two two two two two (a cop-out. in exchange, feel free to cop a grammatical feel.)

I always want what I can’t have. And I want to start this off with a cliché, so you’ll just have to bear with me and wave away the overuse of the statement.
We always want what we can’t have. And sometimes, if we’re lucky and determined and we don’t trip over our second guesses…we get what it is we’ve been wanting. That’s how I like to approach things, anyway: I like to think it’s the long-dormant American in me finally shining through.
*
It was seven-thirty in the morning. The clinic was sparkling, brighter then most hospitals in Quebec ever do, I’m sure. It’s all clean lines and fogged glass and dark wood, which made me feel taken care of. Since I can remember, I’ve trusted clean, bright, beautiful things. Maybe because my parents, my grandparents, my whole family was always so young, and bright, and good-looking.
In any case, I went in alone, which is the best way for life-altering things to happen. Poetic redemption always makes me smile to myself: whenever something “goes the way it would/should/could” in a book or a movie or an otherwise perfectly orchestrated situation, I smile to myself and make a note of it, if only for the sake of acknowledging the universe’s good planning. It is my firm belief that even the all-powerful guiding forces of the world need to know they’re doing a good job.
The woman at the desk hands me a cup and, in polite and perfect French, asks me to duck into the bathroom so that I can procure a sample of my urine, strip down, and shimmy into a surgical gown. After a bit of shuffling, I look in the mirror one last time and grin. This is the last time they’ll ever…this is the last time I’ll feel them…
*
It’s some afternoon at the cusp of summer. It can’t be later then June, because there’s concrete and heat and lingering memories of tightly clutched pencils over momentarily important pieces of paper. We’re at the pool, my friends and I, and we’re getting undressed.
They’re all in cute bikinis. There’s lots of string and a couple polka dots at least. I am in a red Speedo. I look like I’m swimming for the Canadian Olympic team, without the muscle definition. We’re 14, so there’s a little hesitation all around. Are we pretty enough? Will we melt in the water? Do we deserve to be looked at?
We slip into the pool. The water is lukewarm, but it’s better than the hot air. Off-hand, someone asks for my cup-size. Or was it why I’m wearing that one-piece? Or how heavy are they on the front of my body, when I’m so small like that? Whatever. It was something.
I got out of the pool and ran to my sweatshirt. Why a sweatshirt on that hot day, I’ll never be able to explain to you. It wasn’t even a conscious decision, just like the scarves and the blazers and boys’ polos that sag over my body aren’t conscious. But I went to that sweatshirt, and I buried my little body in its warm fleece insides, and I did not emerge from it or the shade until my friends were ready to leave.
*
I’m wasting time. I can’t figure out how this thing is supposed to tie. It doesn’t matter; they’ll see me naked anyways, and I’ll be asleep, so what the hell, right? The body, MY body, is all science and incisions to these people. And as long as they’re good at their science, I’m not about to start complaining.
I sit on the edge of the gurney, swinging my legs, feeling strangely Zen. This is a pretty big deal, but I’m as calm as a lake on Saturday morning. I am a lotus flower in hospital green.
Another woman strolls in, older, toned, tan, eager, and gets subjected to the same pee-robe-nakedness treatment. I saw her in the lobby 20 minutes ago, and I distinctly remember wondering what she would ever want to change about her body. It was perfect, from the looks of it. She was SO in shape.
She settles on the bed next to me, and the nurse tends to her first. Naturally, I eavesdrop.
Her surgery is shorter.
She gets a special codeine pill to ease the effects of the anesthetic.
She is Italian, not French like I suspected.
And she is having something ‘mamaire’ done to both sides of her body.
Hmmm.
Two little boxes get discreetly placed at the foot of her bed. I feel almost ashamed at the blatantness, at the perfect symmetry of the situation. This woman was having a breast augmentation, and there was her new chest, wrapped in plastic and cardboard at her feet.
I wanted to make some witty comment about how we could just trade right now, about how silly life was, about how we always wanted exactly what we can’t have and look at us both! beating the system of what we’d been assigned! in backless gowns, no less! But I couldn’t find a way. I simply smiled to myself, noting Karma’s excellent job, and settled down to have my blood pressure taken and my boobs marked up with black sharpie.
*
I don’t know how to explain it to people without sounding like a jerk, but somehow I feel the need to try anyways.
It wasn’t something that I could control. It’s not something I want to control, that I felt I should. It’s just that, for me, the world seems to have no boundaries. Did I grow up entitled? Did something in my breeding, in my genetics, lead me to believe that I have it all coming to me?
