Glasses long emptied,
chips are down,
sun has set.
The snow is white,
if and only if,
the writer says it is.
The snow is true,
if and only if,
passionate frost bites flesh
seeking to amalgamate the heat
and preserve the body for all time,
but not the fragile soul.
And who knows how to talk about it?
And who would bother?
On The Rock,
surrounded by ocean,
on a molten ball of dirt,
hurling through space and nothing.
This line won't matter.
There's a flow to life,
and anxiety scares you into
a lovely, hidden reality of near-death,
when you know you could jump into the breach,
turn your steering wheel in a complete one-eighty,
and embrace the anti-infinity by choice.
There are two choices in life you don't make:
Birth and Death,
you are responsible for every other mistake and success.
Of course,
you'll lie through your
gritted, stupid, little teeth,
about all the people who wronged you,
and why things didn't go as planned but,
nobody believes it,
they agree to be nice.
Your life is your own;
you fail alone,
succedd alone,
and die alone.
Life is a selfish act,
and our cages prevent connections.
Abyss is too defined a term to describe
the nothingness breathing on my hour glass,
the glass fogs from the moist nasal air,
blurring out the wasting grains of sand.
No,
too soon.
"When you're my age,
death doesn't seem so far,
and it occupies you,"
said the elder scholar,
but he lied,
or was ignorant.
Death does occupy me,
I see it in my fingers pounding
on plastic keys in a dark room
surrounded by melodies of sorrow;
good winter,
that crack the surface of mortality.,
if only fleetingly.
I have failed you,
and the sand doesn't go back up
the one-way paths in all our lives
and neither will the tears of loved ones,
weeping over something we used to be,
but can never regain again.
What was once moving,
loving,
thinking,
breathing,
is now undone,
and broken down.
No trancendence,
no light to follow,
no salvation sought,
and no mercy given.
Born into the godless abyss,
and returned to nothingness.
Love is broken,
Enter redemption,
Marching on mountains of skulls
Decayed bones powdering under the grinding wheels of time.
There is being and time,
But time destroys being cyclically,
Being as cancer exterminated by time’s radiation.
It’s enough to give you morning sickness,
At least a gut filled with bike hatred and profound boredom,
The nothingness slaps against walls of anger,
Maybe righteous,
But passionate for sure.
Life’s lemons are not free,
You pay in time,
But they are sour as fuck.
We are of nothing,
for nothing,
and going nowhere.
Tender, plastic kisses mask
a void we cram full of
Valentine's Day bargain love.
It's not the dollar's fault,
always searching for a way to move,
like the skin wrapped around your body,
always crawling,
path of least resistance,
going anywhere,
can't fight the monster you can't see or prove,
but can't stop feeling.
Our souls are tugged down,
by some inexplicable force,
spritiual gravity,
that never ceases to pull one towards the gutter,
as if anyone needed more convincing of where home was.
One could always look in the toilet and see which way life was going,
a man-made compass,
analogy for life in the most appropriate place:
where we fuck, release waste, and become clean,
in a rinse-repeat pattern of little value or specific order.
The Nothing People,
the only name fitting enough,
aside from maybe those-who-live-with-a-void-eating-their-guts/mind,
but that was already copyrighted by the cynical me.
As a kid I thought there was a way out,
always a next step for progress
-stupidity still reigns,
but the battle changed –
The meaning of life is the journey
and there is no achievement in that,
no victory,
but it's the hand we have been dealt
and have evidently chosen to play rather than fold.
The hand is destined to lose,
but like a gambling junkie fronted a few chips,
we can't put our hands down,
even when we are ahead a few,
addicted to the high of fake winning.
That's where we live,
with our nothing,
It was never a question of survival,
at least not for long,
but of progress.
Not the progress of condo development and urbanization,
or even a take-back-the-streets or reforestation,
but a human progress.
It is easy to survive in a bloated existence.
Life is lived out on silver platters
sometimes lined with gold paint
other times shit,
but the inside is all the same.
Complacency,
comfort,
but it's of a numb variety.
Democraticzed boredom,
CAN YOU HEAR ME?
Boredom has become democratized.
