pub crawl

Mary has forgotten my name again, so I tell her. I can tell from her eyes that she knows who I am. But she cannot remember any of the details. Her eyes teeter, looking electric, searching for conductivity. It doesn't come and her face falls back into that wide smile. Her eyes are bright and lost. I shift weight. I ask her how her friend in the hospital is. She died. "I didn' get to see 'er even", Mary says. I remember that the hospital staff had Mary arrested, for playing music and drinking vodka in the rooms. Mary slaps the side of the bar. "But we go'ne livin' don't we m'girl! Rite? Rite?". Mary slaps her upper arms. "Strong as a horse at sixty-three. Woudn' believe it woud' ya?". As she does this she flutters her elbows out at her sides. Like a beautiful bird. If I mention dancing she performs for me. Kicking up her heels as she exclaims, "Used to have a good time down in Simcoe! Oh we woud have a good ol' time. I'm from the Eeast Cooest y'know". Sometimes she'll launch into dirty limericks. I love these the best.

But Mary is not quite herself today. No dancing just yet. I realise she is torn up about the death. I've been doing this job long enough that sadness like hers shouldn't shock me. But you cannot control these things. It is malignant, like her friend's tumor, the weight of her loneliness. Where will she go in the afternoons? What city bus will she count dimes for? This is a very large hole. Her hands hesitate before they plunge deep in her purse to nab a crumpled envelope. From it she takes a torn twenty and hands it to me between the taps. This is substantially more money than I have ever seen her with before. "I need a good drink m'girl". She asks for a full pint of scottish beer. I give her an 80 shilling. She'll have to drink it slow. Everything will be fine now. For the most part I've given up trying to cut off quiet alcoholics and friendly drunks, especially Mary because we always have good laugh when it is just us two. She tips me a quarter. Her cheque just came in, its the beginning of the month.

I cannot stand to see her sad. I get her to tell me her country sayings. I stick to good topics, like beer, and dirty jokes and picking tobacco. I like it when Mary and I are in the bar together in the afternoon. No one to bother us. No contemptuous men. But before long the middle-aged working boys start to file in after work. They laugh out loud when Mary shows me the new underwear she bought at the corner dollar store. Harder even still, when she offers to give me a pair. I shoot them a quick fuck you stare but not before Mary decides that it is time to leave. She angrily stuffs her purchase back in her bag. "Just tryin' to be nice m'girl. I don' cause no harm darlin'. Just tryin'.. y' know, t' , I jus' thawt. Well." And then she stops and looks at me and laughs heartily and sticks out her elbows. "Ei'm gonna have a smoke eh m'girl!". And I remind her that she'll have to light the cig outside. "Ei'm goin', I'm goin'. Ei'm no trouble eh darlin'". And she flaps her arms an grabs her lighter and stops before the door to light her cigarette, flash me a smile and dash out.

Chaos Theory

E. is sprawled across her old green sofa. Her skirt rides up high on her unshaved thighs. Her eyes are as bright as I remember them. Always intelligent, and often distracted by stress.
She offers me crackers as we talk. I shift my body around constantly as we exchange information. I recline into the sunken springs of the couch and then lurch up, remembering to be a good listener. E. is always fascinating, and I want her to know.
D. taps on the window to ask for a favor. Since we have been discussing his case for at least an hour now, I feel suddenly awkward. I hate shaking hands with someone I know private details about. I thrust my hand out quickly after E. introduces us by name, just to show that I probably don't know very much, if anything at all.

E. is on crouching on the hall mat. She has dumped her purse out on the floor to search for car keys. Her tiny hands pull out old receipts, promotional flyers for local shows, unfinished crosswords, dusty vitamins; "I know they were here. . .", she says staring puzzled into the pockets of her bag. E. gets up to retrace her steps. Came in the door. Got a glass of water from the kitchen. Wrote a note to A.. She starts pulling piles of old bills, dirty laundry and magazines from around the phone, onto the hall couch, then back again. "I wish my life weren't so confusing", she explains. I continue to stand around not doing very much. I'm finding this mildly entertaining. Feeling guilty, unhelpful, I offer my services, rearranging the cushions, looking underneath them for a mass of university and bike lock keys, with one large one, for a green Toyota sedan.
I find pocket change and old food crumbs, and a mass of board game pieces under the cushions. E. picks up educational toys as a hobby. There are mind puzzlers and unsolvable plastic contraptions everywhere. D. is making himself useful by sorting through items on the kitchen counter. I can tell he is tickled by E.'s disorganization, its sexy - she is so terribly intelligent, so there must be a grand plan.
I am distracted by a plaster cast of a human skull. Out of habit, I pass my finger over the upper margin of the eye orbit, feeling the sharp angle. I'm beginning to examine at the jaw line when E. pipes up. "It's probably a girl", she says, still riffling through her bag contents. "You can have it if you want. My friend was doing an art project and made a whole bunch". Then she adds, "Its just one more thing, you know?". Its true. And I'm tempted. Both E. and I have a touch of antiquarianism, a morbid scientific interest in material objects. Her apartment is caving from the weight of its own contents. It makes me feel a bit uneasy, which is strange, because I'm usually so comfortable in a mess.

