The Moving Box

In the last 37 minutes of sleep, when my brain fixings halt, too nudged, bladder full of piss and head full of troubles; alarms and men backing their trucks into nowhere and the silence before shoppers make claim; steak dinner on the waterfront, bed I hate to get out of, there was you.

I was flying in this dream, but that’s not right. Soaring down escalators in a far off city of tin and business bullshit. Mine, but elsewhere. Couldn’t get downstairs and workday was long done. I managed to glide down, impossible lengths and stairways, thinking I should die if I don’t land right, but I always did. No one else had this but me. Thing is, no one really looked over to notice the girl bearing past them, the wake in my breeze offering up some scent of “away from here”; the impetus to shout “run!”. They just kept chatting verbiage from their old bones in young bodies, their smoke breaks and their puddles of shitty brown complacency. That This is just fine, and That is not something to think about. The easy life.

For our bodies to function as they do with this clearly schizophrenic can can bonanza of a mind, percentages go dying or stand dormant under the covers, while we inject it again and again with routine, and facts and ego. That ridiculous thought that you are…..actually in control of the life. Victor Frankel, not in my dream but always sitting just behind my judging glares in bars to people left lonely, tells me everyday that asking what life owes to us means nothing, but what are you giving It, elevator enthusiast? I’m flying overhead and landing just fine, even when the fear takes hold. Stop pressing the buttons and riding to the top floor just to feel the selfish thrill that you may fall off, stop sliding back and forth to the usual place of employ, when you don’t even work there. Coffee machines and lunch hours, paper clips and water coolers….the same dull blade but without the thrill of drugs, the mystery of the sailing ship or the multi faceted sweet face of the wandering (no desert required).

After all this, there was a house. There is always a house, the soul one single diamond in the castle with many rooms to see. I woke up, but I wasn’t awake. In a bed, in a cottage, not here but in the country. Which country? THE country. I felt you with your arms wrapped around me, half-asleep as you are now, trying to budge and wake up. I spoke, but you didn’t answer. Still, I was afraid it wasn’t really you. But I looked down in a lucid spell of a focused dream-eye, and saw your arms. The arms I have memorized. The scars, the hairs, the skin, the hands. Wrapped around me so tight. There was some comfort in that. A bandage on the right hand and wrist told me for true. Still more movement, still no talking, but still you wouldn’t wake up. But you seemed to hold me to you just the same. I looked up at the Lollygagging lady who passed in the doorway – looking at me and smiling and making to leave us alone as she always did.

I caressed your hands as it was the only way to speak your language. I wondered if you’d figured out that the elevator trip takes you nowhere, and is only popular as it’s what everyone else feels they have to do. I leaned back into you, so I could rest in my final moments before the alarm would go off, as my mental fact checker would always wake me in time. In that comforter of your body and mine, I silently hoped for your fears to leave you. That you’d know you could rocket to the stars, down through the dirty underworlds and up through the skies and treetops, taking every fragrant noise with you, if you just knew that you Could.

Writing will commence with a sore hand on Friday.

This is more important today:

Ode to James O'Shea

Written by James O'Shea on paper with a pen and dropped in the post.
He's as free a man as I've ever met.

-------

"Yo Maryana! I miss you. I checked the porch swing a couple of times in case you had forgotten to leave. Alas, still no you. But I know you're there in spirits. Deux ex machina. Dea. et vous?

I just got back from working a Chairman gig at the Children's festival in Saskatoon. It was great but there were too many children! The place was packed with them. Yipper yapping hand clapping let's all count to 3.

Also on the radio today was the following story: World Nude Bike ride day was to be held for the very first time in Nelson, BC. But, oho, it was too cold and rainy for those naked cyclists, so the event was cancelled. But Five "rogue nuclists" decided they were gonna pedal their petals through town any way. Hooray for hippies! Unfortunately, it was not [FUCKING HIPPIES] uneventful. No-one would have even noticed them but that their butts ended up at Riverside Park, which as everyone knows is used on weekends as the kids soccer park. So there they all were, hundreds of kids and mums and dad and coaches and oranges and water bottles and two naked grown men. The hippies had no time to explain. They were chased out of the park by angry dads who wouldn't listen to any world nude bike day excuses. Foul dogs!



