things feel safer, like they can exist or not exist depending on what anyone feels like admitting that day, or like I can’t even commit to words anymore.)
December 2010
0 posts
I swear, your breakdown was like watching my favourite building crumble. So I stepped through your rubble and began stacking safety bricks for both of us.
November 2010
5 posts
I have enough experience to understand that I don’t really understand anything. This makes a lot of moments tricky, like when we’re sitting in your bedroom leaning our heads against each other, and I still refuse to kiss you. You say, “Listen, I think you’re afraid that I will get attached.” And I don’t know what to do, because in a way you deserve a kiss more than anyone, so I hang on to these...
With your guts on the ground, you give experience a bad name. But underneath the table your hand is massaging my leg, and I’m starting to suspect that you are heavy with potential. I chew the rim of my cup and tongue the wet paper, thinking about how love for potential alone is just eagerness to live in the future, and that is how you started a tally in my head, two months ago, of the different...
onlinejournals:
Sloppy drunken kiss
Oh god
Sloppy drunken kiss
It’s not you
Seriously
It’s whiskey dick and
Sloppy drunken kiss
This kick
Oh go
d
Sloppy drunken kiss
It’s not a big deal
Wait until morning
Keep it together
We’ll be together
amnesiac1331:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is...
October 2010
6 posts
1 tag
I went home for the weekend, to beds that are finally beginning to learn how to handle so much love at once.
I held my rolled up concert poster under my jacket like a sucker, and jumped over puddles that you guys took by strides.
We spent too much money feeding the jukebox and ordering all the wrong foods: Chris with his deep fried pickles, and I had half your waffles when all I really wanted...
Roommate,
Sorry the extra chair now smells like whiskey and Adidas Fever.
2 tags
12:35
Going on a Ginsberg binge, you thought,
laughing to yourself in the boxcar coming
home with a ubiquitous need for rum
and nicotine stained sheets.
A vagabond looks,
always, you utter,
for contained patterns in nature.
And like the beginning
of a Fibonacci code,
your train pulls in
at 12:35. Just in time
for you to finish smearing
a message in your own
breath on the window, saying
how...
1 tag
2 of 2
Letting words fall from my mouth at a discount price, mumbling nonsense in a phone booth somewhere - I shouldn’t be getting good at these things, but I am. My neighbour is always drunk and looking for his keys. I just want to get away to a place where I don’t get so easily annoyed at someone peeling a banana from the wrong end. Later I try to explain this to Aaron, because out by...
1 tag
1 of 2
I’m looking to the light display on the alarm clock, and the numbers are so worn down I can’t tell what time it is, ever. Aaron and I hold each other at arm’s length by the doorway and every once in a while it feels like I am about to fall into this stranger I’ve only known for.. I don’t know how long, I don’t know time very well. The carpet makes the thick air smell like...
June 2010
11 posts
As you ate last night Neither of you spoke Dishes, TV, bed The dark was filled with dread But at least the war is over
All the living are dead and the dead are all living The war is over and we are beginning
Here it comes, here comes the first day
Here it comes, here comes the first day
It starts
up in our bedroom after the war
- Stars
“What matters?”
“I don’t know.”
People die once they have nothing left to give a fuck about.
onlinejournals:
Sometimes I do actually read what I write and I fucking hate it. I hate the pictures I take. I hate it all because in a secret place I’m proud of it. And then I wonder what’s to be proud of? Syllables strung together like christmas lights? Bullshit? One word wonders? Fuck all this. The last time I got this fed up with my hobbies I packed it all up and gave it away. I walked up to...
Blood Stained Smile: →
next sunday needs to get here faster, but at the same time I don’t…
I am going fucking insane. The end.
onlinejournals:
I lost my voice sometime the other night. It must have been when we were in the car and you kept sticking half of your body out the window when we were on the Roebling. You opened the window and sat on the arm rest and looked all above you, at the stars and the bridge and the sky and everything insane. I laughed and yelled along with you. We turned everything up. I opened my...
Tomorrow is Monday, and after that it’s going to all slowly come together or pull apart and soon I will be dreamdreaming when you are daydreaming, and I am getting good at this. I am being asked to go in a dozen different directions by everyone and it feels okay; just keep stretching me out even more. We can reach if we try hard enough. Tempus Fugit. Tempus Fuckit. I am claiming all of this...
“Show me! Where is this love? I can’t see it, I can’t touch it. I can’t feel it....”
– Alice, Closer (via nerissajudd)
I need to watch this movie again.
May 2010
12 posts
One day,
I swear,
I will pull myself out from these horrible swimming thoughts
long enough to sit down and answer all of your questions.
It’ll probably start something like,
“This is so stupid,”
because even I know.
Either that,
or,
I’ll end up writing it down and burning it (all of it).
Yeah, it’ll probably be the second one.
The problem with having no...