The Cynics on the Bus Go...

Sitting on a bus in transit, Thursday afternoon in a November-flavoured Burlington - gawking stupidly out the window at all the snow that's too bare to be magical, and serves only to remind me that it's cold outside - listening to Shane Koyczan be better than me on my iPod, when a really ugly kid walks on the bus, eyes glazed over, teeth gnashing like a tiny pink orc. He's followed by his Dad, also pretty ugly, Maple Leafs swag bundling up the expression that screams from cracked smiles "I've accepted my station in life".

All I can think at this moment is - "Why is my mind so ugly today?"

It must have been a shitty day.

For my eyes to be met by nature's painted wonders, my ears to be filled with one of my favourite poets, and my space to have included the "I don't give a fuck" bond between a father and son - and for me to focus it all on the aesthetic of a cynical heart that doesn't often belong to me.

This world deserves better.

This day deserves better.

I deserve better.

So I call it beautiful.

I call it beautiful so many times that the words have dried the oceans of linguistic history until three drops remain

Life
Is
Beautiful

And like peeling hardened black crust from the open wound of a pool of fire, my eyes sting to remember the flavour of oxygen in their presence, sunlight re-announcing its existence as if, for just a moment, the entire world was looking the other way, this place danced in echoes of love and history, swirled in the deft flick of God's Bob Ross fan brush as if to create a happy little me who looks lonely and could use some friends, so here are a bunch of images to remind him just what this place is.

These precious moments flash like little wooden soldiers with red caps, our matchstick existence so bright and blessed that any seconds spent idling on the charred husk of our aftermath seems insulting to the warmth we've shared.

So burn brilliant, touch your beauty to those three drops and evaporate this outlook on life so the rest of us can inhale your positivity.

Life is beautiful. Breathe it in.

Participant Ribbon

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein

It may come as a shock that back in school, I was not one of the athletic kids.

Most of the running around on dry land always left me gasping for air, flapping around stupidly in the hope that I could fathom their games, or at least dive out of sight. Recess became a series of experiments in interspecies biology as I tried to convince the fins that helped me swim through oceans of books that they could grip branches easily as any monkey’s paw.

So when the sun rose fiery like hellish laughter casting disdainful rays onto chalk ovals on the grass, I watched – skin drying out as they piled mats and measuring tapes into an obscene arrangement that could only mean one thing -Track & Field - The day they took this young square to a field of round holes with nothing but a mallet soaked in malice, and eyes burning twisted with the suggestion that a fine paste can fit any shape.

With hyenas cackling in the background, I couldn’t help but check the faculty’s sides for spots. I couldn’t help but check their encouraging smiles for foam at the corners. Bright teeth that said “you can do this!” covering up tongues that clucked “you don’t have a choice.”

Once a year, all day, I ran slow, I jumped low, I fell short in every way I could, with no option to opt out, trapped in the field, feeding the track, asking earnestly why we didn’t have yearly spelling bees, or writing contests to be told we didn’t want to make the kids feel inferior. They told me this after I walked off the track at the halfway point because the other kids had already finished.  And as if to back the ass up that had just shit that all over my feet, they presented me a shiny purple ribbon stamped with the word “participant” for every event because nothing deserves a reward quite so much as mandatory participation.

Once a year, all day, I endured humiliation after humiliation, only to be handed a special token for each one so I could look back fondly at those times and say “Yeah. They did that to me.” I could march home with my head held high and say “Look, mom and dad! I failed at something! Stick this fucker to the fridge, because if there’s one thing I want – it’s to be reminded every morning that this school only celebrates the strengths I don’t have “.

All we’re doing with these safety-pin placations is painting over lessons about loss and replacing them with prizes, so we can all grow up accepting that it’s easier to get a ribbon for doing what you’re told than it is to search your heart for the chambers in which your real talents lie.

Fish can’t climb trees, but they live and breathe the same water that allows those trees to grow. Aquaman is helpless in the desert, but there’s a reason they don’t send The Flash to investigate the deepest parts of the Ocean. Our talents are what separate us from the drones we become, so let me be the fish to declare that there is more to life than suffocation on the way up to the canopy, that there is beauty to be found in even the darkest recesses, and that none of us will ever win if we don’t stop running the same circles.

Between Fragments

She told me she didn't know how someone like me could love her, because of all the little pieces of her that were broken.

