What I learned in the sink

Salt
on my face
crusted flaking
previous form of payment
the worth now infinitely diminished
the hourglass demands the rain sea ocean
leaking away with cool silk texture
reborn a mighty Venus
cleansed rippling
off my face
water

Going gentle into a good night

Come, fair sleep, and triumph o'r the fake night.
Plauged and rolling, no rest for my weary.
As though the God of sleep plays tricks on me,
and has wrapped the day in a dark shawl.
Come, fair sleep, else the new day dawn without a new morning for me.

Weather the weather

Drowning in fog, thick and heavy as sin, a precarious bubble are we; rushing, praying, pressing forward ever so forward so gingerly hoping, at any moment the tiny firefly through the muggy cotton, the little lamps of a big huge bug, bearing, threatening to squash us, doomed because we were not five feet up, to see, or five feet over, to miss, and so now five feet under, to lay blame in sterile paperwork, unable to capture the messy heart it describes.

Enough is enough!

Alright. I can stay silent no longer about this blatent disregard for human wellbeing! We must resist and overcome!
Tim Hortens. Why are so too cheap to provide paper towel in your bathrooms?? Those stupid air-dryers are worse than having someone lick my hands dry!! Are you grinding the towels up to make your coffee? Are you trying to be environmentally consciencious? Because you are FAILING; I get so annoyed I go outside and kick the poop out of any bit of nature unfortunate to get in my way!
From now on I shall be boycotting Tim Hortens! They can't treat us like this! In fact, I shall be picketting outside the nearest Timmy's! All I need is signs, a garbage can fire and some coff... oh. Oh they're good.

Name Game!

1. YOUR SPY NAME (middle name and current street name):
Marie 105

2. YOUR MOVIE STAR NAME (grandfather/mother on your dad's side and your favourite candy):
Sheila Chews

3. YOUR RAP NAME (first initial of first name and first three or four letters of your last name):
M-Ern

4. YOUR GAMER TAG (a favourite colour, a favourite animal)
Green Lemur

5. YOUR SOAP OPERA NAME (middle name, and city you were born in)
Marie High Level

6. YOUR STAR WARS NAME (first three letters of your last name, last three letters of mother's maiden name, first three letters of your pet's name)
Ern Hutxia

7. JEDI NAME (middle name spelled backwards, your mom's maiden name spelled backwards):
Eiram Tuhcalb

8. PORN STAR NAME (first pet's name, the street you grew up on)
Einstein Chinchaga

9. SUPERHERO NAME: ("The", your favourite colour and the automobile your dad drives)
The Green Jetta

10. YOUR ACTION HERO NAME (first name of the main character in the last film you watched, last food you ate)
Shu Soup

Work Circus

We are high-wire trapeze artists; skill, nerve, and luck weave together to make this tentative balance high above the crowd. I can feel people hold their collective breath as we move past and through each other. Trusting in our hands, clasping wrists. Should we falter, fingers fumbling, heart skipping, grotesque moments lengthend unnaturally, distended, waiting to divulge their private horror, like a rancid flower blooming. The floor miles below, sucking me down, arms waving comically, legs kicking, hair blowing in eyes clenched, spine curving against nothing, wind whistling past my ribcage. My head so heavy it tips me skull first down. Mechanisms in place, gears slowly, inching, like a train starting, the grate of continents, pinions falling, doors sliding, ropes pulling, making a net, like the arms of an angel, my savior, salvation. "There are systems in place."

Please sir, may I have some more?

I think I've lost the ability to relate to people. I left the party somehow and when I came back, everyone was speaking a different language. It is extrodinarily lonely to be surrounded by everyone and yet noone at the same time.
How does one come back from this? Where is my map, my sextant? This is unfair; being so acutely aware of Sartre's anguish. Where is my blanket? For protection and forts that hold secrets like a balloon. It has been used too long for sleeping while the other children played. It has forgotten it's purpose: and in it's forgetting so have I. My knees are brittle with effort.

Go watch Mad Money

It is nothing near what it is like to work with huge wads of cash but watching Diane "Martha Stewart" Keaton freak out makes me happier than a bag of crack. Which is, incidentally, what Queen Latifah offers to pay her sons' tuition in.

Correction: Watching Diane menace some giant bewildered black man standing at the urinal was way better.

The inadvertant racist

It is a surpisingly racy feeling, to look, late at night, into other people's windows. watching them stand in their kitchen or living room, sleeves rolled up. They are aware, I suppose, but do not focus on it. It is astonishing how much we put ourselves on display, hoping to be held gently by those who view us. Man seeks reassurance, acceptance by his peers; seeks to find a hand to hold in the sucking black.
Seeing past the curtains, through the warbled glass, into the warmth, the mellow pool of heat, feels like tearing through the skin of an orange, sinking my eyeteeth into the pulpy treasure.

Ravi-au-lait

I had what I will refer to in my later years as "a brilliant idea".
Minutes later campbell's soup joined cooking sherry in a deep shiny pot on the stove.
I overcooked the ravioli, but somehow it all turned out perfect.
Needed mushrooms.

L(y)earning

"Don't you ever learn?"
Oh but yes, yes I learn.
I learn in the quiet ways, the side ways, the hidden ways. You are angry with me, impatient; what are you doing now?
I willing leap into my mistakes again, ("You think something different will happen? It's exactly the same!") but oh, you don't see. Something has changed. I have. This new me hasn't made the same mistake. It needs to learn. To science this mistake. After the error, I devour my mistakes like creme bruille, so sweet, breaking the crispy crust.

