A single eyed albino man blinks in distance at the spectacle, mistaked for far sighted winking. Baby shaven head burnt in slanted summer sun. Cherry topped like sight unseen.
Silver fox trots past, Globe and Mail tightly tucked in the crux. I think he was bill bisset – the front page letters cut and paste in headlines wayward: “Manytoba Dike Beach Proposed; One Dyke Beached”

Sucker punch the sharp tongued beggar, speaking in imperatives, and hungry eyed at sight of cigarettes, as they’re ground and shriveled in the rocky palm of his assailant.

“I like this weather, you know, I like it, it’s better weather than we’ll have in June – too hot, you know, it’ll get too hot.”
pity nods, pithy laughter from backstrange miestro, barely directing, rather subjecting his audience to the burden of a reality, far from spectacular.

“I used to work in Texas, right on the Alamo. In Dallas it would get hot, out on the Alamo. With the Indians.”

“But that was the seventies,” he breathes stories like smoking embers, dying in the good light.

“Oh yaahhh,” – her response could be written like a spent sigh of unlatched sensation.
But I am no false front house, you see, hanging on his every word, and wondering at the listening potential of much younger ears set upon this sight sore man.

“You’re looking beautiful today,” he jingles, turned. Unthreatening, his quips are hardly overgrown on hollow ears.

Archie moves to the front, sits in the sun and rambles with Dylan’s shadow, so much more a sinewed spider of a man than we remember in our yesterdays. He wraps his books in plastic bags, he wrapped them before the great debate on plastic. It keeps them from the rain. Today it rains everyday – tomorrow it may be less.
Talking about Toronto – they agree that Vancouver is a good city, though one is nodding purely out of blithely minded patronage.

“Forty years in Toronto – I’ve had enough of Toronto, HA ha HA – but I made good money, I made fifty thousand dollars a year.”
A victim, he is the working man.

Wrap my legs around your still lipped mind. Wrap my lefts around your rights. Up and gone.

Daniel Good and Daniel Bad come calling every day, barefoot in the garden of Dwayne Smith. Culver City midnights, rounded in halfmooned light, which skirts across the bays of other places, more fortunate in their whereabouts.

Twist my hips and break my salted quips of their bold melancholy. Rusty, hinging geometrics, so unwilling in bent light. I ache with the pressure shifts. My palms are white and drawn – I am a ghost of hands.

“She sounds like she’s going to be a lot of headfucking and not very much of the other kind.” – her cynicism is much appreciated, along long distance lines.

Fumbling among buttons and jagged teeth – everybody wants something for nothing. Something for the unknowns.

She props herself up on one elbow, looks into his face but he is giving nothing away. Staccato beats of waylaid hearts and the incessant slip of “I don’t know yous” beneath the hazed layers of a flooded mind. Adrown in questions sifting through the sheets in search of something more familiar than mere motion.

Netted glances – oh what am I to you, tell me to myself. We know so little and we know little love, only the plays of unfettered seduction. No longer lay lurking, we are clear in our intention. He slips an arm around her waist as she plays to dreams, but he has nightmares in her bed.

“Perhaps it’s the low ceilings.”

She is claustrophobic in this room thick with things unsaid, and left speechless in wake. But at least there are the gentle cracks of breaking light to remind each of the ease that outside offers. Until, however, there is only the revelation of face and hands, which darkness left obscured.

He is lightly skinned and softer in slanted day. She calls the covers up beneath her arms, revealing a long line of back like they do in the movies, though she is ever uneasy, anticipating and mispredicting their next moves. Pulling his sweater over his head he is no longer bare chested – he gazes at remnants of herself, pieced across grey walls and remains silent, slowly stepping and backbending back over the bed in a fallen bridge.

“What are you thinking?” she asks, falsely playful.
“I’m thinking about my nightmares.”

She is abashed, and in thoughtful retrospect wishes she had pried, though instead she remains splayed on the surface in a state of anticipated rejection – skirting the current. Fear has swelled her tongue, lost loves choking back her words.

He kisses her on the forehead, the tenderest of places, reserved for the Lost Boys.

Beating woollen brethren I see your pupils bespectacled and grown to deep black depths
a figure in the face between us blinks
back my face
so that we may never be close
my glass
eyed
guppy.
I am wet with salted excretions and colour in places uncooth

Burning in red clumsiness you spurn me like a racist
my long haired line of lovers
what has man made of you
what has you
o    u

we fuck frantically. badly.
your skin a rippled pool, I run a finger down a ridged back
cannot crawl fast enough away.
I want to pull your hair and bite your toes to see if you’re still here.

Oh cross and muddled tome – the ashen pages slowly made invisible
the oils
the thick
scarlet
bind.
de-visibling and mutilating the minds of my generation
do not covet the final puff, the final static note
the final looming moment of non-existence not to be
before identities are seized before us
and deposited by complex rhythms of the benignly illogical
to the in-between of day or night or time or space or love or hate
Sort me sort you
describe my life to me, display our life to you

Oh care-less love, lost -
you are only an unjust mirage of pixels.

dwayne smith spins into yesterday’s Seymour Savage,
Savage love, Seymour strokes his cat
who’s nearly bald
wonders if maybe he should get a daschund
for obvious reasons
maybe he’s fat, he wonders
for obvious reasons
his friends wonder if he’s a danger to himself
he never bred, you know
and his spice cake turns the noses of both teams
- a mental bender for the brave young man walking his weiner dog on Davie, thinking it     was dead today
but there were still symbolic violences
muffled by the bell jar
in the City of Glass

They hypothesize about the role of control cast by the status of power relations
we are evolving out of relations
He wants her for her smoking potential
While Seymour wafts the odors of his gingerbread house, up and down the rainbowed lanes
Strong jawed confidences will pry her from
pry her from her better minded grips
but she’s a bit of a slut today
not very much of a grown up.