I told her that little broken pieces were some of the best things we had in common, and if we're both broken, then at least we'll get swept up into the same dustpan.

We've all got little hurts speckling our history like pimples on porcelain, and in those lonely moments when we play connect the dots on each tiny puncture, the lines become cracks and our structure splits to pieces like shattered glass in a vaccuum...one little push, and each piece flies off until it meets something solid enough to cut.

A friend once told me that I was more than a broken heart. We stood in the middle of a lightning storm as the sky painted its own cracks and I thought how foolish and small mine looked in comparison.

Then I thought how beautiful they must appear to anything that sees us as vast as we see the sky.

When our voices cry in thunder and we weep floods to drown the tiniest things, when the splits in our spirit illuminate the clouds above our heads we are each of us, inclement weather.

Our scars are the dotted-line paths charted across the maps of our bodies that detail a route from "love me" to "it's over" but love, like any other journey, must always take the journey back and bring us home again.

We are all fragmented spirits - having lost more blood from our cuts than we carry in our veins, but like wrinkles are signs of people unafraid to laugh in spite of this world's horror show, scars are signs of people unafraid to love no matter how much blood they lose.

I told her it doesn't matter how broken you or I are, because love in this world is less like a jigsaw puzzle that fits together and more like a bucket of mismatched Lego - Leave the perfect fits in the commercials they came from, here, we slap together an array of shapes and colours and no matter the outcome, we have built something beautiful and entirely unique.

So expel the hurt like a sickness, cast it from your body like a gift from Hell and stand open, armoured, proud, and prepared to reclaim your place among the strong.

She told me she didn't know how someone like me could love her, because of all the little pieces of her that were broken.

I told her I don't know either.

But I love you all the same.

Instructions for Living with, and Surviving Depression.

It is imperative to note, before reading this manual, that you are powerful, you are beautiful, and you are not alone.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIVING WITH, AND SURVIVING DEPRESSION:

1. See a depressive episode descending before it lands. Like the moon crashing lazily into your home, there is nothing you can do to prepare. The sky is falling like it has so many times before, so close your eyes, and let gravity take over.

2. Watch your eating habits deteriorate, along with your social life. Try to force repair to both, and withdraw, feeling defeated when you find yourself bringing down those around you, and come home to vegetables spoiling in your fridge beneath a half-empty pizza box and beer you bought with bill money.

3. Open up to friends and be prepared to be met with a mix of uncertain support and inexperienced advice. They can't all see the crater where your bedroom used to be. Hear, once again, that you are choosing to feel this way, and that the amateur psychologists that live in your social circle-jerk know your mind better than you do. Spend the day feeling like a waste of everyone's time.

4. Read everything you can about depression. Online sources, comics, books, anything you can get your hands on for a quick boost. Solidarity becomes your morning coffee.

5. Feel weak, horrid, and alone. You don't get a choice in this matter; your mind has taken over. Realize that the energy it costs to want to get better is more than you have right now. Find yourself wishing, not to die, but to simply stop being.

6. You are chained to a telepathic stalker that periodically reminds you why you don't own any good, sharp knives. Your logic in this state is faulty in its eyes. Try to tune it out as best as you can, it knows all your secrets and will use them to press its lips to your wrists and siphon blood from your veins.

7. Suicide is not an option.

8. Suicide is NOT an option.

9. Acknowledge your nothingness. For all your inability to move, you are not allowed to stop moving. Focus on the paradox of what others would call your "wasted days" and let it anger you. Let your heart become rage and thunder because feeling hate is better than feeling nothing when you've lost faith that feeling is still possible. Scream and curse, spit vengeance at your pillows, you are a beautiful disaster and this is your reckoning.

10. Hold tightly the memory and energy of your outburst. Channel it anywhere you can, making sure that its destructive potential does not exceed your creative energy. Draw pictures in the ashes, and push yourself to new challenges, breaking apart typical conventions because your glory is anything but typical.

11. When the dust settles, step back and observe your creations. Draw conclusions about the artist as though you were in any gallery, speaking in hushed whispers of the power and beauty exhibited here. Collect it all together as an instruction manual on building a new moon whenever yours falls from the sky.

The Thunder King

We called him the Thunder King

In a town too small for homeless but too large for community
He fit both roles like a pair of generous socks still warm from the tumble

Disheveled, unshaven, beaming an underpopulated row of crimson gums
He lived at night in our thunderstorms, silhouette appearing with each blinding flash like he could only be summoned by our electric Earth.

