Why did I dig up the drowsing sins of youth,

Morgue chilled memories

An unearthed carriage of Passover plagues,

The voyaging muse

Shaking skeletal willows free of grevious bitters,

Scorched communion fruit

Shaded lipstick red,

Violent rains

All flustering fury.

Why did I forget to shear the unruly mange of time

And pacify its absolved seed

Of wormy weed

That now murders a catatonic sky

With a scream of blood letting thunder,

Its shadowed drapery of nipping pall

Mutilating the sacred stony silence.

Redemption’s tidings

Tumble leaden from brass heavens,

Eating through the soul wisp sacramental air,

The jeweled belt of flame suckling stars

A dawning halo

To encircle the sad slunken earth

Under funeral of night,

And plant the flowering bud of Life,

Blinding time’s fettered Hydra

And its wretched trinity of eyes.

I don't give a shit

Which political party

You have

A hard-on for

This economy

Is fucked up

I just spent $20

On two items

At the grocery store

My splurge, you ask?

One bag of cherries… $12.99

And four nectarines… $6.99

*on sale*

(and not organic, mind you, and not from some pretentious store, either)

Fuck this economy

Where produce

Is becoming

a luxury item

In life, there are things from which you cannot escape, cannot move past, or make a right decision about. You merely hope that all of this is just a dream, a fleeting moment that, fortunately, will not have significant consequences, without having any idea of how it will continue. Eagerly, you surrender yourself to them. Moments of brilliance where yesterday and tomorrow will no longer have any meaning. A place where you lose yourself, and the only thing that can bring you back to reality is the very thing that shattered you from the beginning. While you cannot move a step forward from where you stand, you simply surrender yourself to the now shattered and disturbed flow of fate. Even though you know it’s foolish, you still long to have them. Like pounding on the door of misfortune. You still stand behind that door, knowing that it will never open again. Because waiting has become one of your inherent habits. With memories and feelings you still lack the courage to let go of, you continue to wait. While every corner of your heart is cracked from past remnants. You still cannot refrain from plunging the knife you have driven into your heart. While accepting that from now on, the only thing you can wound is yourself. The place where you can be sure that your heart, once filled with joy from having such feelings, is now broken.

Real Friends

Jimmy lives down the street on Dover. He’s an only child, and quite spoiled. His father works at the mill and his mother at the hospital. I’m not sure what she does, but she isn’t a doctor. A nurse, maybe. Definitely not a doctor. Jimmy is 18 months younger than me, but he talks to me like I’m a kid because I’m with my brother who is three years older, and he wants to be his friend. My brother is cool, and when he hangs with the younger kids he becomes God-like. They laugh at his stories and when he leaves they all talk about how they’re best friends with him, and they argue over who he likes the most. Jimmy says, well he’s here all the time so it must be me, and I say, he only comes here because you play road hockey on the crescent. He doesn’t like that, so he runs inside the house and tells his mom that I’m being mean. She comes out and tells me I oughta get back home. So I turn around and go. When I reach the sidewalk, Jimmy runs up and says, hey, hey, and I turn around, what? And he says, what’s your brother doing? And I say, I don’t know. So he gets mad, turns around, and tells the other guys on the crescent that I told him my brother thinks he’s the best. The coolest. I walk home with my shoulders slumped, wondering when I’ll get real friends.

The Albino Who Wasn’t Albino

We moved around town every two years growing up. A restlessness would sprout out of my folks like weeds and on a whim they’d say, I can’t take it here anymore, and before I could draw a long breath, I’d be packing boxes and helping my old man carry things that were too heavy for me too carry and listening to him curse. When I turned 13 we moved to the house with the red steel roof. It was in a little working class subdivision with four streets all named after battles of the second world war. Dieppe, Normandy, Leopold and Atlantic. Up the street was the skatepark, where I spent a lot of time. Basketball had become like a religion to me, and I played it religiously. There were six nets, three with mesh, and only one with a mesh that wasn’t ripped. It faced west, and in the evening the sun was blinding. But we always picked that net when it was available, because of the nice white mesh. Jacob lived a stone's throw away from the park behind the elementary school playground and would wander over everyday with shorts and an NBA jersey, with nothing underneath. He smiled a lot but it was a broken kind of smile, like the way a battered spouse would smile and say that everything is okay when people asked. He smiled like that. His eyes drooped, and his forehead was often scattered with red pimples. Every summer, he’d play and tell us that in the fall he was going to tryouts. Then the fall would come around and he’d say, nah, nevermind. Then when the season kicked off, he’d get sad and sit in the stands with hands under his chin and wish he’d joined the team. Every fall it was the same thing. His hair was snow white and he was tall and skinny. The guys gave him a hard time, and when his father got murdered during a drunken poker match, things only got worse. I want to think that I was a good friend to him, but I probably wasn’t. I needed a laugh, no matter what the cost. It was my drug, and like any addict, we searched where we could find it. And his life was material for me. He messaged me not long ago and said, hey. You know those things that seemed funny back then, don’t seem so funny now. And I said, no, they really don’t.

