Not To Touch The Earth (An Excerpt)

She took the used, rolled up 20 dollar bill as it was passed on and hoisted it up her left nostril. She lowered her head down to the back of the porcelain toilet and huffed in a line of that powdery stuff up her nose. She'd been married for 5 years now but this was no time to be worrying about that. They were held up in a stall in the men's washroom... Both of them. She met him not 30 minutes earlier and here they were together in this bathroom stall at a little bar called The Flamingo. The bar was located in a small, under populated town in mid Ontario and was only ever busy on Thursday's and Saturday's. Much like The Flamingo the town was petty. It's shortage of places to go and things to do made the people who lived there very restless and at times quite stir crazy. So every Thursday and Saturday night they would pile into the bars in droves like hysterical children leaving their morals behind at home. She inhaled another line, this time up the right nostril in order to keep a balanced numbness as the man slid his hand up her silky black shirt and pried his fingertips at her breast. She leaned back and tilted her neck in order to look at the ceiling as the rush of the drug powered its way from her head down to her fingertips. He kissed and bit at her neck. The faint sound of the house DJ playing Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" leaked it's way in from the other room. She felt free in there, beside the toilet in the men's room with this man she hardly knew. She didn't have to focus on the 2 children she had at home or what it would be like to have to raise them alone. How one day she may have to explain to them both that Daddy wasn't coming home. This escaped her.  She took the man by the hand and dragged him back out to the dance floor where she closed her eyes and moved her body to the loud bass booming inside of her ears. This was her night out. Her time.

She had arrived there with her husband (who was also the father of her children) and a few friends whom of which cared only about themselves just as much as she did, so much so that she may as well had just arrived alone. After an hour of feeling ignored and watching the woman he bared two of the most influential things in his life with throw herself at the mercy of drooling men he decided to leave and go back home to safety. A place where his sanity could not be tampered with, questioned, or tested. She watched him storm out of the front door through the incoming crowds of people with a staggering sense of domestic freedom. The drugs, the booze, the dancing, the sex, all craving's she refused to let wallow and stir.

She pushed back the freshly dyed blond bangs out of her face while her eyes picked up on all of  the smiles and glares of men with scruffy facial hair and up-kept bodies. Some dressed very well and others... well, they wore muscle shirts and tight revealing v-necks as if to broadcast the idea that they clearly spent and spend countless hours in a gym, lifting weights, doing squats, and primitively grunting it out to look the way they do. It brought her a fantastical notion of pride knowing she could have any man in the room. She bounced from stud to stud. They bought her drinks. They grabbed her ass. They whispered sickly erotic exploits into her ears on the dance floor. This turned her on. It got her off.

As the lights went on at The Flamingo for last call she knew she would have to choose, but which one of these cavemen would be lucky enough to degrade her tonight?

"You're coming back to my after party, right?" One of the carbon copy men asked as he took her by the hand and walked her towards the door.

"You have any blow?" She asked trying to secure one of her vices for the remainder of the evening..

"Yeah. Yeah. Of course!" he replied

And so she went. Hopped into a yellow, vacant cab and in the back seat got fondled all the way to the mystery man's house in between inconspicuous key bumps of cocaine and laughter.

He lived in an impressively large villa by the river and by the time they arrived there were already a bunch of his friends drinking in the living room. After introducing herself, grabbing a beer, and doing a couple lines with these guys the savagery started to begin. Not only did the man she go home with start fooling around with her, so did a few of his friends. They went upstairs to a bedroom and slowly started to take off articles of her clothing. She was kissing one of them as another sucked on her breast. The shy one watched as he did a few lines before pulling down her pants and licking her inner thigh. She moaned in triumph. This was who she was. The life of the party. She took all three of them as everyone downstairs drank beer laughing at the sound of her heavy "Oohs and Aah's."