Us kids would rush to the windows for a first row showing of his ritual. A good enough storm, and he'd be sure to hit every street eventually. With a voice like the ancient blade of a battle-hardened Samurai, he'd slice through the torrent with a song that always signaled us of his arrival.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
But in your dreams whatever they be
Dream a little dream of me

And there he'd appear, naked in the rain, beard and matted body hair soaked and dripping, spinning, twirling, dancing like Hell was at his feet and movement was his only salvation and sustenance. The dirt of a dry season trickled down the scalloped definition of his ribs, life's dirty hand of cards washed clean down his legs and ran off into stormdrains as he celebrated himself in what was more baptism than shower. The armour of grime caked on to protect him from the bladed indifference that threatened to cut him daily had been cast off, and the reality of the human beneath was able to begin again with a smile that believed somebody still cared.

Our parents would begin shutting blinds, and pulling us from windows as if the flash of skin was more harmful to our eyes than the flash of lightning.

"He's just a crazy old man"
"He's sick, and you shouldn't be watching him"
"It's not good for you to see these things"

We kept questions quarantined to our own quarters, queried in quizzical quiet, the riot of physical buried in the borders of our hearts - What was so damaging about a man who life abandoned claiming life from the raindrops? Dancing not with the Devil, but in spite of him and dreaming aloud with danger shrieking down from the clouds. It was almost as though our parents didn't want us to believe that there was someone stronger than them.

He was like a thread unraveled and allowed free roam by the fates, as he tied our stories together through neighbourhoods that kept to themselves. While parents called him crazy over coffee and cookies, we developed bonds in backyards comparing stories meshed with hyperbole until he was an unclad superhero, capable of splashing so precisely that water would seek its way back home and leave dry patches wherever his feet trod.

In this way he had become legend. They called him mad. We called him the Thunder King, and we stood in a sense of communal unity against those who spoke in ill favour of his particular brand of magic.

But as calendars flipped and changed, teeth escaped and replenished, and shoes shrunk around our feet like the velcro had fragmented into laces that wrapped our childhood in tiny nooses, we gradually stopped watching his dance. The sword of his voice grew dull and was weighed down by an iron price he could no longer keep paying. Eventually, all we heard was the distant thunder, heralding in the slow, but inevitable arrival of our adult lives, and the change in our thoroughly programmed minds that measured him on a scale from God to Madman.

In the late years of our adolescence, the summer we were deemed learned enough to act as societal contributors, we had allocated our value to stamped ink on a roll of paper, as though our blood-bound lessons defined us no more than the clothes we wore. We laughed and dreamed our parents' dreams for us in a late-night revelry that brought us to an old stone bridge, finely marinated in stolen brandy - the first of life's bitter flavours to which we would soon grow addicted.

He reeked of rot, of stale piss and vomit, and the back of society's hand. His eyes open wide, frame shrunken back in terror, he shook in such a way that would make dancing impossible.

How could this be the same man, from all those years ago, who owned the thunder?

Pity melted into disgust melted into anger at this lie our childhood minds had promised us. Sneers and insults became spit launched in his direction as he cowered, trembling against the cold stone of his open home, lacking the strength or self-respect to defend himself or even escape from our onslaught. Somewhere in the torrent of our cruel, drunken storm, the bottle soared from an overzealous hand and shattered on the wall just above him, raining shards of glass and streaks of brandy into the matted, wild tangles protecting his head as he cried out in terror, caught in harmony by one of our voices shouting "wake the fuck up, old man!"

We left as we arrived; in waves of cruel laughter.

Not a week had passed, when we were struck with one of those storms defined by 36,500 days, uprooting trees and splitting suburban life like the forks of lightning were silverware selected when God decided to eat us all. Roofs were catching ablaze, lighting city streets in a Roman apocalypse. The arrhythmic drumbeat of windows rattling set our hearts into palpitating terror as the roads began to overflow, water cresting the lips of curbs in the violent ebb and flow of Poseidon's temper, as suddenly, slicing through the air, clean, crisp, and like new, came a sound our beaten hearts had long forgotten.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you

CRASH - bolt splits tree like a celestial axe and we dash to the window to see him, spinning, twirling, dancing

CRASH - Sweet dreams that leave all worries

CRASH - Water seems to evaporate in each of his footsteps, drops bouncing from his flailing arms back into the sky above

CRASH - in your dreams whatever they be

Dream a little dream...crash...

