I have a corkscrew empire. Filled with shattered glass and remnant wiretaps. I own a corral for the ones who go wild. Everyone that works here is a spiral staircase, from their helix to their mindframe.

In our down seasons, we bind books. No two eyes here are the same colour. My mouth is half batwing. In older times, I was called a cowboy. The ground echoes my footsteps deep into the dawn. The leaves around the fences have sharp edges and there are no birds. Unless you count the ghosts. The light from the sun is blue in the dark months here. We all have scales. Some like shingles, some like guitar picks. Some like razors, some like feathers. Evolution runs rampant here and it runs quickly.

We write warnings in the sand in letters that can be seen from orbit but they are always ignored. The supply ships touch down anyway, lose power, and I get more ranch hands. I use a tail for balance and I watch the first sunset burn off ammonia in the atmosphere like algae used to glow in the water back on Earth. Mushrooms here are the size of small mountains.

Every two years or so we get new mutations. I'm having an outbreak of fingers across the front of my neck. Sally looks to be growing a small crop of eyes across her forehead.

It's hard to focus on anything. All I know is that I sank all my money into this off-world ranch and things are going oddly.



tags

These days I like to wear adult clothes and pretend to be a library, looking laser-thin down the bridge of my nose to belittled people scraping through the uneducated book lust wilderness. I scrabble their hearts into my lengthening middle names.

I used to split my mind into different tented versions of myself so that I could hunt in packs. I unwrapped Christmas for young girls and sprinkled the glowing owl dust on their tiny moth-wing mouths. My conscience was all elbow back then and I was looking for a candle lens to see myself through. To see myself up. To see myself out.

You speakered me. You made anvil with my river. You made craters of silence in my speeches. Over time, you left graffiti on my driveway prison of a face. Every corner I take too quick, every losing bet I make with glee, every avalanche I start by laughing too loud, it's all dedicated to the way you forgot things in memory of yourself. I can still describe the arc of you, the parabola of your life. I see now that you were a runaway response to jail cell tangents. The further away you get, the more of my mercy you are blind to.

So now I sweep up disco balls and add crossbones to skulls on the black flag of my high seas. I have the intuition of a tame zebra. You left me with scars all over my cloak of invisibility. I let my backstage pass lapse and now it's as useless as old milk. I can only throw curve balls to music teachers these days and my boomerangs don't return. I have the simple anatomy of a pencil. I am almost completely business card.

So thanks for the high kicks and the plectrum embedded in my liver. I am a different person now. Tree frog bright and jaunty. I am bright paint on an old house. I am cobweb free and solid in my stare. Sure, I might be half nametag these days but it's from beautiful failure and not from a lack of trying.

See you soon, supernova. Return to me in your own time. I'll be on vacation until then. There is no smile in the world that can get away from me now.



tags

I see compassion growing in your tender strawberry moon heart, I see steering apparatus forming in your still-soft skull. Broken people have the sharpest edges but you are round and clear and unsullied. Religions that tell of the evil in children are deaf salesmen spiders drowning in jealousy. I envy the clarity of intent in your blue eyes. You are more super hero than person right now, more monk than fighter, more Buddhist that most Buddhists.

I feel oppressive silence when you and your mother are not at home. The silence of what my life would have been without you both. I feel so elated and scared at the same time to think how hollow that would be, like a speeding truck just missed me in an intersection.

Your clock is winding. The colourful machines inside you are balanced and working in tandem. Everything is going according to plan. I see the divine every morning in your face. I understand belief in a higher power when I look at you because what else could be responsible? You make the word miracle into a dull understatement and you can’t even talk or walk yet.

I am lost in your whirlwind, beguiled by your unknowable mind and deeply, deeply in love.




tags

My consciousness is merely a fender on my brain. Much like my skull is a helmet. I see what I’ve been told I should see, I hear what I’ve been conditioned to hear, and I interpret the world as a tall white man living a life of comparative luxury in the first world.

It’s a straddle and no speakers about it. I have airplane lottery tickets dangling in the dozens around my neck, backstage passes from all the concerts I’ve ever wanted to go to. My eyes are twin modems and I see the world downloaded through my vision. My skin is a camera. My bones are made of glass and it’s only a butterfly wing away from reminding me how mortal I am. Diseased meat stretched around a filament of bone sticks and bone pegs.

