If you ever find yourself in St. Catharines, Ontario, follow Bunting Rd. to Queenston st. and head east. You'll see some townhouses and a field on your left. You'd hardly believe there used to be a school there.
A Kindergarten to Grade 6 establishment known as Consolidated Public. A building made of short steps for little legs, now a puzzling phantom for old eyes paying a visit.
I swear there was a school there.
I swear 8 years worth of my memories stood encased in red brick, surrounded by paved playground, swingsets and a field that stretched eternal to elementary eyes. Where winter would see the formation of a sheet of ice for students to simply slide across at recess, because who had the time to lace up skates? Where the best day of the year was the day the janitor took a push broom up on the roof, and for a moment, it rained tennis balls.
And suddenly, days became decades, and the student body became incorporeal, ghosts haunting halls torn to rubble and cleaned to make way for new homes. For new families. And I understand that populations need room to grow, but I can't shake the feeling that the evidence of my existence is just gone.
There was a kid with a friendly disposition towards teachers. A kid with a mercurial temperament. A kid who didn't quite fully grasp that a chemical imbalance translated to an emotional one. So this kid had a lot of trouble coping with a lot of things. He was known for crying at every opportunity, for writing endlessly, and for lying his ass off just for the sake of it.
Consequence is a vague notion when you're a kid, so when I came up with stories like "My parents made me play a baseball game at 10pm last night, which is why I'm so tired." I just wanted to be pitied by teachers. I wanted the attention. What I didn't want or expect was an inquisition to be brought down upon my family. This continued for a while, and when my mother was approached by staff and Children's Aid, asking through grave expressions why Daniel said he and his sister would get locked in the laundry room for a week any time they misbehaved, she could only roll her eyes, and ask "How many times are you going to be duped by a fucking 8 year old?"
So I'm sure teachers had some problems with me. I'm sure a lot of them didn't appreciate being told "it's your job" by someone wearing velcro shoes for purposes of practicality, rather than style. But I'm also sure every one of them hoped that I was going to be alright.
It ended with a kid on crutches, wearing a cast that matched the school colours to help mend a broken ankle, delivering a valedictorian address in 1997. And there's a graduation photo to prove it that hangs in a hallway that no longer exists.
The only remaining details of those 8 years lives in a small bachelor flat just above my eyes. Bits and pieces are scattered in other heads, but the entirety lives within me, and me alone. And to a set of guiding spirits who knew me by name, who knew me by my lies both on and off paper, teachers and faculty who may still remember today and wonder if that kid is doing alright
To Brown, Van Geest, Nield, Gosen, Findlay, Harris, Williams, Belzil, Tebbutt, MacMillan, Scarry, Quinland, Gilgunn, Telford - to every one of you who may still hold proof of that red brick structure and the lives within it - Please know that he has grown, learned, loved, risked, lived, and never stopped writing. Know that he has survived the worst the world could throw at him, that his name has been chanted on a national stage, that he has not forgotten you, and that God Damn it, he's alright.
He's alright.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
The Dissolving Wall
Come brick it up boys
Come build that wall up ten feet tall
Brick it up, stick it up, crack the sky
Put it up motherfucker, don't be shy now!
It starts with a foundation
Creation-crafting concrete, feet framing flight inhibitors
This is for focus
Shoes cementing your place in society, pay attention
Cause you're no Billy Pilgrim
No, you're still stuck in time, love
We're gonna nail you down with nine-inch diagnoses
And force you to believe you have ADD before you can learn to A-D-D
So please S-U-B-T-R-A-C-T me from this equation
Because it's dividing us all
So here's your wall.
Construction underway, you stay in place, belief in your "disease" your new career
Fear tearing you away, shelter calling, walling faster to escape the world,
Every laugh you hear and assume is directed your way-ward glances and not-so-subtleties-ing
BUILD IT!
Build it past your line of sight and be sure to Van Gogh for your ears, hear no evil, see no evil, but speak it all behind your wall
And they'll call from up above, tell you that they can pharma-see where the problem started
You felt alone, dejected, different
In short - like every teenager ever
But they won't say that!
They'll say CLEAN SLATE!
MEDICATE!
But this prophetic Prozac will make the poetic prosaic
A mosaic of muddled meandering
signifying nothing.
But you're trapped in this wall...so as the pills pour in, it's either swallow or suffocate.
