Teenage Angst

Bathroom mirror he'll be practicing the murderface
With a union jack, defaced and tagged it with a circle A
That squeaky clean is just a lack of shit to perpetrate
A cataclysmic circle-jerking shattering his vertebrae
Patent melodrama with a pack of melatonin pills
Capped with belladonna while he shatters his Achilles heel
Tell 'em how you really feel, trynna act mysterious
Leather jacket Byron that they taking half as serious
It ain't a factor period, tip of the iceberg
Sending out signals in an intricate cypher
Distress code, black ink, lax dress code
Depeche Mode lyrics next to sketches of Sinestro
Let's go, backpack strapped and he takes the bus
Mask of acne from the half sweet hazelnut
Swiss army blade is tucked, broken but he taped it up
To bootleg tapes of viking gods inhaling angel dust

"They say it's just a phase, understand that it's a movement!"
Twenty-twenty hindsight, and god damn that shit was stupid

The End

          I woke up to the end of the world. The sky was a tapestry of fire, a five-alarm sunset howling on the horizon. The wind screamed in the distance. Or maybe that was just me. Either way, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes with balled fists as I stumbled towards my dresser, lurking in the corner like it always did, a monster in the shadows. The wood complained in a shrill tongue of creaks and screeches as I forced the top drawer open, finding inside the companions that had proved invaluable in my years as a private investigator. They were a .45 revolver, a smudged vagrant with a nasty temper, and a hip flask, an austere gentleman embossed with ornate tangles of steel. In my line of work, these had been the best friends the world could offer. Moving from the oak behemoth to the door, I took a generous swig of whiskey from the flask, the fire in my gut winking knowingly at its big brother outside. Then I flipped over the sign on my door, the one hanging limply from a rusted nail a foot above my head.  The side facing me now implored clients to enter, while its twin regretfully informed any future visitors that I was closed indefinitely. I guess I’m a sucker for symbolic gestures. I hobbled back to the perch I’d woken up in, a black leather recliner hidden behind the ossified skeleton of a metal desk. Kicking my feet up on the rickety tin I did all of my legitimate business on, I took another gulp of the elixir that inspired less savoury dealings. I raised my flask to the inferno outside my window and proposed a toast to absent friends. Like I said, I’m a sucker for symbolic gestures.

          I guess I should start at the beginning if I’m going to talk about the end. It all started with a dame. The best stories do. So do most of the mediocre ones. I’m still trying to decide which this is. She walked into Callohan’s one night in August, cutting through the room like a knife through a phantom limb. Guys swivelled to stare as she passed, jaws descending to the ground like Autumn leaves. I could tell she was trouble the moment I saw her; she had the curves of an hourglass and the edges of a bayonet. The constant roar of the bar faded to a simmering murmur, the kind of hush you can hear heartbeats in. So everyone heard as she offered to buy me a drink, draping herself across the suspect surface of the bar. And everyone heard me when I turned her down. Her blush spread like wildfire across the delicate contours of her face until it matched the hue of her auburn hair. I heard a while ago that redheads are going extinct. I guess we’re all going extinct now. I told her loud enough for the bar to hear that I didn’t drink on the job. Of course, that was a lie, but it was the kind of lie that would save her some face. Way I saw it, she had a face worth saving. And to my credit, I was working, staking out the joint in case Fast Eddie Donnelly decided to make a cameo appearance. He’d been on the lam for weeks, and most cops thought he'd shot the moon and skipped town, but my connects told me he was laying low in the city until the force was off his back. Smart kid. Too bad for him that a smart kid’s got nothing on a grown man with ears in the right places. So there I was, waiting to get the jump on a two-bit hustler a bit too smart for his own good when she came in. Just my luck that Eddie chose the same moment to drop by. In a silent room, he took one look at a guy like me saying he was on the job and knew the score. Smart kid, makes sense he could put two and two together. I swore when I saw him spin at the door and start running. I tore after him as the crowd parted in wary awe, a stumbling Red Sea. My right shoulder crashed into the entrance like a battering ram as I gave pursuit. I winced a moment later. I was getting too old for this. Fast Eddie was already making a fleet b-line for a getaway car, and he didn’t get his nickname for nothing. I was wheezing already, running on bravado alone. I thought he was guaranteed to make good his escape; chasing the kid was like trying to lasso a lightning bolt. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a leg stretch languorously out in front of him. I saw it before he did, and he careened across the pavement, landing spread-eagled on the street corner. The redhead from the bar yawned with her heel on his back and asked about that drink. That was how I met Nikki Rouge.

          She told me she used to be a model, one of the ones pacing back and forth across thin platforms in the City of Light. Looking at her, I could believe it. But her career had been cut short by a freak lighting accident that left her back with a jagged scar, one that traced her spine with a Glasgow grin. After that she was damaged goods. I told her that I used to be a private eye, still was. She laughed and told me she knew. She had a Giaconda smile, wry with a secret lurking behind it. As luck would have it, she was in need of my services. Figures. The first dame to buy me a drink in years was getting married in a month and wanted to make sure her groom was the gentleman promised. Wanted to make damn sure there wasn’t another woman tucked away behind the curtain, or skeletons snickering in the closet while her fiancee pledged eternal fidelity. Struck me as a bit insecure until she dropped the bombshell: she was getting married in three months to a guy she’d never met. This mark was looking like the luckiest man alive to me and it turns out she didn’t even know what he looked like. It was an arranged marriage brokered by the groom’s family, a mining dynasty from India, the kind of people so wealthy they could buy themselves anonymity. That’s what they told her at least. She was skeptical until the first million arrived. I laughed softly to myself; the most gorgeous woman to ever set foot in Callohan’s had a million dollars and wanted me on payroll. I told her my costs were steep. She said her pockets were deeper. I let her buy that drink.  

          All she had was a name: Raj Patel. I spent the next week foraging through public records, uncovering everything I could about the would-be bridegroom. Which was precisely zilch. The man was a ghost, invisible and untraceable, for all intents and purposes dead to the world. Then again, if my bank of information was restricted to public accounts, I’d have gone broke years ago. If this guy wanted to be a ghost, I knew just the people to set up a seance for me. There was a group of hackers that owed me a favour and right now it seemed like high time to collect. They had my intel within the hour; the ingenuity of kids raised by the television never fails to amaze me. Turns out Raj Patel was the assumed name of one Osmium Singh. If my parents named me after a rock I guess I’d have changed my name too. Little Os was a science prodigy, reared in the finest technical institutes India had to offer. He graduated top of his class from MIT and was snatched up by a multinational think tank to lend his considerable intellect to their cause. Within the decade he was running it. This had all been accomplished with a shocking lack of fanfare, with any news of Os’ achievements immediately smothered by the boot of the Singh dynasty. That’s why nobody heard when the brain trust he headed up sold state of the art weapons to the American government, or when it peddled those same instruments of war to North Korea. During the past quarter of a century, Pandora International had been working as a glorified arms dealer; Osmium Singh's think tank was looking more and more like the Panzer type. I felt a lump in my throat. Ms. Rouge had been promised a front. I had to get to the bottom of this.

          As the weeks went on, I delved deeper and deeper into Pandora International, attempting to get a menial job at the local plant of one of their subsidiaries. They caught me on my first try to investigate the premises and had me ejected faster than I could wave my fake badge at them. Doubt that would’ve worked anyways. I thought I saw Patel though, as surly men in kevlar costumes escorted me from the facility. He was in a room full of white coats, bipedal lab rats scurrying back and forth. He was as still as death, elevated on a small platform. There was a leering smirk scrawled across his face as he surveyed the workers below.  If this was the guy, I had a bad feeling about him, the type that set off klaxons in your head and send shivers down your spine. There was only one way to be sure though; wearing my best poker face I yelled “Os!” at the top of my lungs. As he turned towards me, the grin remained on his face, but his eyes told me everything I needed to know. They told me that I was an ant in a giant’s gaze, and that Os Singh was a kid with a magnifying glass. They followed me like an assassin in a rental car as I was dragged out in the grips of paralytic stillness. I felt a shiver of panic for Nikki. I realized that that was how I’d started thinking of her. Not as a contract. Not as Ms. Rouge. Nikki. I sighed. I was getting in too deep, and now a rogue wave threatened to drown me. 

