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