A month was no time at all
and all I had left here,
it was a month to cram two years of life
into a final month of saying temporary goodbyes.
Every goodbye should be temporary,
but there is no heaven
and I would even take a hell to say
one last goodbye to some.
We continue after death,
but are no longer human and we
no longer matter.
Live now,
live well.
I stared into it.
I saw the white stars
Fuzzy at their distant edges,
Wet streets and dark-grey sidewalks
And the damp grass starving in the darkness
With snow peppering the fields.
The wind shook the foundations of the world
And we felt everything teetering around us without
Feeling the effects of being on a rock hurtling through space.
We pay attention to the details
Without understanding the big picture,
we complain about the dollars spent on gas
But barely notice the air getting thicker and worse.
I notice how the moonlight plays in your hair,
Hinting at your angelic nature,
But won’t put together the obvious.
Your white dress gripped your body
like melting snow hugged the sidewalks
And the feelings of the night invaded
Everyone lucky enough to see you.
You had matching heels on and
You didn’t get to wear them often.
The moon and stars are always beautiful
But they were playing second fiddle for the night
And they could have exploded without
Me noticing.
There was a warmth about you that made
Any thoughts of cold unthinkable
And unfeelable,
But maybe that was from sensory overload.
You dominated the night without trying
And I imagine even the sun
-hidden underneath the world and our feet-
Was jealous or in love.
We walked wet streets
Grass peaking out
And drunk kids wandering by,
even the most beautiful of them
Must have felt like old rotting hags.
Big, endless eyes beamed your soul
Into my baby blues and we smiled often
There is no description for when
Souls collide and caress another,
But we felt ours coming alive.
Life is mostly colourless,
Often blurry and fuzzy,
But the right mix of inner and outer beauty
Is never out of focus or the colour of life.
You radiated colour
Love
Life,
And I hope the world doesn’t consume you.
Some angels never fly
even with the most
beautiful
and glorious of wings.
Something anchors them to the
boring and pedestrian ground
and usually they are attached to the undeserving.
Maybe she is afraid to fly,
afraid to spread her wings and be
vulnerable
or to be loved as she deserves to be.
There are cracks in the happy of your life
and I watched them between perfect smiles
as something in me was falling
deep into the well of experience.
Sadness splashed up as acid to lick
my always-healing heart and
I know I am not the lucky one
or the one at all
and neither are you
with those chains wrapped around your neck
in this big tragedy of loving and living.
Don’t close your heart for him,
don’t give your heart away for
half a heart,
half a brain;
half a man.
I ache to watch you fly
and be as only you could be,
but maybe the tired irony of life
will come along and make
a tragedy out of beauty and brilliance
as it is known to do.
History is a difficult reality,
because it existed and is remembered in
simple fragments and usually
out of sync.
We write it down,
we debate about it
and we pretend to understand it.
In reality,
we are making up fictions
that loosely fit the facts,
but rarely even do that.
I can tell you what I walked in on
or whose heart I broke
and how bad of a man I was
but I can never show it to you.
I can also never show you the tender things
and how good I was to lay besides
and the way I hung on every word,
cared about even the smallest details.
History is always lost
whether it’s kept orally or written
and we pretend differently to employ scholars
but we are all rasping at straws and ghosts
even in the best of times.
One poem and then silence.
Is this how Hemingway felt near the end?
The words all ran away and he was left
lonely
impotent,
finally defeated.
What is a writer who can not write?
Nobody.
The words have a way of hiding when you need them,
and only coming around when the sun is up,
or maybe life works differently and
the words only leave when you’re finished
and ready to end it all.
A writer is nothing special,
like a doctor, a lawyer,
a singer,
an actress,
everybody is a nobody and we inflate them
to somebody they could never live up to.
The wordsmith breathes a final breath
just as the welder or mechanic does.
Everyone dreams of something,
or someone to come home to
that means anything at all
in this plastic and material life.
We fall apart
a shaving of dignity at a time
and we become so thin and barren
that only another so broken could love us.
Our best friends are the worst critics
knowing that we are capable of more,
fists red from punching snowbanks on
hour-long walks home through the St. John’s
streets that are empty and decrepit.
They demand what we could never give,
or can only show in glimpses,
potential is a tricky game and it drowns more than it saves.
I opened the door and wished you would
walk out of the old room
sleepy-eyed and confused
and I could tell you that it was okay
and I was home,
but I would never be home again.