          I met Nikki the next Saturday at another bar, less of a dive than Callohan’s, but a long shot from the Ritz. I told her I was afraid. She rolled her eyes. They were a shimmering green in the glow of the bar; I kicked myself for noticing. She asked what a seasoned private investigator could have discovered that would turn him into a coward within the course of a few weeks. She was teasing me, but the words cut like a Stanley knife. I told her about how I'd seen him, playing God in the lab, the look on his face as a host of white-coated insects swarmed beneath him. I told her about the secret deals he had brokered with hostile nations, the sticks and stones he had passed around to every kid on the block, the gasoline he was selling to the fire. I told her that Patel himself was a facade, a costume to disguise the monster lurking beneath his alias. She asked what proof I had, voice heavy with the gravity of revelation. I told her the truth: all the proof I had were some files stolen from thin air and a klaxon screaming in the back of my mind. I’d chased down monsters for the better part of my life, and in that lab, I knew that I’d found another one. She nodded slowly. Turning her head away from me, she started to cry. As tears traced trails across the contours of her face, I did my best to console her. Regretting it instantly, I offered to walk her home. Smiling between tears she said that would be nice.

          Home for her was a motel on the outskirts of town. I asked why she chose to stay there when with the money from Singh she could hole up in a five-star suite for the rest of her life. Her voice said the motel reminded her of her childhood. Her tone said to leave it at that. I got the hint and did my best to keep the conversation away from arms dealers and broken homes. A couple times I managed to make her smile. The city was a pale ghost of its former glories, but it seemed a little brighter with her smiling in it. We got to her place, heralded by a flickering neon banner. It shouted CHEAP ROOMS tactlessly in flashing green. I thought to myself that for a girl whose cosmetic mask had been marred by the passage of tears, she was remarkably beautiful. I started to turn as we approached the doors. I’d come too far already. Still, I felt like Orpheus as I walked away, and when I turned Eurydice lay before me. Neither of us said a word, we just fell into each others’ arms. Her lips tasted like December beneath the neon lights.

          Later that night, hours later as we lay together beneath the glow of spastic cathodes, she told me she loved me. I ran my fingers absentmindedly over the red seam that ran along her back, gingerly tracing that dream-shattering scar. I chuckled, saying she moved fast. She asked if I loved her. I had to concede that I did. She smiled, drawing me into a long kiss. We didn’t say much after that. Our bodies talked for us. They spoke in a language they were rapidly becoming fluent in. 

          She was gone when I woke up, replaced by a post-it note written in deliberate cursive. I took the hint and made myself scarce too. I didn’t know what to make of the note. It was a collection of sweet nothings, but it had a strange air of finality that I didn't understand. The grace of the written word has eluded me all my life; apparently now wasn't the time for me to wise up. I had to clear my head. And the only way I know how to do that is to work. It was only an hour before I was back at the Pandora facility, and this time I wasn’t in the mood for subterfuge. I punched out the first guard I saw at the perimeter and took his uniform behind a drooping fir. It was a size large on me, but with a gun in my hand, I don’t think the white coats cared much about the fit of my sleeves. I wandered the maze of corridors until I noticed a sign winking at the end of the hall; in embossed steel it whispered Agni. Recalling the name from Patel's files, I palmed the steel door beneath, surprised as it swayed ajar at my touch; I pushed it open further, entering slowly, weighed down by trepidation. In a laboratory this secure, an open door in a restricted area seemed eerily convenient. Inside the room, the furnishing was sparse, and a single hulking computer dominated the centre of the room. State of the art, chrome beauty. I couldn’t figure out how to work the damn thing. I thought to myself that I was getting too old for this. It wasn’t the first time. I noticed another desktop set up in the far corner, a much older model. Scanning its contents, I noticed most of it pertained to a Project Agni. As I read on in growing horror, I realized Singh’s endgame. The jargon was foreign, but the intent was crystal clear. Osmium Singh had no political aspirations, no dreams of control; he was just a little boy who wanted to set the world on fire. My eyes were glued to the screen, dilating in fear when I heard the door slam behind me. It was Nikki. I ran towards her, not sure how she’d gotten in, not caring. All I wanted was to get her out, to get both of us out. I told her we had to leave immediately. Her face was empty, but she said the .38 revolver in her hand was full. She told me we’d be staying right where we were. It was at that exact moment that my heart broke. 

          Patel came in a few minutes later. I wanted to beat the grin off his face. He looked across the room at me, his incessant leer unchanged from our previous encounter. To add injury to insult, he took Nikki in his arms, bent her over his knee and kissed her, the pose straight off the cover of a bodice-ripper. He winked at me when he finished, rictus expanding to his gums. I couldn’t suppress the yelp of pain that escaped my lips. He revelled in it. I stared at the woman I loved and the man who had stolen her. All of a sudden the end of the world didn’t seem like a terrible idea. All I could ask was why. And, bastard that he was, Patel had the gall to answer. Because he could. The world was his to burn. My heart was hers to break. He was Siva, the destroyer, looking to bring the world burning to its knees. She was Devi, his consort in the dark. Smirking, he bid me watch him. Against my better judgement, my eyes followed his hand as it veered towards Nikki’s face. Without warning Patel clawed at the flesh beneath her eyes, revealing the steel sheen of chrome plating. She did not move, face retaining the same pretty vacancy it wore when she pulled the gun on me. Laughing at my outrage, Patel destroyed me with the cold truth. He told me I’d fallen in love with a machine. I’d given my heart to a creature of his design, an angel of electric pulses and titanium veins. She didn’t have the capacity to love, he told me gleefully, rubbing his hands like an excited virgin at a science fair. Finding refuge in the only sanctuary I knew, I told him to go fuck himself. His eyes narrowed. He had created life. But he couldn’t stand it in its disobedient form, obscene, flawed. Me. But I realized, looking at his child-like joy that he had needed to confess his accomplishment, needed to prove his worth to a primitive creature like me before he destroyed them all. Seeing the epiphany written across my face, his smile returned. He called himself Prometheus, creating life, then leaving fire within its grasping reach in hopes it would burn itself. The venom in his voice was pervasive. I felt it in my blood. I told him smugly that he was mixing his metaphors, claiming to be the Hindu destroyer and the Greek creator. He looked at me like a parent, proud of their precocious progeny. All myths are the same, he informed he with calm condescension, all religious dogma the same. There are only two stories, those of the creator and the destroyer. And here he was, both, the alpha and the omega. With that said, he told Nikki to take me to the woods and kill me. Automatically she moved to oblige. I fought against her, batting madly at the arms that had held me the night before. They clamped down on me with unexpected strength, and she dragged me screaming from the room. I tried to get the attention of labouring scientists, shouting as we passed. As my cries fell on deaf ears I realized with a sinking feeling that they were machines too, Singh’s instruments of oblivion. They were cogs in a clockwork bomb. Giving up, I let the world fade to black. 