Her husband was sound asleep in bed at home. Their children were in the next room snoring peacefully. Most people who attended the festivities at The Flamingo were also at home trying to get some rest before doing it all again the next following Thursday. The men downstairs had fallen asleep on couches and scattered pillows and blankets on the hardwood floors. She however... Moaned deep into the morning, drunk and fervently high on cocaine. She had one cock in her mouth, one in her pussy, and one in her hand. A warrior woman in a silently sedated world...

These Bones

These bones of mine keep me mobile
and prim, and proper, and tall
They hold all of the guts inside of my skin
to blacken out the Sun
A big ol' pile
A structured mass
That are seldom ever seen
Until they twist and break and penetrate
The soul that is within me

These bones...
They play with fire and wane under the moon
In some naked dance of permanence
Be it in soil, wood, or tomb
I swear they're getting sharper
Unlike most that wear out smooth
Other bones...

This skull is drunk with knowledge
These hands are getting old
These feet crack when they're walking
Those obscure and dirty roads
A spine,
With force I straighten up through my cranium
That with age I'm sure will weaken
But for now... Well...
It's good
The bones of Tchaikovsky are somewhere FAR from here
But the music they made still lives inside a hollow near my ears

I hand the pen over now to this skeletal form and pray
These bones will deliver a poem
Before my essence fades away

Untitled

Everyone is fruitless in their aspirations
And just as it has always been we still walk around pretending that everyone isn't dying
Living, breathing stories that if aren't written are somehow forgotten
and who better to tell them than strangers wasting souls in the pummelling grip of silence?
Lick your fingers
Turn the Page
You are what is imagined of you
And there is nothing more terrifying than this.

Winter

You know when you're standing out there
having a cigarette in the frigid cold
and there are those buildings with big
blinding neon signs through the heavy dark night
and a few of the letters have died out
and they breathe out toxins across the street
or down the road
or miles away
and the cars breathe them out
and the trains breathe them out
and yeah
You're breathing them out too
and you think to yourself
Standing there in the cold
"Hell... It must be winter again."

I call this home...
We... Call this home

and I dont care if you don't want to hear
that I could watch the whole thing burn itself apart
Choke on fumes
Break its bones
Whatever
But when you come around
You're like the surgeon that sews the tendons
of reality back into place
Triple bypass sunshine surgery
PHD in making me happy
and that means something to me
Then you are gone again
when I get out of the snow
and I'm at the bar drinking ice ciders in a broken place
Making up excuses
Waiting on friends who hardly care to show
I'm just the guy writing words that you don't want to know
Relying on some passive chance that scribbling them down might warm up your mind
Or at least warm up my own
and so what if it does?
This is just the place that I call home...

In winter.

In Headlights

What are you chasing down
Good friend?
It'll never turn out the way you plan
Nobody at home
Devil's at the bar
Turn all that hard work into nothing
But an aching hangover
A night without stars
A bloody liver
A rotten brain
You buy the beer for thirsty mouths
They give you peace for an hour at a time

What are you hunting down
Good friend?
or is it you who has become the prey?
of all the dirty tricks under your camouflage vest
In headlights the whole entire way
I guess you've got to hide it somewhere
Up your nose
Down your throat
It's all the same
And you can run as far as those two feet will take you
But will it be fast enough to lose track of your brain?

Are you crying again
Good friend?
Is it burning hot inside of that bed?
The one you have made with a blanket of flames
and the stories locked inside of your head
Are you tossing and turning in the ashes
of a sad, lonely girl's dying heart?
Would you still be in there
If the lengths of her hair
knew everything those fingertips have touched?
Are you lying again?
Are you burning again?
Are you crying again?

