1. Illustrated Bible Stories for Children
Morning bright, rise. Go over your lines. Iron your carefully crafted disguise. We'd all like to sing. It's easy to sigh; to sprinkle a handful or plausible lies. Our buildings will rise, poke out our own eyes. Publicly smile and privately frown. A weeping reprise. Please hear my cries; I'd like to pull just this one building down. So turn off the sky. Head in my hands. Night keep me warm. White window-sill. Blinded by heart. Cut my hair short. "Eyeless in Gaza with the slaves at the mill."
2. Diagnosis
I have a headache. I have a sore back. I have a letter I can't send. I have desire, it falters and falls down, it calls you up drunk at three or four a.m. to wonder when...wonderful. All the cheap tricks I tried too hard not to pull. Pulled along or pulled apart. The diagnosis of a foreign frame of heart. I have a story that I'd like to tell you, it's littered with settings and second takes. I have a feeling that hums with the street lights and hides under ice in always frozen lakes. My mistake to make you cringe. Another greeting like a broken creaky hinge to oil and push or pry apart. The diagnosis of a foreign frame of heart. Found a cure for being sure, and, sure as anything, I'll smile for my reckoning.
3. Confessions of a futon-revolutionist.
Held like water in your shaking hands are all the small defeats a day demands. 10-6 or 9-5 trying, dying to survive. Never knowing what survival means. Leave the apartment to buy alcohol. Hang our diplomas on the bathroom wall. Pick at the plaster chipped away, survey some stunning tooth decay, enlist the cat in the impending class-war. Let's lay our bad day down here, dear and make-believe we're strong, or hum some protest song. Like maybe "We Shall Overcome Someday." Overcome the stupid things we say. Say I needed more than this, say I needed one more kiss. We left that light on way too long now. Let's plant a bomb at city-hall and kill an MLA. We'll talk the night away. You call in sick, I'll quit the word-games that I play. I swear I way more than half believe it when I say that somewhere love and justice shine. Cynicism falls asleep. Tyranny talks to itself. Sappy slogans all come true. We forget to feed our fear.
4. None of the above
All night restaurant, North Kildonan. Luke warm coffee tastes like soap. I trace your outline in spilled sugar, killing time and killing hope. This brand new strip mall chews on farmland as we fish for someone to blame. But we communicate in questions, and all our answers sound the same. Under sputtering flourescents, after re-fills are re-filled. Negotiations at a stand-still, spoon and rolling saucer stilled. If you ask how I got so bitter, I'll ask how you got so vain. And all our questions blur together. The answers always sound the same. We can't look at one another. I'll say something thoughtful soon, but I can't listen to the quiet so I hum this mindless tune I stole from some dumb country-rock star. I don't even know his name. It's like my stupid little questions: the answers always sound the same. Tell me why we sound so lame. Why we communicate in questions and all our answers sound the same.
5. Letter of Resignation
Takes a dried up ball-point, lemon juice and water, keeps a diary invisibly, In the kitchen corner of a basement bachelor suite there's a certain search for certainty, you know we'll never see her hands touch her childhood home in photos that she took. It's one more omission from a high school history book; how whole lives get knifed and pushed aside. To whom it may concern...Take a broken bottle. Take a rafter beam. Take a needle and a tarnished spoon. Or just words to kill off one more unheard statement of another dying afternoon. She says she's leaving soon. So so long to ten hour shifts and faking sympathies. Farewell to piles of bills, unpayed utilities. All rolled up and unfurled like a flag. Wake up and pack your bag. To whom it may concern...There's a bus that's leaving half an hour from now. It won't take her where she really wants to go. So she sits there with her luggage at her side. leaving empty stations, leaving empty lives.
6. Leash
Had one of those days when you want to try heroin, drunk driving, some form of soft suicide. Sitting in silence and staring at ceilings or peeling the paint off of things to confide. Teach me to wiggle my ears like that, show me the scar that you got when you fell off your bike. Ask me the questions you never want answers to. We can re-write them however we like. Stop the hardwood floor's lopsided grin. Leave the dirt and dead flowers in a brown coffee. Let your hand melt a hole in the frost. Peer out under a sky that looks just like a shirt I lost. Maybe someday the lies we've led around will crawl under our beds and sleep off the years.