          The next thing I knew I had woken up to a burning world, alone in my office. The post-it note was placed with care in front of me. The sweet nothings that had baffled me before were now painful to read. “Some people think I can’t love. But I can learn. And you taught me how. Thank you. For everything. If I don’t see you again...I love you.” To my credit I didn’t cry. I came from an era where any man worth his salt didn’t. I had no spirit left to break. But I took a swig from my flask and pledged it to absent friends. Then, with a front row seat to the apocalypse, I set the Post-It Note on fire. The struck match was my little Siva. The flame was the colour of Nikki’s hair. Like I say, I’m a sucker for symbolic gestures. 

                                                                   ***

Take Your Son To Work Day

          The sky was a particularly bleak shade of grey, draped in gunmetal clouds. This was nothing unusual in the heart of the city; it was always some kind of grey here. At least that’s what Scott Larson thought as he shuffled through the urban haze that invariably cloaked the streets. The worn straps of his backpack weighed down mercilessly on his shoulders, which threatened to buckle under the volume of their burden. This was understandable considering the bag contained, in no particular order, five voluminous textbooks, ranging from Biology to Comparative Civilizations, a notebook featuring prominent illustrations in lieu of less interesting lecture notes, a copy of Hitman borrowed from Scott’s friend Jamie and a nickel bag of marijuana from the same source. Among the scholastic texts and recreational indulgences, a bulletin printed in an outlandish font on fluorescent green paper gleefully heralded the upcoming Take Your Son To Work Day. The notice was crumpled between Scott’s Geometry textbook and an anthology of American poetry. 

          Scott didn’t get home until half past four. Even with the weight of his bag’s contents casting him as a modern Atlas, he had elected to walk home from school. Despite competition from hefty texts, the heaviest thing in his bag was the green slip promising fun and filial bonding with a sincerity painful to anyone younger than forty. While his classmates were heading home to present the notice to their parents with adolescent ambivalence, Scott was consumed by a dull dread. After Scott’s mother passed, his father had devoted himself to his work, which he insisted on keeping from his son, cloaking it in a vexing shroud of secrecy. Scott had brought it up on many occasions, each ending in a more stern refusal by Scott’s father to discuss his vocation, this trend continuing until the younger Larson sullenly resigned himself to his father’s ‘cloak and dagger bullshit’. Anticipating the discussion that the crumpled missive would invariably provoke, Scott hoped in vain that he could indefinitely postpone the frustration of that inevitable conversation. As he crossed the threshold into the humble apartment he shared with his father, he realized the futility of such hopes. 

“How was school today Scott?” Gabriel Larson asked as his son passed the glorified closet an architect had had the audacity to label a guest bedroom. Over the years Scott’s father had managed to transform it into a makeshift den, a feat of considerable ingenuity. “Good,” Scott replied, trying to escape to his room. To his chagrin, fate would not release him that easily. “Really? Just good?  C’mon sport, you’re not giving me much to work with,” Scott’s father chuckled. “I’m gonna cut the bullshit Dad, Take Your Son To Work Day is coming up at school, I need to do it to pass Planning 10.” Planning 10 was a hollow syllabus that had aspirations of one day growing up to be a real class. Scott had no intention of failing such a miserable course, but his true intent lay in the discovery of his father’s clandestine occupation. “Scott, I really don’t think you’d be interested in what I do. It’s pretty technical...I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you tagged along with Jamie’s dad.” Jamie’s father worked at a video game studio, a fact Jamie was insufferably proud of, constantly pointing out titles his father had worked on whenever he and Scott were browsing the latest releases. “I don’t know if I’d be bored by what you do, because I don’t even know what you do!” Scott protested emphatically. He felt his forehead knotting in the grip of an imminent headache. “I’ve told you Scott, I work in a troubleshooting area of mathematics. I handle problems.” The response was cryptic enough to provoke an outburst from Scott. 

“That doesn’t explain shit! Every other guy in my grade can tell me exactly what it is his father does, and when it comes to me I end up standing there looking like an asshole saying that I think you do math equations. Then somebody tells me that’s not a real job and that’s why we live here instead of the ‘burbs like everyone else.” 

“Who says that?” Scott’s father asked quietly, a glint in his eyes betraying a dormant anger. Scott sighed, knowing he had gone too far, hesitant to admit that those were as much his own misgivings as they were those of his peers. “Look, it doesn’t matter Dad, I just want to see what you do and actually get to spend some time with you. Since Mom died it seems like you’ve been working way more late shifts. I don’t mind...I know you work hard and I’m proud of that. I just miss having you around.”

There was a long silence in the room, Scott’s father wincing at the mention of his late wife. In the absence of sound, Scott noticed his father appraising him with a foreign expression, like he was trying to look through Scott into the man Scott would become. “If it means that much to you son, then I’ll take you to work with me,” Scott’s father spoke in a hoarse whisper, his grey eyes radiating a sadness Scott had yet to understand.

***

          The day arrived faster than either of them could rightfully expect, time’s fluid progression seeming to accelerate as it approached. Scott had returned the permission slip to his school and had subsequently slipped into a nervous anticipation, unable to really focus on any of his classes with the prospect of visiting his father’s work on the immediate horizon. Not that in the throes of raging hormones his classes were foremost on his mind anyways. But, in the week that stood obstinately between the present and the impending visit, Scott did his best to shelter himself in the usual refuges of youth, blazing in the parking lot with Jamie, strumming his pawn shop guitar, and writing awkwardly sincere poetry about unreciprocated love. His father seemed to be home more often as well, and Scott suspected that their conversation had resonated with him on a deeper level than he had intended. Still, Scott wasn’t surprised when he came home one afternoon to a note and a frozen dinner. Nor was he surprised when he heard the familiar clockwork of the key twisting in the front door and his father’s footsteps in the hall hours after midnight. Scott barely registered the sirens in the distance.

          Scott woke up Thursday morning at 6 AM to his father standing over his bed rattling a wooden spoon in a cast-iron pot with a wholly unnecessary vigor. 

“Rise and shine!” Gabriel chuckled while Scott murmured various obscenities. “What time is it?” the younger Larson asked incredulously, brushing sleep from his eyes with the back of his hand. It was still dark outside, as dark as 6 AM had any right to be. “Business time,” his father responded with surprising gravity, face stern, voice heavy with consequence. Scott was dressed and had composed a meager breakfast of burnt toast and orange juice within five minutes. He made small talk with his father as he ate, discussing the mundane subjects people do when topics of import lurk beneath the surface. 

“I’m sure you can still catch a lift with Jamie if you decide to go to his dad’s work instead.” Scott gave his father a look. There was nothing to discuss.

           The pair arrived at the train station at 7 AM, the marble walls glimmering in the early light. Pockets of commuters stood around, eyeing their watches with glum resignation. As with most forms of human transit, the trains obstinately refused to arrive as scheduled.
“I didn’t realize you took the train Dad,” Scott said, puzzled as they moved to the mezzanine. “I don’t,” Gabriel answered with a wry smirk. Scott was thoroughly confused as they approached an anonymous locker, his comprehension unaided by Gabriel procuring from it a jet black duffel bag. His quizzical stare went unanswered as Gabriel turned on his heels and began to head calmly for the exit, his gaze steely and pace constant, a relaxed stride. “What’s in the bag?” Scott asked, eyebrow arched in concerned skepticism. “Nothing,” Gabriel responded smoothly with uncharacteristic brevity. “If it’s nothing then why did we come here to get it?”
“Think of it as punching my clock.” With that, both the elder Larson and his perplexed protege stepped into the sunrise waiting beyond the revolving doors. 

                                                                    ***                  

                                                          

          Scott was beginning to lose his patience, his muscles growing tense, mind fumbling for an explanation as to why his father was leading him up a derelict fire escape onto the roof of an equally dilapidated hotel. His father had done nothing to give any indication of where he worked, or for that matter any reason for anything they had done so far that morning. He certainly gave no explanation for their clandestine ascent of a broken down hotel. Scott was trying to bottle his irritated confusion, but this became completely impossible when his father carefully extricated a scoped rifle from the black duffel bag. Eyes wide in fear, Scott shouted in wordless protest. Whatever vexation he had felt with his father had been usurped by abject terror. 