It's horrible,
even the working class feel boredom
– beat it out with gunshots to projections of humans –
the quasi-intellectuals in ivory towers
– known it out by the sound of dices rolling,
or kids screaming in ears,
middling worries, or egotistical chest-thumping, about rat populations-
whatever tries to tickle what can not be tickled.
Some say the train derailed after failed revolutions,
or from near-tyrannical governments
– although tyrants don't come like they used to,
in the 1900s or even 1200s –
but there is always choice.
Chirk it,
you know you want to,
come on man,
who wants responsibility anyways?
It's not your fault you are bored,
– or is your guilt rattling your conscience? –
but then again,
maybe it is.
You can blame the culture that force-feeds spectacle
– with their fists –
into every orifice in your body,
leaving you numb, gaping, confused,
but the blame doesn't belong there.
You take it all in,
you open your legs for the wrong pleasures,
you have become a spectacle whore like any other,
and that responsibility
– along with the guilt –
is yours to bear.
You can wake up and become a being worthy of greatness,
or lay back with your metaphysical legs wide open,
waiting for next flashy new toy to fill the void in your life.
There are the heroes of passion,
thrown from failures or successes
with an indiscriminate valour
unaffected by the shallow hearts that plague us all.
Life,
for them,
is lived with the bullets of hate
grazing hearts on sleeves
no armour could defend.
Death,
for them,
an indifferent act suceeding
every other event that came before
without special cause for distinction.
The truly great come through bearing
no gift particularly
but in making no demands
brings gifts greater than any else offered.
A friend is not a friend solely because of geography
a connection made through similar hobbies
or one night of great intimacy or affection conversation.
Pause.
Examine your connections in the world
and then despair,
because only despair is applicable
when life is compared to this ideal of great friendship.
Who are you,
and when did you stop caring,
or calling?
The two-way street analogy is out-of-season,
not out-of-touch,
and while South-bound is a traffic jam,
the North,
a lane to nowhere,
fast,
appears as new pavement.
Of all the things you pushed on me,
I understood it the least.
I did not have the capability to learn it
Nor you to teach it,
And nothing more must be said of us.
A amethyst on our once-collective mantle
where the fireplace has long ceased to be alive
An oold apartment,
Musty
Sleazy
In the heart of the old world in Sudbury
Is now abandoned of the emotion that once exploded it to so many lives and demises that any sort of count is impossible.
Hollow ppl may reside there with our skeletons
They are puppets in comparison.
Pant hangs onto the walls,
Although for dear life,
From the wars we waged,
With each other, the outside world,
And inside.
There’s a love laid to rest in that casket that has halved my being,
And crippled you.
A puppet walks on,
Clunky and awkward as puppets do,
And the old ghosts stalking are left feeling pity in place of anger.
A hand
in the distance
turn your head
you can see it
I know you can see it
you can see something
or is it just the reflection
in the mirror that binds you?
You can see me
or at least feel it,
somewhere in your bones
your heart skips three beats
light-headed now
but you can see me,
can't you?
Anxiety
can you see me?
I could have sworn you
winked
blinked
stopped
stared.
Can't you see me,
or feel,
well, anything
for me?
The deperation takes me by the throat,
raw, yellowed, finger nails shake into
dirty, exposed flesh
re-opening old wounds
or emptiness and bitterness,
directed at no on in particular.
I remember this,
I would beg you all over again
just for a taste of your conversation.
A fleeting surface talk,
of nothing important,
or to have you open me up –
we could releases some demons together,
chooe which to keep
and which to kill,
maybe we could kill each other,
or learn how to hold
and keep
love.
Please,
open me up.
there,
could you hear it?
It came in the slow,
monotonous,
ticking of the clock.
It left ashamed,
forgotten in the absolute silence of space
following that booming,
clicking,
noise.
Whether it came or not
was as irrelevant as her
claims of the same.
It did not matter now
and would not matter later,
but that's true of everything.
No revelation there.
No unshrouding of mystery,
only a compounded problem,
and another averts their gaze,
afraid in a soul-paralyzing manner,
keep walking.
Just,
keep walking.
It's too big a problem,
it's too big a battle.
Keep walking.
The clock ticks,
the jump to something real,
the clock ticks,
the jump to
anything at all,
the clock ticks
anything…
the clock ticks,
at all…
the clock ticks.
Andy Veilleux 