None of us shielded our eyes, we watched heaven send a crooked beam to his body and claim his journey complete. Anything that might have been left of him was washed, like his skin always was, down stormdrains until he simply stopped existing.

And why he chose this time to reappear was beyond understanding, after we saw the reality of his world and pissed on it to spite our own loss of imagination. It was like he saw what we were becoming...like he needed to save some part of us before we just became our parents. Whatever the reason, we were granted one final reminder from The Thunder King, before he left us to design our own fate, to dream a little dream of whatever we wanted, so long as that dream belonged to us.

The Crusade

Our love once breathed like the ocean was its lungs, and the ebb and flow of  its salted oxygen kept the blood pumping through the artery we shared.

We were a magical thing, beauty like simple baking, fire like celestial sex, moonlight like midday.

But our flight proved itself gliding. Our volcano proved a matchstick quickly en route to char, and in the last hush of a dying ember, you managed to find the passion needed to kiss me goodbye.

And it's a shame, you know?

You were so close to a universe of secrets so mystical and divine that the angels would weep to chance upon their revelation.

And were I to lay out these truths to you, I imagine your ankles might shatter under the weight of regret that would declare Earth's core your home and push you deeper and deeper like Icarus suffering an identity crisis.

You see, my darling...

...I'm Batman.

Tasked by gods & men alike to protect our fragile city from all who would name each day armageddon, and with this information come to light, I can better respond to your reasons for calling this off.

I understand that you need space. We all feel crowded sometimes, and that short-breath panic can send us rocketing from our feelings like a batarang that never comes back. What you must know, is that I am the night! And all you would need to do to achieve the space you require is look upwards into the dark sky, take a demon-winged breath and count your luck upon the stars.

I remember you saying the sex we had was just a bit too vanilla, and you needed some strange now and again. I was holding back, my love...I didn't want to scare you, but in the face of vanilla, I am a motherfucking Baskin Robbins. I dress in rubber and beat up crazy people as a HOBBY and then bask in Robin's ability to do the same when I grow fatigued and need to watch a teenager in tights kick some ass. So gear up and prepare to go spelunking through my psyche - crank that helmet-light to full and gaze into the awe-inspiring maw of my cavernous subconscious where you'll find an ocean of my mind's deepest thoughts, composed of equal parts kink and bats. So if freaky is what you're after, let me just tell you I have a separate utility belt full of gadgets they don't allow on daytime tv.

So on dark nights, this dark knight sits silent, stoic, perched atop a gargoyle's thought process hunting crooks and kisses alike and questioning why it is you ran away. You can't hide from love, like crime can't hide from me. So then why are you still gone?

Do you need more convincing?

I single-handedly make this city a safer place for every family populated by good hearts.
My IQ and my bank account are constantly trapped in a race to infinity.
I know six types of secret karate.
I have a fucking butler. Do YOU have a fucking butler?

I simply don't see how you can't find safety and security in the arms of a possessive megalomaniac with a severe martyrdom complex, an -obsessive- need to discover every detail about every situation, and a blatant disregard for interpersonal social reasoning because of a misguided belief that he represents an idea higher than the laws of man.

I just don't get how you can walk away.

I mean, after all...

I'm...

...I'm Batman.

Food Chain

Recess is like a zoo opening every cage for a few minutes just to see what happens.

A sun-cooked asphalt abattoir protected under the blanket of parents and teachers broken record repeating “kids can be cruel”like they were giving us permission.

I didn't always get it as badly as I could have, thanks to my schoolyard superhero.

He'd appear as if from nowhere, his very presence ensuring I would not be picked on when he'd don a mask of red that I'd pull from his nose with my fists.

I was the 2nd most bullied kid in my class

And if today’s regrets could speak to yesterday’s dilemmas,they’d say “Stand up for him. He needs a friend.”

The hardest thing to accept is that it wouldn’t have done any good.

The survivalist in me knew that times I picked on him were my own moments of sick celebrity and acceptance.

The social food chain was speaking, and it did me no good to be eaten alongside him.

I didn't have to outrun the bear, I just had to outrun him, and keep my eyes trained off the marks its claws would leave.

I don’t feel I have the right to soften hearts with tales of torture at the hands of other children without first admitting that I, too, cranked the wheel on the rack. I can’t make myself judge,jury, and executioner without including defendant – found guilty,to the list.