“I’m going to need you to be quiet Scott,” his father’s voice was gentle, the same soothing tones that would be employed to calm a spooked animal. However, they had little impact on the spooked animal that his son had become. “Be quiet?! Why do you have a fucking gun?! What the fuck are we doing here Dad?!” Scott yelped, frenzied, sweat streaming profusely down his temple. “If you calm down for a second I can explain Scott. Here.” Gabriel patted the ground next to where he was now kneeling, assembling a small tripod. Scott moved towards him, pace of his timid steps slow and trepidatious. Gabriel handed a pair of binoculars to his trembling son as he brought the rifle’s scope to his right eye. “You see the guy in the leather jacket in front of the cafe?” Scott nodded in tremulous affirmation. Even a fifteen-year-old scraping a C- in math could put two and two together. “His name’s Joey Giovanni. He runs some cocaine rackets on the South side. Consequently he’s run afoul of some people who have no qualms paying me a lump sum to take care of him.”
“You’re telling me you’re a fucking hit man?!” Scott exclaimed incredulously. “If that’s what you want to call it. I prefer to think of myself as a mathematician. I’ve never lied to you...I solve problems, I remove variables from equations.”
“You never lied to me? You sure as fuck didn’t tell me the truth!” Scott protested. His voice was shrill with indignation as a tapestry of deception evaporated before his eyes.  “I’m sorry about that Scott. But can you blame me? Do you think I wanted to tell you that I kill people for a living? Honestly until now I didn’t think you were old enough to know. I’m not even convinced I made the right call. But you’re fifteen...you’re standing on the precipice of young manhood. I realized I couldn’t keep you in the dark any more,” Gabriel said, grey eyes baneful as the morning light caught tears threatening to escape. “Jesus...did Mom know?” Scott stuttered, struggling to stay calm. “Oh she knew. This is how we met. She was better at this than me.” Gabriel smiled at the bittersweet memory of the art his late wife wrung from a brutal craft. “She gave it up to look after you when you were young. I told her it should be me, but she just laughed and said she didn’t want to harm my fragile masculine ego by admitting she was the better...mathematician...of the two of us. I think she just wanted to make sure she got to spend time with you. I’m glad she did.” Scott was speechless, his mouth oscillating from gaping to shut as he tried and failed to articulate his thoughts. The revelation that he was the progeny of assassins was overwhelming. All he could manage to say was: “Hey, where did Joey go?” His father cursed, turning back to his rifle, scanning wildly for his departed mark. To Joey’s misfortune, Gabriel Larson caught him in the fiberglass snares of his crosshairs half a block away. Five pounds of pressure and a silenced pop later and a departed mark was all that was left of his quarry. Recoiling instinctually, Scott was still in shock as Gabriel took him by his arm wordlessly and began to run. They moved across rooftops, cutting a fleet swathe through amassed mobs of indignant pigeons with their progress. The wailing of sirens faded to memory as Scott’s lungs burned with exertion. After a few blocks of being dragged at an all-out sprint he hunched over, hacking up hot saliva. Despite the ephemeral high they afforded him, smoke sessions with Jamie had stolen his stamina. “Mr. Rodriguez told me he caught Jamie smoking pot the other day,” Gabriel remarked casually as his son struggled to recapture his errant breath. “Oh yeah?” Scott responded nervously. This line of interrogation made him justifiably uncomfortable. He could imagine the pungent baggy of faded green leaves hidden in his sock drawer pulsing like Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart. “I was just wondering if you got the weed in your bag from him,” Gabriel said, looking pointedly at his wheezing son. Scott moaned in the low anguish of someone who has just been found out. “Yeah, we blaze together.” Scott said, attempting to find sanctuary in simple honesty.  “I’m disappointed Scott. Marijuana is a gateway drug. It can lead to some bad stuff and I’m sure it’s not helping your studies at all. It certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much for your stamina.”
“...Dad...you kill people for money.” Gabriel was silent in the face of this retort. “I’m sorry...I didn’t mean for it to come out like that. Look, it’s just something I do, y’know? I promise it’s not doing anything to my grades...sometimes I just need to tune out all the ugliness in the world. When I’m high, it seems like there might be some beauty left that’s just hiding,” Scott murmured, finding it hard to believe he was perched on the sloped roof of an Asian diner discussing his drug habits with his assassin father, As snub chimneys belched white smoke in the distance, Scott smiled grudgingly at the surreal direction his life had taken. “You might have a point about my stamina though,” Scott conceded, launching into a violent coughing fit. His father smiled in spite of himself. “I’m not going to lie and said I never lit up back in my day, and I hate having to be that hypocritical parent but would you rather I didn’t care at all?” Gabriel Larson asked, pulling the classic parental guilt trip. “No Dad,” Scott sighed wearily “It’s just that in light of recent events I think your moral pedestal is a bit suspect. That’s all.” His father nodded slightly. “All right. I’m not going to say you can’t. Because I know how little that means, especially now. But don’t let me catch you again. That’s the mantra of my trade anyways. Just to make sure, if  I find out that you’ve been smoking again, I’ll kill Jamie.”
“Joking!” Gabriel added hastily in scandalized response to Scott’s appalled expression.
“That’s fucked up Dad.” But Scott began to laugh in spite of just how fucked up it was, and soon he and Gabriel were bent over in stitches on the roof, howling at just how fucked up life could be. 

                                                               ***

          The rest of the day was spent running down a short checklist Gabriel had been handed by an anonymous benefactor, who in turn was contracted by an alternately disgruntled, greedy, or simply bored clientele. First there was Jake O’Donnell, a crooked beat cop who insisted on collecting an exorbitant fee in exchange for looking the other way. Gabriel and Scott saw to it that he collected some loose change in the back instead. Then there was Janet Sullivan, whose extramarital escapades broke the heart of a neurotic and wealthy spouse. She never made it to the next rendezvous planned with her Brazilian gardener. Next was Sidney Stark, thrown into a shark tank for trying to run a lending racket out of an aquarium. Scott had to concede that the irony of an aspiring loan shark being fed to his aquatic counterparts was darkly amusing.
“One more name,” Gabriel told Scott as they walked down the boulevard. “I have a feeling you’re going to enjoy this one.” His lips curled upwards into a Cheshire grin. The name was Taylor Townsend, a young singer/songwriter who had managed to climb the pop charts with saccharine ditties extolling the respective virtues of abstinence and temperance. Like many of his ilk, he had a cocaine habit and a set of aberrant sexual proclivities that would appall de Sade himself. It was becoming increasingly difficult for his label to keep the smudges on their angel out of the public eye. That coupled with his cracking voice and insistence on eschewing ghostwritten numbers in lieu of his own ponderous compositions had led his label to believe that he was worth more to them dead than alive. From Greatest Hits albums to tribute compilations by celebrated peers to R.I.P. Taylor <3 (already trademarked) coffee mugs, there were a myriad of merchandising opportunities that shimmered in the eyes of enterprising executives. After all, as gutter poets have long observed, a supernova is far more beautiful to observe than a dying star. Gabriel got to 'Taylor Townsend' in this rationale before Scott agreed enthusiastically. The duo arrived at Townsend’s hotel just as the sun was starting to fade into the west, though it still peeked out from behind the clouds.Even it seemed curious as to what would happen next. Through a series of elegant deceits, Gabriel and Scott arrived at the room Taylor was staying in. There was no security, a token of goodwill by the record label. There was just a locked door, easily battered open, and a shocked young divo whose jolt upon the sudden intrusion caused a small mountain of cocaine to erupt in a miniature narcotic snowstorm. The singer yelped inarticulately, dialogue laced with profanity as the Larsons approached, duffel bag hanging ominously from Gabriel’s left hand. “Calm down Taylor, we’re big fans. Isn’t that right Scott?” Gabriel spoke in a soothing tone that smothered a lurking smirk. Scott couldn’t find it in himself to lie so guilefully. “You’re an artless fraud,” Scott spat venomously. “So I lied about the fan part.” Gabriel cracked, laughing openly as Taylor’s eyes widened in growing horror. Opening his duffel bag with a theatrical flourish Gabriel presented a gleaming pistol to his son with pantomimed reverence. “I bequeath unto thee Excalibur, Arthur.” Gabriel smiled as Scott took the weapon and leveled it at Townsend’s terrified face.