Also I am having a recurring sense of horror as I realize we are going to live in Saskatoon for a year or two. Why? I have the latest BC virus. Why? Why bother? You are already here. The cold out there. The cold. Have you ever felt 40 degrees below? It's the same temperature in both marking systems. F & C. Here Comes Everybodies! Jesus its cold. Not cute snowflakes cold. Cold like it hurts. Cold you just ache. Fuck I love it. You must come there. You must.

In other news Chloe is still a long legged goofball wandering both aimlessly and purposeful around the deck. It still hasn't warmed up here so she would rather be inside. If she gets bored she hunts Flies. She thinks they are tiny birds and she dreams of the mean streets of Mexico. My brother kept telling me - "watch out man: that dog is gonna drop a balloon of heroin in its turd one day and 2 guys are gonna jump out of the bushes and take it from you man - the dog is a mule - a drug mule!" He was teasing. But still. Whenever that dog shits I get ready for the cartel to seize the turd. Why else smuggle a dog across 2 borders? Chloe won't say - she's still not talking. Love, James"



----------

This letter is forcing me to ravamp, writing wise and come back to the gypsy ship a much plainer speaking, non flowery woman. I'm gonna try. I'm really gonna try. Love you James and Patty, Keelin and William O'Shea. And Chloe, you cocaine cowgirl.

Barnacle 6.13

a few poems in one, just spewed out in this lil window...

Dis one is for Nora.

---------------







Livy took a seashell to her harder will and squeezed
it with all her might.

Honeymoon up against a stonewall whiskey burning behind his eye
her let her try
perpetually duped

Pleasure that these brainwaves sought found home at the
inside seam of her fake lace thighs
She directed the synapses
her body to his skull
fucking right all the wrongs, they set the world to their will.

Made all the white spots sparkle with filth - pride
raised up all the dirt that could not bear a bed
and gave it
theirs.

paper to pen
pussy to heart
prayers to breathing
breath to thunder
clap hands
slap arse
film all fears
edit the jeers
for papercuts on paper footsteps
soaked in loin and tending all the rivers at once

God in his drawers
the toilet soars
the beauty of everyday things.
Its sound is true,
the breath hard and tight.

The inability to remember none but naked things.

In the stone face of a watery death comes something to do on a Tuesday,
when no opera belts out a girl's name over her death bed,
for no other reason that she's bored with you.
Yes, you.

The lips grind with the stained stones that men have planted in their wake
taste the filth of all others in their years of trouble and conquest,
for reasons not to fulfill the things that play hard at them,
of shrill and crippled winos who bake their sundays into jelly
they shove hard and fast between their toes.

Governments never know how sweet you tasted when the dark turned into day.
Colors adrift, too long a battle to sacrifice your wits over, but
trouble yourself,
Do.

They just don't feel the same nerve endings that eat away at our dreams,
the endless gesticulations that no one sees but me.

It's forever in a dime, a dance hall in a day.

You know, that novel you've been writing...?

**Well, it's been more than "3 years, hmm?" for me, but I thought I'd bring this pile of verbal bile out for the day, again about strippers. More of a newer draft, and it will change again and again, but here's draft part {}**
---------------------------------------------------------------------------


Lucky was a candy cane stripper who Ryan and Louise had come across in Indiana somewhere, just outside Gary. Not much of a strip joint to speak of, but these places were scattered wildly all over. The less people, and less things to do, it seemed, the more of these little shacks rose up with no fury, only garnering a drink license and sometimes just the guilty grey promise of one. Calm driving by, not while inside.

