Brexit

I

I have been left rabid and wanting

Brief encounter(s)

They have become like sunsets

It always happens

And it always surprises

Me

II

You were my own private Brexit

III

You grew up in Stoke Poges

And you felt the ocean inside you like a private

Second heart beat

Just like

Me

Cold tea for writers

I think a writer has no choice but
to get used to the taste
of cold tea

Fun and Games

Do you count the minutes between each text?

Is there a certain amount of time you like best?

Because this conversation could have been over
and we would be much closer

to eating the Chinese food I am now regretting
inviting you to join me for

You are playing a game that no body actually
wants to play

So stop fucking around

I'm hungry

Lover in a mall

The air was cold and the ground was covered in snow. My legs shook inside my snowflake covered stockings and the furry balls on my moccasin boots swayed back and forth. I was waiting for him outside the bus loop, looking left and right, not sure in which direction he was coming. I didn’t know where the Crest Institute was located. He went there on his own accord, checking himself in to a place where the painfully depressed and the suicidal went to have some sort of convalescence. I was out here in the cold because I was feeling bad for being so angry, for not talking to him for months. I wanted to make it right even though I knew he didn’t deserve it. My phone rings and it’s him, asking me to meet him at the mall, I turn to the right, shuffling my feet and pulling the hood of my red coat over my head. It’s a weird mall, there is a college campus stuck to the side, the whole building entwining into some sort of an education shopping centre.

The big Christmas tree has been taken down and the court yard looks bare and cold. I see him coming from the side wearing too thin of a jacket, his face red from the cold. We embrace and his ear is cold against my face. I scold him for not dressing warmer he smiles and says it’s cold outside. We go inside the mall and he stops to phone the institution, explaining that he will be back an hour later than he promised. I am staring intently at is face, trying to find some sort of a mark that may explain the situation that he is in. He feels sad and far away. I grab his face without thinking and ask him what kind of drugs they are giving him. He tells me nothing more than he usually takes and tells me to stop being so dramatic. It is when we finally sit down with our coffee that he tells me he is also taking Ativan. That would explain that far away feeling I am getting from him. I express my unease about them giving him Ativan. He assures me this is normal and it’s only for a bit. I let the subject drop and let him stare off into space for a while. It’s been a while since we have spent any time in each other’s company and we are awkward and slow of words. He asks me if I want to see the place he is staying in, I ask if I can see his room and he says that no girls are allowed in there. He thinks I am suggesting sex and he gives me that smile. I shake my head and laugh. He is now convincing me we should find somewhere to go have sex. I laugh some more and shake my head, but I am following him.

We walk through the mall and down corridors, the whole thing seems surreal and we end up outside again. We walk all the way around so we can get back inside the mall. This time we find a corridor that is long and winding. We find a corner where there are no cameras. He is coaxing me and I am laughing, from nerves, from guilt of even being here in this corner with him. We start to kiss and all I can taste is the mint gum in his mouth. The snowflake stockings are around my knees and his penis is in my hand. He turns me around and takes me from behind. My hand reaches out to the dusty wall as he slams into me from behind, the hood of my coat keeps falling onto my head. I don’t feel passion, I don’t feel excitement. All we are; are two bodies, rocking in a corridor in a mall somewhere in the suburbs.

We used to be two people that for over a year tried desperately to love each other. But we were afraid of loving too much or not enough at all. The crazy in our heads made us toxic and poisonous and here we were, he was trying to fuck the pain away and I just needed to feel something. But the pain was still there and I still felt nothing. We were just two people rolling around in our human and trying to feel okay about it. Our heat of the moment didn’t last long and we readjusted our clothes and slipped back into the mall, like nothing happened. But I could feel the wet in my underwear and I could see a part of him closing back up, disconnection. We headed to a restaurant and ate as companions and talked about our crazy.

We said good bye over calamari and potato skins and coco cola. We summed up the reasons for our failures and the reasons we should never be together. We even talked about the failures of all our relationships and shared a moment that we both understood. We left the mall of education and he walked me to the bus stop. We kissed and said our goodbyes. I told him to take care of himself and if he needed me just to call. I made it clear that I would not be calling him and left him to his walk alone, back to the place of sadness and loss. The only thing I feel now is release. No more anger, no more sadness. I left it all in the corridor of the mall.

Forgiveness

I think all that running around has made us tired

all those lovers

all those heartbreaks

I am sorry I fucked your friend

I am sorry I was afraid to love you

Let’s just be sweet now

like apples baked in pies

let’s make baby pies with your ears and my chin

The bleed

Being alive in this world can be awfully painful. What with all the feeling going on. All those things we assume and expect. Right now for instance, my brain is telling me he is not texting me back because he really was grossed out about me getting my period in the middle of sex. Well, I already knew it was sorta there, I just didn’t think it was there, there, you know. So I ask him how his day went, even though I don’t really care. I think I would just be really relieved if it were all over. And yet, I am seething inside because he hasn’t texted me back.

Please don’t hate me. Please don’t be offended by me. Please don’t reject me. Please want me. Please like me. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t actually get to know me. I don’t know how it feels anymore to have someone fit so well within me. I no longer know how to share my bed or my life. And yet I still want you to text me. I just want to know that there is someone else out there that enjoys my company as much as I do.

It’s funny, because by tomorrow I will just laugh and shake my head over the fact that I bled all over our fucking. I’ve bled for worse things and I am still here.

