A feeling slides down

my brain and seeps into my heart,

or maybe it’s a soul,

and floods my senses.

It bleeds from my heart

until I feel it in my fingers and toes

and it moves out through my soft skin.

Maybe I’m not okay.

Blue –

the water-coloured orchids,

the GNC shaker bottle,

your favourite kettle on the stove,

and the Creemore beer can –

is so majestic, yet morose and missing in itself.

 

And so are we.

The city below makes the sound of a

drainage pipe sticking into cool air,

overflowing with flood waters.

 

The pieces of the puzzle move –

every jaded, free animal and

the numerous happy bits of matter that

cannot, or will not, think –

in a strange, perfect design

built by no one.

 

We assemble reality in our head

like Ikea furniture,

and we make stories to give it meaning

where there is none.

 

Can I be the grand architect?

It is no one’s right to give,

and nothing’s right to take.

The first touch was a sweet gesture,

a night approaching as shift set in,

and there I was to pick you up and

drop

you off.

 

We met before,

but this was classic ‘me,’

and I was the gentleman,

the scholar,

and the saint.

 

I did it to help,

but there we were just

a few weeks later

with you bent over the desk

in your spare room

with your roommates fast asleep.

 

The saint is the sinner

and the hero plays the villain too,

but neither of us will regret the memory,

or the company in the

badlands.

Age dances on your face

in the form of forgotten laughs

and remembered tears.

 

Your body still burns

the flames of youth,

sparked by desire unspeakable and

the dark unknowable, nestled deep in you.

 

The smoke sneaks out of you –

the smell of beautiful burning birch –

as the fire dances

forever

deep within your ghost-blue eyes.

The bed on milk crates

in the fake-windowed room,

with the rough ending of love.

 

Memories pierce and

pull

and turn the easy seas of

Saturdays

into the shy touch of first lovers.

The path is hard to hold,

but impossible to stop hop off.

 

The tears hit harder than bullets,

with the love pouring down gutters

and never hitting home, where it belongs.

 

Time brushes through my thick, graying hair,

a constant mystery – ducking and dodging definition –

and always running through our fingers just when we thought we had it.

 

Your kiss on my collarbone,

your hand on my naked chest,

and the way gravity pushes you into me,

is everything it means to love and be known.

The love we need

is not the love we see,

but the love we don’t eat.

Trouble – the capital T kind – loomed large, hinting at impending drama, outrage or madness. The mind’s eye was clouded by sun-kissed, all-too-revealed skin and one too many cold ciders on ice. Or was it vodka sodas? The impossible became possible, but wouldn’t flirt with being plausible. The night the music died came in like a lamb, bloodied up and quickly eaten by lovers in lions clothing. The collapse of sanity and vanity made me look in the mirror and see a manatee, or maybe a manakin. Was I a tiny bird or a Mannequin? It didn’t matter then, and doesnt matter now. All I wanted was to increase the speed of my fingers, and decrease the speed of these thoughts banging on the inside of my skull. Thoughts punched the inside of the whiteness – take that white privilege – and looked for orifices to push their way out of, no lube required. The madness poured – or seethed – out of my hardware (read:brain) and software (read:mind) through some imaginary spaces between my eyes and this screen. I was a sinking ship and then I found the cure – although I’m not sure if it’s an anchor to capsize me or a liferaft so I can rebuild on that tiny little island. Rebirth, the pheonix, or infitine sadness, the bluebird. -two destines in one man.