On the trains, Lucky would soon be known as the one who shifted her eyes too many times when listening to Ryan and Louise talk of their rememberings -- the last town, the mean outskirts, the horror of the center place. Lucky's eyes keep forcing themselves to shutter closed -- back in the strip, back to working. She didn’t have a real problem with the job to tell the truth. Since Lucky was little, which was a time hard to believing, when she wasn’t exploding out of her sequined t-shirts...she pretended to be a stripper in her upstairs bedroom. All by herself, she’d dress up in her mother’s shawls and wrap herself in scarves like a Pompeii whore and she’d undo it all in perfect sweeping arpeggio time in front of her parents’ mirrored closets. No one ever came to find her, or caught her there in all those years. She’d make it with her stuffed animals without knowing what slots and tabs were involved in all that raucous motion or the particulars; it just felt comforting, good, less lonely. Or she’d do up the whole soap opera of the date, the affair with the boss, quite lewd for a girl of five, as her father stood outside, in the backyard below, making hamburgers. She had asked for cheese on hers, she could smell the bland, processed American square melting onto the burger, steaming, as she victimized her teddy bear, black and white dog, took them all to heaven with her. Within five minutes of meeting Louise, Lucky would animate these childhood tales to her, and top them off with the idea that she blamed television, the nighttime soap operas, but that she enjoyed the experiences, even then.

Lucky had been running after the train. Ryan was in the middle of falling asleep in Louise’s lap, mid-afternoon. It was one of those perfect moments, when the leaves were catching sun and you could smell it and they were swinging with just the proper amount of aggression. Ryan was too. He was a simple boy, but the way that his fists had of cupping like the angry infant he was onto Louise’s knees minded her well, and he slept wildly, still needing to touch when he was fast asleep. The breezes were kissing their foreheads, as the railway car door was open – in this territory, no one was around and seemed to care and they could meet up with some of Ryan’s old school mates down in Illinois. Like always, there were people passing, here and there, but when she finished running, Lucky knew she had found friends for sure. On a mission.

Louise was always watching for the world as it printed itself across people's faces. Lucky was no different. Out of breath when she joined their train car, Lucky was dressed in her pink undersized t-shirt, not washed properly. She was a mound of matted shit brown hair, too light for richness, spreading out from the corner of the picture frame. Pants jacked up, loose only at the shins. Tiniest loose bag on her shoulder and face still made up with drug store cosmetics on sale for this her premiere appearance in the world of the trains.

After she flashed the most desperate squeaky smile onto them, Lucky climbed into the railway car. Ryan awoke, manners instinctual, and helped her in, though the train was crawling like the dead as it usually did when passing through the lowlands. Lucky wasn’t flirtatious, though. She clearly thought Ryan a sweet looking boy as Louise did, but it was as if they were five years old and he was one of her father’s friends. Not proper. Lucky had declared to Louise that they were sisters from the get-go, with Louise not knowing why she needed to have one in a place such as this. She told them of her time in Gary, as they all had just come through. The strip club where she had worked since she was fifteen. All these places were like libraries, Lucky had convinced herself, as she chattered to Ryan and Louise at three hundred miles a minute. Yes, they were small town libraries, and these men that came were all scientists of a certain sort who paid their tuition to come into darkness and research.

They could find out all sorts of things from a girl like Lucky. She was an Aries, as so clearly worn when she had on nothing else. Her paganesque sign of the Ram planted in the beaded sweat droplets that nestled her neck when she did the deeds. They could see she was of German stock, her build, her bosom, the dangerous clarity between her wide-set blue eyes. It was Americana at work, Dresden style. A disarray of voices from the pills the other girls would give her sometimes made her dissociate like she were in front of a painting, but in the space that it occupied, the murky sorts of fields and thick figures blending more and more the closer you stepped towards it. The female form is like a painting, she said, becoming another girl every new day, and there were no paintings to look at in Gary. So, these men came to Lucky like a Greek Goddess of old, to study her form, to be true to the darkness clouding up in rotten smoke and to stay with her while she danced right past them in that darkness, following the paint as it spilled to the floor and tripped the goddess for good, twisting her ankle on the way down like always happens when little girls try to dance in their momma’s oversized shoes.