“Whoa, guys...let’s just talk about this guys...call up my people, they can give you money! Hey, you can even have some of my blow!” Townsend smiled pitifully as he offered a handful of the suspect powder. “We’re here for your people Taylor. They think you’re a piece of shit too.” Scott looked directly at the quivering specimen in front of him, and even as venomous intent surged through his every fiber, he felt his trigger arm begin to tremble, that shiver increasing in a violent crescendo, culminating in full spasms. He dropped his arm and stood for a moment, absolutely still, before dropping to the floor, crying. “I’m sorry Dad, I just can’t do it. I’m not like you. He deserves it, but I’m not the one to do it. I’m too weak for this.” Scott’s voice was apoplectic, muffled by tears. “No. This makes you stronger than I’ve ever been Scott. I’m proud of you,” Gabriel told his son, meaning every word of it. Townsend, seeking to take advantage of this touching moment was slinking slowly towards his bed in hopes of vaulting the pair of Larsons and escaping through the splintered door. Gabriel’s shot hit him before he could mount the mattress. “Heaven waits for those who are pure.” Gabriel whispered with a rueful smile, quoting Townsend’s biggest hit. With that, the two Larsons fell into the embrace of father and son that accompanies the conclusion of so many coming of age tales. Leaving the room through its battered entrance, the pair made their way to the lobby, striding calmly through the foyer, resplendent in wood splinters, cocaine, and blood. They passed through the revolving doors like proud specters, drifting into the gloaming. The sky was a vibrant grey as they disappeared. 

          

                                                                   ***

Here Comes The Phantom

Here comes the phantom
Stumbling through the night
His feet fade into whispers
On the weathered sands of time

Concocting an abyss
In the back of my mind
Murmurs in utopia
Combustion of a predator

Flying to Goliath's grasp
A falcon flailing leather wings
Men were not intended for
The dynasty of paper kings

The queen ignites the feathers
Wax and tin foil alchemy
Paraffin explosions
In a peregrine's display

That treasured fortress
Holy Xanadu in supernova
Captured in a jar and bottled
Locked away with hidden keys

Writhing in the thrall of wonder
Shadows dancing on the wall
Here comes the phantom
If he's really there at all

Blackbird

Beneath the empty chattering of magpies and blackbirds
Vagrants in the woods breathing baptized and backwards
Disorderly zen in the black eyes of cancer
Captain of the ship come to capsize the rapture
Can't find the answer in a dog-eared pamphlet
Tremble as you're standing on the frontier's anklet
Anguished, shimmy in the noose with a halo
The red and blue veins of the John Deere banquet
Swing and a miss, king of a distant abyss taking sips from a lingering mist
Whispering fists, a mixture of liquor and piss, an elixir that didn't exist
Imminent blips, clips of belligerent tinsel intent upon sinking the ship
Licking his lips as he sits on the red eye, a dead sky's just a wishful eclipse

With warm regards to Aesop Rock and Wallace Stevens

Instant Infants

Glass skeletons of monarchs, delicate in their chrysalis
The imminence of Winter, the celibate shame of Sisyphus
The sickly sulphur scent of an angel with lead wings
The harbinger of frost tap dancing on dead kings
The eidolon melodies, apparitions and memories
Spectres in the mirror, posing close to the rosaries
Opiate poetry in the thrall of a jaded moon
My ghost and my lover sleep in the same cocoon
The misted iris of God in a vacant room
My ghost and my lover sleep in the same cocoon
A widow smiling at a sunset that came too soon
My ghost and my lover sleep in the same cocoon

Infant Instants

Estranged and tremulant

On timid echelons of vertigo

Impose semantics

On the verdant archipelagos

My wings are paraffin

I drew them on with magic marker

Hidden in my carapace

Which glistens artificially

Laments and ligaments

Lost labours lie awake

The pulse beneath the floorboards

As I say it with a straight face

A crooked smile barely

Slants towards the setting sun

Twisted tongue, I'm askew

Just as much as anyone

Escape From Downtown

This story begins as so many seem to for me, with the bus system doing its absolute utmost to thwart my timely progress to the domestic comforts of my home. I saw the 22 as I approached Robson, backtracking after depositing friends at the Canada Line...muttering an obscenity beneath my breath I already knew how this was destined to play out. I sprinted towards the stationary vehicle, only to be confronted with a surly driver who bore a conspicuous resemblance to Kerry King, the notoriously misanthropic guitarist of notoriously misanthropic band Slayer. I made a polite "yo, I need a lift homie" gesture at the door, which was met with a gaze of pure and utter hatred, tempered with a healthy dose of absolute and unadulterated contempt as he shook his head and gunned the engine. My previously hushed profanity leapt several decibels as I roared into a sprint, tailing the errant bus with an inhuman exertion of frustrated energy. I was thwarted yet again at the next stop, the driver casting another glance of ocular daggers before leaving me inhaling a noxious cloud of exhaust. Undeterred and pissed off, I kept running, hurling epithets through the air at the deaf ears of the vehicle that constantly eluded me, remaining a perpetual inch from my fumbling grasp. Eventually the bus lured me as far as St. Paul's Hospital before I realized that if I pursued it any further I'd be in need of that medical facility's services, wheezing in the remaining fragments of the stamina I squandered in adolescence. With an expression of smug satisfaction scrawled across his face, Kerry King's malcontent doppelganger sped into the night, leaving me stranded in the downtown core. After pausing a moment to inhale the night air, a sweet atmospheric elixir that tended gingerly to my bruised lungs, I realized how winded I really was, winded enough to be on the verge of coughing blood into an otherwise picturesque rhododendron bush. It was as I was hunched over said foliage contemplating the merits of said action that I was accosted by a middle-aged black man. "What you doing there...you taking a picture?" he asked with genuine curiosity. As if to provide fodder for film if I was, he jumped into the air, clicking his heels in a bizarre reenactment of Dorothy's escape from Oz. Amused even in my physically deteriorated state, I managed to justify his actions by catching a couple blurred snapshots thereof, rendered in pixellated goodness on my phone. He was wearing a modest brown blazer and had an oddly conservative demeanour. Pairing these characteristics with the leather-bound volume clasped in his right hand, I'm now in mortal fear that I'm about to be converted to Jehovah or have a bible unceremoniously foisted upon me by an industrious salesman. Instead, he takes me under his arm, allowing me into his confidence and into a potent aroma of bourbon. "My wife is a bitch." he declares drunkenly. "Mmm. That's a common problem." I muse in a tone I sincerely hope resembles sympathy. He nods thoughtfully for a moment before crowing triumphantly "But I liberated myself today!" Somewhat concerned I nod. "See those towers there?" he inquires, gesticulating towards a pair protruding into the city skyline across the street. I nod in affirmation, unsure of what he's getting at. "As of today," he advises me in a stage whisper "I own those towers.""...And my wife is just at home eating some bitch's pussy." he adds in passing. Struggling to contain my obvious amusement at the man's intoxicated statements, I'm drawn into  a bear hug with him, which is concluded by an oddly officious handshake. I tell him to have a good night and congratulate him on his recent windfalls. Who knows...maybe the man who walked into the night, pausing to inform the minor baseball celebrity shilling Booster Juice on a tattered poster that he could in fact "boost my DICK!" really did own the buildings. If so, in my frustrated tenure at an abandoned bus stop, hobbled by exhaustion and contemplating the unfortunate likelihood of throwing up in a collection of rhododendrons, I encountered one of the wealthiest men in Vancouver. And if not, I encountered somebody with comparably rich delusions. Either way, as I climbed groggily aboard the last bus to leave downtown that night, happy to find the driver a far more benevolent individual than a certain escapee from thrash metal's heyday, I realized that at least something was worth staying in downtown for. And then I got the fuck out. 

