a city visible but un-scene

blow a kiss and stow your hiss away, i won't bite anymore. 'cause it's saturday night prayers and sunday morning lights. and now i'm dumb from this plastic crap riff-raff shit that drowns my steps and thoughts. and now i'm getting hot. i'm so hard to turn off. a quiet "can't," a little lie, the riot tents, the longest lines. i need you to need me more than you need this. i've seen you less greedy before. can't you leave it alone? i should have known. walking off, feet rotting the dirt. i'll remember, i'm just meant for fucking off, feet caught in the hurt. i'll remember, i'm just meant for following the crowd, swallowing my proud anger and your refusal to apologize. if you still do i'll call it nice instead of off. that's the only way you blow me anyway. but after all this is done, who would you rather be? the loner or the one bemoaned? oh, seriously. you're gonna make mistakes, you know. eventually. shake your hips. take your lips back, they're not mine anymore. now it's saturday night dares and sunday morning slights. and now that all this is done, who would you rather be? the beater or the broken-boned? be serious, baby. you've gone and made a mistake now. pretend you see. and come on, baby, talk to me: after all of this is gone, who would you rather be? the seagulls, or the ocean foam?

a long time coming

It was late at night. The hour at which taxis alone, taxis and stragglers, and early early-morning wakebirds mistakebirds, ride the streets. Mostly just taxis.

Character was listless relentless lackluster all over some stupid parkbench, tackling his fear of the dark by playing into its hands. Outside dark was easier to deal with than inside dark, in any case. He drifted in and out of being tired, watching the flicking lights slide by. 485-8585. There's always someone who needs to get somewhere, somewhere. He zigged/zagged through markets and demands bullshit. Gravity was bearish. He was a blow-up float in his own tickertape parade. 7 3/4. 7 1/2. Somewhere in there was his apartment. His concept of home was so fractured nowadays. The costs rose, slowly, steadily, like taxi meters. His wallet was dead and stuffed with empty. He hummed

i did my best, it wasn't much.
i couldn't feel, so i learned to touch.

Across the street, the lamppost bathed him in a sickly light. i've told the truth, i didn't come all this way to fool you. Somehow, there must have been a gap between the glass and the metal,
yeah even though it all went wrong, i'll stand right here before the lord of Song, flies had obviously gotten in.

Their dead corpses, wings and not much else, of course he thought, who needs rationality when you can fly, perhaps this is the logic behind the non-invention of flying cars, had pooled together into a crocodilian sort of face. It shed no tears but light.

Oh to be so great. A long thin metal tail, and jaws composed of decaying mandibles. He was sweaty. with nothing on my lips but hallelujah.

He was in the mood, he realized, for something. Were he but a newcomer to this town, he shuffled, he might ask a taxi driver to take him, "downtown, where all the action is at" or some such nonsense but he wasn't really smart enough to play that dumb. Thoughts fluttered at him like moths, clustering and flustering his naked, cluttered, random body. As they alit, wings aflitter, they fried. His rashness stood out against the darkness and to it they came. He wanted eightballs, highballs, speedballs, powerballs. He wanted handholding maintenant. Harder better faster stronger. He started singing again, getting up and measuredly falling eastwards, though how quickly he could not tell. you say i took the name in vain. i don't even know then name, but if i did, well, really, what's it to you?

there's a blaze of light in ever word, he gasped for breath, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah.

In earlier years he might have felt sorry for the crocodile-mouth dead flies, but this was before he moved into the apartment. This was, he supposed, one of the pitfalls of shopping for a place, it's difficult to encounter all the possible problems that might arise living somewhere in a quarter-hour. One such possible problem was the existence of very large houseflies. He no longer trusted dark spots unless he was wearing his glasses. Frequently they would start to move. They were easy enough to kill; their continued existence brought out a sort of animal rage in the roommates, and a repeated banging of something papery, light and yet — they didn't get the newspaper, which Character sometimes regretted during scrambles to find appropriate weaponry, although the BestBuy flyers that always seemed to clog up their mailbox made decent enough substitutes — heavy and worthless enough to use for fly-killing, against a wall. There was always blood. So far as they could tell the flies did not bite or sting but they did bleed. Parts of Harry knew this was only to make the roommates feel guilty for their dirty deeds. The blood raised them up, made them human. Unsurprising, then, that they were so maddening in their refusal to disappear entirely. And so whack whack whack whack you goddamn motherfucker whack the roommates lost their sympathy for various families of Insectidae — not that they were particularly fond of them to begin with, of course.