Jean-Paul Sartre had me believing there was no human nature. He wasn’t the only one to argue that point, and maybe not even the best, but when he spoke I believed him. I crave the complete responsibility for my own actions. There is a hitch in the plan though, that is only provided by experience. The more I live the less I believe humans are neutral morally. The more I live, the more evil I see. The evil of violence, which humans gorge on. The evil of inaction, exemplified by the lazy generation I was born into, but we are not alone. The evil in the way that love ends and how we make our most intimate friends and lovers into strangers. This also happens with family.
Loyalty is dead, or is at least left bleeding in some gutter, unattended to. We have become loyal to only our desires and personal ambitions, and not even the sort of real ambition only certain people possess. The false ambitions – that of wealth, personal “success,” and moving up some invisible and indifferent latter – also push people in strange ways.
When we eat, we seek to feast. When we get ahead, we seek to take metres instead of inches. Progress has become a clock spinning out of control, and what of morality? Nobody gives a damn about morality, because it doesn’t pay the bills. Morality is argued about in dark corners of philosophy departments, where even as we speak, it has taken a back seat to mechanical debates about logic and the obscure discussions surrounding the meaning of a solitary word.
We are not some privileged animal, despite our sophisticated brains, because we spoil and waste our talents. We possess the tools to look deeply and meaningfully at our lives and our predicaments, and we would rather use them on the inconsequential and mundane tasks that have no bearing on our being. We are the most advanced animal, well ironically the most stupid. No other creature on this planet rapes it or takes advantage of it the way that we do.
No other animal finds ways to mass murder its own species and other species with such efficiency. Our faculties have evolved, but unfortunately, our morality has not evolved at the same rate. Our moral compass is pointing north, telling us we are good human beings despite the evidence to the contrary.
Sure, you don’t recycle as much as you should, and you drive a distance you could walk in five minutes, but at least you don’t own a Hummer. And if you own a Hummer, at least you don’t fly a private jet plane. And if you own a jet plane, at least you donate to charities, and maybe you dump money into carbon off-sets for some of your travels or buy Monsanto seeds for poor Africans to become dependent on. They were already bankrupt and starving before the seeds anyways, right?
None of this is new, or hip, or popular to talk about, except the environmentalism, and even that depends on the circle of friends you keep. Humanity is just not that good to each other. They are awful in intimate situations, brutal in social settings and the worst in mob-sized dealings. There’s no cure coming, no sudden invent of a gadget that will teach people how to live better, deeper and smarter. There is nothing like the investment that gets poured into science and technology, but they care about your vehicles, new drugs they can invent new illnesses for and new ways to sell you something you don’t need.
But let’s not talk about all of that. It’s a good ol’ Saturday night and the people are dancing and drinking, and if they are not dancing and drinking, they are losers anyways. Certainly, I am a loser. I’m a loser to be spending a Saturday night reading interesting books, writing about how broken our species is and drinking a tall glass of water and reality. Charles Bukowski said what was needed was an old school jester, but even the cleverest and goofiest clown in history can not show us a shred of redemption in humanity. We are in a funk like we have never seen before. Humans before used to break everything, but they couldn’t destroy their planet with their stupidity. We possess the most knowledge at any point in human history, and it’s only led us to innovative ways of crippling ecosystems and hearts.
So don’t tell me there is no human nature. As far as I know, history has taught us what human nature is. Easter Island is human nature. Hiroshima and Auschwitz are human nature. The Crusades are human nature. Two people sitting alone trying to figure out where they go from here after one lover has confessed to infidelity, lying and stealing, both peoples’ hearts crushing and not for the first time, are human nature. The way we stab the earth with needles and explosives for minerals and oil to build more luxury SUVs, and over-priced trinkets, just to see all that money climb up some greedy tree where the top one per cent collect their lop-sided earnings, is human nature.
Human nature is not a broken concept, and I’m surprised the goblins, trolls and devils of our world do not being funding Arts programs seriously. They should be teaching people there is no human nature – although Sartre wouldn’t make sense to teach, because he preaches responsibility and free will – because there are always those in control of money, and those without it, and that’s all based on human nature. Humans idolize and place people on pedestals. Having your face on television, your voice on the radio and your general idiot nature yapping all the time, makes women and men want to bed you without having met you. Don’t tell me we are not broken, or that there’s some sunny dawn coming to chase away all the bad times. We are the bad times. We are humans being natural, and we are broken beyond repair.
It is not religion that stabs the knife
or science that slams down the bombs,
It is people,
Regular ordinary People.
People bend objects from their neutrality
Towards evil or good
And most often Evil.
The child tears the wings off of flies
as the priest or coach abuses young ones
And the serial killer or general
Slaughters many.
It is not the instrument that is evil
It is the people.
Flesh face,
Metal razor
Too close
Again young.
Old winter
Spring comes.
One lost,
Now is
Left behind.
Andy Veilleux 