these aren’t my friends

i’m going to tell you why i
stay away from dark water
you may not believe me
it’s pretty damn stupid
(i mean, come on, i’m an adult) but
sea monsters scare the fuck out of me.
so you won’t find me
swimming in the ocean with you
anymore.
keep your whitecaps
your waterfalls
your surf is up.
i’m sailin’ on
keeping close to shore.

sea monsters scare the fuck out of me.
with their gnashing teeth
and selfish gluttony
swimming in solitude
no pack no questions
just darkness and quiet.

i stay away from dark water.

you are a legion of sea monsters.
stay the fuck away from dark water.
and don’t try to get me wet again.

i’ve been falling apart for months. humpty dumpty, broken stanzas. but putting linebreaks in something doesn’t make it poetry;

it makes it
disjointed

and
ha
rd to re
ad.

so i’ve set myself straight. i’ll keep on track. get all my old thoughts back. keep walking and talking to the clean cut.

and this will look best off your dash. i look best when i have the cash or i’m face deep, tonguing a gash.

crude, yes, but a valid truth. i smell home in the strangest places,
because home is … you know the rest.
and i’m at my best with all this pain my chest.

bell curve

the hardest part of every day is letting yourself disappear. become something different. drink some cream soda. have a candy-coated chocolate. imagine the sun as a perfectly fried egg. wish you were here. or somewhere else. have a dream which ends with your death. the worst part about dying is that most people only get to do it once. there’s a whole aisle at the grocery store you won’t get to try. hanging? exsanguinating? drowning! think of the breakfast cereals and frozen dinners you would miss if you could only go down each laneway of shopping cart traffic once. heart attacks. dog attacks. shark attacks! the women you’d miss out on if you stuck with one from the first time your heart palpitated around her. all the night-time mistakes (which, everyone knows, are the best kinds) you would lose if you had one night and slept the rest away, safe in your blankets and the knowledge that there are no such things as cloakers but still somehow people manage to suffocate in their sleep. aneurisms. electrocution. overdosing! and all the feelings of success and regret you would miss out on if you lived your life safely. working. breeding. saving. dying. dying. dying. the old don’t die of age; they die of missed opportunities with ‘big titted blonde’ at the deli counter and ‘i can see the shape of his dick’ in the liquor store line. i won’t miss. i’ll never miss. or maybe i’ll miss it all just to feel the moist, sweet, metallic taste of bad aim.

it’s everywhere; what?

everywhere
it’s not stable
i’m sorry
i can’t apologize
my head gets around
more than i used to
i’m stagnant
it’s on fire
nothing
mekas snese
sryor
i can’t hlpe it

Shady Friends

Sleep wasn’t something that came easily to me these days. When I did sleep it was usually for around ten hours and I was almost exclusively wasted on cheap beer and liquor or coming down from a night of seriously blasting my nostrils apart with cocaine. I could never decide which was worse. The nights I tried to sleep normally I awoke after just a few hours so I could smoke a cigarette and take a long nap later in the day. Everything was wrong. I’d watched my bank account empty itself into my liver and my drug dealing friend’s pocket for the last month and still had no drive to hit the sidewalk in my beat-up shoes to look for a means of employment. You fall off a horse and there’s a good chance it’ll kick you in the face. I was lucky to have easy friends, willing to take me out for a night a few times a week.
I was everything I knew I deserved to be – troubled, addled, depressed, manic. I started to notice I had a tendency for panic attacks over the smallest things. Once, sleeping next to a girl much too good for me, I had to leave the bed and smoke a cigarette on her balcony. I thought about jumping for the entire time but decided the fall would only leave me terribly injured and the idea of being handicapped was more frightening than going through another day of the same mired shit. Another night I had to run to the washroom of the bar and coerce my dick to push out some piss so I would stop breathing so heavily. The last one was just a serious case of hangover blues and, after writhing in my bed for a few minutes muffling my cries face down beneath my pillows, I took a nap.
The weather wasn’t helping my mood either. I barely saw the sun and when I didn’t sleep until nightfall the sky was always covered in those thin grey sheets of autumn rain clouds. My favourite season, dressed up as a corpse. It reflected how I felt: a placeholder for a better day. I just couldn’t get out of my own head so I stayed inside mostly, to avoid real life and the outside world. Was everyone else blind to it? How inane it is to go through all the actions of the modern human life? I tried to subdue that train of thought with snapshots in my mind of late-night informercials asking for money to help starving African children but it only made everything worse. There was a starving North American manchild right there in my room. Starving and failing to live the way he should much worse than the African boy with the flies above his head. A friend of mine from South Africa told me once that the flies were believed to be the ghosts of their ancestors and that the director showed this to the world just to get money. I believed it.