Is it unfair to assume this dude would give you a ride?

Lullabies for the Deaf

It's that disconcerting feeling, mired in hypnogogia, as the fabric of the universe shimmers in serene artificiality, that sense that there's something beyond the mundane constraints of our existence. Drifting towards the open arms of sleep as you recognize the tolling chimes that echo in anonymous caverns you never noticed in your mind, you begin to wonder if maybe you're just now waking up. What you were so convinced was reality is now suspect, rendered counterfeit by the conviction of dream. This inversion lulls you into paralytic stillness, comatose, overdosing on kaleidoscopic reveries of raspberry afternoons with pixellated pixies and simian tycoons. The world slides away infinite second by ephemeral eon, and you find yourself stumbling alternately through blissful utopias and their jagged reflections in dystopian dynasties. Prometheus labours in penitence, his cathedral crumbling with his altruism's decadence, his sentences colliding in the forge as if Hephaestus' mighty arms were tempering the elements. And Tom Sawyer waves from the raft, an imaginary captain of a fictional ship he sails through a permanent July to a crimson eclipse. How turbulent the skies become as harlequins arrest a beating heart beneath the floorboards of a desecrated science class, nostalgic reminiscences of skeletons and diaphragms and empires scrawled with silent hands, and unrequited love within the grip of stark irrelevance. Irreverent, their gazes lead towards a muted beam of light. A broken stage you stand upon, aware that it's a play and you're a character today but the audience is ominous, a scarab and a sage and when they dare you to behave as actors, changing chapters suddenly, swearing you're in love with me, the dungeons breathe in throes of passion, lonely bastion, underneath this parrot and a blade is just a boy pretending he's a pirate, seas as violent as his inclinations, trampling the Inca nation on his way to Easter Island. The Talking Heads are playing in a cellar with the walking dead and even as the scarab sighs the sage is watching hours dye the sour hearts and harpsichords that spark the floor ablaze because they're burning down the house in peristaltic memories of Science 9, refining lines so that Prometheus can find the time to intervene the splintered scenes of Huckleberry brandishing a mannequin, his mannerisms caged and repetitious, going on endlessly endlessly endlessly endlessly endlessly endlessly. And all of that occurs and they dare you to obey, and they don't care that it's a play, you're unaware of what to say. And then the curtain draws back, pierced by the dissonance of an alarm clock, a digitized banshee whose wails perforate the very fabric of reality. And the veneer slips away, gradually, and you wake to a sour disposition and the prospect of a new day. And in this transition, there's this disquieting sensation, mired in the grip of hypnogogia, where you know that you're discarding dreams. But for one split second those harbour schemes and Harvard queens  hardly seem like butterflies in the west, singing for nobody, lullabies for the deaf.

Deep Blue

*Once again, if the lyrics pique your interest, check out the track here http://soundcloud.com/strawberrydragons/big-blue-v-3*

Crows scatter shattering the ghosts in the rearview/Midnight is silent but I know that I can hear you/Moonlight to blind me but I know that I can see you/This is just a chess game, I’m just playing with Deep Blue

It’s got me feeling like I’m Logan in Japan/Got a glass heart, feel it broken in my hand/Into cracked shards, isn’t going like I planned/Shit I only took a stand to have a throne at my command/But now it slips away, like if that’s art, this is just a black market targeting a harlequin in disarray/She liked the last part, an image of a stained glass saint cast in lunacy, she knew that we could ricochet/Way past the waves splashing, interlaced with ocean floor/Arguments could turn her open mouth into an open sore/But then again, when my body was a broken sword/She came back, charmed her open arms into an open door/I’m overboard, lonely shore and a siren’s song/Right or wrong, I stay back and make tracks with open chords/Shimmering in tremolo, disguising words as see through/Different when I let her go, it’s checkmate to deep blue

Crows scatter shattering the ghosts in the rearview/Midnight is silent but I know that I can hear you/Moonlight to blind me but I know that I can see you/This is just a chess game, I’m just playing with Deep Blue

A queen is moving through the white and black/Slips towards the king, a pawn is trynna act like he might attack/She calls the bluff, stabs the king through his chestplate, it’s checkmate, the throne is not enough when she’s smiling back/Sky is cracked, clouds cover secrets in a deep blue/Even as I speak the ether seems to be as renewed/As me, tipped king, left pleading for a redo/She shakes her head and smiles like “I just beat you in three moves”

Strawberry Dragons

*If the lyrics pique your interest, check out the song on Soundcloud http://soundcloud.com/strawberrydragons/strawberry-dragons-v-3*

Strapped with an AK/When I'm on a track with a rap for the payday/Rocking the boat, get socked in the throat, and you're not even close and I'm telling the captain to mayday/Spit synonyms, sick simian, six billion people on the planet to vacate, placate, stay in the pad with a playmate, hammer to bang in the anvil of daybreak/Damn, how'd I say that with a straight face, same way I say I got cash in the millions, reptilian, just killin' 'em, let's get it in and you know that I'm back for the melee/Boom, king of the team/Dr. Evil: ridiculous schemes/Mixed with Ali, wrote me a doubletime, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee/Bringing the heat like Lebron James or Dante, but I got flames, listen to me/Ready for whatever I'm heartless, but regardless I get it in never missing a beat/Flipping the page in a cypher, sickest rhymer, cider I sip in the shade/Sharper than the tip of a blade, I dig 'em a grave the minute I save/Watching 'em spin in the flames, I whisper their name like the ending of Citizen Kane/Naw, I'm Nicholas Cage, flipping a script for the minimum wage/What I'm saying is it's Lipsis AKA I don't give a fuck/Pale kid raps fast. hash tag, zip 'em up

Lover and a fighter who says I can't be both/Arcade beat in the street with a cheat code/Get 'em in a Stranglehold, blitz with the eagles/Reload clips while I'm dripped in a speedboat/I move slow, John Woo swag, an invincible ego/Captain Tequila, dance with a glass of tequila and actually think I'm a hero/It's a dark knight, come through with the backhand/It's A Dark Knight, now you losing to Batman/Catwoman slowly removing her track pants/Bruce in the back while she move for the lapdance/Stay tuned for the fanfic, fuck antics, I'd rather make loops with a trashcan/Afghan on with a groove like it's Bam Bam/Bullets everywhere like a movie with Van Damme/Got 'em all running home like a Grand Slam/Naw, laser to your dome like a CAT scan/Fuck a hater cuz I'm dope with the rap man/Run away, I'm marking your back like a tramp stamp/I know it's hard to react, armed with the fact, marks are as sharp as a tack/Wait for the sharks to attack, carving a track, I harbour and sharpen an axe/Yeah I'm spitting those gun rhyme similes/Silly me, king of that punchline villainy/Yeah you know that it's that I double L shit/Shout out to the dragons that I run in hell with