E. squeaks with delight when she discovers that her keys were deep in her bag pocket the whole time. D. smiles affectionately, apparently humored by the whole affair despite the fact that he is in a terrible rush. I retrieve my small orange backpack that has been backfilled by the whole process.
We wait by the door as E. snaps her keys in her left hand and grabs a pair of scratched but still funky prescription sunglasses from the floor. D. is still smiling at her. She puts the glasses on quickly then removes them and stuffs them back into her purse. "Shall we go?".

The Musicman's Daughter

Your tiny hands pick fugues <
    de novo
for the streets of europe found,
absent and without,
the weight of their men.

Music falls out of windows
  like cobbles
            drop (ped)
exquisitely into
         linen-lined pockets,
notes plunged like apples
into soft earth
the rumble resounding
To coda:

Clouds of dust
boil up from
girls feeats pounding tempos,
arhythm of hearts braying
    in bodies
        of the hunted.



Reservations::
not so sure about this one,..
This blog is turning into quite a lot of poetry, and I'd like to make it clear that I don't consider myself pretentious or particularly talented,... and I would (really would) take any critical feedback in good stride because I never have any, and I'm too damn scared to do this any other way. Is it too much? honestly. (honestly.)

reflections of a two-headed girl

When I was eleven the neighbors' golden retriever attacked me in a game of tug-of-war. She almost got the whole of my upper lip before my father could beat her off. When the doctor was stitching me up, I could hear my mother caterwauling in the corridor singing, "Oh my baby, my beautiful baby..", and the doctor winking at me as he consoled me saying, "Just be lucky that bitch didn't get the whole thing."


First of all, my mother lied. I was never beautiful, before the dog or after. Eyes too close together, freckles all the way up and down my right arm but not the left. I had frizzy red-brown hair. The weight was not baby-fat, it was chub, and I had enough of it to be teased mercilessly at school. If it is a mother's right to remain delusional about the sufferings of her children, maintaining all the ways that they are "beautiful babies!" and "delicious gems!" and "little darlings!" despite whatever (and most obvious) evidence speaks to the contrary, then it is a child's right to suffer in her own way. And I knew better than to break with silence. I was unusually intelligent for my age, and I was not about to let any sign of irrational or age-appropriate emotion sneak out of the private corners of my being where it was safe to hide those things. As a result, I was a downright mean child, capable of the most bitter forms of spite. I was terribly resentful of authority (believing myself to be smarter than seventy-five percent of adults), I never lowered myself to enough to be a tattle-tale, and when I set my sights on retribution, it was always swift and dirty.


One time in sixth grade Mary-Anne Hawthornwitte offered me a pudding on the playground. She lured me between two trees where her grade six girl friends hung poised to whip gelatinous flavours of all kinds at my newly braided hair and washed jeans. I retaliated the very next day. I found a dead blue jay in the woods behind my house and snuck it into Mary-Anne's desk. When she found it she was so scared she screamed, puked right into the open drawer and then started yelling at all the girls in our class demanding to know, "Which one of you whores put this in here?". And she got detention for a month. One week before Mary-Anne got released from detention, I got attacked by the dog and after that things changed forever.

For one thing, I had seen something of terror. And shortly after -there was the blood. It was from my very own wound (!) pooling on the pavement, covering my father's white shirt, flooding into the cup of my hands, and smearing over every inch of the backseat while we drove to the hospital. My parents were grey with fear, I was numb with shock. The flint-blue interior of the car was bouncing up and down, up and down, while my eyes stayed fixed on the onboard ashtray and the glow of my mother's lit cigarette.


My scar runs all the way from the left side of my nose to the centre of my top lip and, if they had seen it, it would have frightened those kids at school half to death. How I wished I could have gone back to junior high with my pink slug of a scar. Unfortunately, my parents had decided that given my previous difficulties with teachers, students, and school-associated-people of all kinds (office staff included, for I was always truant), they would keep my disfigured self away from the school-grounds and educate me at home. I was already reading four years above grade-level, and my math was not far behind.

This gave me time around the neighborhood. I enjoyed telling people that my scar wriggled in the rain like an earthworm. My mother hated it when I said that. She insisted that when I got old enough she would take me to a plastic surgeon, not the med-school hack who stitched me up like frankenstein the first time. It was then that I realised my mother saw me as terribly imperfect. The way she excused my scar in the presence of strangers gave me a strange elation, like I was finally allowed to be miraculous and different.