7. Wellington's Wednesdays
The night's a spill, a permanent stain; the city soaks in silence, salt and dirty snow. A blue glow from the tv again, the curtains never open, faces never show. And every time a light is turned on there's a light that's turned off somewhere. For every failing feeling that's lost there's a perfest cost, there's a debt you can't share. And every night they play the same song to the same offbeat believers. And everyone is singing along wearing blueblack eyes, wearing dead men's neck-ties. Clocks stopped at the corner of Albert will show your last bus left an hour ago, so stumble down the stairs again, pretend you're not to proud to understand and still know when your voice cuts through the crowd that lonely people talk too loud. Numbers on a washroom stall. There's always more then one last call calling you.
8. The last last one
You always stole all my last words. Here's no exception then, one more for me to send. And nothing happens in the end. I'm thinking of you less, more concerned... and more is less, I guess it doesn't matter now. Maybe we'll never go insane. You always said we would, sometimes I wished we could with you lying naked in the rain and singing Boney M, cutting down all our old friends. I talk to them again now. So here's the last one I have left. We fell a little deep, I watched you fall asleep. And nothing happens in the end, but I remember when I could remember when. Seems like a long time ago.
9. Greatest Hits Collection
Knock so I'll know you're still there, half listening, interpreting the air. Full of failing foreign tongue, my dialect of stammer come undone. I've got these threads of you and I that I use to tie my doubts down, and from four times-zones away, still yesterday, still talking to the past: from the front seat of your car, gravel road and falling, falling hands and falling star. Start the engine up. I'd like a new identity. A pseudonym. Some plastic surgery. Or just a way to disappear. Someone to write me out of here. I hear you hum an unfamiliar song. Thought maybe you would come along. Perhaps you'd like to see some piece of this; my new philosophy is that a crappy tape deck somewhere plays a greatest hits collection of strange and tender moments, lost, stranded, and forgotten. I'll meet you there. (Something I forgot to say: can't find a way to make this mark more clear. So crack your skull before you weep, and I'll try to keep some part of me sincere.)
10. Sounds familiar
We emerged from youth all wide-eyed like the rest. Shedding skin faster than skin can grow, and armed with hammers, feathers, blunt knives: words, to meet and to define and to... but you must know the same games that we played in dirt, in dusty school yards has found a higher pitch and broader scale than we feared possible, and someone must be picked last, and one must bruise and one must fail. And that still twitching bird was so deceived by a window, so we eulogized fondly, we dug deep and threw its elegant plumage and frantic black eyes in a hole, and rushed out to kill something new, so we could bury that too. The first chapters of lives almost made us give up altogether. Pushed towards tired forms of self immolation that seemed so original. I must, we must never stop watching the sky with our hands in our pockets, stop peering in windows when we know doors are shut. Stop yelling small stories and bad jokes and sorrows, and my voice will scratch to yell many more, but before I spill the things I mean to hide away, or gouge my eyes with platitudes of sentiment, I'll drown the urge for permanence and certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement.
11. Anchorless
They called here to tell me that you're finally dying, through a veil of childish cries. Southern Manitoba prairie's pulling at the pant leg of your bad disguise. So why were you so anchorless? Shoebox full of photos; found a grainy mirror. Sunken cheeks and slender hands. Grocery lists and carbon-copied letters offer silence for my small demands. Hey how'd you get so anchorless? Got an armchair from your family home. Got your P.G. Wodehouse novels, and your telephone. Got your plates and stainless steel. Got that way of never saying what you really feel: so anchorless. A boat abandoned in some backyard. Anchorless in the small town that you lived and died in.
12. Fallow
Wait until the day says it's closing, and public is put away. Write by the light of a pay phone your list of "I meant to say". Like "Winter comes too soon", or "Radiators hum out of tune". Out under the Disraeli, with rusty train track ties, we'll carve new streets and sidewalks, a city for small lives, and say that we'll stay for one more year. Wait near the end of September. Wait for some stars to show. Try so hard not to remember what all empty playgrounds know: that sympathy is cruel. Reluctant jester or simpering fool. But six feet off the highway, our bare legs stung with wheat, we'll dig a hole and bury all we could not defeat, and say that we'll stay for one more year. Bend to tie a shoelace, or bend against your fear, and say that you'll stay for one more year. With so much left to seek, the lease runs out next week.
E-mail us if you have any questions