And like this, wholly unsteadily, he made his way across the fourfivesix a.m. streets, as grey as the pavement he walked and twice as cracked. He was looking for a fix.

Overhead, the sun unfurled, heavenly, westward, though, how quickly, he could not tell.

the fighting temeraire

i'm prince rainiest the third. in a rinse-rain he kissed the word "tomorrow" and the number "11." his sorrow became dumber and leaden and fell away by pieces. until a day when she says "stop," keep going. it's the only way to stay sane these days; drops keep growing and plowing their way down my "please" face. they form a crown around my shoes, a smattering of "whatsamatter, kid?," a worn-up down that surrounds my dues, and splattering an "i don't matter" king. but i'm just prince rainiest the third. to evince pain he just demurred and turned his face away. no yearnings came today, he'll have to wait 'til tomorrow at eleven and borrow a mask, and a ring, and a throne, and some grace for a task where he'll sing for a bone and his place and the key to the royal coffer for he can't take his thoughts up off her. for a kiss he'll dismiss all of his manservants. he'll lean in with a grin and a face that's nervous and hope that she'll acquiesce to float and feel happiness.

lo-fi

like a steamship with only words to live, we gobble, gargle and then burn the midnight oil to piss. we're kept hanging on by pocketbook mistakes. come home to bed to find a pick-locket just took the drapes. so we keep drumming, waiting for whatever's coming and the last thing that gets summoned is the always heat of the moment. can you tell me why i feel so hoarse? i can't stop ponying up tears from the lint-encrusted depths of my eyes. can you tell me why i feel no remorse? i want to love 'em and leave 'em but my throat always gets stuck on goodbyes. the water never washes anything away. the rust just keeps building up. and i never sleep either, at least not until you're away. the lust is all that's keeping us together in my mind. i know it's ill-defined through the haze that cloaks my eyes but i could have sworn i saw a dagger in your alibis. you think you look good while smoking, and i look good in mirrors. you are my queen but i am no king, and (no jest) i fucking revere us.

marshmallow bananas

it's high time for high tide to hogtie the tongue-timed. she chimed in but i couldn't hear her over the rhyme din and the leak spin; i couldn't get near her. it was a weak win. a pause. did you mean this? a cause? please. have you seen a kiss romantic as that? slow-dancing, is that what i think it is? not what i think of this, but what this thinks of me. abet this sick story. we want to vanish to venice, see how deep the seine is. i wanted to be an actor; went through life actin' it, but if the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the mouth is the door and i've got a foot in it, and i'm about to swallow it whole. i'll take a long walk with some short-sighted peers. the last man to yell "abort!" died in fear. these are rough times for tough guys around here. in a town where fluff flies you'd best believe huff lies around here. my ears are ringing off the hook. we'll make this thing by the book or by crook. we want to vanish to venice, see how deep the seine is by the book or by crook. not what this thinks of me, but what i think of this. wanna bet? this is for me. i know it is. fuck every prick history. i know this is for me.

writing childhood hockey again

Character was in the hallway, when Harry emerged eventually, drawing patterns on the wall. Not in or obtrusively. At ankle level. Little black lines here and there. It was almost cute. He was reminiscing about his childhood. He'd grown up in a bad neighbourhood. Riding his bike, training-wheels-less, through sidewalk cracks and dogshit, dodging ghetto gepettoes and drugs that he hadn't at the time realized were there. I don't think he realized, back then, the importance of any of it. He was just being, in that way children are. The poverty was just life. It never really affected him. Then his parents moved a little to the north. The mean streets of Westmount were just a wholly different type of cutthroat. Old blood, old money. He didn't believe in ghosts, not then not now, holy or otherwise, although he did like them conceptually and in songtitles when they meant memories and forgotten feelings, trading places like fading faces, but Westmount was definitely a ghost township if ever there was one. The façades. Oh god, the façades. They were everywhere; brick, make-up, chequebook, fender, fuck fuck fuck. Everything. The smiles were wanton and rampant and everyone was up to his neck in self-righteousness. He made it through, though. His out had been hockey. He hadn't responded to any ropings-in, any accusatory, finger-pointing posters. I want YOU to waste your youth skating in circles. No, he'd seen another poster entirely. Tight fingers sink gunslingers. Dead or alive, he wanted to be a goalie.

