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...

I Found Out Just The Other Day What Love Feels Like When It Is Dying

Its when all the windows in the world are laughing at you
Hissing at you
Telling the doors not to let you in
The stories you once immersed yourself into,
Have been submerged
Soaking in tar and alcohol
and the ink is dripping from their pages
but you never really cared for the colour red anyway so you let them go
Red like roses
Red like that anarchy poster you used to hang up in your little apartment above the shoe rack
It hung there like a militarised welcome mat
and for some reason it always reminded you of the cigarette burns on your forearms
The ones you could never figure out where the fuck they came from
That flesh you wish would have made you stronger
With time... With time...
But time is just a marathon we run until we are totally empty
Just to get a sneak peak ahead to the finish line
Where we see:
Car crash's
Tight knot's
A raging fire
The kiss of cancer
Get your tongue ready
Saliva thick
and have everything shoved straight into your mouth
No holds barred
Become the champion of the disease
The fly on skin
Get sweat and sugar and then get swatted away
That's love!
A trophy
That is what it's all about
True humanitarianism
But
Muzzled
With its hands tied back and bleeding
Buckets of blood
That are then dried to soot and rubbed on foreheads for smiles

Rip open your heart
Ashes of Christ
Eat your words
Peace be with you

You Know Nothing

You do not know anything about earning a buck
Until you've worked the factories
12 hour night shifts
Empty stomach, hangover, gut rot
10.50 an hour

You know nothing
and you went to school
For a 9-5, ass grab position
Behind a desk on the 30th floor of some
21st century, post modern social club
With 500 friends online and the ego
of a pampered pre-teen pop star

You do not have it rough and
You don't know anything about smoking a pack of cigarettes and
pouring the rest of yesterday's whiskey
Into your 4th cup of coffee on break at 4:30 in the morning
and your line supervisor comes over to ask if you want to go home early
and you say
"Hell no!"
Why?
Because your mental state is like a steam engine now
You need that scratch to keep the body afloat
In this ammonia filled ocean of a world
Determination turbine
and that's tough

So... You took a media arts course in college
Professional writing?
and had your parents buy your intelligence?
Well, it didn't work and I'm not impressed
You just keep writing about broken hearts
and subconscious psycho babble that only oafs
cling on to because they think your stuff is great
Yet they hardly think at all
It means nothing

Not until you give up a piece of every part of your soul and body
dollars for breath
dollars for sweat and blood and time
money for staying quite and getting the job done
night after night after night
Until you finally understand that hell isn't a place you go when you die
but it's fully alive in those last 3 hours
when even the clock hands are too tired to count down

Not a single coworker opens their mouths to talk
The pallets and conveyor belts and machines keep moving
Until they break
The machines break often
so these men in hard hats and shiny orange vests
Who are paid double your salary
go to the machine and try to put it back together

They do so romantically
by playing with all of its parts
They stick wrenches, and hands, and tools into it
and look at each other awkwardly with wide open mouths

When the thing starts back up again they walk away like hero's
and everyone else is left with a bunch of extra work and emotional trauma
but I guess that's how all love making goes

You know nothing
Know nothings...
You do not know anything about giving up day light
and you are not strong until you realize it was already ugly to begin with

The Fear

She said she was afraid of losing her dad
He said he was afraid of losing her...

The guy who lived next door
Woke up every morning at 6 am
Got in his car, buckled in, just to make sure he got a coffee before work
Did the same routine everyday and worked at a boring office job
He was afraid of spiders

His mother
Well, she was afraid of commitment but she's long since passed now

This beautiful girl I met at a party one night back in the city
She took me outside to have a cigarette and we talked for a while
She told me she was weighed down and absolutely terrified of failure
and then she kissed me

My old friend Dominic was afraid of clowns
He was an asshole

When we were children my brother used to cover his eyes with a pillow
anytime I put on a horror movie
He'd scream at me to "Turn it off! Turn it off!"
and then he'd just end up watching it anyway
But he still covered his eyes
Whenever he felt a real sense of fear coming on
His face would be buried deep in that pillow

I saw a bum on the street just outside of the mission in downtown Ottawa last year
He was skinny, and withered, and bruised, and he had track marks in his arms,
and a bunch of tattoo's that had faded and appeared as though they were becoming the texture of charred, burnt leather
He was crying
I think it was because he was afraid to die
I'm sure it was probably coming soon
Or
Maybe he was hungry
Or
Maybe he just needed some smack

There's these guys in bars
They brag about how tough they are
They go out with their friends
Their carbon copy friends, who also brag about how tough they are
They gel their hair and dye their hair
and they slam back shots and look for fights
This is how they stay tough
It's how they get by
These guys,
They are afraid that their penis' are too small

This bomb went off yesterday in Boston
A big fiery thing
It was detonated near the finish line of a big marathon run
The explosion killed three people and is said to have wounded 170 others
I saw all of these pictures of people with their body parts askew
and their limbs blown off
and blood like graffiti on the streets of Boston
The bomb scared everyone through television sets and computers
and through radio's and cell phones
It may as well have gone off right in our living rooms
Primed by media detonators
Scary

Ergophobia is the fear of work or functioning
Ombrophobia is the fear of rain
Papaphobia is fear of the pope
Chronophobia is the fear of time and of time moving forward...
It seems we're all a little chronophobic these days

The Prime Minister, Man
He must be afraid of everyone
and rock stars are afraid of losing crowds
and doctors are afraid of losing patients
and lawyers are afraid of losing money
and children are afraid of the boogeyman

What scares me most is that everyone around me is so goddamn afraid of so many things
That they don't realise the fear is of themselves
and of each other
Progression scares them and so does death
and communication
and I feel as though I'll never be able to have a normal conversation again
Without scaring the shit out of somebody...