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.

alfalfa

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.

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.

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.

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.

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