My mom used to say that when we fought. When she’d get frustrated with my teenaged reasoning, she’d whip it out, knowing that it cut right through me every time. “You’re so selfish, Talia. You act like you just have the whole world coming right to you.”
It isn’t anything like that. It isn’t anything that has been cultivated by my upbringing or brought to fruition by any kind of snobbery. It is something that life has backed up for me every step of the way. It’s been solidified by my experience.
When I see something I want, my natural and uninhibited instinct is to have it. And if I can’t have it, it’s only because I’ve found (or convinced myself?) that I don’t really want it any more.
I started brushing up against her more closely, started watching the way we’d look at each other and the way I’d feel when she was in the room, and all I knew was that I wanted to know her and to call her something close to my heart. It didn’t even cross my mind that it made no sense given my previous romantic or sexual track record, or that something as big as society or as small as my little brothers wouldn’t get it. I wanted, and so I would get.
I told her this, in blatant terms, with no agony or second doubts. It wasn’t that I knew she felt the same, though I certainly wasn’t afraid. I just needed to know if what I wanted was feasible. And she answered me, and eventually she loved me, and to this day, I am holding in my palms something that I can scarcely believe I deserve.
*
What is this, E.R.?
They wheeled me in, pumped me up, and shimmied me on to the operating table. My surgeon is talking about her summer vacation with one of the nurses, and they all turn and nod at me from behind their masks, ask if I’m feeling okay. I guess that’s fine. What did I expect them to ask, my opinion on the new N.E.R.D. album?
They pierce my skin and feed in the I.V., which gets less and less painful every time. I don’t know if I’m getting less squeamish or the needles are getting skinnier. I say I’m a little nervous, but I feel comfy in my backless gown, and the next thing I know, I don’t know anything at all.
*
I’ve spiraled out of control only once.
I wrote down my meals for a full three days in my journal, and it was awful. Counting calories, in my sacred little space. How dare I? What made me?
I felt like a psychopath. I might as well have self-diagnosed myself with anorexia. Until this year, there was not a thing you could tell me about my body that I didn’t already know and accept, even my chest. Stoically, with the knowledge that one day I would change it, but still, I acquiesced to its existence. I had self-love completely in the bag. But for whatever reason, the rest of the world became too much for me, and the whip had to come down on something. My body was right in front of me.
I consumed less then 1700 calories a day. I ate nothing but salad and granola, refused myself seconds, did the elliptical. Healthy enough, I guess. Nothing drastic. But it felt awful. I was so ashamed of my sudden obsession. I felt like a fool. I felt so far away from myself. Could I be a size 4 again? Was my cup size smaller yet?
To this day, every pinch I give my stomach, every second of self-doubt I feel when I look in the mirror, throws me back to those three pages of notes in my journal. And every day since then, I feel like I’m clawing my way back from the edge of the Grand Canyon, wondering how I could ever have contemplated such a ridiculous jump away from solid ground.
*
I wake up to a clear and focused picture, the lens perfectly in place. No grogginess, no sore arms.
“Can I see my parents yet?”
“Not yet, sweetie, you’ve gotta stay here for an hour.”
A whole hour!? Is that a joke? I’ve got things to do. I’ve got people to see. Like my new girls.
I keep my eyes open and look around inquisitively, determined to show the nurses in the recovery room that I’m not only completely fine, but raring to go. Finally, they take me to the bathroom, which I zoom towards at what is apparently record speed for post-operation patients.
“Wow, you’re doing great. You must have a really high tolerance to pain,” the nurse says, wide-eyed. I can’t help but laugh out loud.
“Tell my mother that, please. She’ll die.”
“Well…then, you must be really athletic.”
I chuckle again, this time to myself. The woman clearly doesn’t know what she’s dealing with, but I take the compliment. I feel great. I could run a marathon. I could wear a halter top. I could take on the world, for crying out loud. I’m a B fucking 34.
*
We can always look back on the evolution of the marriage between our minds and our bodies; the continuous, complicated Argentine tango between what we see in our heads and what we see in the mirror. And undoubtedly, upon looking, we all find our honeymoons, and our fights, our great meals, and our triumphs, and our long, longggg days.
We can always change our outlook, our frame of mind, our muscle definition. But we cannot change the decisions we’ve made when we’ve made them, or what we’ve wanted when we’ve wanted it, or what we’re doing with the time that God or The Universe or the Big, Blank Hole has given us.
We can, however, change the chest size the powers that be have handed down to our humble frames. So I did. Because I could. And I will continue to do, because I can.
This is the renewal of the vows between my inside and my outside. And as for my back and shoulders?
They’ve never felt better.

