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.
Poetry
Tiny dancer
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.
To the gorgeous
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.
Then and now
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.
Intensity
Why else would it be worth living?
Here be dragons
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.
I killed him
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?
Forty nights
Forty nights brought no relief
and the same expectation of waiting
for the someone to walk into what was
once
home.
It was home for one,
and too big to be so,
and that added to the drama of it all.
It had been over three months of
unbearable suffering
unrestrained freedom
and the void,
and nothing changed much,
not at its core.
There was a special hatred
reserved for ex-lovers,
and it could be broken down fairly easily
even to the uninitiated whom could not
fully
understand
the feeling of loss.
It was a mixture of trusting someone entirely,
having absolute confidence in the Good,
and dreaming enough to believe in Santa Claus,
and coming home to shattered dreams
trampled on a dirty floor with
muddy work boots,
figuring out the Good is some abstraction
unattainable to humans
and seeing the one you love
unzipped themselves to reveal
a serial killer
poltergeist
or android.
There was the cheapest
and deepest-cutting
feeling of betrayal and emptiness,
but maybe that wasn't down to you
and maybe that's just
life.
To everyone whom I have spent a night with
Love does not happen in a
Set space or time,
Sometimes it happens in one
Small
Seemingly for fun alone
Moment
And sometimes it spans years or decades.
It holds me alike either way
And I find myself reflecting on
Everyone with whom I have spent an evening
More commonly these days
And much more fondly.
There was love
Even within other love
And maybe there always will be.
Surely, there always will be.
We watched Harper reelected,
Consummated years of built-up lust,
Snuck away to your jeep,
Frequently tents or spent time laughing in a tent shared with a friend,
Spent time as three in a shower for two ,
Exchanged pictures or videos,
There was no limit to the fun.
The fun ends they all say,
But maybe they never experienced the fun that I had,
Or they didn’t understand that this fun
Could be built and sustained by two and two alone,
Granted you had the right two.
Australia,
Newfoundland,
Quebec,
British Columbia,
Taiwan,
And of course Sudbury,
Thank you everyone and everywhere.
Life is much less painful and gruesome
When a bed is filled with two or three
than when it is one,
And there have been tens of twos.
The wind and you
I hope the cold
Windy nights
With the heavy
Wet snow
Rip at your face and hair
Throw you around the sidewalks
And age you worse than the sun.
I hope the cold air seaps into
Every window
Door
and crack in your room
And reminds you of the cold
Lonely
Empty feelings
And the hollow men that inhabit that space now.
I hope they make you happy,
And that’s the worst insult of all.
Andy Veilleux 