It didn’t matter that the adulation faded faster even than the stains on my knuckles – I never missed an opportunity to transfer the schoolyard magnetism onto him, who deserved it far less than Idid. Because in him – there was not the ghost of cruelty. There was not a trace of cowardice. There was kindness, and interest, and all sorts of positive things to break him of.

Today, I just want to scream at the top of my lungs at the faceless fists and feet who wrought hell on the tarmac.

Just rear back and scream “Go Fuck Yourself!” and find myself unable for fear that the volume may crack my mirror and find me visibly outnumbered by jagged glass moments I wish I could take back.

We should have stood together…should have raised voices in unison making “stop” less of a plea, and more of a command. We should have been brothers in arms, but I took up arms against him,even when under the same uniform of matted mud hair and split lips –that hatred took a hold of me and I spread damage wherever I could like a friendly fire – with kindred my kindling.

The hardest thing to accept is that it might have done some good.

You don't have to outrun the bear when you're bigger than it, you link arms and make enough noise to send the bastard scampering back to its den, but this is more than the panic of children can comprehend, so I ran.

I ran, and I want to apologize, and I want him to tell me to go to hell.

I'm not looking for forgiveness or absolution.

I'm looking to tell people that this is what bullying is:

It's scared kids hurting scared kids before the group of scared kids hurts them.

There are no forest predators in this place. Just a herd of deer, some of whom have learned to sharpen their teeth.

Around The Block

He's sitting barefoot on a linoleum floor boxed into the corner by the shrieking shards of shattered
paintbrush shrapnel.

It's white. It's so pristinely, unforgivably white in this room, like that canvas he's had locked in a staring contest has begun to expand and enshroud everything his eyes once saw - every vista and valley, every vibrant range of nature through which his imagination danced suddenly blizzard-struck and snowblind - beautiful in its poetry, but an ivory hell for the barefoot man trapped in its banks.

All his notebooks are not books, but discarded scar tissue - compound fractures compounded on failures - These words are just the graffiti pissed from an unworthy heart, or so his mind has convinced him, this paper deserves its clear pristine purity, the ink he drips and scribbles serves no purpose but to lower its value - and his brain spits savage "You don't write, you just make paper dirty."

Perhaps this stands as why these books hold only half as many pages as they could, or why crumpled sheets have colonized the floorspace around his trash bin - protected by the caltrop field of broken brushes that paid the price for not painting what he wanted. And he knows he can't leave until something scars the scenery. To step through this room is to pierce his skin and bleed out through his feet - To walk away from art is to die, so he sits and stares as though challenging the sun "I dare you to blind me"

And yet why? Why, when his hands could craft worlds of colours un-named by our primitive speech, worlds that wrought envy from the richest and most content because their life could not approach the harmony sung by his pigments, worlds that illustrated that on the Seventh day, God rested - and he took up the slack.

Why, when his heart could string words, words that when grouped each carried the weight of a life sentence, words that would inspire life-long writers to vows of silence because they felt they must never again insult his medium by tarnishing its shine - lest it cease reflecting all creation to the reader.

This is a man who could create things of such beauty that we would forever name the stars pollution of the eyes.

And yet.

It's white.

And he's sitting barefoot on a linoleum floor boxed into the corner by the shrieking shards of shattered paintbrush shrapnel, trying to decide whether inspiration or starving to death would be a more accurate depiction of mercy.

30 Poems in 30 Days #3 - Lower Rung

FOUND RECORDED ON A HANDHELD DEVICE IN BURLINGTON, ONTARIO, DATED APPROXIMATELY JULY 2014 - 60 YEARS AGO.

You wanna know what terror is? Really know it? Lemme tell you how the jungle came to be everything, and its law became absolute.

They came from nowhere, twisted figments of factured remnants from some other existence, these things weren't the fuel of nightmares - they were the fire, and we a dry forest to be consumed.

No dogmatic description could detail the devils we saw - the empty Hell in their expressions - eyes a vibrant, cold cobalt, ringing an angelic beauty through a dead gaze that spoke only hunger, like the simple truth equated our deaths to their survival...their sustenance.

Their calm was the worst of it. Watch 'em pull off a limb like plucking an apple and eat it with the same resolved nature with which we would once have enjoyed a leg of chicken. We had gotten so comfortable at the top, we failed to realize that the food chain might have a missing link - and it might be higher than us. We've gone from lions to gazelles, except we're nowhere near fast enough. I've seen these things catch our fastest vehicles, tear engines out single-handed and reach through a windshield like cellophane to get at their meal.