one two step

i'm torn
between boston winters and montreal summers
or is it the other way around?
the ground looks so different depending on where you put your skin.
if you lay belly-down against the pavement of a city, any city, even the city you know and love every nook and cranny of...i'm sure you see it way differently.
i want to zip open my cities and climb inside them
know what makes them tick
charm them
maybe alarm them on occasion
but nothing serious.
just enough dizzyness
and sidewalk-level perspective
to let them know
i mean it.

one one one one one

it's log
it's log
it's big, it's heavy, it's wood.
it's log,
it's log,
it's better than bad, it's good!
*
responsibilities echo in the corridor of my mind
walking somewhere with purpose awakens muscles sleeping in the sun
and still i feel that there's some resting left, waiting
that this stretch of a summer ain't over or done.
but i take down the log
with my usual brand of precision
snaky notes and shaky thoughts of things other then business
and i wonder how i'll turn out in the end
if i'll disappoint or astound
if i'll get it all down
or if i will stumble
over the strangely accurate balance of fairness that exists in the world.

i have been sliced, diced, and resurrected.

three three three three

i'm remembering
lying with my stomach against a big, warm rock
looking out at the caribbean sea
letting you pop my zits
and i'm thinking to myself
"this is what it means to believe you were my friend."

it's dark and muggy
and i'm hungry and stumbling around on crutches
blood rushing to my foot
and you pour me a bowl of cereal
and talk to me about siblings
and i think to myself
"this is what it means to have a moment with a friend."

i'm sitting on a couch
listening to other people's beautiful words and music
and you come up to my shins and wrap your hands around my ankles
and i scratch your ears
and i think to myself
"this is what it means to take a friend back."

and i'm letting my eyes hang heavy
ignoring my well-being
looking at old memories
wishing them new again
and thinking to myself
"i could be a better friend to you, talia."

two two two two

to you, good city, i offer a toast.
for breaking down the things whose strength i never questioned.
for throwing my friends around in the figurative dark alleys of their heads. for wearing them thin.
for the sweeping changes you've brought to me by simply standing still.
for helping me disconnect. for your barbed wire language barrier.
for crashing my plane into this rainforest jungle. for leaving me sweating and dirty.
for laughing at me from above in your clean concrete suit.
for winning a battle i didn't know i was fighting. but i like to think i give credit where credit is due.
to you, good city, i pose the question:
if not to you, then to whom do me and my memories belong?

one one one one

i can feel the tremors of worry and stress from my little snow nest here.
suspend your disbelief and trust me: even rainforests suffer the occasional flurry.
... the story continues. because even authors get sidetracked.

and we're back.

so i took a little leave of absence.
so i want to go, but i can't find my chances.
so little words make me nervous.
so i often rhyme but not on purpose.
so i write to write and not to say
i write to love you, to ask you to stay
so you make me the girl, the person i am
i'd be nothing without your glints and glimmers
i'd be half of what they think i have.
so i live off my friends' good natures
assign their smiles nomenclature
make my meaning out of faces and people and features
and hide myself away.
so?