I am a median. I am a traffic cone. I am yellow lines painted down the middle of basket-weaving courses funded by professional distractors. My voice, when unified with the rest of the voices, is powerful. My voice, when given the ability to change the opinions of many minds at a time, is powerful. That goes for all of us. Keep us down. Keep us segregated. Keep us entertained.

This is not news. This is what my eyes say to my brain all day. This is not news. I am on a ferris wheel and the ride is getting monotonous. I am not bored. I am not ungrateful. But I am worried at the gathering speed.

I need to remove my filters. I need to uncondition my hair and bequeath bare feet to my soul again. The gravity of time has me. The gravity of this planet has me. But I need to life up my mind. I need to light bulb higher. My thinker is gathering precepts and defaults. It’s accruing a mess of ‘knowledge’. It’s becoming glutted with facts, making it too smart to realize, making it too stuffed to think. My brain is a saturated sponge in need of a wringout or a drying.

I need a cleaning. And I need it soon.


tags

I am with you in the rain.




tags

My morals are wearing a short skirt and doing shots of espresso vodka in a college bar. My morals have red hair and a fantastic body and they’re too old to be here. My morals have a beautiful swoop of a nose and cheekbones designed in a wind tunnel. My morals have eyes that are small but piercing. They sparkle. My morals are looking for a good time but no one is hitting on her.



tags

Sure, come live inside of me. It’s not unlike a seal’s mouth. The ghost of wine-glass weekends with smooth skin and not a lot of talking stud my trachea with pepper. Look out for the growing crystals. I’m unsure if they’re diamonds or cancer or salt. Keep in mind that it’s all collateral damage in here when a gun goes off. It’s all hit. There’s no miss. So be careful.

See how perfectly preserved the fingernails are. You can still see the wrinkles on those hands. It’ll all come to powder if you touch it but it’s like the tendons sank into the quicksand weeks ago instead of centuries.

And here is what I’ve always mistaken for love. It’s the close-up of a fly’s face. The eyes see several thousand different kinds of affection, each of them in only one direction. Its mouth parts want to kiss and its hair is like guitar wire. It’ll want to talk to you about math. Probably best to keep moving.

Ignore the dueling pelicans.

As you explore, I’ve heard that you will find a glade of cherry blossom canopy oasis branches spreading shade and summer evenings near a clear stream. It’ll reek of flowers and it’s the kind of grass you could roll around on naked. Please let me know if you find it.

This pit here contains the skeletons of two people that were married for a long time. As you can see, they have antlers and are wearing jewelry. The seashells suggest that this entire area here was once an ocean.

That bridge rising out of the fog is the way out.

You’re welcome back here whenever you want to return.




tags

He cracked as he moved, sounding like a fireplace. Popping softly, brittle matches stuffed into every joint. Each step brought him closer to me. I was handcuffed to the radiator. I didn’t know where I was or how such a frail old man had the strength to capture me like this. The room was old and looked abandoned. Piles of newspapers gathered in the corners, rustling with mice. One of my eyes was swollen shut and the other one was blurry. I looked up at the old man as he came closer. He held a tray of tea which he placed just out of my reach and sat down with painful, slow effort.

“Hello Jeremy” he sighed. “Do I look familiar?”

I’d been testing the strength of the handcuffs. Either my enhanced strength wasn’t working or the radiator’s mooring was reinforced. I looked at him with my good eye and snarled, trying to give him the sense of a dangerous animal.

He laughed. “Oh, very good, Jeremy. Very good.”

I was worried that he kept calling me Jeremy. That wasn’t my name. Mentally I reached for my name and found nothing.

A shot of panic rustled through me when I realized that most of my memory was a void.

“Yes, yes, by now you’re realizing that you’re not altogether altogether, are you? You’re here but you’re not really here, eh?” He laughed softly. “Yes, well, that sort of combat will do it to you. Tea?”