Get nice and comfortable. Wheel in a chair, set up a desk with a computer and stick up those picket-fence photographs; snapshots of everyone else's reality.
Emptying bottles just to fill them with your honest perceptions.
Like all bottles...answers are not to be found in the bottom of these.
TEAR IT DOWN!
Beat your fists until they crack on the concrete, let them know you've got more blood than balance!
Let them know you're NOT just another brick!
Form your rage into a jackhammer and shred this wall you've built until you're inhaling red dust
and when it settles, help everyone else out of theirs.
Come build that wall up ten feet tall
Brick it up, stick it up, crack the sky
Put it up motherfucker, don't be shy now!
It starts with a foundation
Creation-crafting concrete, feet framing flight inhibitors
This is for focus
Shoes cementing your place in society, pay attention
Cause you're no Billy Pilgrim
No, you're still stuck in time, love
We're gonna nail you down with nine-inch diagnoses
And force you to believe you have ADD before you can learn to A-D-D
So please S-U-B-T-R-A-C-T me from this equation
Because it's dividing us all
So here's your wall.
Construction underway, you stay in place, belief in your "disease" your new career
Fear tearing you away, shelter calling, walling faster to escape the world,
Every laugh you hear and assume is directed your way-ward glances and not-so-subtleties-ing
BUILD IT!
Build it past your line of sight and be sure to Van Gogh for your ears, hear no evil, see no evil, but speak it all behind your wall
And they'll call from up above, tell you that they can pharma-see where the problem started
You felt alone, dejected, different
In short - like every teenager ever
But they won't say that!
They'll say CLEAN SLATE!
MEDICATE!
But this prophetic Prozac will make the poetic prosaic
A mosaic of muddled meandering
signifying nothing.
But you're trapped in this wall...so as the pills pour in, it's either swallow or suffocate.
Get nice and comfortable. Wheel in a chair, set up a desk with a computer and stick up those picket-fence photographs; snapshots of everyone else's reality.
Emptying bottles just to fill them with your honest perceptions.
Like all bottles...answers are not to be found in the bottom of these.
TEAR IT DOWN!
Beat your fists until they crack on the concrete, let them know you've got more blood than balance!
Let them know you're NOT just another brick!
Form your rage into a jackhammer and shred this wall you've built until you're inhaling red dust
and when it settles, help everyone else out of theirs.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
5 More Minutes
It’s hard to stand sometimes.
When doubt holds you down with such force that your shoulders cry out for the levity the weight of the world can provide.
See, it’s not that I’m afraid to fail. I’m just tired of doing it. And my outlook’s getting bleak.
I keep serving myself sentences that all end in Kurt Cobain exclamation points, or trail off into ellipses…
And I ask myself, when did I get so cynical?
But it’s easier to sleep 5 more minutes than it is to answer that question.
So I’m lying in bed just like Brian Wilson did.
Because I like the illusion that under the sheets, the world goes away.
Under the sheets, I’m safe.
The toy in the bottom of my own private box of cereal. Just begging for somebody to find me.
Filling out tax forms with my favourite blue crayon.
Waxing poetic through a waning spirit.
And I can hear it, the foghorn leading me to shore, but I’m steering starboard to avoid it because disembarking would mean stepping on solid ground that I’m just not ready to handle.
And this fog accepts me as a ghost within it. I could land. I could let myself be found.
But I want 5 more minutes.
There are times I just wanna go home.
I hated my childhood, but I really miss the perks.
Someone used to make sure I got out of bed. I never thanked them for it.
Maybe I’ll do that when I get up.
Maybe I’ll get to work on getting my life together, despite knowing I may just fail again.
Maybe I’ll show everyone that I’ve been worth it, that I haven’t been a waste of time. That when I apply myself, I can accomplish any single fucking thing that I want.
But then, maybe I’ll just count some sheep, go back to sleep, and hope, with my head in the sand, that everything will somehow work out.
When doubt holds you down with such force that your shoulders cry out for the levity the weight of the world can provide.
See, it’s not that I’m afraid to fail. I’m just tired of doing it. And my outlook’s getting bleak.
I keep serving myself sentences that all end in Kurt Cobain exclamation points, or trail off into ellipses…
And I ask myself, when did I get so cynical?
But it’s easier to sleep 5 more minutes than it is to answer that question.
So I’m lying in bed just like Brian Wilson did.
