to new york and back

this city,
so familiar through images, ideas, sounds, and my dog eared copy of Catcher in the Rye that i loved so much,
this city,
a place that we all know without knowing, familiar and strange,
people burst from subterranean chasms like jack-in-theboxes,
grim and grimey, a city upon a city,
with half never knowing the snow and sun,
half never knowing the dank odours that emanate out of human existence when it goes underground,
ice skating under the christmas tree in rockefeller centre,
billboards on broadway eclipsing the sky,
beautiful in a grotesque way, bigger than life,
and is there happiness here?
cafes, clothes, and a pit in the ground that made us all gasp,
explosions that we still feel the tremors from,
and is there happiness there?
black kids beat box on the bus,
signs in spanish,
shopkeepers light their mennorahs,
and is there happiness there?

as a pilgrim, one is always homeless and yet always at home,
wandering down strange streets and savouring their names for the unknown promises they conceal,
imagining the day when they are familiar,
imagining life in this place.

when one crawls into a cave,
the walls of comfort grow thick with the mosses of fear and apathy,
only when one bursts forth out of hibernation
does the whafish intensity of the winter sun hit eyes that have grown dim and useless.

white boots aren't meant for heroes,
they dirty and scuff in ways that a 10 gallon never seems to,
no,
white boots are meant for crime
and for love that comes out of a hungry spirit,
a wandering spirit,
a spirit that only finds satisfaction when it is consumed, overwrought and perturbed,
a spirit that wants to be shaken with art and filth, poetry and constant love.

drifting over this familiar and wild geography,
contemplating those little lights of scattered homes,
distant as stars that burn and churn in galaxies I will never venture to or know,
so many lights,
so many lives,
with vastness of oceans and space in between,
bless my wings.

It takes more than that

You may roar but that doesn't make you a lion,
You may shine but that doesn't make you the sun,
You may come but that doesn't make you a lover,
You may jump but that doesn't make you a flea,
You may rise but that doesn't make you a loaf of bread,
You may climb in the mountains but that doesn't make you a goat,
You may live alone but that doesn't make you a hermit,
You may fly through a wheat field but that doesn't make you a locust,
You may sing but that doesn't make you an angel,
You may write but that doesn't make you a poet,
You may roll but that doesn't make you a stone,
You may howl but that doesn't make you a wolf,
You may be hungry but that doesn't make you a stomach,
You may struggle but that doesn't make you strong.

It takes more than that.

The rain has come with blackness

Pale, skinny, bare feet inside of wet shoes,
My blackness is enveloped by the liquid blackness of the night
And I fly like a specter towards my warm, butter coloured room,
The gutters rebel against waste management, water treatment and civic planning
By expelling when they should be ingesting,
A madness of yellow leaves and chestnut spinepods chokes the rapids,
Swirls the potholes,
And adheres to my expensive wet shoes that are being ruined,
The rain has come with blackness
Sure as spilled India Ink spreading through a rented carpet.

Late nights at the library

I came down from the mountain and went to my little house. It was much as I left it, neat in its messy, bare sort of way. Simple, temporary. I arranged some fall squash on the counter with a ring of chestnuts, ate some unremarkable food and headed out into the night time. Lots of people in my neighbourhood freaking out, as usual, generally in their own quiet ways. It's getting cold now but Shelly wasn't wearing her shoes. She'll be alright though, Shelly is long-term crazy and knows how to get around. Past the things that are open at this hour between the early and the late. Cafes offer warm beacons for lively ideas to float about and lonely people who clutch their coffee cups at 9 at night. What are they staying up for and what is shifting behind those watery old eyes? Grocery stores, convenience stores, darkened restaurants and various other holes to crawl into, my stride is quick past them all tonight. I finally ended up here, maybe to reinforce my solitude by checking on everyone who isn't here. To open emails and not know what to say. To try to remember the clarity I felt on the mountain, in the forest, I wanted to write something about it down before it fizzled away. I can feel this little place pulsing all around me with connections, memories, faded tendrils floating around my life, ensnaring it. I can remember the first time I climbed Mount Douglas, how proud Kerria and I were to find Beacon Hill Park, discovering QV's, the cage under the Johnson Street Bridge. So many little places, pockets of memory, delight and discovery, places that I still love. People that I still love. So when did we get so tired, set in our ways? When did we decide that we'd learned it all, knew what to expect? My time is counting down now, a minute left before the library closes and I'm still where I started