three three three (this is an attempt at salvation)

At the temple in the woods, they call this "laying it all out on the table":

My skin is bubbling, there are so many things going on underneath it.
Most skins crawl. Mine bubbles. I’m just different, I guess, but I’ll get to that later. I can feel it happening too, getting worse because it goes untouched, just accumulating under there.
Sometimes, my thoughts burst white on the surface, splattering up close against mirrors or rubbing off on a select few people’s fingers. Yea, I let lovers and best friends and supposed best friends and my brother pop my zits sometimes. What are you going to do about it?
So there are lots of things on my body and in it that get touched. Things like: my neuroses, my hang-ups, my achievements, my trophies, my jewelry, my shoulders. But there are lots of things inside that don’t get so much as stroked by anyone, least of all by me. Weird, isn’t it? You’d think that someone as insightful, solitary, and “deep” as the person I seem to be would know her own ins and outs.
My big secret?
I don’t.
The most I know is what everyone else who looks at me knows, as though my eyes are mirrors reflecting my own self back at me as I go. I feel my lower lip getting pulled down. I wonder if that’s a sign that I’m getting somewhere.
I tend to have romantic notions about small things holding meaning. I’m pretty sure someone else pointed that out to me. I forget who it was that found it first, but it was phrased something like: “you have weird ideas about things sometimes.”
Anyways, I have this current romantic notion that this vacation is supposed to mean something, or rather, that it’s supposed to hold meaning, as though meaning is a tiny little kitten you could cup between your hands and coo at softly. But this is so abstract I can’t even stand it. Can’t stand on it. Can’t poke it with a stick. Can’t so much as make it out in the snow. That must mean it’s white. Or not. I don’t know. I’m silly about things sometimes. You should know that by now.
I wish I had paid more attention to grammar in elementary school. It’s not the kind of thing they teach you at this age, but I really don’t know anything about verb tenses. Did it happen, is it happening, will it happen? Couldn’t tell you. It seems to me that the older you get, the more you have to teach things to yourself. As you get older, more and more people let go of your hands in one way or another, and it becomes your job to hang on to them. What I’m trying to say is that growing up is hard. It’s a lot of grasping and gasping and taking initiative and discerning the different steps of an operation and executing them as beautifully as you can manage. It knows when to walk away and when to step forward, when to stand still and when to burst into movement. It’s like dancing, I guess. But I always thought I was a good dancer.
It’s also like baking a cake. I was never much of a baker, but I’m sure I could be if I wanted to bad enough. The thing is though, I want to be at the stage where I’m just waiting for my cake to come out of the oven instead of scrambling frantically for all the ingredients I’m not even sure I have.
I’m a shitty writer who gets a few good ideas once in a while. I say I want a typewriter, but I’d probably just fuck that up. I’m no good at sticking to things.
I almost want to stop sticking to you. You make my life complicated in a way I’ve never seen before. You have me upside down and I’m not sure who demanded the handstand: me, you, or the universe. All I know is that I’m here, blood rushing to my head, and I don’t know what to do next. I romanticize my old self a lot, and this is one of those times I want to think that I knew everything back then and lost my knack for understanding the world and my place in it.
I just realized that I will probably want to send this to you. What is up with that? Why do I feel the need to let everyone in on my journals? Is it because I feel no real attachment to my life, thoughts, secrets? Is it because I want to grab attention in a most unconventional manner? Is it because words harden like marbles in my mouth and the only way I know how to shoot them is when I put pen to paper? And I even fail at that most of the time, by my own rigorous standards. I wonder where all these rules of mine came from.
You know how there are those people whose moral compasses are always working? The kinds of people that exist in books and movies, who always know to save their families and friends first, who always say the right lines, who wear the right hairstyle with the even righter dress, who run the railroad with an iron desire because oh, they know what they need to do, and it is always the rightest thing because it came from inside? Fuck those people. I put them on pedestals and then I jab myself with self-doubt, because I don’t have a compass inside me and I’m trying my goddamn hardest to built one out of my organs.
It might be that I love you, and I love you because to me, you have one of those perpetually functional moral compasses inside you. I like it when you tell me what to do because most of the time, I believe it, and when I don’t, I feel safe arguing with you because if your arrow is pointing to me, than there must be something about me that’s right too. Wow. That’s why I love you, sesame. That’s why I feel this air-light desire for you to be around me forever. Because you make me feel right.
It don’t feel right, it don’t feel right, it don’t feel it don’t feel it don’t feel it … come on. That’s a roots reference. What is my thing with hip-hop? Now there’s an interesting one to dissect. I am scared shitless of being caged in to my status and my lifestyle, but I’m already so damaged from being sheltered that I get paralyzed my politeness and feel all funny inside when I walk by a homeless man or a black guy with a bandana hanging from his pocket. I think I’m so high and mighty, so out to do good, and I don’t even know why. I love to dance. I love to move in my mind, love to picture the stage and the position changes and the coupling and the energy between people. Hip-hop lets me do that. Maybe under all my layers, I really am black. I really am African. I wish the whole world could get on the same page about one goddamn thing. A good thing, too, not just any old notion. Like that we can all love each other in a sexual or non-sexual way, regardless of any arbitrary factor. That everyone has families who they love for better or worse. That our skin is fragile, and the color of it is never really our choice.
I wish I didn’t get so nervous about loving people. I wish I didn’t get so fucking sweet and chipper and politically correct around people I want to like me. I wish I could be me at all costs, me no holds barred, me the bitch the snoot the smart-ass the goody two shoes the Jew the upper middle class the Canadian the one the only the prophecy the grain of salt the dirt the earth the compass inside you who tells you what to do because it’s right the journalist who actually has a grip on what she’s doing and a notion of how to go about doing it.
I think I’m done for right now. This was nice. I might get on that typewriter, right after I get on that camera, right after I figure out why it is I notice the things I do and then use them as tools to dissect my own empty being. … I’m going to eat a cookie.

