Wednesday, October 5, 2011

first hit with a brass bullet






f stands for first. first hit with a brass bullet, a small one, just a toy- the rimfire 22. that's not a man's gun a man's gun's got power velocity speed duress. this is f for female first fast forever foremost fountain forgetful fatigued fucked fantastic futuristic frugal french free always leave a present for the life that you take, grass honey herbs or meat. and do it by hand piecemeal taking the time to caress each task with love and respect.


Sunday, October 2, 2011

bloody turkey














34 years of menstruation. 12 months times 34=408 menstrual cycles minus 15-12 (child bearing) =380 menstrual cycles.

Oh. It's not that much.
It's not like a Friend's rerun.

right. vapid soft serve poop.disseminating special brain power soup.
I'm talking about blood the stuff that makes our machines full
the stuff that our great great great ancestors shared
with fire and furs and dried meat
in a cave sharing the heat

This was sopposed to be a story about a small hamlet
in Turkey. I don't know what happened.






Friday, September 16, 2011

trouble in the hippocampus













the great idea do you remember
no
but you remembered yesterday
i remembered what
you remembered that you forgot about the great idea that we had the day before. Remember
what
we had a great idea but we couldn't remember what it was
then how did we know
because we remembered that we had it
had what
the great idea
we remembered that we forgot what it was
yes
and now we forgot that we remembered that we forgot what the great idea was
yes
still can't help us
I know. But at least we remembered.
Yes.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

la belle village












Montreal will always be about poverty and freedom stuck in a cage. dreams that manage to float above the corrugated steel. beer in a bag and bums squatlegged on a cardboard with the quintessential dog and the bilingual sign can't work give me argent stp
can't won't can't won't
this town was never about working and vivre la difference was projected in the offshoots and roll offs of acumen and the lesser gods. welfare mothers pepsi cola chips and chocolate icecream sweating garbage men picking up maggot born bags spewn open on the curb in the sweltering the purply sky of summer humid live caldron of heat wave in your face no place for sweat to go it sticks on your skin like an infringement to space can't go out to dissipate can't go in to have never been stuck in tight jeans and on backsides rolling down the slippery shallows of body voluption great tits by the way. tacky ouash! bingo signs on the doors of churches with their steeple way above the third floor building restriction once upon a time you just had to look up and remember that god was watching you in every neighbourhood on every street corner. it's in the dreams and in the collective unconscious. it's in the water. green grasses parks salted through the neighbourhoods bicycles everywhere. i lived on all these streets these streets where the sex and love and drugs and the lungs and the voice your voice and others flying through the broken glass the tainted glass the brushed and smoked glass the isadora of pandora the isis of poetry how it oozed from the crumbling and the dank and the dim like those long apartments facing the east side-never any sun, everybody knew that. flatroof town. i loved you and i smoked you to death.

Montage from photos by Michel Saint Jean

Friday, April 1, 2011

43.5 mile house specimen b

















The ticktock is in my brain. On most days. On most days it's a waiting game. All of my breathing is for waiting it's the abstractions that make us forget. Though distraction can also make me remember. Echoes of past resonate from the geodescence of my immense landscape of imagination they coming down with centrifugal force hammering the dull gray fatty matter of my neurological brain, my events, my story, my world my time my clock my ticktock that which is what time is it it's half past my ass and a quarter to my elbow I live to die I die to live my name is sophie and I have full blown full blown full blown aids full blown full.

Friday, March 11, 2011

birth





I was 23, pregnant and meeting with Francoise, a midwife. It was going to be a natural birth, with my friends and family. Bath births were not yet raging. In fact, this was pre-yuppie birthing time and the only cloth diaper that was being sold, somewhere in one of the dusty back isles was the big cotton square with the jumbo safety pins and plastic shower cap bags. I didn't need designer pee and poop pads. I was grassroots. Wanting to be as closely connected to the real thing as possible.

I went into labour on a Friday evening. Francoise came over. There was excitement in the air. My boyfriend Bryan was a champ. Room-mates and my parents hung out downstairs in the kitchen. This was going to be wonderful. My contractions increased both in timing and strength, I kept going. And going. And going. Saturday morning the house was quiet. My parents had gone home, roomies sleeping, B and F beside me and me continuing the contractions. I got up, walked around, took a bath, did this did that and yet still, no baby wanted to come forth. By Saturday evening I was fed up. F was downstairs sharing doobie with B and my room mates. I felt abandoned. F suggested that maybe I wasn't ready. Abandoned and a failed woman. I was exhausted. Saturday night I was sleeping between the contractions and I would awake with every new wave of pain. Every minute and a half I thought I was going to die and sandwiched between thoughts of death I rode bareback in unconscious blackness. At eight centimetres dilation baby was not coming.