It was around this time I started wearing the strangest clothes, baggy shirts made for women ten years plus my age (and twelve years out of date), mary-jane shoes with woolen socks, armbands I manufactured myself, also, various accessories I chose according to the barometric pressure of the day that could dictate whether a hat, purse or umbrella was most suitable given the chance of rain. Sure, it was strange, but I was a scarface now, and what could be stranger than that? So I allowed myself to develop all kinds of wonderful habits. I took an interest in magic tricks (which also explored my talent in physics and engineering). I took apart old stereos.

My favourite hobby was I fashioning new dolls out of parts of old ones that I took apart. My patchwork people were scared and ill proportioned just like me. More importantly, they were my very own little creations and I cherished them for this reason. Sure there was some medical interest here, the anatomy of childrens toys leaves much to the imagination. But when friends and parents scorned my handiwork, my love and devotion only became more fierce and intense.

My tiny body craved to remake itself differently in the post-attack-dog world. I wanted to make in the way that old ladies quilt and junkyardmen build cars. It wasn't my birth as an artist, it was my emic descent in to the craftwerks. And It was pragmatic and crude, focused and material. I was a survivor. I was a child, and I was alone.

bartender's lament

Three hours to sleep
-and I tangle myself in
the bedsheets
avoiding the stare of the
afternoon,
the industriousness
of blue skies,
and the alum-rim wheels of the day,
a.winding-

Three more hours:
just.
before the grind of the barstools
and the grit of molars,
lips held taut in
the whiskey'd eyes
of blue-collar'd men,
and the undergrads who believe
themselves to be
equally hardworking.
(I serve them
weak drinks
all the way through college.)

while thinking
of how your palms silenced
my body's moan;
the small-of-my--
sacrum caving under the warmth
of your hands.

Back in Guelph,
we watched the starlings dance
on the steps of the Church of Our Lady
while the Albion jukebox spilled
chamber pop ballads onto the patio
and down, down, the waterlogged streets
of our city.


For the remainder of the night,
I watched the freckles on your
cheek blur as
we talked in the rain;
the shadows in the street-lamps
inching towards daybreak,
and the wings of bats,
beating against
the wills of moths towards the light.

The simple joys of late-night convenience

Today I went across the road to buy orange juice (-not from concentrate) so I could drink it straight out of the carton. When I paid Aayen at the counter I noticed he looked exhausted. I told him so. Without speaking he raised his arm straight-stiff out to his side and pointed at a young boy aged nine or ten sitting in the folding chair by the cash. The boy sat sleepy-eyed, eyebrows like two caterpillian tufts hovering over his deep brown eyes. He smiled revealing more of his teeth (for his mouth had been open to begin with). I giggled and winked at him, "So you're the trouble are you?", which drew a big smile. Aayen, I noticed, was trying to hold his mouth stiff so I wouldn't see him enjoying his own jokes. His bouncing shoulders soon giving way to a fit of giggling into his shirtsleeve.

For Aayen, the convenience store is more than the family business - it is an endless way to amuse himself. He loves watching too-serious anglo- customers puzzle over his kooky antics. He always gestures wildly when giving change, faking a switch of hand, then pausing expressionless while holding on to your money for a few seconds before dropping it coin-by-coin into your palm. He always gets a good head shake out of me and a sly smile.

I know he thinks I'm slow because I always answer his questions wrong. I'm horribly embarrassed when I don't understand what he is saying and I'm sure he thickens his accent purposefully to watch me blush and fumble for answers that don't make any sense. It doesn't help that he commands an intimidating height, and it took me months to realise that there is a step-up behind the counter. When I'm at a loss for words, I always resort to asking him what he is studying because his open textbooks are always on the counter. Spanish one week, physics the next.

Aayen was still laughing at his joke when he handed me two-fifty change, running his hands through his short black hair while shaking his head. His son was still smiling, but I'm sure was thinking about bed, blinking his eyes and yawning, easing back into the vinyl of the chair. I was feeling giddy staring at my over-priced OJ carton and whole wheat loaf resting on the plastic trays of lotto tickets. I was musing over the gamblers' adage, "if you never play, you'll never win.", and revelling in the simple joys of late-night convenience.

Untitled

Juggernaut
though he was,
he could always be counted upon
for keylime pie
made fresh
the day of the party.

At the ladies church bizarre
we crooned,
when he
came      careening
into the handicraft tables
still juggling five copies of the Old Testiment
while gallantly singing songs
of the Jazz age.

      Hei Marianna !   yew
      got-tuh piana?
      Yeah, banana, noh.

White-lipped and kleen tongued
he could play alto sax while chewing gum,
and we all thought (yes!)     
why this man he.
he is bound for glory.