two two two.

christmas has already happened there.
it was punctuated by the rustle of gift wrap opening and lots of goodbye hugs.

one one one

there is something not right with me.
there are a lot of somethings.
my tight muscles, for one. my erratic sleep pattern, for another. my bouncing diet and fluctuating weight, my early periods, my maladjusted eyes. life is having its cake and eating it too, going at it so voraciously that the only logical conclusion is that the poor thing is making up for eighteen years of dieting.
you guys are making me live, once and for all.
you deserve a medal for that.

three three

It is often in the middle of two familiar places that we feel the farthest away from either, the most detached from one another, the most distant from ourselves. It is often in transit that we lose our identities. The process of moving inspires a temporary emphasis and encourages our metamorphosis into disgruntled customers, heavy-lidded vagabonds, whirling rivers of flustered flesh and harrowed bone marrow, and/or speeding blurs of baggage and waving tickets, hoping to god we don’t miss our connection.
It’s too late, however. The plane is gone, and we’ve forgotten how to connect.
We don’t know the first thing about mutual kindness and interest in things beside our own bodily nation-states. We draw borders around our frames like chalk silhouettes on pavement, and we’re just as dead. We treat relationships like transactions and transactions are our favorite relationships. Just swipe my card, hand me the pen, and I can cradle this jacket, these boots, this book until I die. If I work hard enough for things, I won’t need people. I’ll be too busy.
Is it because of our skin colors? Our language barriers? Our origins, histories, personal philosophies, affiliations to different gods? Is it my pale eyes? Are they too light, to cold for you? Do you not like the feeling of a light flurry on your face? Not even the first one of the season, the one you can taste cool on your tongue? Is it my flushed cheeks, the ones that only get tearstained over absolutely nothing because they’re too good for somethings?
Goddamn it. The more I refuse to be another textbook example, the more life tries to write me in the margins. Does life pull that shit with you?