After more than an hour of this bullshit verbiage, Ryan stared off one too many times, forcing Louise to look Lucky straight in her wide eyes – Louise told her about the one time she went to a strip bar, when her older brother’s friend was getting married and they had no babysitter. She had used the bathroom there almost immediately, though would have preferred to hold it in, probably. She found her way and all the girls were most obliging, since she was girly enough in her big funny, fake fur coat, like a twenties do-gooder slumming it for a change in the night. She crouched above the dirty toilet to pee and heard two strippers, one asking the other if she wanted one of those pills. Lucky’s face sank with recognition at this phrasing. The only other thing that Louise remembered in that bathroom was the mound of colourful, cheap, used underwear that was piled outside the stalls like the stinking defeated dead from a roman battle of some kind, as the girls adjourned in the backstage/changing area. It might have been three feet high; all meshed together, worn like gypsies gone to hell, or some dark basement in Florida, whichever fell closer on that day.

Ryan squeezed Louise’s hand and Lucky looked outside the car for the first time, at the passing streets of the next town, and another strip bar, as cheap and bright and tiny as hers must have been. Lollipops. Lucky preferred the 1950’s vintage flair of Calendar Girls. Lucky’s eyes shifted to Ryan. He was fixated on Louise’s forearm, which was stretched across her lap, while she sat Indian style. It was as if Ryan was looking for a vein. But he then only held Louise's wrist. Ryan's eyes were testing some grand ideas to gently bite her wrists, his teeth shifting slightly, as he swept his fingers across and down Louise’s forearm, again, slowly, and again. Methodically, as he cracked a smile. Louise couldn’t help being in a state of sermon-like calm at this, as she looked straight with compassion through Lucky’s dubious policies, no light gesture as Lucky was still looking over at Ryan's artful game. Lucky wasn’t really looking at Ryan all this time, but at the kind of attention he gave. It wasn’t like a man’s, or any she’d seen recently. Those darling, infantile boys like him, they never made it in to Calendar Girls.

Lucky grew up through teenage weeds like a rotten rose pushing and showing itself to any available light, seeing again and again those boys after they gave up and became repetitive, lewd old men; or, what’s worse, those silent, morose types somewhere in between in age, who were trying to calculate their love of losing inside the blankness of a mind’s page, while watching Lucky strip down to her childhood limbs, swinging the umbilical shoelaces of her gaudy costume at their deadened, dim eye-lights. Fumbling for change, they would only see the girls’ supposed power over them in terms of vulnerability calculated through lack of age that would play out in years to come, when the obviousness of the change bouncing off the liquor-stained floor would grow complacent, silent in the taciturned dollar bills that work provided to them as they grew older. Their dollars silencing their minds, their tongues yelling audacities at any young thing to shake her ass in their faces. Their mouths would be silent no more. Lucky just sat there facing the air, turning occasionally back to Ryan and Louise, just letting them be. Louise sat, calmed by the tremor of her fertile boy’s silence, which still spun verses through fingers softening, lips touching;and any right-minded girl will tell you, there’s nothing more soothing than a young man’s vibrancy – brown fists of hair and the furtive conquer of his beating heart galloping towards the maze of oncoming towns.

Hump Day

I went looking for the bruises that bring me dead pan concrete luxury, sleeping quietly under blankets, the stone of them keeping me in place. But this time, nothing------

The quiet tide of you left me with no insects marching towards light; the faraway of you an actual relief to the incest on the streets that maybe ought to lease themselves out for prey.

The nights resemble a going away into nothing / my eyes don't see the others, or hear them or know them. Just that middle ground of brown between dark and amber that swivels its hips to and from, mangles its intentions before it even sets a plan between our sweat and endless sleep.

[Don't
mind the snoring Ganesh.
Lord of Beginnings < > Lord of Obstacles.
Yes}

Where does this leave it? The sun keeps waking up hangovered with its limbs intact. Bruises of luscious, beautiful fiery bronze and red golden hue. Same as you on the inside.

There is comfort in that never changing.