Sunday morning that was it. I had enough. Get me to the fucking hospital already and get this thing out of me. The taxi ride was murder. I was in the front seat screaming on cue every 50-60 seconds or so. B and F holding my hands from the back seat. In the hospital I am flinging my clothing off in the hallway as they are rolling me to the birthing room. I am screaming for drugs. Which they give me. Four hours later the sweetest little thing comes out of me, plump and squished and perfect. Charlotte Storm Amelia is born and my life is changed forever.



Eighteen months later I am seven and a half months pregnant and I have the flu. Things don't feel right. I am anxious. I visit Erica, my obstetrician. They keep me two days and do their tests. The amniocentesis demonstrates sickness in the uterus. I am sick. I am tired. I am freaking out. E suggests inducing. I have no decision making access in my brain. I am induced. I begin contractions. And then everything just sort of frizzles out. Now that I am 'open' I am in danger zone of contamination. Baby must come out. No seconds are wasted and I am whisked off to operating room. Zackie my ex-sister in law is with me. She is allowed to stay. They do local anaesthesia, put a little curtain between my chest and my belly and open me up. E says that I have beautiful ovaries. Z is stoic as can be, holding my hand and alternately comforting me with her eyes and checking out the construction zone. Within minutes this tiny 4.5 pound mosquito is lifted out of me and I catch glimpse of her skinny purple blood ass as she is taken away for checking and monitoring and controlling. She stays in an incubator for two weeks and I come visit her by public transit every day, leaking milk from my breasts in the September Indian summer. She wails and wails and wails for a year and I have to slap her bum like a basketball to calm her down. Victoria Francis Orlean incrementally becomes my beautiful second born.




Wednesday, March 2, 2011

agen







Third floor full of light, yaya's room, filled with shoots and sprouts and bulbs and blossoms, miniature painted glass elephants kittens and giraff. Middle floor, copper pots and platters, gilded ornate papered walls, oak shelving containing leather in dark browns, painted porcelain, antique pottery and brass. Many rooms with many doors. Doors to open, doors to close. Light at the end of the hall the tunnel. The deaf and languid white haired long haired feline with those dumb blue eyes; roodoodoo. roll your r rooodooodooo. ma cherie, ma cocotte. Pastries, pain au chocolat, mint drink from syrop in a bottle. Massage parlor and steam bath on the first floor, white shoes with geometric patterned holes, french kiss in a cave on a dare with a boy from summer school. soft cheese with rind on a plate with hunks of bread and coffee in a bowl with hot milk. i have something to show you, uncle's little secret. here it's over here yes like that a little more down you are my special underground joy i make you make me sing and finally after many songs I am saved by appendicitis.

this is the beginning of me as a recondite.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

almost the end of february









tor·por (tôrpr)
n.
1. A state of mental or physical inactivity or insensibility.
2. Lethargy; apathy. See Synonyms at lethargy.
3. The dormant, inactive state of a hibernating or estivating animal.

Torpor may extend for a longer period of time. Some animals enter this intensely deep state of hibernation for the duration of the winter. Torpor is alternatively used as a reference to any non-physiological state of inactivity.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

jean street










There was a little pig
tied to a heater
he turned around
and burnt his seater




I wrote it on cardboard cutout from kelloggs cerial. Hands always in something; flour and water, mud and spoon, sticks and earth, tadpoles and ponds, leggo on carpet, fingers up nose. I went over to the neighbours for dinner, it was a big deal for me. She lived on the other side of the woods. We had chips and hot dogs and pepsi. I'm a frog you're a frog, kiss me and i'll turn into a prince. French canadiana and rotten teeth. Joyce shows up at my front door once and in all her pockets of her snowsuit she has chocolate bars and black balls and gummy bears and black hair and pale skin, she come from the irish peasantry. The woods. The woods where I played indians with johnny who showed me his long skinny penis. We made a little fire under a triangle of sticks and it grew and it grew and it grew. Half the woods burnt down. My father said boys could pee standing up but I had to squat. Squaw. There was something wrong about you my mother would say much later, you always wanted to be outside. Outside one summer I stepped into dog shit every day between my toes it would sometimes ooze and my mother would carry me to the bathroom and wash my feet down in the bathtub. We had a fire in the house. Playing with a bedlight under the sheets making shadows against the cotton. We had thick and wide window sills with shutters on the inside I sometimes would hide myself in between and watch the outside. My father pulled my pants down and gave me a good spanking in the back yard because I accepted twenty five cents for raking the neighbour's yard. We weren't allowed chips at dinner and chocolates in our snowsuits and we helped our neighbours for free. Please say please and thank you. My mother, when we had invites, would make the tiniest and most exotic hors d'oeuvres; smoked oyster and olives, marinated squid on cracker, fish egg mayonnaise. I was sometimes allowed to peel the onions.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Saturday, January 15, 2011