interlude, or, commercial break two

this is intended to be a personal prayer for purity
but I plan on talking like it’s just you and me
in our own little circle of what-ifs and maybes
punctured by I love yous and whys and babyyyyyyys
and baby
I’m trying to save me
trying to draw the line I walk in sharpie
clearly defined and bright black, burning holes in the page
and none of these words have been born in rage
this shit is holistic, all natural, all sage.
I prostrate
before you
to give my inner workings as an offering
my explanation: the inscription on the inside of your ring
glinting gold
as it’s told
I stay outside the hold
praying I don’t grow old
in your eyes
as I grapple and struggle to incite the rise
of the reasons behind the most high-pitched of my sighs
pinched between a hard place and a rock
I place my own being on lock
prevent my breaths from getting too close to their breaths
but tying them up in my hair so they don’t stray too far
and the people I’ve subjected to this theory
know who they are.
but notice it’s “they”
this is a thing of the past
if my life is thrown overboard
you’d still be the mast
and i draw a new line
in this paper sand
and I’m serious this time
I’m taking a stand
and the oceans of time
can’t breakbeat down my hand
the stone of a wall that resists life’s plans
of white picket fences
or neatly cut grass
I’m chopping my hair off and cutting class
theoretically
that’s huge for me
to reject everything
that I thought I and this could be
and to try and see
just how real IS this clarity?
so far, it’s reacting blindingly
proof so full we can barely see
the insignificance of controversy
the futile nature of the objects of worry
and I’m drawing
and writing
and tracing my life
and thinking about possibly having a wife
going under the knife
risking my life
and cozying up to my own inner strife.


… I’ve got a plane to catch.

two two

It was what you’d call a collision. A one-two sucker punch from your past after getting carded at Peel Pub by your future. Don’t cheapen this, please … I live here. I lived here. What marks that difference? What makes that ‘d’ so valid? Validity oozes from these sidewalks, the greyed, formally whited tile in the metro. I miss you, warm whooshes and French chit-chatter. I missed you so much I forgot how missing feels, miss. It was a loud bass line and free love and the beauty of not having to make anything of myself or make anything for the world except a good time. It IS a sweaty, smoke-filled terrace with best friends perched on wood walls giggling about the beauty of cityscapes. Solidity. Confidence in brick and steel. Belief in the functionality of a wheel. Wheels turn, blitz over New England in the fall, and they bring me home. Wherever that is.

commercial break

oh boy
oh boy ohboyohboyohboy
i am quickly coming to understand the perils of life being too good
speedily comprehending the dangers of being too understood
and by this i mean
i have no fucking clue
how i got to a spot
where i'm revered by you
and you and you and you and you
the flesh and bones of the perfection that i'm experiencing through and through
and the way it exists
is like these knots in my back
constantly there
and not giving me any slack
in regards to how to fix
what's not housing a single hairline crack

a life without holes
lets no air in
so if you find my mind laid down in a gutter
smiles aligned
with a shudder
don't bother taking my pulse.
it'd be a waste of your time.

one one

i probably should have told you that this book would be like a hand game of slide on crack cocaine, or a bad record on repeat. one, two, three. one one, two two, three three. one one one, two two two, three three three. four. you get the gist of it. each setting owns its own number. i’m not going to be subtle about it. i’m just going to tell you straight out that where you start is exactly where you’ll end up, with a few mutations to your inner workings or additions to your deck of cards.
so welcome back. welcome, welcome, to the city that lives in the pupil of my eyes, from the city that lives in the peripheral of my vision. there are things stirring here, and they’ve been stirring for quite a while, like chocolate milk with half a spoonful of mix stubbornly sludging around at the bottom of the glass refusing to get along with the one percent. but in a rare instance of discipline, i’m going to keep them from you a little while longer. like the best investigative reports and the most beautiful rivers, everything trickles out in due time. only then you’re drowning in an ocean, wishing you’d just been patient. so i’m appointing myself your lifeguard. no running on deck, kids.
this book in front of our faces is everything. the bodies around me radiate their heat like softly burning stars? they are everything too. and the only thing that i’m not allowed to read will always be the thing i want to. isn’t that just how it goes? furthermore, the focus of the sunlight through our tear-stained windows is concentrated on the delicate nature of this situation, i’m sure you must have noticed. and i’m sorry, I’m sorry my nature is so delicate right now, but even though I look like glass, I’m really a diamond, strong and glinting, covered in fingerprints and spread over your eyes like a bandana, and you’re holding this stick in your hands like you’re miming a fight with a piñata, and I’m sure you must want what’s in it… but i just can’t tell if you’re being clumsy on purpose.
please, can you keep bumping into me?
if nothing else comes of it, i still like the way it feels.