Because I like the illusion that under the sheets, the world goes away.
Under the sheets, I’m safe.
The toy in the bottom of my own private box of cereal. Just begging for somebody to find me.
Filling out tax forms with my favourite blue crayon.
Waxing poetic through a waning spirit.
And I can hear it, the foghorn leading me to shore, but I’m steering starboard to avoid it because disembarking would mean stepping on solid ground that I’m just not ready to handle.
And this fog accepts me as a ghost within it. I could land. I could let myself be found.
But I want 5 more minutes.
There are times I just wanna go home.
I hated my childhood, but I really miss the perks.
Someone used to make sure I got out of bed. I never thanked them for it.
Maybe I’ll do that when I get up.
Maybe I’ll get to work on getting my life together, despite knowing I may just fail again.
Maybe I’ll show everyone that I’ve been worth it, that I haven’t been a waste of time. That when I apply myself, I can accomplish any single fucking thing that I want.
But then, maybe I’ll just count some sheep, go back to sleep, and hope, with my head in the sand, that everything will somehow work out.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Psychophiliac
Who are you?
What makes you special?
I'd wager if I asked you, you wouldn't know the answer.
I'd wager with a gun to your head, the answer would come from friends and family a week later at your funeral.
But would you agree with it?
I mean if I sat you down with everyone you know, handed out paintbrushes and asked for a portrait, how many different versions of you would exist? And would they be compatible?
Would you end up as some artistic abomination with Van Gogh features and Picasso proportions, or would everyone be just as stupefied, and hand back a stack of blank canvas?
How do you prefer your perceptions?
Do you want them to know who you are?
Do you want you to know who you are?
Do you, or have you ever, engaged in psychophilia?
Letting your philosophies represent your psychology to those around you, adding lines and trick shading to yourself to present the illusion of depth like you were born of the vanishing point.
See we all have superpowers - granted early in life, we learn to project an illusion before our true selves - presenting an image of who we'd like to be , and staring at it just long enough ourselves to believe we're already there. Holding the kind of self-importance that would suggest we didn't spend the first few years of our lives shitting ourselves.
It feels sometimes like grade school never really ended. It just got more subtle.
Our swingsets have turned into cars, and we're still trying to go all the way around the bars - Those of us who go fast enough to do it invariably die in the attempt. We've all still got a little gravel in our teeth.
So between that time and this one...who have you become? Is it you our your image that's adapted and advanced?
I'd wager if I asked you, you wouldn't know the answer.
What makes you special?
I'd wager if I asked you, you wouldn't know the answer.
I'd wager with a gun to your head, the answer would come from friends and family a week later at your funeral.
But would you agree with it?
I mean if I sat you down with everyone you know, handed out paintbrushes and asked for a portrait, how many different versions of you would exist? And would they be compatible?
Would you end up as some artistic abomination with Van Gogh features and Picasso proportions, or would everyone be just as stupefied, and hand back a stack of blank canvas?
How do you prefer your perceptions?
Do you want them to know who you are?
Do you want you to know who you are?
Do you, or have you ever, engaged in psychophilia?
Letting your philosophies represent your psychology to those around you, adding lines and trick shading to yourself to present the illusion of depth like you were born of the vanishing point.
See we all have superpowers - granted early in life, we learn to project an illusion before our true selves - presenting an image of who we'd like to be , and staring at it just long enough ourselves to believe we're already there. Holding the kind of self-importance that would suggest we didn't spend the first few years of our lives shitting ourselves.
It feels sometimes like grade school never really ended. It just got more subtle.
Our swingsets have turned into cars, and we're still trying to go all the way around the bars - Those of us who go fast enough to do it invariably die in the attempt. We've all still got a little gravel in our teeth.
So between that time and this one...who have you become? Is it you our your image that's adapted and advanced?
I'd wager if I asked you, you wouldn't know the answer.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
30 Poems in 30 Days - #12 Poets
Of all the venues in all the cities in all the world...you've walked in here.
First timers and audience vets, you are here today as equals
And while you differ in what drew you in
Some - a wary curiosity
Some - a staggering addiction
Some - a desire to expand
We are all of us present through the draw of words, and the power within them.
To the night cats of the audience - play to the poetry in a unified rhythm
drum out a brand new beat generation - shoulders, hips, and finger-tips
rap-tap-tapping on the nearest available surface
Hit the mic if it's open - unclench those timid teeth and let go the flowing frustrations - give your shoulders a night off, and share the weight with us lest they develop a chip. And cast away what false application you have witnessed of the term "poet".