Strange Times

It was late. Not that late, all things considered, but late enough that I wanted to go home and the bus system was doing its utmost to thwart me. I'd just gotten off work, black shirt tucked in to my black pants, streaked with stray nebulas of vanilla syrup and bleach. Occupational hazards of the closing barista. Regardless, I was in a decent mood as I walked down the block to my bus stop, undoing the buttons of my shirt as I went. I paid no mind to the February chill that punctuated the night breeze. Being born and raised in Vancouver means you get used to the cold after a while. Work shirt in tow, spring in my step, odd looks from the few pedestrians who couldn't reconcile the month with a t-shirt. I got to the bus stop and noticed a blind man standing there, a white guy, left hand clenched firmly on the leash of his seeing eye dog. The dog was so dark that I almost couldn't see it, camouflaged in the shadows of the bus shelter. I stood behind him, not wishing to trespass upon courtesy...when the bus showed up, I would let him get on first. There were a couple other tired denizens accumulated around the bus stop. A woman with a foam mattress tucked awkwardly in a camper bag, a Main street refugee blurring the line between haute couture and homelessness. An old Asian man sat on the bench, a skater teetering on the edge of his cigarette as the end burned an insignia into the night sky. I ignored them for the most part, isolated in my earbud empire, biding my time until the bus arrived. Fifteen minutes later, it did. And by some peculiar coincidence, some obscure, serendipitous twist of fate, there was another blind man on the bus. It was a black guy, led forward by a dog whiter than fresh snow, white as Scarface's vice. The driver held people back from exiting while this guy was led by his dog through the front door of the bus. It trotted along gregariously enough, until pausing, it noticed its opposite across from it. The white dog's hair bristled, as did its counterpart's, and next thing I knew, they had lunged at each other, pulling their wards violently as they found themselves locked in feral combat. Their barks pierced the silence of the night, jagged over the neutral hum of the engines lurking in the background. The blind men were balanced precariously over a dog fight, chromatic opposites, resembling some surreal yin-yang symbol. I could barely believe my eyes. Moments later, the fight had vanished from the dogs, their canine urges satisfied, confident in their dominance. The men parted ways, the only parties unaware of the acute visual irony of the scene they had just painted, neither the wiser as to what had just happened. I got on my bus feeling one step closer to having seen everything.

Whispers of the Night

I spoke too soon
Pagan hymns for a broken moon
Carving my own cocoon
Alien with an open wound
Sapian, I'm saying salience is overdue
Atheist praying that faith is just overused
But understand, I know the devil's below me
A degenerate's throne and he exits it slowly
It's underhand, but his exodus holds me
In a stranglehold, manacled to my pedestal, holy
With a feather and sunlight
Candlewax, ambition and some might
Assume it's doomed to end in a gunfight
But the swords are sheathed
I'm distorted meeting foreign teeth
In unexpected stupors, losing lucre
To these laurel wreaths
Never had a dream so vivid in my life
Euphoric guilt is echoing in whispers of the night

The Academy

A solitary tear to trace a jet trail down a single starlet's face

Acceptance speeches wither in the taut expectant fingers

Of four Laurens, forlorn with masks of equanimity
Covering the teeth intent on tethering their trembling tongues

Wrods scrwaled hatsily in tense nticipation

Crumble in upon themselves, trampled in obscurity

Paper balled inside a velvet costume's sleek compartments

Readied for its meteoric travel to a burial

In anonymous ignominy deposited in garbage cans

As lithely and discreetly as the circumstance permits

Amidst the empty room that's full of people

Canapes, and cavalcades of cameras

It's glamourous, and desolate, the night becoming desperate 

Lashing out, regretting it, memoriams and exits and orchestral pits

The music swells...

...and she thanks the academy, striding off the stage

To the applause of her adoring peers

Who fear aborted speeches, short careers and sordid dreams

Of their acceptance when they win next year

The Wonderful World of Polvorizador

Well would you look at that. It's a new year. Coincidentally it also happened to be a new year about a month and a half ago. Looks like that resolution about procrastination has been irreparably shattered already. C'est la vie. But, being that it's a new year and I've managed to stumble through the lethargic throes of early 2012 in sloth-like indolence, I suppose the annual grace period for inactivity is coming to its inevitable conclusion. And therein, as the Bard would say, lies the rub. On a nominally related tangent, Therein Lies The Rub would be an excellent name for a seedy massage parlour. #JustSaying. But, back to the point I'm still meandering towards articulating. It's a new year. Because I haven't established this yet. Being a new year, the general tradition is to make some sort of change in your habits or behaviour. Given that I'm one of that elite class of arrogant bastards who have the gall to refer to themselves as artists with inadvertent sincerity, a change in behaviour or habit inevitably impacts a parallel shift in the nature of my art. So, in a sudden submission to the ever-dreaded stranglehold of maturity, I've sold out. Given my status of literary obscurity, an irrelevance that makes Samuel Pepys look like Dan Brown, the consequences of my Faustian transaction are understandably negligible, but in my sense of self-inflation I feel they warrant explanation. I partnered with AdSense upon realizing that this blog, originally created to satisfy a mandatory component of a high school creative writing course, is now my exclusive domain, a forum in which I can now post whatever I want to. ...Which is approximately what I did prior to graduation as well, but being that this is a question of pretentious artistry, symbolism is ever-so-important. So given that I've now been handed the reins of my intellectual property, reacting with impeccably swift reflexes over a seven month span, I've decided to have a go at monetizing off what I make a habit of labeling as art. While AdSense precludes me from directly exhorting my faithful audience (of which I delude myself into assuming the existence of) to click the ads that are presently surrounding this post like an ominous mob, I presume it's within my rights to say that I wouldn't mind if you did. If not, you didn't hear it from me. And what content am I using to grease my descent into the palm of avarice? In the past this blog has been relatively dependent upon poetry riddled with the petty anguish of hormonal angst, various interludes of unadulterated wiggerism, woefully earnest social commentary and Lovecraftian horror parables. Given that I've already broken my resolution about procrastination, I suppose it's only fair that I break the resolution about varying the content I write as well. So if you've enjoyed reading about zombies, rap battles, Hindu philosophy, blatant allegories for sexual frustration, sunsets and summer nights, fragile things, my burgeoning alcoholism, empires crumbling, Atlantis rising and various other facets of a scattered psyche, I bid you to continue with my sincere gratitude. It is a new year after all.

Moksha

In a blank monastic haze of grey I try to gaze inside myself

Aiming for the deity that dwells within my depths
Moksha dancing just beyond my grasp

Stumble through the tangle of a myriad of faults
My cerebellum swells into the crystal shell of Narcissus
A road to hell is paved with good intentions down my vertebrae
Leading to a cellar selling lecherous desire
Lost in tired battles with my desolated self-control

As Yeats deplored the second coming, sighing so do I
Marvelling at imperfections Brahman breeds inside of me

I leave myself, unconscious of the God that breathes inside of me

Sonnet 4: Hypnagogia

My lover is a specimen of grace
Her siren smile a sigh of scarlet stars
A harlequin who harvests harnessed hearts
Collected in the net of her embrace

My lover is a goddess on the plains
Floating freely through thought's forgotten mist
Her sole fault is that she does not exist
She is poetry, flawless in the rain

Her absence is an aching phantom limb
An echo in a violet abyss
A moment in the silence of a kiss
But still I give myself to random whims

For while her art may truly have bound me
I take heart in the beauty around me

The Wizard of Ooze

Be forewarned: in all likelihood this story is probably one of complete fiction. Even I'm not sure of its veracity. I'm a simple messenger. But regardless of its truth, its a story worth telling. I heard it from my father in a long drive away from a long night at work. I was burnt out, sinking deep into the comfort of the night and the more tangible pleasantness of the cheap fabric seats of my family's '95 Taurus. I was bitching about my work, as I was wont to do in those hazy shifts washing dishes at the Galley. Leave it to my dad to prove why I was so wrong.