He'd skated down, I guess, between the pipes. There was no time to tap any remorse code messages on the red steel, his mom had put the pads on the wrong legs at first and had had to go through them, strap by aching strap, loosening, removing, and then redoing. He'd barely made it out on time. He probably stopped the first shot he faced, and the second, and maybe the third and fourth and fifth. He probably let a few in but came out of it feeling that kind of kiddy giddy high that creates behavioural patterns. And voilà: he spent a lot of his youth skating in circles around the defensive zone face-off dots, waiting for something, anything, to come his way. A metaphor, if you will, for his problems later on in life. There was never enough adversity for his tastes. You figure after a while someone like that's bound to do something stupid like race an oncoming forward to the puck at the blueline. And whether or not he makes it there first, and whether or not he sprawls the right way and miraculously knocks the puck away, and whether or not the forward misses the net anyway, he decides to try it again, maybe. Maybe. It happens.

a few paragraphs

They had stopped getting the newspaper a month or two earlier. Current events weighed on Character. The cost weighed on Antimony’s wallet. Harry never read them enough to even take them lightly. A silent consensus (of sorts; as you might have guessed, this was the only kind of consensus the three ever arrived at) was reached. It stopped coming. They found new ways to occupy their mornings.

Harry slept in more. Character worried more. Antimony went in to school earlier. They were an odd company, the id, the ego and the alter ego. A sittragicom of sorts. None of them had the balls or the time to write a pilot episode, though. Character had half-heartedly tried to make a pilot light joke once or twice, but neither of his roommates had laughed. It happens.

This particular avant-meridian caught the trio sleepily and solemnly unaware of a terrorist attack that had gone on in some far-off corner of the western world the night before. The mourning and patriotism were just rearing their geary heads. There was a television, I suppose, if you could call it that. The only thing they saw on it was dust, and not from very far away, either, so the roots, mixed-dead-language, were both shallow and meaningless here. The radio, too, was silent. They were cut off from the world, awash in an island of silence, lies and liaisons with telescopes and stargazer lilies. They did not function like normal people.

In this spirit of abnormalcy, Antimony went jogging. Whenever he went off wandering and started wondering his mind would go money laundering. His thoughts were easily the most valuable ones the apartment produced. He had a career ahead of him. They lived in Montreal, under the shadow of the very summit of veracity, but he had better places to go. Truth concerned him only so much as it could be used as a means to an end. And so he was a friend to the fiends and did nothing to curb cocaine use. He let the grunge build up when it suited him. And when it didn't, he went jogging. He reminisced, from under his jetset black hair, about Character. A younger, fresher-laced, straighter-faced Character.

As fans tie fantasies, like Hermesian wings, to the ankles of their heroes, so, in his blundering, did this Character tear asunder the sundry tundra of his hundred hungry minds. The stress of his teen years was too much to bare his skinny hips and awkward ribs to the world. His pregnant, penitent, solemnly raging desires went unnoticed. In stations of the metro, in grocery store checkout lines, he was cloistered up inside. His dry split lips spilt no tales, his effusive veins moaned in vain. His walls were unbreakable. He was a fortress, constantly under siege. From the inside. I sincerely wish it had been resolved in a battle. The Battle of Stalingrad rather than Leningrad. I don't know. For his sake — he loves grandeur and artifice — it should have been a crack bang powhatan pow-wow. An explosion of feathers and anti-aircraft guns. Takka takka takka tik tik tik takka takka. Drums and the most intense high you ever hat. It sort of diffused. Like a crowd in a lobby somewhere. The agonizing slowness would have killed him if the siege hadn't starved him, fractionally, to death already. It happens. Noms de plume are too easy to come by these days, anyway, to say nothing of the guns of the never home. Maybe it had been for the better. But he had changed, he had changed, slowly, impurely, he came into his shaky own.

This exercise-as-catharsis conception was not unique to the tallest of the three. Character had a punching bag in his room. As they lived in an apartment, it was not bolted to the ceiling, but lay on the floor in a corner. Every now and then, in fits of rage and self-hatred, he would beat his impertinent and unimportant fists against it uselessly and collapse, panting, on top of it, the way he might ride a pummel-horse, chest heaving and galloping, legs abandoned to the breeze behind him, arms wrapped around a head no doubt left in someone's bed somewhere. In French class once he had meditated on the irony of the horse's head in the capo's bed. Maybe an alternate universe culture mob boss would receive the heart. The head was pretty useless anyway. All that came of it were thoughts and coughs and no days off.

