Andy Veilleux

The value of sorry

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Sorry doesn’t fix things
Even if it is a nice gesture
But often its empty and common.

There are some things you can’t be sorry enough for,
Cheating on the person who would die for you,
Manipulating a trusted friend of years,
Leading people who love you to worry about your instability
And any true mistakes from your past.

Intentions are the manipulator’s safe haven
And don’t lead to much with real mistakes.

There is no sense of regret or dread that makes
Anything better or easier
And responsibility is the gauntlet of honesty
That only some truly wear.

The honest, the damned
The wounded, the loving
All feel the pangs of shame and guilt
Sent out by regret and injustice
But it never helped a soul being sorry
Except for your masochistic self.

boredom as lover

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We kill time,

because we're afriad of it

and what we fear

we destroy unprovoked.

 

A society of men and women

intimidated by empty hours

afraid to face the minutes without

stuffing them full of mindless entertainment.

 

A never-ending cycle of mediocraty

encompasses Can/American culture

to the point every pleasure becomes

guilty.

 

That's a fitting label in a society of sinners,

who only commit the lamest and most

selfish

of sins,

and never the exciting ones to confess or live.

 

Or maybe we are exciting,

with sky-rocketing adultery and greed

living to fuck and spend

and people say Freud is 

no longer in vogue,

but that's because he is feared

as truth often is.

 

There is something like the Confessions 

coming

but I never found God

and I'm not remorseful.

 

I was vengeful,

I hated

I cheated

I harmed my fellow man

I destroyed whole individuals

and I certain lied,

but I'm no different morally than the

vast ocean of human emptiness we call a race,

I'm just a sliver more exciting than most,

but mountains less boring than others.

 

Don't be afraid of that boredom,

embrace it,

Time is leaking out of our pores

a few skin cells fall off with every touch

– the great sand people,

a mock Terracotta Army –

but here I still stand

and you do too,

or you could lay with me and

forget about the boredom for awhile.

 

Life is used up all the same,

and I'm stabbing at my boredom lately

like a damned peon,

when I should be holding it like a lover.

The line

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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.

Dreams and reality in bed

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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.

For fun

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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.

Thoughts on hail

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Here be dragons

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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.