words

~

Synonymless

Well, it's not three a.m., and the bar's long gone, but I'm back,alive and swaying nicely, like a happy flower, in a hurricane, my petals and colours dropping one by one. When I close my eyes it all comes back. Being drunk is simple, it's too easy. Anything that easy must be either bad for me or come at too high a price. But prices come in many shapes and forms, all with open-faced palms. Physical exhaustion, looking like shit, stumbling, fumbling through hallways, past ugly faces and blind stares. I saw a newspaper this morning where a title read: "Colourful and Crass." How appropriate -- that's how I feel today. My insides want to scream and laugh and roll down a green, green hill. When I was a boy, in elementary school, there was a field -- behind some buildings, past a fence -- an overgrown field that smelled like earth and laughter and sunshine. We would hide in the tall, tall grass, long after the bell rang and tell each other lies and truths and so many stories in between, wearing tight jeans and corduroy pants, spending time to run my fingers through the grooves along the back on my thighs. The next day is always the best. Jesus. The more the hours tick away, the more the mind plays tricks. My head is filled with flips and toys and little funny stories running wild, loose and free, but mine, mine to keep, mine to smile outwardly, from the heart and the eyes and every part inside.

S*
2002.02.01
Notes of a Dirty Young Man

~

(parce que je t'aime ma chere....)

I Love Snow

I love snow...
It helps me for
Get the sad forest
Accidentally left
Over housing develop
Ments and the
Painted statues
Of Mary.
On this land once owned
By the Church, where
Roots still feed
On huminerals
Seeping out
Of the nearby cemetery.
Here, snow transforms
The edge
Between objects
And
Manufactured nature
Into
Something organic
Where black pines
And bare, grey maples
Seem etched onto pale
Sky.
A mist there was too:
Blurring details and
Contracted
Space
Making me present,
Making my presence
In this landscape,
Both intimate
And separate.

A.L.
2002.01.17

~

Wet -- my city is wet today. Water trickles upward onto the back of my pants; my socks are wet, my shoes are wet and my feet go “squish.� I imagine thought, somewhere across a hedgerow, along a fjord or somewhere across the Mississippi --where eyes may once been wet -- that better days and drier times are to come. For now, the best part of my day was when she called me “love.�

S*
2002.01.11