For his part, Harry walked the length of NDG nights, bathed in calmly neon lights. Nocturning of tables meant nothing anymore. The night was practically as bright as the day. Modernity, the future, had, like it did in so many situations, blurred the line between black and white. Defibrillators and such. Inter-racial couples. Ha. He paced like a clock, like a ticking time bomb that will never ever explode through crackedpavement streets and immigrant apartment complexes, rife with inferiorities and gods. He saw no one, and was seen by fewer still.

it takes a planet of billions to hold us back

bare hands and naked eyes, my pickup lines are really compact. broken glass and raking sighs, my fuck-up fines are chilly and cracked. i'm axing my fears away as fast as i can hit 'em. you're taxing your "heres" and may's as slow as a quicksand victim. i put the online in nonlinear. you put the "i'm fine" in "not this, dear." but we're so good at talking it out. sad candles, flames and steam. in the hood and stalking with clout, mad handles, game, and a gleam in my grills. end my ills, s'il te plait. got hell to play, a mile left to race, but a smile on my face. i'm a wind and i'm crushing. you won't rescind but we're not rushing. i'm a misanthrope, you're a liberal. i'll try to kiss and rope you in. pivotal lines go unheard. i'll sit and wait and watch our minds intertwine and grow a cure.

cut the fuck up

still stuck in still hives, drowning in your dust moats. ill-will fucking still cries, hounding friends in rust coats. the wind winds through these codex passages. i'm moving on to better and stronger things. the sand sings. you need no ex-pats in this. absence makes the heart go wandering. had enough of this shit-taking, bit of hit-or-mistaken. cry and the world laughs at you, laugh and you laugh alone. die and cenotaphs laugh too, pass on? you'll have to groan and shudder like the cold mettle i know you don't possess. sinking in the north-atlantic. hands, upper, break the "i'll settle." i know you're in distress, but i can't stop being shy and frantic. don't acknowledge me, i don't need apologies. i'll keep up my never-ending runs. please don't start my lips from coming undone. and now you see him, now you don't want to. how museums turned from a yawn to a blast to a wreck, titanic: hold fast to my neck, don't panic. it's women and children first, and you're both of. keep winning and you'll be cursed. please don't ghost us.

Pirouette

The newspapers were right: I'm going to drink myself to death tonight. Wait, stop, back up. I just caught myself taking myself seriously again. Weight drops, facts, loves. Eyes. Lust, not myself, was faking nice well. Seriously? Again? I'm shocked and a pallbearer. It's locked in: a call fearer. I don't want to hear the news. Shut myself back in with a tear and a bruise in a shallow place, wearing away at this callow face. So what if I'm clichéd? Let's call this heart a three of spades and start digging me up. Send a kiss through the mail and keep on rigging me luck. Knowing this, I won't bail but I may stop to waste my hunch money. Something about the knows kept the launch runny, but on this jaunt through Hell, I'll still want to taste your smell. There're only a million ways to say "Better to burn out than fade away." I'm not the one from your dreams: things are just the way the seams tear me an opening. You spared me the jokes and things.

manus haec inimica tyrannis

how many slaves did you enlist to build this wall? too scared to deal with whatever free-for-all? berlin has got shit on my feelings. how many generations until it falls? how could you ever love a horde like the mongols? i can see you through the brickwork, and i'm trying so goddamn hard to make this thick jerk seem convincing despite the joy i take in wincing. keep hiding among the parapets, we'll see how corrupt power gets when i make a move to invade lands for which you prayed. we're both haunted; neither of us wants this.

like the english patient, but more breakdowns

i swear the sigh of relief you heard wasn't from my lips. mine, sure, but not mine, and in case you're wondering what gives, i apologize for the two-facedness and the saying what you want to hear. it's just that to see you trace it, miss, as far as warmth i've got naught to fear. i just wish going to bed alone wasn't set in stone. and it's you, doctor, i presume and we met while traveling through my room. it's a jungle in here, but darling, so long as you don't tumble, don't fear. i'm struck and/or stuck mute. (i'm half-tempted to say, "fuck cute," but my heart's acting up again. my lungs are squeezing shut and playing the part's acting, but again these rungs are teasing shut-ins.) it's jurisprudence, it's written in cold blood. it's your twist movements, and i'm smitten in the bud. i just wish going to bed alone wasn't set in stone. i presume these writings will also spell my doom.