I lashed out with my foot at the old man’s tea set but came up short. Something gave way in my shoulder and I shrieked with pain like an animal. I immediately felt embarrassed at crying out.

“Jeremy, Jeremy, listen. Look. You almost spilled the tea there. It’s going to take weeks for your memory to come back. All you need to know right now is that I’m your friend. We’ve trained you and sent you out into combat and now you’re back. No one will find you here.”

I glared at him. I was more scared than before but I found the sound of his voice comforting. My instincts were all I had right now. I didn’t trust him but I did think that he was an ally. I’d never been in a situation like this before.

He stood to leave with the sound of toothpicks being broken, muffled popcorn, and twisting celery.

“I was like you, Jeremy. And you’ll get through this.” He nudged the tea closer. “You better drink this before it gets cold.”

He walked towards the door. Just before he left, he turned back to me.

“We won, you know. We won because of you. No one’ll ever know but I wanted to tell you that.”

He shuffled off down the hall until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I stared at the tea, debating whether to drink any.




tags

Hey there. Another post of mine is up on that awesome daily fiction site, 365tomorrows.com

Hey don't you wish your musical idols could continue to play concerts for another hundred years? Wouldn't you like to go to a Jimmy or Janis concert tomorrow night? Well now you can with the power of cryogenics. Read on.


->CLICK HERE<-



tags

Vancouver’s weather
Is fit for a king because
It reigns all the time



tags

I think that’s it’s somewhat amazing to me
Just how offensive a person can be
When I’m really worried ‘bout how I’m perceived
I look at a bigot and I get relieved
Or when I see someone who’s mentally ill
Shouting a list of who he’d like to kill
The crowds that flow past him all pay him no mind
Completely ignoring his screams and his kind
Suddenly I feel much freer inside
Like my insecurity’s not cut and dried
Like maybe approaching that girl I like
Will not result in my head on a pike
Or when I see someone who’s rude to a server,
A jerk with a woman who doesn’t deserve her,
An ignorant person who picks on the weak,
Belligerent people who spit when they speak,
That’s when I notice that people don’t care.
They suffer these jerks like they’re not even there
I don’t feel jerkish comparatively
And that’s a feeling that liberates me
Now I tell strangers when I like the way
Their appearance appears to be pleasing today
Their coats or their face or their looks or their hair
‘Cause either they’ll like it or they just won’t care
Talking to strangers before made me queasy
But indifferent people make courage so easy
The next time you’re doubting your lines or your patter
Always remember it just doesn’t matter.
If you’re attempting at least to be nice
Regular people won’t even think twice
Feel free to express yourself just as you please
Freedom is yours and those are the keys




tags

I believe that you have an evil version of you in hell already and an angel version of you in heaven. When you die, one of them gets you, is strengthened by your soul, and the other one dies. There is no God or Devil, only good and bad versions of you co-existing in alternate dimensions. You can hear them.

Do they have bad and good versions of themselves, too? Is there a limit? I love the idea of a spectrum with us as the fulcrum, fanning down to the depths of evil and up to the incomprehensible upper limits of holiness. A domino train of deaths working its way up or down the ladder.


tags

My worst fear is that I’ll have an embarrassing death. An inconvenient death. That I’ll die in the audience during a friend’s performance and the whole place with be struck with the tragedy of it, ruining the night. That I’ll die during a performance of my own and while the retelling of it would be dramatic and even amusing, the act itself will be chaotic and horrifying to anyone present. That I’ll die at work and forever scar my co-workers.

But I will probably have no control over where I die.

I realized the other day that there is no shelter from evil. There are manners, there are societal niceties, and there are agreed-upon laws and people who enforce them. There are houses with locks and the belief that evil is outside.

It makes life bearable but it’s a lie.

Lately, I turn to darkness. Not fulldark but trenchward. Like a dolphin going deeper to avoid an oil spill.




tags

White-knuckle millionaires on bobsleds are haunting my dreams. Grizzly-bear run zoos handing out free hugs roam the countryside like circuses from the fifties. Mathematical tornadoes calculate how much of your life is left while you’re busy eating ice cream and feeling guilty about it. Hands are reaching down to help you up. They brush through your hair while you’re texting and walking.