Are your eyes drunk as sin tonight
Good friend?
We both have bottle's to chase with our souls
and mine is for the numbing
and the boredom and the pain
and yours is to the next bottle's goal
So the great outdoors won't feel so empty
So you can bare to make that telephone call
So you can brave on through it like a breathing machine
and laugh and play with all of the flowers on the wall

You've almost disappeared
Good friend
Down into the world
you kept telling me you'd never let win...
I bled out the role of a recourse
and let you back into the night
Repeating your fate is just mentally insane
but who am I to offer any inch of advice?
Instead of swallowing your words
You swallowed everything you could
For a lifetime outside of yourself
Some call that hell
and I could not help
and that's my hell

A Eulogy In Reverse

Disposable fool
You gave up the moon
for a heart made of pain
crown of thorns for the king
Don't you know that you smiled far too soon?
Your hands fell apart when you told them goodbye
The more the truth is heard the more it sounds just like a lie
Now earthworms squirm around the dirt inside your mind
and carve their way through the tunnels that your thoughts have left behind
Even the shoes on your feet that have torn at the seams
are plotting your death behind your back
The words you wish to say are so afraid of your tongue
that it has wrestled them down and killed every one
Disposable fool
Loving just like a cloud
Had to soak everything up and then rain it back down
For a eulogy written in reverse
For the illusion of floating off the ground
and when you touched heaven, did it want you?
Did you feel safe when the angels pulled you through?
The promise that you made, a burning halo on your brain
Just close your eyes and hope that everything will be okay
What you want does not need you
You've been chasing dreams that dream too
Don't you know that you smiled far too soon?
Your fingers and lips have been chewed
Now the passion just comes out all used
and even the shadows have lead you astray
Disposable fool
Organs made of sand and your heart in the wind
Don't you know that this is how it ends?
Its how it all ends.

The Voice

Just another night out on the railroad
running behind trains
Believing, sincerely that you'd never have to follow them back again
There's a tangy, copper tongued taste of surprise
every time your eyes shoot down to your feet
and you keep telling yourself that somehow you haven't yet tripped once
on any of the stiff, rooted, wooden ties, leading their way from the tips of your toes
to the faint and perplexing reaches of god knows where...
But it's somewhere
and the reflection of that dream
keeps your legs running
and the sweat pouring
and you know that she's out there
Just minutes away from the very untouched, sanguine pathway
that the calloused hands of hope levelled out the first time
you both said hello
and when the goodbye came
You thanked the sky for not crashing down on your head like bad luck
You cursed the velocity of time for giving up
You held your soul up by its throat, told it where to go, and hit the open road
and I'll be damned if there wasn't a certain amount of respect in doing that

Just another night out on the highway
chasing cars, and trucks, and tail lights
Smelling the fiery, searing rubber of all the wheels on the asphalt
The scent of victory over the pretence of distance
Drinking down memories like gasoline
Pushing, pushing you further toward the enchantment of a better day
You marvelled over the thousands of miniature, bright, bulb like, stars up in space
and rapped off some compassionate prose about how she is present
in the same universal positioning that you are,
Yet also the same spot that none of us really quite understand anyway
and even though you've been running around with empty, untouched hands
The sound of her voice through the telephone makes all of the flowers in the world stand up
and the purpose of gunning it out alone, at least for a little while,
worth it in the long run
So you keep chasing that thing down
Doing everything you can to make good time
and all the cars on the road know you by name now
and you gotta know that... That's alright

You've gotta dream, dream, dream while sitting on the clock,
or hounding trains, or rushing cars
and, without exception, squeeze the delectable juices of experience into your cup
and drink it on down to the soft linings of your heart
which should be located right below everything that tore you up in the past
and in turn made you weary of the unforeseeable future,
(Somewhere just behind your left lung, if I'm not mistaken)
But it's not of any concern now
Just try, try, try not to prick your finger while you're smashing the moon on that long drive back home
and her voice should be there when all the flowers begin to start dying again
or when the colour on the walls take to bleeding
When the music burns you out
When the muscles start to burn
When the dreams overflow
When the words are no good
When your bike won't unlock
When bulldog's leap up
When ceramic tile's are for sleep
When you'd rather not sleep
When every breath you take grabs for air
Her voice should be there...