Living is a game of missed nitrogens.
Splicing, Cleaving, heaving specimens of disease and control operating from the lack
picturing explicit incision before inevitable rebuke by the anti-body faction that breaks     against its other side

Touch: to bring one’s hand, or another part of one’s body into contact with.
if my science rebukes touch, then touch is not a part of science
the bad chemicals in my brain refuse touch, and I am left
gapped in lack -

My heart is a drum machine, while my mind has lost all rhythm,
I am playing tricks on both of us.

Strips of sun flicker over baseball caps and unhid hairs
softer when licked in light
and playing off the dropped consonants of a Canadian dialectic
- dialogic
the dulled logic of tongues worked hard of their edges
hewn to speak to anyone, uninhibited-like

Begin with obituaries, eeking into missing persons, misgivings,
to unwanted disapproval of the once-had knowns

(she wanted me to watch her kids, watch em all day and I don’t know what she was doin – some said they saw her, you know, like with some guys, men

keeping busy? keeping busy keeping busy
- the work, and lilting tones of subtle gratefulness, having found the fulcrum of a balanced life

(how much you work? bout 3 days, few hours each sluuuuurchh
yeah I just took a week off for mah back, coulda taken 2 but I wanted to get back,
yeh know, coulda taken 2
evrybody counts.

go to the mall
- private spaces masked as public meeting place
in all sorts of fluorescence

vigorously sucking his slushy
an acid haze of colour

(why haven’t ya been to the mall lately? where ya been where ya been where
ya
been?

slipped days and attentions wander
in between these system cracks we look out of one another
and negate the stance of Other

Still, there is the hot spice of you left on my breath,

But I ate you.

Take in tongue your tip
and suck from it the last, sweet strands of cadence
the grip of life once forced upon a backless letter
who writhed and whommed and WHOAMED beneath the frantic dance of wordly hand
they will not be known to the nameless

I let the word roll like leaden log about my mouth
right before the gap
before being birched by its dead bark
dead-dog barks that mar conscious givings ins as
not good enoughs

take a snuff- out
and listlessly lightless

I am infected by pronouns – infected by the intersection of eyes and me
perpendicular and red at the ends
Should I be referring to myself in third person figure if my identity remains foreign by fable?

I am an otherness machine – all around there is difference
I hear manic laughter, vice, elation and relate impossibly
Iam foreign – I feel impelled to watch my step, impaled by pace

Old acquaintances compel sadness – I drip back into well worn gutters
the rainy season,
seasonally two dimension and condensing upon the windows of a cracked hatchback sold when I was in a midst of dream and dragon

Beating woolen breathren I see your pupils bespectacled and grown to deep black depths
a figure in the face between us blinks
back my face
so that we may never be close, my glass
I’d
guppy.
burning in coloured clumsiness you spurn me like a racist
my long haired line of lovers
what has man made of you
what has you
o
and u

o cross and muddled tome – you have made a coccult of me.
the ashen pages slowly made de-visible
the oils
the thick
scarlet
bind
sinvisibling and maiming the minds of my genderation
do not covet the final puff, the final static note
the final looming moment of non-existence nottobe
before identities are seized before us
and deposited by complex rhythms benignly illogical
(the heart is a drum machine)
to the in between of day or night or time or space or love or hate

Sort me sort you
describe my life to me
oh careless love-lost

Strips of sun flicker over baseball caps and unhid hairs
softer when licked in light
and playing off the dropped consonants of a Canadian dialectic
- dialogic
the dulled logic of tongue in cheek, worked hard of its edges
and hewn to speak to anyone, anywhere, uninhibited in the like
Begin with obituaries, eeking into missing persons,
misgivings to disprovals of once-had-knows
keeping busy? keeping busy keeping busy
go to the mall
- private spaces masked as public meeting places
arrowed in fluorescents
vigorously sucking his slurpee
an acid haze of colour
why haven’t you been to the mall today? the mall today
slipped days and attentions wander

Mince your words my dear
and publish the count front paged and central to your discussion
the mouth is a muscle so tame your tender tongues, as there is nobody bowed to your balless poetries of disembodied bawd

Operational Binaries of Opposing Trends
(and we roll our snouts cross the ground)
clawed companies of Unequal Proportions and Distorted Normalacies

Where in jesus went the dream? can we mind this mindless blather of unsubconscious matter?
 you can’t sell your dreams to me – espouse the exchange value and extort my invigorated exertion
(I won’t blister my tips to touch ends with your leprechauns!)

Grey monoliths loom,
hone the grind of the monorail –
the mon
ot
o
nous
K – AR – EEEEL – EECH
(ka-blumps the freak powered martyr who reels against this time induced, timeless servitude -
it’s post-cycle, post-circle, post-watching your watch hands)