charlotte street










Come on
Fritzzi was hanging his top body out the second floor window. Casting the rope for me to grab, Michael was beside him. The hookers on the corner in their bedroom slippers and faded housecoats watched us as they smoked and periodically picked at their straps and hair and scabs.

I caught the rope and braced it around my elbows and my waist, grabbing with both fists I jumped up against the wall. Fritzzy and Michael began pulling me up. My sneakers stuck well on the brick as I hoisted with my arms but I began to slip. After the initial few feet my legs and arms felt like cement.
I can't do it
I said, sliding
yes you can yes you can
the boys hooted from above. Lurching back down to the ground I said
no I can't
I turned, grabbed the bottle of beer on the sidewalk and stumbled to the stairs. Dark hallway with rising up wooden steps into the murky unconsciousness of Michael and Fritzzi's home . Acrid urine funk dissolved once I got to the top. The door was open and I walked in on the kitchen's uneven linoleum floor. Clear of furniture, it was like a miniature brown and beige dance floor in the bulkhead of a great ship out in the tempestuous sea. The floor rocked all the way to the window which looked onto the back courtyard of the Hasidim poultry butcherhouse. Wooden crates stacked against the wall with live chickens, cornish hens and quail clacking from the inside. Standing by the window here there was a new smell. It was humid and musky.

I joined the boys in the front room. A large L shaped with the long side hosting two windows looking out on the front, where below was the sidewalk, the hookers and a few moments ago me trying to scale the wall. Fritzzi, small and sleek, wearing trousers and short cropped black hair was perched in one of the window frames, one leg insouciantly tumbled towards the floor. He was barefoot. Beside him was a large table buried under papers and paint and brushes and glue and a violin a mandolin and piles of books, a couple of magazines, empty beer and wine bottles, overflowing ashtrays, empty cups of coffee with the black rings around them, a pair of antique metal scissors, some razor blades, a screw driver, a roll of toilet paper, two paring knives and an opened bag of puff ball cotton with half the puff gone. Michael, mussed and whiskered with curly dark hair, round glasses, busying himself with something in his hands, cigarette in mouth, was cross legged on the bed, the only bed; a large sepia stained mattress laying on the floor in the short L of the room.

Can you look after Kormic for a few days, I've got to go to Toronto for this big family thing
Michael says to me
Kormic the pit bull, caramel chocolate two tone, is lying in the corner gnawing on a bone
yea sure
I say. I finish my bottle with one long room temperature swig.

Later, Shelly's was crowded. I was up front by the stage at a small round rot iron table with Michael. Fritzzi was doing the bar. Shelly was slumped in one of the arm chairs looking haggard and fused at forty something. This was her place, her baby. A notch above speak-easy all us local kids came to drink, smoke and play.

She looked like bridget bardot, I saw the photos
That was Bobby talking. He was a good looker in a clean cut kind of way. Blond hair blue eyes beach boy bod. We had crossed paths a few years back, he keeps reminding me. I have a vague impression that we had met at some west end party. He came from privilege; private school and bavarian cream. We managed to share common ground as our heads ricochet against the walls of somebody's bathroom after smoking some very heavy grass. Between the toilet and the drainpipe of the sink our knees and knuckles meet. Oh yea. We liked to get high. We liked to loose it, get off the motherfucking ground man.

I spot Lucy in the back with her new boyfriend and a bunch of people I don't know very well. I've always liked Lucy. Always jealous of her perfect body and white teeth. Lucy and me go a long way. I met her at a group home when I was fifteen. We watched each other grow up; Vertical with spikes and dud buds and broken glass fusing our roots to one another. We had a little fling in our maybe we are lesbians phase.

Her and Fritzzy were together for a bit too. Lucy went traveling and met up with him on his aunt's farm in southern Italy. It didn't take long before they were sharing body fluids under the crucifix in a four hundred year old stone shelter behind the barn. When they came back to Montreal they got a small apartment downtown but the romance didn't survive the winter. Drab, bleak and disproportionately long, the city ate their love alive. A voracious appetite of mirth winter has in flat roof town. One must be strong to pursue and follow through.