For others who cannot sleep

Sometimes I can't sleep,
I feel this mortal body dying all around me,
The details are just fireworks that you see long before you can hear.
Sometimes I end up tangled in the sheets,
Sometimes I read,
Sometimes I smoke,
Not because it makes things better,
Because it makes things worse.
I'm turning up my collar,
This season stretches traffic lights across the asphalt,
and I hate that that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,
The perfect body wears a scar.
The perfect body wears a scar,
Eerily smooth,
Feeling flesh replaced by unfeeling,
Electric rivers changing green to red,
The pillow when I rise to work before the sun does.
Eerily smooth,
Eerily smooth.

how i am learning patience

maybe i am not meant to see you until my hair is long like it once was,
not until your beard has grown in again,
so that we can braid them together,
and be woven into love.
and i know that i must go to you,
because you will not come to me,
i am proud, but not so much as you are,
i am stubborn, but not so much as you are,
i will,
and i am,
just slowly, as my hair grows.

this coast, this island

everything grows too easily here, clings too heavily, overruns itself and drips with excessive fecundity. the wind stirs the air too vigorously, sweeps across the grass too aggressively, makes waves in the landscape refusing to just let things lie still, let our ideas settle,our dreams to drift at their own pace.
change is constant, though sometimes imperceptible, sneaking, surprising and crawling through the cracks in sandcastles we build.
our moats will fill with ocean water,but just at that moment of satisfaction, destiny realised, the battlements start to crumble and we are left with nothing but a heap of sand and the ocean, frenetic, oozing and incessant.
the earth is soft and roots grow deep, grabbing, ripping and rearranging as they go.
we are reminded that life will go on, not withoutbeauty,but always with a subtle violence.

the torn out page

i like to stare up at big trees and personify everything that i see
i love the desert for its refusal to let me do that
for it is nothing
and there is nothing
but
mercy mercy mercy
rain down upon our parched souls and lips cracked from the mountain altitudes
and soothe these spinning heads
i prefer my longing to my lovers and rebel from love when it's with me
wake up crying and biting my pillow,
hung over from joyful excesses with old friends
i enjoy sitting in cafes, spending money on bullshit and i like saving pennies in jars,
i want to meditate in the himalayas with a caveful of toothless saddhus and dance like a drunken fool to 80's music in a trashy bar
and i enjoy being severe and serious
pretending to know things
actually knowing things,
being sardonic and cruel
a great iceberg of frigidity filled with this hot soup of lust and selfishness
that i try to own
try to hide from
and sing little bajans to myself while slaving in the back of a bakery
working too hard for nothing but boney fingers
and to channel this intensity into something other than tears and love
and wavering wobbling between the aesthetic and the ascetic
burning and languishing and hating everything and hating lostness
while trying to get lost
to disappear
taking the winding backroads and shit filled alleyways
but always guided by some inborn constellations behind my eyes
despite my attempts to cloud them, rearrange them
with intoxicants, exhaustion, walking too long in the sun
as it beats me, rattles my dry brain in my skull
like the warning of a snake that i almost stepped on as a child
eating the wrong mushroom by the shushwap
puking up blackness on a bus ride
and loving the terror and the rush and
huddling alone, fearing every noise
keeping this material world spinning around this material girl
(keep it together)
(om hari om)
until i can let it all burn burn burn
because i don't know what i want to do for money
but i want to love india so i will.