Too much space

It didn’t sink

It didn’t come to rest at the bottom of my rib cage

Hanging from that curved bone
Like star dust might hang from the moon

I was wet fingers on a wet glass 
Slipping out and shattering all of our many pieces on the floor

I carried us both inside

I think if it was your broke open on the floor
It would only be reflections of you

I couldn’t stain myself inside of you
I used to tell people that we were like Chinese finger cuffs
No matter which way we pulled we were stuck fast.

Your finger slipped out
Somewhere in the night
An elusive fish swimming into the cavernous dark

It wasn’t sinking in

There was too much space inside my rib cage

The River

The rain is coming down

cold grey bullets splatting and zinging off in every direction

it comes so fast it looks like the earth is spitting it upwards

back into the sky

the river will most likely flood again

it will open wide with a million hungry mouths, swallowing up the gravel road

I can see this from the picture window, nestled amongst blankets and pillows

I am reminded of the last time Tahsis flooded.

my mother came in with a big little girl grin and told us to come out and play.

she was careful to wrap us up tight; my sisters and I little gifts, bobbing up and down as we

sluiced about in Mother nature while her icy fingers laced around our knees

it’s a good thing it is November I think, and not September

for if it were, the pink bellied salmon, long dead from their journey up river,

would flow out to join us in our watery dance,

their gaping mouths silently singing of their sorrow

Bread and rice

The People in this place, they did not want real conversations,

conversations about jobs or school or about where we were living.

They just wanted to talk about how inspired and creative they were.

But

I could no longer find inspiration in the places that I used to,

in the rails lined up like snow white caterpillars on the backs of toilet tanks

or at parties where everyone was an artist 
and you and thirty other people are crammed into

a kitchen with the D.J. having long forgotten the names of everyone around you.

One girl went to India and all she ate was bread and rice

and one girl was in the bathroom snorting MDMA

she is asking for a bill so she can snuff up some of that inspiration that I lost so long ago.

It’s Monday night and I’m looking at this girl in her punk rocker skin

with a face that looks so much like my own and I get tired.

They were every girl I had tried to be and at every place I had ever been,

except for India,

where I too would have only eaten bread and rice

Roller Skates

My roller skates are white with blue wheels.

I think that they are better than everyone else’s.

I want everyone else to think so too.

The strobe lights are pulsing and the music is blaring.

Hey Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine…..

I have made sure that my ponytail is just right and that my sweater is just the right pink,

Just like Lindsay Paulson’s.

No one has skates like mine,

And yet Justin Campino still doesn’t look at me.

Even though I have worn that carefully planned out pink shirt,

It still doesn’t look like Lindsay Paulson’s.

Her sweater comes with boobs and a bra that holds them up.

Mine comes with the undershirt my mother made me wear.

I flash around the rink one more time and I suddenly hate this sweater.

At least no one has skates like mine.

Especially Lindsay Paulson.

For you

I had one of those dreams again

of secrets and drugs

They leave my day so full of ache

and unnecessary guilt

When you asked how my day was and I told you

you didn’t say

How can a dream fuck up your whole day?

We have similar secrets with similar pasts

you used to smoke for your numbness

and I snorted for mine

We wear scars on the inside of our bodies

and when we lie

hip pressing hip

they match up

And so when I smile with my crooked smile

and say I love you like the hand needs the glove

you say

I love you like the dust needs the bunny

Zion

We were practically strangers crammed inside your 

Volvo with all our camping gear  and lust.

Driving along the I95, blasting music from my ipod that you said you loved but, I’m not sure you did.

Washington State greeted us with rain our optimistic August day turned to grey as we made our way to Cape Disappointment. It was disappointing.

We out drove the rain the higher ground we gained in Oregon. 

The lush ocean breezes giving way to brown landscapes and heat.

Northern California came with the anticipation of the well planned out map that told us of the campsite with a lake. I could already feel the loving tongue of the lake  as it lapped off heat and dust of the Oregon Mountains. But, there was no lake. Long gone we are told. 

All we can see for miles are dried out fields and cow rumps.

How old are these maps?

Maybe it’s like that story of the lake that freezes in an instant and the ducks fly off with it stuck fast to their webbed feet carrying it away to a land we will never meet.

The long stalks of dried out grass rustle in the wind, the tops of deer ears just barely visible

bedded down for the night, bellies panting from the high mountain sun.

I slip out my old ratty copy of Leonard Cohen poems and oh so quietly stretch out in Mother nature’s messy hair and read softly to my sleeping audience.

As my voice drifts out to flow with the wind it joins me in a chorus of Hallelujah’s

 Hallelujah…

Ears twitch and my lover sighs.

Las Vegas is a blur of lights and blow dryer heat.

I couldn’t get enough of the swimming pool.

The Canyon was Grand

but it did not make me feel like I thought it would.

I guess I thought I might find some inspiration in those vast gullies.

I guess it only tells its secrets to the birds.

It was in Utah where I found that inspiration mixed up in the thousands of years of that red sandstone that painted the landscape with one solid slap leaving its handprint in the most beautiful way.

Because Utah really is beautiful

don’t let the Mormons scare you.

God really does exist here, but what he looks like to me doesn’t look the same to you.

And after he saw what we did on the hood of your car on the side of the road

He will never let us back into Zion.