2D Glasses

Someone had gotten there before me
and left their mark.
Her skin, owned not worn,
projects a burlesque outline
not unlike
the others,
Shelby like a hurricane
descended
with an awkward sign
that said
“First of the night”
and to those who
would label
me as virtuous as
Armstrong or Polo
I can only say
that unexplored lands
have never been
so beneficial –
so human.
So intimate.
The barren topography
of a Winnipeg winter
replaced by the subtly
of sin
and the artificial openness
paid for by capitalism.
A man shouldn’t laugh
at this
person –
stripped as she was –
but one couldn’t
ignore the juxtaposition.
The interplay
of nineties music
and my hands being
overly forward.
She asked why I took my glasses
off.
“To see you”
So it is. That the eyes see
but the body knows.

The Very Serious Game

A rose flattened into math
under the weight of a book on Ingres.
All the pretension of depth and curve
shown to be illusion
by a French master’s authentic love of deception.
Her petals, hips, and stem
all numbers determined by logic
no matter how wild, majestic, and unpredictable
their beauty.

Her history from seed, to plant, to flower,
to a cut beyond death and into a vase
can be viewed as destiny or chaos.
The words you water her with determine
how you will see her. Why this one, of the dozen
bundled at the foot of a coffin.
Babies breathing in soft white bubbles
singing, if not commanding you into the rocks.

The meaning of the world,
is the separation of wish and fact.
A flat rose. A dark smudge
on a yellow book. A mouthful of dirt.

On the Edge of the Flat Earth

June 8th, 2018

We pulled our lawn chairs close together
onto the flexure of the world
and into the hanging light, that often falls
at the same time of day as the failing of our beer supply,
whispered our deepest concerns.
A lot of people die without knowing anything truly happy.
A lot of people die without knowing anything.
A lot of people die without.

A lot of people die.

Occum’s flattened earth is taut, and doesn’t give.
Where do rivers go if they don’t run in circles?
When they come to the edge of an unfolded map
do they fall into wine-dark space? Or rise above, finally relinquished
from the gravity of indecision. This space between
spaces is so thin, and haunting. Is it worse to be angry in a bad place,
or lonely in a beautiful place?

Larry Walters knows. Our last beer is for him.
Poured into the abyss, floating ever upward
above the mountains, passed the lanterns that
hang from an antique bronze cloche
and into heaven where he sits with St. Anthony
outside the pearly gates. They kill time. Talk about travel.
Food. Wine. Tattoos. But they don’t go in. They never go in.

Flying/falling/Failing/defying

Everyone wants to fly.
Not as many by way of cannon fire.
As a child I had the pleasure
of seeing an unemployed batman
take to the sky. Not as grim crime fighter
but half-clown satyr. Knowing
only too late the man who dawned
the cape was desperate to feed his family
after falling from grace like a half-known satire
about Icaris. How the spotlight tanned the skin
pulling at the edge of a proud smile – his mask slightly askew.
A pause. Perfect posture. Then a bow. More
a hero in that moment then the imagination
of countless children. Myself included.
Whoosh. Wham. That was our batman.

 

Summer 2017

For the soul, it is not unlike putting on
an ill-fitting wet bathing suit.
Admittedly, avoiding nudity is important
but there has never been something more uncomfortable.
For a time it was fashionable to be glib
about politicians, but not for survival
not as a defacto principle of disbelief.
Now, opinions are forced like chubby thighs
against wet synthetics over-spilling awkwardly
from what should otherwise not be spectacle
or sport. Graceless, not unlike distasteful comments
made to shun and exclude. I just want to swim.
The throbbing undulation of water drowns this out
and relaxes the demand of gravity.
Yet, here we are in the desert with pool toys
and ill-fitting wet bathing suits expecting
something other than discomfort.

End of Business

Addicted to checking things off,
the list was a hangman’s prerogative
at the whim of her hungry highlighting.
Sufficiently succinct to the point of practical
purposelessness I’m perpetually surprised not to find paradox
at the end. Turtles composed of “check thing off list”
repeating all the way down
like the tyrannical march of time she meant to save.
Told, if not taught, to do this she can’t find
the cure in the disease. End of business only means
another list. One for you. One for me.
For me never standing out makes
the highlighter seem like a head rub.
A guess that is what they mean
when they say “those two deserve each other”.

Mukbang

It occurred in the middle of a long satisfied slurp
A moaning Lisa’s smile, bent to form a hole
where pan friend noddles dance like charmed snakes.
Enigmatic – underminingly coy – enough to know
that these aren’t fakes and that the reduced sodium
soy isn’t magnetic – but staining. Pollock in motion
peeling back shrink wrap while adolescents across the ocean
come of age under harsh florescence. Eyes straining
but pragmatic, try to digest where it all goes.

Nobody asks Marcel. But he knows.

On the subject, the Sublime is the awe of
being confronted with the mundanely normal
becoming grotesquely exaggerated. She bends
like Dali’s mustache for the countless thumbs
of the unknown connected. And as time
extends its red march, the maw slows,
and it occurs at the end of a long satisfied burp.

#,#,#

Some hear the pound, pound, pounding
of their heart confirming their life.
Such metaphors sting the rickety
piping of a noble 17th century colonial
trying to push against a nighttime
decline. The uneven hobble
of expanding warmth frightening children
in the cacophonous choir of inflexible
wood frame structure straining the wind.
Howl. Whistle. Crack. These words
have no place in our understanding of the heart.
Instead these blunt aggressions –
thump, beat, and pound. That is what meat does,
isn’t it? So name it this way. But when the twilight
of the age of meat dawns, don’t come to this haunted
colonial and cry tragedy against the gentle tyranny
of a ceaseless whirring fan. Against its coldness.
Against its calculations.

Meditations on the Age

Caught longing for a more complex time
I was quickly reminded such moods were anathema.
Worthy of prescription.
Punished by conscription
Into a war of pretending to be something easily defined.
What happened to renaissance men
battling until exhaustion just to find
one person to provide succor against
the tide of mediocrity, and in that initial rivalry
finally reclining in the tender grasp of friendship.
In this age, we are the informed
but ultimately uninspiring
participants in labeling and categorizing endless
mundanity. It is not that bad. But that is perhaps the worse part.
In all the cold barren scarred tundra faces
that slump there is something clean.
Something sterile and safe.
Something desirable about a time whose only virtue
is how nice it all is. The word every person lands on
when they can’t say anything else.
It somehow hangs on the vaguest definition of compliment
but in a way that only serves to undermine
the complete lack of qualities in our frozen landscape.
A nice day for a nice people. A nice age.

Mistaken Identities

Rewind to find
a start to which we affix
this place – where we are who.
Hope it sticks.

The body is only part of us
if we love or hate it.
Otherwise no – it cannot be our who.
Hope we can sate it.

The me that is free
is too good to not be true.
But the plant that grows has roots.
Hope its you.