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.