But we were young and lazy. Our understanding of the world and life a little hazy. Wanting too much too soon too much brooding to consider and deduce, just enough to jump in the juice. At our age the juice was fresh and sweet, like honey and wild asparagus shoots, too early yet to sour and ferment, multiply its parasitic microbiological orgasm into reproduction, making more and more sickness and thwarted happy solitude, more kicking and slapping and drunken dancing turned fighting and bashing a little bit of thrashing, more molder and devastation through reactionary and ill induced foreplay. The swelling of the wayward skies had not convulsed yet.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

fat floats







Breasts are nice. They are round and soft. During heat waves they can get sticky underneath and I don't care what anyone says; you need a bra to hold them in place when you jump a horse. They make food in the form of sweet watery milk, the only body fluid that you can ingest as nourishment. not bad The squirting milk makes for good party tricks too.

The left one is marginally bigger than the right one. They used to be small little things but times have changed. They move to their own centrifugal force. One may find them enjoying the muffled vibrations of flamenco, hungarian gypsy songs or iggy pop. What strange and fantastic floating fat balloons. Perhaps one day, they will save me from drowning.

If I were to loose one or both? I would mourn the loss through the caressing of its scar. I don't think that I could bring myself to replace it with synthetic reproduction. Even if it was perfect. I like following one stigmata to the other. After all the shit in the river, I finally like my story and as it is, I am prone to getting confused between fact and fiction.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

light










Awakening from a stupor of a sleep, drugged and incoherent I witnessed bolts of light thrashing in my brain. I could barely get up my legs were jelly and fighting a case of vertigo, my hands groped along the panelling I managed to stand and rest upon the window sill which is where I saw it. Not at first at first it looked like an ordinary night with the lights of the bridge illuminating the dusting of snow, a long cargo train rolling its goods across the continent.

That's when the light appeared.








Ominous and striking, spirals of pale green and yellow propelling its hub, a great white wolf dog with its parasitic hunchback clone, hovering over the bridge outside my window. There was a crack of sound, blackness and then bright pink solardog residue bouncing from hard surface to hard surface gradually disintegrating into the darkness of the moonless night.






Yes, I was scared for my life.

Friday, January 7, 2011

passing time















It is friday just like that. I didn't notice the days changing from one into the next. We had been in a slump for the last few weeks, hell it's been months. Everything's gonna be ok I've been saying to him at strategic low points throughout the day. We are gonna be alright. Winter is not particularly our friend and only exasperates the feelings of entrapment. Waiting on a small gold mine- the mythological liquidation of my parental estate looms over us cradled within the hollows of overcast skies. Just a matter of time and we will breath easy, pay off the master card, the personal loan, buy off part of the mortgage for one daughter, help pay the studies for the other and finally purchase a piece of land of our own. Often times we keep ourselves busy drawing, quilting, writing cover letters and sending off resumes, painting, reading, cooking and running bubble baths. Hot brandy has been our maintenance drug of choice. At almost twelve dollars a pop, we gradually incorporate a compensation plan to stretch the time between alcoholic shopping excursions; we smoke grass from our apple pipe. The grass has been gifted to us from our one local good friend who lives a couple of tankfuls of gas away. Local is a matter of perspective I suppose.

These are on our good days. And there are many. There are many of the other kind too. The kind of day where I can't bring myself to open a book, pick up a pencil, scour the meagre help wanted or when I am feeling too fat to make onion and herb sour dough fry bread. After stumbling through meaningless internet sites, flicking alternately through my friend's pages and my own, hitting my stat counter and updating fb, after hitting the cbc commentary a zillion times I often find myself on mls; the real estate property search engine.

Obliged for its gift of promise, I revisit my 'favourites' that I keep hostage in my top right corner, I take them out to gleam and glean and dream, I take them out to hypothesis and speculate. My little dreamboats of broken houses and barren lands, north facing, east facing, dilapidated workshops and greenhouses, boasting mountain views and crackling creeks. Sitting on the living room floor of our rented trailer home, cushioned by the pumpkin coloured wall to wall ply, I imagine a beautiful life with birds and goats and donkeys and bees, All this immediately and for free with a click of my computer key. It's my fix my mania, my addiction, my need, my inclination, my habit. It gives me all the hope I need.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

recycled







Bearing fruit from repossession

Restless 
Slow motion of the floating 
skins abrade against others lying parallel bound by water and 
this sea of bodies that have been rotting from decades of guarantee 
With diagrammed contrivance guidance no longer a practice of insight
Such an old school tool animalesque antiquity
Slow motion of the floating
This fetid culvert stinks

I want my fat for better things 

Followers