three

according to a colourful wes anderson movie, indian airports have temples in them.
i’ve never seen a temple in an airport, but for the purposes of this book, there was one in the rome fiumicino, trying very hard not to collapse.
there are lots of moments where life grabs us passionately by the collar, shoves us up against a wall, and makes us grow up. that is to say, it fucks us, and in the breathlessness of those moments, we don’t know that we’re getting better, realer, older, duller, less innocent, or sweatier. we just do it, grit our teeth, and hope we come out with our hearts in one piece.
a leisurely trip to italy, all expenses paid, hardly sounds like one of those moments. it sounds like a backrub, maybe, or a full-body massage, at best. but getting fucked over and grown up, shaken and sweaty? hardly. however, like i told you, you’re deep in the forest right now, this temple is cool and shady, and the way it welcomes light and opportunities is entirely dependant on its unique angles and positioning. so when i went to rome for two weeks in may, the light distortion was peaking over and under the sunset.

the linear progression of nausea went something like this:
running towards madness
on a gold-plated track
when things are most perfect is when they’re most dead
and dead things tend
to recall
dead people instead
and you can lay down your head
and you can bawl to the tuscan sky
and you can ask the venice cobblestones
why? why? why?
and the tears can flow
and the door can click shut
and the maid can sweep up this emotional rut
and we can drop euros
like soap, like bombs
and we can keep quiet and morph into our moms
and the david can watch
as it all floats to the top.
this may not be
just how you thought it would go
but it IS proof of the fact
that you never
really
know.

two

i already know what you’ll say.
you’ll say that this is too many ideas not executed well enough.
you’ll say that there are too many characters that aren’t developed enough.
you’ll say there are too many places where lower case letters just aren’t enough.
well, here’s what i say:
you’re in canada now, darling.
and not just anywhere in canada, but montreal.
hold up your peace signs, because frankly, where i’m from, no one gives a shit. my country, my province and i are quite the rebellious trio. we walk away from wars with our disaffected stares. we mess with school systems like some people mess with my head. we mix cheese curds and gravy and we add fries because we want to be like america but with that certain je-ne-sais-pas-quoi.
as this heavy night falls, a lot of my cells are off-kilter. the heat pad attempting to unknot the roots of trees heavy in my back is too warm. this air is too fogged. and most of all, i’m too unsure of where my feet are planted … or if they’re planted at all. so i need to send my mind back to an older place, a place with cobblestones just like here but without the pretensions living in every nook and cranny. i send myself back to my belle province, and wrap myself in warm summer visions of a better kind of heat. eric screams his knotted lyrics through a black wire fan as the temperature climbs up the walls of l‘inconditionnel, and lea, glowing in the humidity, holds her camera poised and ready. it rains down on my cheeks, and i’m riding through the countryside mist on a frosted blue bike, sweatpants and a relationship clinging to my ankles. all these thoughts are safe, but they didn’t hold me down well enough. they didn’t keep me there, in mon beau petit hometown, under warm comfortable gazes and warm comfortable meals and in a warm, comfortable box. however, warmth and comfort seem to follow me wherever i go, in such a gluestick-worthy manner that i couldn’t shake this life if i tried to.
i always say to my heart that at my essence, in the core of this temple, i need to be alone.
however, i’m quick to forget the longer, slippery consequence of that hard, glinting independence: loneliness.
a ce moment, entre la noirceur de hier et d’aujourd’hui, to me manques, montreal. toi aussi, mes amis, ma famille.
i will get you back soon. i will gather it all in my arms and schlep it back up this sleek, water-operated elevator.
you still trust me, right?