You’re not supposed to name lions. You’re not even supposed to call them lions. They exist and that’s all they are.



tags

We all get a little rain on our sunglasses here. Here in this perpetual vacuum of energy on the west coast. A rainforest that makes us all fail to be punctual. We don’t care if you’re angry unless you’re articulate.

Myself, I’ve been a Vancouver man ever since puberty turned my penis into a boxing glove. I came down from the mountains with eyes the size of calendars. All I wanted was a little whipped cream on my wizard.

Vancouver swallowed me whole in the eighties and now in this new millenium my critical eye has exceeded my talent. I find myself swimming away from the shore.

The thing about most lakes is that you can see the other side. I know this because I’m from the interior. Oceans are too salty for me but they do love a challenge.

I’m going to do laps down here until I figure it out.



tags

I’m an upside-down daddy with shoes on his hands.
And when I ask questions they sound like demands.
It’s less of a power and more of a curse
I always bring last what I should’ve brought first
The craziness isn’t the worst thing I feel
The worst are the super-rare times I feel real
That’s when I see my life plainly and true
And how the plain truth of it lies to me, too
Like I’m a senior with Alzheimer’s brains
Who only remembers his name when it rains
And once a month knows that his wife passed away
Eight years ago on the fifteenth of May
And knows that his daughters are here every week
Cajoling and stroking his mystified cheek
A moment of clearness so cruel in its clarity
A moment made crueler because of its rarity
These are the moments I feel now and then
Thinking of all of my kin and my friends
It’s like a nostalgia but based in the now
A feeling of knowing what happens and how
Like missing the person that sees things so clear
Like I miss the way that I used to live here




tags

Each tulip made of lego calls my name. It’s this fragile garden right here, the one that has no need of water, the one created by children’s hands, that waves in the breeze near my naked feet. And every step hurts like every step does when adult feet are stepping on children’s toys.




tags

This small feeling like I've come through the worst of something.
Like my conciousness is only a thin veneer on a continent.
I go through battles I'm not even aware of.
Huge aspects of my character come to a conclusion
and bubble up to the surface as a passing emotion that runs surprisingly deep.
Call me still waters.





tags

When every human speaks there’s a variety of quiet:
The silence of the one who pulls the strings when there’s a riot.
The quiet of the perpetrator perpetrating theft
The stillness of the smile on the face of the bereft
The secret-keeping victims of the sexual abusers
The overcompensating winners thinking that they’re losers
The woman planning suicide who smiles to her friends.
The man who never protests but who bends and bends and bends.
Communities that cover up a crime to make it seem
Like everything is beautiful and everything’s a dream
Everyday hypocrisy and lies and scams and cons
Happening with cavemen from the stone age to the bronze
All the way to present day and centuries to come
The silences we all keep secret make our voices dumb

A cornucopia of quiet shouting us to sleep
Silences as massive as the ocean depths are deep
Secrets and denial mountains choke the very air
But ‘cause we cannot hear it we can say that it’s not there
All the voices crying out that never say a word
Deafen me and deafen you because they’re never heard.

I don’t care how smart you are. Stupid or collegiate.
My favourite human beings simply cannot keep a secret.
Language lets us hide things but it’s us who has the choice.
The truth can set us free but first we have to use our voice.



tags

Alexander Graham Bell’s wife and mom were deaf.
What will planet Earth sound like when there’s no people left?
MY guess is that it’ll sound like forests in the breeze
‘Cept there’ll be no human ears to hear the falling trees
Animals will root and fight and rut and snore and bleed
Prey will scream and speedy nasty predators will feed
Nature’s sounds (though varied) are all of a common time
There is no need of calendars and no concept of crime
Death is death and life that lives survives by simply living
There are no silent secrets for the taking or the giving.
Not that it’s idyllic. No. It’s brutal in the wild.
It’s the sound I’m referencing. Repetitive and mild
Even though a person might describe the noise as violent
With all the human talking gone, I’d say that it is silent
The silence in a post-apocalyptic world’s air
(or even on an Earth where we were simply never there)
Would be a single kind of sound encompassing the global
A golden uniformity. Eternal, pure, and noble.



tags