We are all of us, poets. Metaphor is common to the mortal mind, and with time, comes the ability to employ it. The weather reflects the mood of someone - and pathetic fallacy will follow.
We are all of us, poets - though we suffer illusions that we practice the elusion of allusion.
So speak, if you would speak - or listen, if you would listen. Just be sure to do as you would.
And to the listeners - we exist only due to you. Poetry inhales in the writing and exhales in the reading, The mouths and the ears - the heads and tails of this beautiful artform. Those receiving aurally what we deliver orally - let us inject ink through our words, and tattoo you in patterns of shared experience.
It is every writer's dream to change a fellow being to such an extent that it can be seen by the world around - so as to gesture to the effect, like an architect to a finished building, and say "I did that."
If you would, dear listeners, take our lives into your hands, heads, and hearts - take our experiences and our frivolities - take us by our hands, and let us march into eternity, marked by the lives of every poet we may or may not have ever met.
First timers and audience vets, you are here today as equals
And while you differ in what drew you in
Some - a wary curiosity
Some - a staggering addiction
Some - a desire to expand
We are all of us present through the draw of words, and the power within them.
To the night cats of the audience - play to the poetry in a unified rhythm
drum out a brand new beat generation - shoulders, hips, and finger-tips
rap-tap-tapping on the nearest available surface
Hit the mic if it's open - unclench those timid teeth and let go the flowing frustrations - give your shoulders a night off, and share the weight with us lest they develop a chip. And cast away what false application you have witnessed of the term "poet".
We are all of us, poets. Metaphor is common to the mortal mind, and with time, comes the ability to employ it. The weather reflects the mood of someone - and pathetic fallacy will follow.
We are all of us, poets - though we suffer illusions that we practice the elusion of allusion.
So speak, if you would speak - or listen, if you would listen. Just be sure to do as you would.
And to the listeners - we exist only due to you. Poetry inhales in the writing and exhales in the reading, The mouths and the ears - the heads and tails of this beautiful artform. Those receiving aurally what we deliver orally - let us inject ink through our words, and tattoo you in patterns of shared experience.
It is every writer's dream to change a fellow being to such an extent that it can be seen by the world around - so as to gesture to the effect, like an architect to a finished building, and say "I did that."
If you would, dear listeners, take our lives into your hands, heads, and hearts - take our experiences and our frivolities - take us by our hands, and let us march into eternity, marked by the lives of every poet we may or may not have ever met.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
30 Poems in 30 Days - #11 Reign in Ascent
I've developed a sense of self-preservation
spending sleepless nights staring heavy-lidded at tar pit skies
starting staggered strategies, soul-shifts, soliloquys, super-hero aspirations
Fixated to define myself, guideline myself and live by truths I won't possibly forget
Marking calendars as though each day were a new year, making resolutions when I lack the solutions required for the prefix.
I can visit a mental gallery with each previous incarnation of myself taxidermied and posed in genuflect to hail the me that exists this moment - each level an upgrade, signifying my status as 'most improved to date'
Today's model has developed a sense of self-preservation
having identified core behaviours known to tax my sanity so heavily, it would seem my mind was at war.
Behaviours that twitch the veins in my eyes, that curl my toes as though I were attempting to grow roots
Past instances of myself flash in the faces of those unaware of the aggravation piling up
And I see the history of everything I needed to change, everything I can't stand about every other person I was
plastered on every pillar of flesh and bone that speaks with a different voice.
I watch myself be insincere to women, and hide my true feelings from them, only to complain to the world that they didn't love me because I was too nice.
I shake my head in embarrassment each time I hear the words "I love all music except country and rap". The me who didn't see the blind arrogance in dismissing a genre because of a distaste for the examples he'd been granted.
I want to scream at the top of my lungs at every mask of me who sits quietly all night, eyeing the stage in the vain wish for enough courage to step upon it.
These compound as flash-fire images of regret upon regret upon regret
Every girl I never kissed
Every song I never sang
Every word I never wrote
Every chance I never took
These regrets are the newest ammunition loaded into the .50 caliber tongue in my head, and I spit them fully automatic through the skulls of each face before me.
