We all write searching for the one line
That will change everything.
The one line that clarifies centuries of thought
The line that makes the murky clear
and the line that ignites the embers of your heart.
Its usually buried in the mess that we call
Writing
All the muck we heap out just to get some ore
Tons of it,
just for one shiny diamond.
You mean something to me,
even if you never know it
And if not to me
Then to somebody else.
We all find love in the creases of pages.
There’s a grand difference between being awake
And getting out of bed.
There was some major fault line to cross
That occasionally could shake your reality apart.
Being awake did not mean you were fully out
Of the realm of dreaming
or fully conscious
it just meant you were perceiving some of
The ‘real world.’
By contrast,
Getting out of bed made you exist in the world,
Or you were being-in-the-world,
As opposed to the sort of unbeing of bed.
I could laze around in bed for hours
Firing off text messages to friends and lovers
Entertaining ridiculous thoughts
And occasionally letting myself slip into a dream,
It was the easiest way to exist
At least when the dreams were kind,
Which they weren’t always prone to be,
But they mostly behaved themselves lately.
I write,
Waste time like anyone else,
And occasionally I do something real or worthwhile.
Lately there’s been a lot of time wasting away
And I watch my pile of unread books
That don’t go away like they used to.
My appetite used to feed on a book or two a week
And now I’m not hungry for more than one
Every two weeks at best.
Its like eating and soccer or the gym,
I haven’t been pushing myself enough mentally
So my brain isn’t asking me for food,
The books sit undevoured.
Freud has been sitting in some part of my mind
And has found his way into my hands
And Skinner joined him in what made me seem
Like a psychology undergrad,
But I’m reading it for fun.
The hail outside made me think you were Falling out of the sky, Long held in high regard by me, But now your cold heart was fractured And pouring dramatically to the ground. The air was frigid and the downpour mostly Unnoticed, Save for maybe the one man who looks up To get a piece of hail in the eye, And that was me. The hail had dazzled me, and I walked around in it Shocked and enthralled Until it finally hit me in tender areas And I learned to walk away. It wasn’t a quick lesson And it was far from painless But lessons worth learning often are.
Tiny dancer from my dreams,
Just out of reach
And outside of my present reality.
Where do you go during the long
Hard
Nights?
Whose dreams do you dance through
When not dancing for me,
and how can I keep you?
The silence seems to grow with the black of night
And it only drives the splinters of loneliness deeper,
But there is hope in that smile.
We had a way of bringing smiles around
and we laughed
together
not unlike children.
A mostly-digital friendship that craved more
Like I ached for you
And there was no relief coming for months.
We took to each other like the two kids
From different primary schools
Who found themselves in the same homeroom
Bullied by the cold world around them.
This wasn’t life in a classroom but our bully was love
Or mostly a loss of it
And we had brought out own issues to the table
And had plenty food for thought.
The people who are not broken are boring
Or hiding something bigger than themselves.
I showed you canyons running through my heart
And the skies where my dreams soared
And still
Some words could not be said and
Some memories could not be shown.
The happiness in memories is often
Overdone
Misremembered for the better,
And that’s where the pain comes from.
Surely there were good times but
its the bad times that lose their edge
With memory
And good times come out looking polished
And new.
But there’s no novelty to be had
And that’s where the track ended
Not just for you
But for me too
Or maybe it was somewhere else.
The novelty had never been the break before
So maybe it was something else,
The worrying both ways and trust issues
Or maybe it was all stupidity.
I thought about talking to you today,
After three weeks without a word,
But it didn’t make enough sense yet
And there was no real will to do it.
I thought of time travel and if I could
Jump back somewhere and talk to you
Or talk to me
and if that would change things,
But I wouldn’t even want to.
There are whole universes inside my head
With real people and fake people and
You will slot into one of them
Although the memories seem more fictional
So maybe you’re unlikely to be found at
Your common haunts downtown and
More likely to be found in my bed
Talking
or sitting in the shower with me.
I took the best you could give,
Gave back the best I could give then,
and it was more tragedy than comedy
And surely the audience yelled for us to marry
Except the jealous ones
But the story of it ends bitterly
At least in this Act
And everything I wrote about it is true to me.
Why else would it be worth living?
I know why you didn’t bring me around them,
and why the ones I met were uneasy with me.
When I looked at them,
I didn’t see nurses,
paramedics,
or working professionals,
I saw children in big peoples’ clothing.
My gaze pierced their eyes like a spear,
and infected them with a seed of doubt.
It was not about the truth,
or about confidence,
because those were broken concepts
in the dull
and naive
who creates recycled dreams
that Hollywood stuffs down their throat.
You should have never walked into the
den of the dragon,
a creature so rare they are thought not to exist,
except at the edge of imaginary maps
or maps made up of imagination,
because I burned any sense of
dumb
easy
life that was possible.
You can try to heal the burns by chugging back
so many shots you forget how
your clothing came off,
or by filing yourself up with those
kids in adult clothing,
but the burns never heal and one day
you will be sitting in a chair,
alone,
or with someone you want to run from too,
and a dagger with the force of every
unrequited love
and the pain of all the lost
romances in the history of humanity
will stab you right in the heart.
You will remember your brush with
the Good and Evil,
the magnificent and terrifying,
and the one love that never heals.
I carved scars to match yours on my
heart and in my mind,
a memento to join every
other
memory of the lost
and the fallen,
a collection of pain and fantasy
somewhere between a dream death
where nobody goes anymore.
Can you hear me?
There's something in these words
I am trying to get across to you
and only you,
or at least there is a way
that only you know me
and think of me,
this is our moment
HERE
in all of these words,
sit and read as I do my thing.
There's a scream in the distance,
but somehow it's piercing into my brain
as if it were a shotgun fired just beside my ear,
and my brain feels like it has exploded,
or at least
feels empty.
The scream is mine
it echoes into you as you read,
there is no cry for help,
and such thing as the helpless.
Are you reading this?
Girls who touched my heart
sometimes manipulated it,
because love sex and sorrow are a
two-way street
and sometimes pitchers hurt most.
Read these lines,
to all my closest friends,
do you remember all the times we
should have died or
at least given up on living,
but we never let each other?
There's someone I don't want to write about anymore and I'm not sure what to do about it.
I figured a book would be enough, but it seems there are endless thoughts,
and is it you,
or is it just me?
Maybe it's both,
that special connection between a con artist
and a fraud
where every move was a bigger lie until
it all became so top-heavy we couldn't stomach it
and especially,
we couldn't stomach ourselves.
That's the birth of the hatred that peeled us like
the salted edamame we snacked on in between
games of cribbage,
good and bad television shows,
and acting like children in the best and worst ways.
Flaying is a more suitable word than peeling,
it skinned us alive like only the most savage hunters
and the worst part is that we were both too stupid
or too self-absorbed to realize what was going on,
or maybe,
our inner con artist deceived our selves into it.
I killed that con artist;
I trekked him through the jungle and
over-grown mutant forests that surrounded my mind,
I grabbed him by the jugular and
I did not have any mercy left,
maybe I gave you my last helping.
Could the loss of the con artist be
the emptiness I feel?
I appear as a stranger to my closest friends,
and to have grown up to everybody else,
but what if it comes back,
or if it pulled the best fake death since
Sherlock?
So good that we never know the difference,
and what if I am it,
or maybe it killed me?
Andy Veilleux 