~

The sun was almost gone when I opened my eyes. My phone had done its annoying dance of vibrations and beeps a few times throughout the day and I succeeded in ignoring life to get some rest and fantasy. A dream of walking down the street naked with a raging erection and women staring at me in a mix of fear and desire. I checked my phone to see one of my friends had some money and a girl he wanted me to meet. The text said she liked it rough. I replied and four hours later I met him at one of our dives.
“Nick, this is Fran,” was the first thing that smug bastard Ted said to me. He was so sure of himself, with his money and talent. Fran wasn’t so bad. Not a Grade A night but good enough for sure.
“Nice to meet you,” I said to her, with my hand stretched out. She shook like a girl should – lightly but not without at least making sure she was shaking properly. Some girls just give your their fingers to hold and you have to make do. Those are the ones you know won’t let you put it in them.
“Nick, man, what have you been up to? I haven’t seen you in a while.” Though it was true that we hadn’t seen each other for a few weeks it was never a problem for us.
“You know, drinking, sleeping. How’s the store?” We used to work at the same place until I was unjustly sacked. Don’t piss off a man who can have your ass sacked.
“The same. I got another raise.”
“Great. So the drinks are on you.”
We all laughed, Fran included. And we drank.

~

Fran and I stumbled through my front door and went up the stairs, keeping our shoes on. We had been at it all night, flirting and making stupid ‘fuck me’ eyes at one another until Ted finally got the hint and fucked off back home. I stumbled up the first step and nearly hit my face against a stair. I heard Fran laugh at me from behind and I wanted to stuff her throat. We made it to my bedroom, tore each other’s clothes off and started to get real. The only real things are sex and whatever comes after you can’t have sex any more. She started to suck me off, circling the tip of my penis with her tongue but then I was hard and didn’t want to waste any time so I pulled her off me and got on top. She was into it, almost too into it, and I knew we woke up at least one of my roommates. After a few minutes of groaning and swearing at each other she told me she wanted to be choked. What Ted had told me clicked in and I put on hand on her throat, the other on her hip to keep my balance.
“Harder,” she said. I obliged.
“Harder!” she shouted. I squeezed my fingers tighter around her throat, thrusting all the while.
“Harder!” she gasped, and I hesitated. I was pressing on her windpipe pretty hard already. But then again, I was wasted and everyone makes poor decisions when they’re wasted. So I pressed down harder. And kept thrusting.
I shut my eyes so I could ignore her hideous ‘O’ face and thought of some scene from a porno – a girl getting spitroast fucked by two large men. She gasped and moaned and finally I came, gloriously and all over her insides. I opened my eyes to see hers flutter and roll into the back of her head. She was silent. I pulled out of her, got up and wiped my dick off on the same towel I’d use to shower the next day.
“Are you staying the night or leaving now?” I asked. Sleeping alone was better drunk and being drunk was better alone. She didn’t respond. I turned back to her. Her eyes were half open and all I could see were the whites. I stared for what seemed like a few minutes, shaking with nerves broken from liquor and coitus.
“Well, I’m really fucked now, aren’t I?” I said to the walls of my room. And laid in bed beside the unmoving Fran.

~

The next afternoon I refused to open my eyes after I awoke. I did not want to sort this mess out. I had some shady friends but none of them were shady enough to help me get rid of a body. To get rid of a body. Was I actually thinking about that? I didn’t want to go to jail and every cop, jury, and judge would find me guilty because I didn’t call for an ambulance. But I was wasted that night! I laid in my bed for nearly half an hour with my eyes shut, refusing to believe that I would be going to jail to get my ass pounded for the rest of my life. I still had so much to do, so much life left to live. I didn’t want to be locked up in a cell, cut off from the rest of the world, cut off from women and liquor, having to suck a man’s penis for a cigarette. But this was my reality now and so I opened my eyes to an empty bed. I paused in mid-despair. An empty bed? There was a pair of panties where Fran had been and a bit of my come where her pussy had been but there was no dead Fran. I breathed a deep sigh of relief, rolled over to a see a bottle of red wine I had let vinegar next to my bed, took a deep hit, and thought about having a nap.

a year ago, in review

i can’t smell you any more
your scent has vanished
but lingering is a ghost
vaguely shaped to the brushstrokes of your hair
clanking chains in my skull.

i can’t hear your haunting moans
the hushed coos coaxed out
of your throat
with my tongue on your depths
escape me.

you are forever
from me
we snapped the necks
of broken ships
a boy who loved you
another who tried.

between the tines

sitting in the midst
of this fork in the road
i see so many bodies
picking directions
making decisions
following the road
watching them go
and i
i remain stagnant,
sitting,
between the tines.

emp(i)ty

roses red deep in pockets empty
crushed petals with dollar bills
thorns stabbing through
there is a hole in this five dollars
or is that my pocket
either way my palms are itching
for something more than this

gin

a good friend singing
an old awful song.
me quietly acknowledging
that i know the same damn tune.
a bottle of gin in my hand
all night long.
i wonder why i’m still awake
and why that terrible breakfast
didn’t make me pass out
as soon as i hit
the futon in my room.