canadian poems

Love’s clearance rack

/ andyveilleux / 4 Comments

Some people have been cast aside,
hanging on the clearance rack of love,
For far too long.

You pick them up,
Try them on,
And say you can’t believe the price,
But you wonder why they were there to begin with.

Some people are too picky,
And their price is just too high,
While some people chafe your nipples
Or irritate your skin if worn too long
But some are just unlucky.

Some are just not fashionable,
Or out-of-season,
Too warm of a sweater in a post-dating climate
Where attachment is gone and summer styles
Are all the rage.

Everyone wants to let their skin breathe,
Except a chosen few,
And mist are just serial shopaholics
Always looking for a new style.

We invent ourselves through new lovers
Just like we buy new fashions
But an asshole is still an asshole
Even if they dress like Mother Theresa.

Its not the accessory on your arm that makes you,
Its what comes out of your mouth
And what you allow inside you or find yourself in.

So tired

/ andyveilleux / 1 Comment

My soul had become so tired

ragged

but my body could never catch up.

 

I sat awake,

laid in beds staring

at ceilings that did not mean anything

even with the shapes I imagined dancing.

 

There were occasionally figures dancing

on the ceiling with the brutal brush strokes

but also in the corner of my eyes

but when I turned

you were gone.

 

Life can hurt you when you are laying around

in the quiet and isolated moments

where no one is being touched or touching you

and there’s too much gravity to get comfortable.

 

Bukowski spoke of his soul dropping

down through the mattress,

but maybe if it was just a soul

I would cut my losses and move on without it.

 

It wasn’t just a soul being left behind

and there wasn’t a mattress expensive enough

to lull this tired mind

and worn-out body

into dream’s clutches.

 

The condo echoed the ticking, broken clock,

a casualty of one of my latest good memories,

and the condo snapped awake with heat against

an uncharacteristically chilly St. John’s evening.

 

The place had no apt defenses to the cold

just as I had found myself savaged not long ago

because the cold of places and especially of people

has a way of taking us by surprise.

 

The frost sneaks up around your

walls of trust and respect

and bites at whatever it can touch

and unfortunately

we let it into the most tender and

intimate

areas.

 

I wasn’t sure if the scars had accumulated too much,

the real pain of all of these open woulds stung too much

or the phantom pain of everything lost and still felt

was the culprit,

but sleep remained elusive nonetheless.

 

The reason doesn’t matter,

because humans aren’t built on rationality,

not at our deep and tender levels,

and that’s where all the real danger was.

 

There were many ghosts that became my friends

even though they prevented me from sleeping

and there was a white elephant in the room that

I wasn’t going to talk about anymore.

the moral middle of the road

/ andyveilleux / 3 Comments

Everyday is Halloween

as we dress up as sinners

or saints

when the reality

is somewhere in the middle.

 

None of us are as good

or as bad

as we paint ourselves

or people paint us to be.

 

We are all capable of great evil

and magnificient good

but none of us are clean of 

the other.

 

We pretend we are as good as we think

putting on masks and surrounding ourselves

with so many lies,

and half-truths even,

and the kind of friends that tell us how

special and amazing we are

and how we couldn't have been in the wrong.

 

And that's where the best of friends matter

to tell you you're an idiot

and that you made a serious mistake

or five

but you're still alright,

because you can always fight for redemption.

Nobody

/ andyveilleux / 4 Comments

And today

I am nobody.

 

Nothing stirs by my hand

no one moves at my voice,

my freedom is absolute.

 

One lonely soul sitting

at a too-bright computer screen

poking at keys on a shadowy keyboard

is of little real or imagined consequence,

especially now.

 

I sit in a dark corner of a

room filled with a lot of 

empty

space

and some junk

a laptop

and no personality or soul

reaches back out to me.

 

Nothing else draws breath or

thinks about the bitterness of these defeats

and the biggest failure one could have prescribed.

 

Nothing else.

 

I am nobody.

the future I will not see

/ andyveilleux / 4 Comments

I can see you with

a painted-on smile

and man on your arm

who doesn't know the

first important thing about you.

 

I will not see it happen,

or else,

I will shield my eyes,

for fear of losing respect 

and admiration for the near

and the dear.

 

 

Nothing near stays so

for long after the fact

and that's life:

a constant shuffle of people

getting closer and further

and sometimes itr lasts longer

than others, 

but we're all orbitting somewhere,

satellites with our own gravity

alkways pulling and being pulled.

 

Some gravity is stronger than others

and some are gentle as the spring breeze

while others will collapse your lungs and skull.

 

Some orbits are bad business,

and that is what I never want to see

for you

but a prophet is not required.

 

Gravity rides everything,

and sometimes

we all do too.

lonely hatred

/ andyveilleux / Leave a comment

Hatred is a gun loaded

with loneliness

and sometimes ignorance.

 

Sometimes knowledge is

ammunition.

 

There's a fine line between letting

the 

good

times

roll

and the screeching halt of apathy and selfishness.

 

Actions are always stronger than

words spoken

and especially

ideas thought and intended.

idiocy of our idiocy

/ andyveilleux / Leave a comment

I have to write something smart

to replace that last idoitic waste

of space and life

and what are we actually doing

besidses throwing life and time and space at our problems

i guess we throw money

but money is human-made

-AS IF TIME ISN'T-

feel it out physics or well, 

science

feelings

irreconcible differences

or hadn't you heard?

Well,

I had heard and saw the second coming

but many more than that too

and nothing change.

 

Time is a rubber stamp

no definite moments

– a building falls, bombs burst, a baby born-

just a stream that does not always

follow the path of least

or most

resistance.

As gravity, we think it exists and

you are an absolute idiot for believing in it or disbelieving it,

take you pick you absolutel idiot.

 

Disheartening,

but we're all ignorant and don't forget it,

and I love you anyways,

but I'm an ignorant idiot too so take that for what it's worth.