"Back when I was in Alaska, long before I met your mother, I was wandering aimlessly, clamping on to whatever career I could find. For a while I was fishing in the inhospitable waters between Anchorage and Russia with a crew of Aleut natives, trying to capture crabs and fish from the embrace of the frozen waters. I guess Deadliest Catch sort of ripped off our gimmick some years down the road. Then for a while I was a miner, burrowing deeper and deeper inton the heart of the earth until I strode through her black ventricles, striking gold from spare arteries long forgotten by man's eyes. But the  job I'll never forget was my time spent in an oil refinery. The job itself was unremarkable. The pay was meagre, the work was tedious. But it was at this refinery that I met the Wizard of Ooze. He was an older man, in his mid-sixties. And I feel no shame in saying that if he'd wanted to kick my ass, he very well could've. He was sinewy, still pulsing with a virile vitality that most men abandon upon marriage. A bachelor for the entirety of life, this man was immune from that depravation of strength, instead maintaining a surly distance from his more docile coworkers. I observed him from afar at first; he was assigned to the purification booth, an area generally regarded as on of the more hazardous of an inherently dangerous plant. But he never seemed worried...instead he derived an enjoyment from his work that was unparalleled by anyone else on the plant. After a period of observation, I felt an inexplicable compulsion to talk to him, if only to truly appreciate his peculiar demeanour. His voice was different than I had expected, gentle, even as his vocal chords were frayed by the toll of years of whiskey and cigarettes. When I asked him why he enjoyed his work as he did, he replied simply "It's all for fun isn't it?" I was baffled by this. When I asked him for clarification, I soon realized what he meant. He told me that in the Vietnam war he had been an assassin for the American government. He hadn't enjoyed having to kill people, cloaked in an anonymity rendered irrelevant by the barbarism of war, but he did so anyways out of a base patriotism. At one point he even claimed that he'd been commissioned by Uncle Sam to assassinate the French royal family. While this homicidal conspiracy had been unsuccessful, he was still proud of his involvement in a scheme so grandiose. Even so, when the war ended, he found himself in a strange place. The army had cultivated an innate ability for murder, sequestered deep beneath his gentle nature, but in peacetime, he was useless. He became a nomad, moving from place to place, trying to adopt what skills he could and inevitably failing. This cycle continued until he reached Alaska. It was there that he discovered an inexplicable talent for purifying oil. And so, despite the danger, he whiled his days away in the purification room. He was so glad of work that didn't require his base talents that he performed his services at the modest cost of lodgings and food. He was so glad to have found a skill of his separate from the savagery he had displayed that every day he would head to work with a broad grin scrawled easily across his face. I was shocked to hear this. I hadn't imagined hm to be a killer, and even to this day I think he might've been taking the piss, telling me some elaborate hoax, trying to distract me from whatever real reason he was so invested in and pleased with his work. But whenever I pressed deeper, he'd simply smile ruefully and say "It's all for fun anyways isn't it?". After a while we became friends. I quickly realized that he had no interest in dwelling on his past, so our conversations soon became focused on our futures. He encouraged me to settle down, find a girl worthy of my love and have a son to bear my name. I encouraged him to do the same, in a gently mocking tone. I'm glad I took his advice now, but I'm saddened that I failed to recognize the desperation behind his persistent hints that I needed to adopt the shackles of domestic life. I realized what he meant when the company called me. It was 1995, and my son was two years old. I'd been out of touch with the Wizard, corresponding exclusively through occasional postcards. The company told me that the Wizard was dying, and that he wanted to see me before he passed away. Without hesitation, I explained to my wife how important it was that i see him, and I bought a ticket to Anchorage. I saw him bedridden there, and it broke my heart. His frame restricted to a linen tomb, sequestered in a wing of the hospital people aren't expected to exit intact. But even as I entered to room, he was smiling broadly, although in a more resigned fashion than I'd seen while we worked together. Turns out all those years handling toxic substance, even with the delicacy that had earned him his Baumian moniker had proved carcinogenic. Even as he smiled like a bachelor in the prime of his youth before me, he was dying of cancer, But what he said to me has stuck in my mind ever since, and I've made a point of not letting it slip away. "I've done a lot of bad things in my life. I've killed people. Hell, I even tried to kill the French royal family. Fuckin' dog and pony show THAT was. But I've also done some beautiful things. I've made love, crafted it from thin air in the arms of beautiful woman and watched it float into thin air, scarlet and proud. But for the most part I've done a lot of tedious shit. Hell, I grew up, I worked at an oil refinery for Christ's sake...that's a good forty years of my life of little to no consequence, a tale of sound and fury told by an idiot signifying nothing. But you know what I realized? It's all for fun anyways." And with that, the Wizard of Ooze took his dying breath, releasing himself from a life that had shepherded him through a turbulent era, forced him to violent acts and rewarded him with gentle beauty. And his mantra rung out in my ears, resplendent in its resigned finality."

I listened to my dad's story, unsure of whether it was one of his anecdotes he'd trot out to test his mettle as a storyteller, trying to gauge whether his craft would sell in the cut-throat business of modern literature. Chances are there is no Wizard of Ooze, and he's just a figment of fiction fantasized in a brief moment of artistic indulgence. Either way, ever since my father told me the story, I've never managed to complain about my work with anything remotely resembling sincerity. Or anything else for that matter. Whenever I think things in my life have taken a turn for the worse, I think about the Wizard of Ooze, that peculiar man who spent half his life in a failed conspiracy against French royalty and the other half labouring happily in an oil refinery, working gladly with his killer in a tragic partnership. And I recall his mantra, recited cheerfully to the day he died. "It's all for fun isn't it?"

Truck Stop Flowers

I'm standing in a truck stop bathroom, sequestered off near a little-used exit on the Kansas interstate. I'm running on caffeine alone, jittery as I brush impending sleep insistently from my eyes. In my heavy-lidded daze I almost don't notice the flowers. Almost. As I'm washing my hands, they're grazed gently by the thorns of a spare rose. I look down, momentarily invigorated by the shock of such abrupt physical contact. And I see a whole bouquet of the most beautiful flowers I've ever laid eyes on, glowing in the crimson splendour of young love, abandoned to the ignominious tomb of a basin streaked with stains of questionable hues. They are immigrants here, foreign in this sovereign nation of motor oil smudges and crude epithets and enticements scrawled upon the walls in black Sharpie. Looking closer, I see the tiny gems of glass mingled amidst the verdant thorns, and I draw my gaze forwards. The mirror has been shattered by some impact, the epicentre of its crystal mosaic bearing conspicuous resemblance to a fist. There are spare tracks of faded iron trailing gently down the mirror's cracked facade, rusted by the flickering light. With all the care I can lend to my quivering fingers, I brush the shards from their resting place on a bed of abandoned flowers. I stand there a moment, thinking about fragile things; rose petals squandered on an enamel grave, crystal jewels scattered carelessly by the desperate fury of a glancing blow, and heartstrings in the night, taut to the point of breaking. I walk out of the derelict empire, taking drags of the evening air and savouring it before I release it back into the Autumn sky. In my left hand I'm clutching a bouquet of the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen. While I absentmindedly stroke the thorns, taking care not to puncture my callouses, I realize that even these fragile things possess an edge, something sharp even in their delicate embrace. I'm still thinking about this as I pull onto the interstate, sirens perforating the taciturn cloak of the night with a mechanical lament. Flowers, glass, and a heart to keep, with miles to go before I sleep.