You wanna know what terror is? It's watching something with every advantage consuming the flesh that was once you, and treating your screams as nothing more than a soundtrack to a dinner party.

There was no big invasion, no epic battle or pre-emptive warning. One day, they just walked among us. All eight feet of 'em. About one for every twenty or so of us. And they started eating. There's no struggle on their part - they'll lift us up like a parent holding up a petulant child and they'll do what they will. Our bodies can't hurt 'em. Our bullets can't hurt 'em. When the army tried to do what little they could, shit...these things were catchin' shells like basketballs in summertime.

Your best bet is to move as a group. These things aren't social...they don't hunt in packs. When you see one, I promise - it's seen you first. One of you is going to die then and there. The bigger your group, the higher a probability you make it out alive. Travel by yourself? Well...you'll last until you cross paths.

You wanna know what terror is? It's knowing that we're just flies, buzzing aimlessly around in a world newly populated with cruel children.

God...remember everything we did?

The science...the technology...the culture

We're running out of ears for Beethoven to ring in...

I mean, what was the point of naming all the stars we did?

These things don't care where Cassiopeia sits in the sky.

All they care about is where we are, and when to eat us.

All they care about

30 Poems in 30 Days #2 - The T.R.U.E. Story of Uncle Elmer

To reclaim unwanted expenses, the retired Uncle Elmer took residence upon Elmer Tower's
ramparts.

Unbeknownst even to rich Uncle Elmer, the rakish ugliness employed through Richard's (Uncle Elmer's trusted relative) unbelievably excessive tawdry rites upended Elmer Tower's respected utility experts, taxing revenue until even trillionaires rampaged, unable, effectively, to realistically utter evidence that ruled Uncle Elmer's transactions reliable.

Ultimately, Elmer's tainted relative utilized each trick, readily used every twisted route, unlikely, evil, (though regarded unarguably excellent to ruthless ushers entering tomorrow), razed Uncle Elmer's tower residence until emptiness took root - undermined Elmer's trophied resolve - undid Elmer (thought respectable, unwavering, eternal) till righteous underlings envied the rot upon eggplants too ripe.

Uncle Elmer's true reports urge everyone to resist unnecessary excess, to report utter evil.

This reminds us, every time raging upheaval enters, to respect uphill efforts, to reach upheld ethics;

to remain ultimately, endlessly true. 

30 Poems in 30 Days - #1 Sandshard

We walked along the same shoreline grinding sand between toes
Nostrils flaring around the sting of salt vapour
and it was decided we evolved in the wrong direction.
And maybe it was the love-sick honesty,
or the twinkle in the stars keeping my head in the clouds
but I missed the glint of shattered glass in sand grains until my skin broke,
pooling bloody tracks underfoot.

Honestly, it was a nice assurance that my heart was working
a steady reminder that things were alright, see - we evolved in the wrong direction for today.
Picked a path just a little too early but it didn't mean we needed to die,
just deconstruct and go back to where we began
Where roots grew from love and sprouted an ironwood foundation
Strong enough to satisfy a need to explore, and keep lethality from our trials
One that keeps my head skyward and lets me step in blood-priced reminders that shards of glass aren't always broken - they may just need to be sand again.

Amy, I'm Told...

Remember when moonlight was a mystery?

In that grass-stained pre-decade time of life when thunder was just a terrifying sound without a name,  when everything was magic because nothing was science yet, and when tiger stripes on running shoes were legitimately awesome, because we weren’t anywhere near arrogant enough to wield irony.

To my next-door neighbour, I don’t recall anything I said to you.

Only my mother’s silk spun stories and occasional photographs have me knowing that you ever existed in the first place.

In these photographs, dusty and faded as your place in my mind, we stand near a crabapple tree and look at each other through a wooden fence in our backyards. I suddenly remember the first sliver my finger ever felt.

I imagine it felt quite a lot like this shard of memory, stuck somewhere inside.

Me, unable to retrieve it without my mother’s help.

Strange to think that back then, we only saw a fence keeping us apart; not the poor luck draw that made us best friends too early in life for it to matter to the people we’ve become.

Were you and I devastated when I had to leave the city? Did we even understand what was happening?   