"you needed nothing of mine" (shitty eyes)

i miss the snow, the miles and miles to go. such a barometer of our society, white gets grey and then fuck purity. through the flakes you'd rise higher and higher, kept adrift above these lakes on wings of my stupid, dumb desire. take this advice: never stop to think or look twice. where faces are wreckful and bites go for a neckful you're better off aloft. i'd tell you to save yourself but i know you're out of my range anyway. i know i won't have to say you fell 'cause i know you know that i'm strange, and he may treat you real nice but never stop to drink or fuck twice. keep flying, i'll see you around. i'll keep trying to make it off the ground.

a three-way deathmatch between franz ferdinand, frantz fanon & franz kafka for possession of my eternal soul

i'm not in the business of loosening lips or playing games, but rather sinking ships and laying blames. give me a border right now and i'll cross it, honest. gush down the drain into you like from a faucet. tallest tale i could ever tell: finding my way to safety from this hell. i guess the difference is distance. i'll hack through every vine that i can see, but the only one looking out for mine is me, so i'll play it safest when i'm feeling bravest. take projected earnings and revenge burnings and sudden turnings in stride. i don't have feelings so who really cares what i look like inside? liars and cheats, and "just trying to make ends meets." we're all in this together. and while it seems like forever, in a few minutes we'll wish for a change in design. from the other side, things seem so strange, besides.

starving at tiffany's

i'm feeling overdone like lyrical clichés: it's last call for rhyming "pull it" with "bullet." i'm feeling so done in like when you say that "he says." it's not going to be honest so i might as well bullshit: you're like a goddamned lottery ticket. keep on trying and eventually i'll stick it? (will all the losses pale in comparison to some far-off imagined monetary win?) stay tuned, i'll bet we'll find out soon. maybe it'll be the next one. and the next one, or the next one, it'll be excellent. just you wait and see. everyone will want to be me. go ahead and pick up my slack — because i am never coming back. i'm leaving this land of milk and floods. momma always said, "beauty is as beauty does," and i've asked around; we all agree that you've got it, but it was a toss up until you jumped up and caught it. my hopes too, but they must come down. if i fell from my cliff i know i wouldn't make a sound.

dancing!!! (animasque in vulnere ponunt)

i've got seven goals in a period, see, and you're still not taking me seriously. i can go through the motions same as anybody else. sure, the uniform's changed, but the smirk is just the same. don't put me on the shelf. i can hold my hand to my heart same as anybody else. sure, the rules have changed, but the game is the same. don't radio for help. i've got my colours on my sleeve and a number on my chest. maybe we can make believe that this is all for the best, and maybe we can get out of this alive. the odds are high but i'm dying to survive. and the edge or dead centre, but couldn't it both? i'll pour my insecurities into a cup and make a toast. lose myself to the dance floor, as i compete with the dead to see who can romance more. i'll get over myself eventually. until then content yourself with watching me bleed. until then, content yourself with watching me be me.

close to ghost

god save the queen, the king is dead. god loves a liar, it's the witch instead. and i'm finally coming close to finishing this off. all i need is the cash, the grab-&-smash state of mind and the kiss-off. is it the best thing i could do? don't have the time to calculate hedons, but i bet that you would too given the situation and the smell of freedom. so sick of dancing in this macabre ball, i'm finally coming close to ending it once and for all. ding dong, the witch is crying. long live the king's son. the king is dead, fuck, the king is dying, did you think this was fun? now tell me, what did you expect? something other than a wreck? we were so close to the coast! so now we're finally coming close to ghost.

the navarro dardanelles

caught up in a scandalous dream with turtlenecks and fabulous cream. could someone tell me where i'm going wrong? 'cause i hate to catharsize myself through song. it always means hang-ups about the stupidest things, and all the knots & tangles that thoughtfulness brings and could someone tell me why high school is never dead? with so little said i don't know what's there to be over-read. still feeling like a kid, was it something i did? but i know it's not about me in the end. just another one too dumb to pretend. it took me longer to notice but that doesn't change what it was. just another stupid link between "why?" and "because."

wheat field with crows

so when you quit driving nails into my eyes for just a bit i'll pry the hammer from your goodbyes and sling it so far away finding it'll take forever less a day. the most common problem with webs is they won't leave you alone, but as this familiar tide ebbs i'm dying just to keep my home from breaking apart. i can see the cracks spreading like the dark and i wish i could say something worth saving. these frowns in hard-hats just won't ever stop repaving my past, half-assed, now half-past long past due. the time for half-mast has passed and if there's something i wish i had amassed, it's you.

big steps (dark satanic thrills)

it's not so much a pain as a shock-hurt, even thought the breakdown's just like clockwork. so i'm sitting here trying to be bobby oppenheimer with an emotion explosion and a ticking egg timer. a smile and a hug, denial and a tug at a heart in my head, of a hand in my bed. we know how this goes, the very same thing at all the very same shows. i've never been able to avoid you, not to mention all the tricks that annoyed you and i'd tackle/tap that crackle, snap popping of my dream bubble. these fingerprints can only mean trouble. i've never been there before but goddamn it i want to go. now i'm stuck in a detour and goddamn it i'll never even know (let alone come close).