Watch me learn.

Now available in a smelley box on wheels!

In self-defence against my driving I have decided to start jumping (i.e. NOT drving) all of my runs.
The positive? More time to write, think, and relax my overstrained forearms.
The negative? Not everyone in the shop is a better driver than me. It just means I won't be pegged with anymore accidents.
In other news I have broken down and purchased a car.
Angels weep.

My roommate Jared's anti-depressing advice

"Well, I've been feeling kinda bummed out lately..."
"You should stop eating cactuses."
"I...uh...Yah. Yah that might work."

Stolen Recollection

Trees flip past like the legs of a million soliders marching. Fields carefully tended iced in frost. A steel silo stands like a bugle call beacon.
Remembering, by this little red smile, what was given up for me. Young boys, older men, left home, hearth, hearts, to travel far away to the cold and fear, to fight for me. Plans left off, opportunities sacrificed, lives cut short.
In the morning and at the going down of the sun,
We will remember them.

As the poet says

Transformed utterly, a terrible beauty is born.
For once I am reminded of the power of my sex. The launching of a thousand ships from the look in her eyes, curves of a graceful arm shatter an empire, her tears salting the ground.
My motherly grief denied I turn to my other soltice; the avenging fury of a lost angel, wielding my rage like a scythe, laying waste, ravaging in my despair. Full aware of my childish actions, I am as powerless to stop them as those in my path.
I, Hiroshima.
I am a woman scorned.
Hell hath no fury.

Nothing left

I wrote a huge post about how frustrated and disappointed with myself I was for my complete inability to make anyone, myself included, happy, and accidently deleted it.
The irony is reaching critical levels.
I'm going to bed.

futuere stercus

What awkwardness caught

What strange awkwardness, caught in my throat; this cough is never enough to pluck it, steaming in the cold air, from the bottoms of my lungs. It was transplanted, as am I, into a place it did not belong in; I wonder if it feels as I, my mouth far too wide, too open, the glitter of my necklace heavy on my clavicle, the scents in the air all merge like the sepia on antiue photos. I am surprised to find I am old enough for them.

Last night, while fetal in the cold, fingers sticks of lead, back a curving branch of beef on the butcher's slab, I dreamt beneath my fluttering lashes; my work partner and I, there was fear, a puddle of urine, and a sensation I wish I was not familiar with, of standing on one's head, surrounded by a honeycomb (but not sweet) of metal that sacrifices itself around me. Now we, four who are loved, dearly, deeply, travel home in this tiny precarious aspect, at speed our ancestors never dreamt of, in a tiny pool of lamplight, on this round globe of earth that cannot even acknowledge us, how much we need it, it's tiny passengers.

Mental invading forces

It has been a long time since I have had a sleep-over in someone else's house like this, I suppose. It is a strange feeling, crashing
(ooh yes crashing, since I have already broken something, the washer, damn knobs. Now I must glue it, and wrestle with the confession. What an awkward situation to be in, the strange complete familiarity of living in someone else's house but not even knowing how to address them.)
in a new house, no, a new home.
Many times I have stayed with family, even lately house-sat, but I adopted those area with such complete ease, having seen them many times, usually with the comfort provided by the aura of someone who has known me since diapers were haute couture.
Yet now?
These stairs are unknown to me, the noises all alien.
I'm moving through it like a tourist at a museum.
Staring at things like the consumers in Ikea, my fingers itching to touch everything, even the chairs I can't pronounce.

All this strangeness has done one good thing; The added adrenalin has spurred me to do some things I've been meaning to get done, so far I've completed three loads of laundry and read half-way through a book I've stared at for a week.
And now I'm surfing through garbage on the internet.
Perhaps this could be good for me?

Excuse me mister, I'd like to borrow some of your time.

I'm living on illicit time. I make silver tounged promises, compromises that wish for wings. 2 more minutes, 3 more hours, 1 more day, anything.
Time still confuses me. What possible effect could such a untangible, relative, vague concept have? More and more I find it standing in my way, or even behind me. Sometimes it trips me, sometimes it carries me. The hardest thing is to court it. Learn to dance with it, the proper seduction that changes daily; slow, sweet, furiously panicked, he is never the same twice, and because of that;
I may never be the same again.

Summer mournings

Staring through the bus window glass at a man staring out his car window at a Tim Hortens cup that is miraculously still upright in the road, summer waves goodbye, opens the way for a loving fall, the trees tentative in their yellow, but a million leaves on the ground already, washing through my steps toward my connecting bus, wishing I was camping in this perfection, with the yawning blue sky and the wind, staring at the woman staring at me staring at her wondering if I could overpower her and steal her double-double...

I am not awake today, wandering blearily in the sun through my kitchen windows. Instinct dresses me, I catch my bus on time, but this day has not even started, oh no, not even started not yet. I have a million hearts to break yet, and a million hearts to be broken. Possibility cradles me easing me into the cavernous bowl like an underground lake, so black it has no bottom, making me aware of my feet, standing on a thousand miles of nothing, perhaps watched, in their pink vunerability, by slick eyes with clear eyelids.
Every movement squeezes my heart; I am a sleepy ninja.