I look forward to aging, to learning, to getting to a point of old where I can wield the kind of wisdom I've always wanted to have - the wisdom that can help me write a poem to leave this one in the dust.
See, I've developed a sense of self-preservation
To strengthen my sanity and build fires upon past mistakes, in oath to myself to never again develop regrets for things I didn't do. I will take this stage and aim no lower than I can imagine, and it will be my life's work to rule this entire god-damned world, or die in the attempt.
I will incinerate the hall of my once-was incarnations, and I invite you all to help me pour the gas.
spending sleepless nights staring heavy-lidded at tar pit skies
starting staggered strategies, soul-shifts, soliloquys, super-hero aspirations
Fixated to define myself, guideline myself and live by truths I won't possibly forget
Marking calendars as though each day were a new year, making resolutions when I lack the solutions required for the prefix.
I can visit a mental gallery with each previous incarnation of myself taxidermied and posed in genuflect to hail the me that exists this moment - each level an upgrade, signifying my status as 'most improved to date'
Today's model has developed a sense of self-preservation
having identified core behaviours known to tax my sanity so heavily, it would seem my mind was at war.
Behaviours that twitch the veins in my eyes, that curl my toes as though I were attempting to grow roots
Past instances of myself flash in the faces of those unaware of the aggravation piling up
And I see the history of everything I needed to change, everything I can't stand about every other person I was
plastered on every pillar of flesh and bone that speaks with a different voice.
I watch myself be insincere to women, and hide my true feelings from them, only to complain to the world that they didn't love me because I was too nice.
I shake my head in embarrassment each time I hear the words "I love all music except country and rap". The me who didn't see the blind arrogance in dismissing a genre because of a distaste for the examples he'd been granted.
I want to scream at the top of my lungs at every mask of me who sits quietly all night, eyeing the stage in the vain wish for enough courage to step upon it.
These compound as flash-fire images of regret upon regret upon regret
Every girl I never kissed
Every song I never sang
Every word I never wrote
Every chance I never took
These regrets are the newest ammunition loaded into the .50 caliber tongue in my head, and I spit them fully automatic through the skulls of each face before me.
I look forward to aging, to learning, to getting to a point of old where I can wield the kind of wisdom I've always wanted to have - the wisdom that can help me write a poem to leave this one in the dust.
See, I've developed a sense of self-preservation
To strengthen my sanity and build fires upon past mistakes, in oath to myself to never again develop regrets for things I didn't do. I will take this stage and aim no lower than I can imagine, and it will be my life's work to rule this entire god-damned world, or die in the attempt.
I will incinerate the hall of my once-was incarnations, and I invite you all to help me pour the gas.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
30 Poems in 30 Days - #10 A Moment to Reflect
Raindrops on the rearview stood stalwart
Automotive blurs flew past without definition
and somewhere in the middle, time froze
She unclasped sweaty palms from the wheel
unbuckled and exhaled, she swore she saw flames in the opposite lane
Clear signal...no going back.
Feeling well-seasoned in disease, cooked in a carcinogen marinade
seeing sick silhouettes of splintered spines and spindly fingers clawing the asphalt behind her
Off to meet the maker, though she felt like the maker's meat, slathered in sauces of otherworldly delicacies
To be served up on a plate for his dining pleasure.
Faces of fear in the mirror, so much closer than they appeared
Time, death, regret...catching up quickly
She knew time would return any second now.
Would that she could freeze it a while longer.
They told her she had one month to live.
Just freeze it a while longer...
One month to live...
Just a while longer...
One month...
One month when she still needed seven to balance out the loss.
Automotive blurs flew past without definition
and somewhere in the middle, time froze
She unclasped sweaty palms from the wheel
unbuckled and exhaled, she swore she saw flames in the opposite lane
Clear signal...no going back.
Feeling well-seasoned in disease, cooked in a carcinogen marinade
seeing sick silhouettes of splintered spines and spindly fingers clawing the asphalt behind her
Off to meet the maker, though she felt like the maker's meat, slathered in sauces of otherworldly delicacies
To be served up on a plate for his dining pleasure.
Faces of fear in the mirror, so much closer than they appeared
Time, death, regret...catching up quickly
She knew time would return any second now.
Would that she could freeze it a while longer.
They told her she had one month to live.
Just freeze it a while longer...
One month to live...
Just a while longer...
One month...
One month when she still needed seven to balance out the loss.
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