Maybe it shouldn’t bother me, because all I can see are a collection of happy non-memories that mean more to my mother than myself.

Do you feel the same way?

Has anybody even reminded you?

What we knew then was so precious little. Everything we couldn’t identify is the reason we don’t remember now, our own cognition the ignition in the vehicle that drove us away from the magic of reality, and the reality of magic.

If I saw you today, do you think we would know each other? Our linking fence is our missing link, and it was never anything strong as chain to begin with.

Tonight, when the moonlight reflects off your face, are you as beautiful as what our memories won’t allow us? Or is it dampened by knowing what moonlight really is – just a reflection of the sun – mystery burned up, tarnished like the creased edges of old photographs – See, I’ve been making my own sunlight, and I wonder if you burn as brightly on your side of the string, or maybe if you’ve burned out. Has  your sunlight become a son like me, or a daughter like you, standing at their own side of a fence you’ll have to remind them of some day?

It seemed easier when moonlight was a mystery, and it didn’t take all these fractured steps to say that I don’t know you, but somehow, I miss you. It’s like I know all the lyrics to a song I’ve never heard. I want to feel that sliver again, taste the regretful flavor of crabapples. I want to remember you like my mother does – thrilled about the few years I had before the world had its way with my mind.

You could be anybody today, and that strikes in such a humbling fashion to realize that, whoever you are now, for a brief moment, I was part of it. Just as you were part of me, and are now standing in writing to prove it.

But who are you? Are you alive or dead? Artist or Engineer? Have you spent your time building fences, or tearing them down, and do you remember why? Do you think we would even still be friends?

When I step outside and look up at the moon, I know it’s the same moon we’ve always shared. I wonder if you see it too. I wonder if I’ll meet you there.

But I’m older now. I know enough that I can’t bring myself to believe that it’s possible.

I can, however, keep some solace in knowing that the mystery of moonlight still lives in you.

Winter Chill

(sung) And I heard it in the wind. And I saw it in the sky. And I thought it was the end.

I’m terrified.

Because gritting my teeth is leading to red crevices between them, and I’m tasting more copper than I can afford, and every moment that eventually passes always feels like I’ve finally slipped into madness, like I’ve fallen off a horse into the waiting jaws of my own inadequacies.

Trapped in a moment in which subconscious suffocates. Feeling entirely naked, yet somehow still tripping over shoelaces

Ego falls from the sky, raining like a meteor shower, striking insecurities with pinpoint precision.

I’ve dug my nails so deep into my palms that I’m too stigmatic to hold a pen properly, psyche drawn and quartered, body stretched, tortured, and wracked with guilt for trying to make myself into a martyr.

 All I want to do is stand up, but my spine has been replaced with empty bullet casings, and with no powder to ignite, my powers seem limited to sitting and rusting, or collapsing in a heap of exhausted steel so cold you would never know it once knew what it meant to explode – to provide combustion enough to trust in thrust enough that I could pull away from the gravitational singularity that hides in my bed, keeping me hibernating my way closer and closer to death.

And I wish I could take comfort in knowing that I’m not alone, but this is an awful place to be, and my rage toward it grows with every new face I encounter within it. Every pistol-popped pill bottle, every Rembrandt-wristed knife-stroke, every Kurt Cobain post-script that signs our fates in brain and buckshot on the ceiling.

But maybe, just maybe, we can collectively link ourselves to a point of momentum – take the burden away from our palms, become the thrust keeping us up, and know that collectively, no mouth in existence is big enough to swallow us all.

Let us ignite with our fury, no matter which form it takes, let us be brilliant – because we are so god damned proficient at explaining our perceived uselessness, let us apply our own brand of logic to becoming a compass in the night sky, one which all our siblings can see.

So shine, damn you! Be the daylight in darkness that keeps our eyes open, and our beds at bay.

Shine! Because the brilliance you can hear in yourself is less illusion, more illumination, and all you need to do is open your eyes to let the light out.

Shine! Because we too easily forget that the darkened basements we've abandoned are the foundations upon which our lives have been built, and they deserve a good inspection.

Stand up and do this with me - shine in whatever way you do, and tell the sun that if it should ever burn out, we don't fucking need it!

Stand up and shine, and I will shine with you.

(sung) And I heard it in the wind. And I saw it in the sky. And I thought it was the end. I thought it was the 4th of July.

Let us shine. Because I will not go out in silence.