The King of the Trailer Park

Nate lost his virginity long before the rest of us in Campbellton and so for a little while, he became a kind of king. What’s it like? We’d ask. Is it really wet? And he’d laugh like a seasoned pro. He went through a stretch where he was overweight with long bleach blonde hair, and the kids made fun of him because of his wide fingers and his lunches. Sausage fingers, the guys called him and then fishsticks after he microwaved beer battered fish in the cafeteria. But then he became a weightlifter, and with his bulging frame, and his cut hair, and his seemingly unlimited confidence, the girls started to forget about sausage fingers and fishsticks. He also knew how to speak French, so the French girls who went to school on the other side of town became like a fantasy land to the rest of us, but a reality for him. They were beautiful, but our French wasn’t good. Then he slept with one of them, then two, then three, and while I’d hadn’t gone past kissing a girl sans tongue, he’d already slept with three. One afternoon, I went to his trailer park to shoot hoops and he said Kal from across the river was coming over. He did that to me a lot in those days. Tell me to come over and hang out, only to boot me out not long after I arrived. So she came over, and I knew her a little. Her head was hung low and her face red. She was embarrassed because she’d acted filthy when she was texting Nate, and of course, she deduced that Nate had shown me the messages. All of the things she was going to do to him when she arrived, and then she got dropped off by her mother, and realized that she was just a kid in a trailer park, a long drive from home. I walked down the street to the rink, where there was a little park and connected with a couple other guys, and told them what was going on. Kal is so young, Chris said. And she was three or four years younger than Nate. Then I instantly felt bad, the way I did when I’d joke around about Jake’s misfortunes in life. After a couple hours, I walked back and she was sitting on the step while Nate and I shot hoops. Popped her cherry, he said. Fuck, she was tight. Didn’t even shave. He kept shooting hoops and that was how Kal lost her virginity. To the king of the trailer park, on a humid afternoon in a dingy bedroom with posters of cars and Biggie and Tupac. No romance, no love, just a quick fuck, and all Nate remembered was that she was tight, and that she didn’t shave.

Six Beers In The Dugout

We had a bar downtown that was going under during the market crash. In a desperation attempt, the owner decided to host teen nights on the weekends. Of course, you couldn’t buy liquor there but we all found a way to get some before and saunter downtown to the Flagship and act like fools for a couple of hours. Jake had a friend named Becca, whose boyfriend was 18. 18 was legal age across the bridge to buy a beer. Me, Pat and Jake all chipped in for 24 Bud’s. Now he’d had a sort of career out of doing this and kept the beer in his basement. It was warmer than hell, but we paid whatever he was asking, shoved them in a couple of book bags and walked to the dugout behind the school. We didn’t know our limits to drinking because other than a couple of sips of my old man’s beer here and there, I’d never actually drank a full one. So, we had six each, laughed our asses off, walked downtown and then passed out on Jake’s floor. The following morning I was introduced to the hangover.

Stitches and Stuffed Bears

J.D headbutts me during basketball practice. It’s not on purpose, so I don’t say anything. It hurts a little, and when I look up my coach’s face is white, and hollow. Someone get him some towels, he says and a couple of my teammates run off to the dressing rooms outside of the gym. I don’t know what’s going on. Another teammate says to tilt my head back, and I do. There’s blood everywhere. My other coach tells me to get into his car and he’ll drop me off at the hospital. I have a date with my girlfriend across the river, and I’m bummed that I won’t be able to make it. I text her in the emergency room and tell her I’m sorry, she says don’t worry about it, and if I can still make it later, she’d love to see me. I’m falling hard for this girl, so I tell her I’ll make it if I can. The doctor takes me in, he’s tall and slim. All business, there will be no laughter here. He gives me a couple of needles on the side of my face to freeze the area and gives me 12 stitches. I’m out in a half hour, feeling woozy from the blood and the needles, and the fact that I haven’t eaten anything in half a day. Before I exit the hospital, I pass the gift shop and see a large teddy bear in the corner on the floor. He’s brown with a heart and I buy it. I don’t tell my girlfriend I’m coming over, I just go. I hop in another cab and place the large bear in the seat next to me, and look out the window as soft February snow falls and we cross the bridge to the other side of the river. The snow starts falling harder and I forget where she lives. I tell the cabbie to drop me off at the church, and he does. I think it’s only a block, maybe two and I walk through the reserve with my bear, who’s half the size of me. It takes longer than I suspect because I got him to drop me off at the wrong church. I knew she lived close to a church, just not which one. So I walked for a half hour and when I find her door, the snow is falling in heaps. I know, and she answers. The look of surprise and joy on her face is still seared into my brain all these years later. That someone could be so happy to see me. What a brilliant feeling. Surprise, I say. And she hugs me, then kisses me, and I can feel a couple of stifled sobs. I’ve never considered myself a romantic, but a busted face and a teddy bear is pretty good, if I may say so myself.

Something Is Wrong With Mom

I live in the country. The boonies. A place with swerving roads that people call dead man’s curve. Darkness and silence so absolute if it wasn’t peaceful, it would drive a person insane. I don’t mind it, but sometimes I feel trapped. One weekend my mom drives to her father’s place for a couple of days. I watch movies, play ball, and call my girlfriend on the phone, telling her I’d go see her in a heartbeat if I had a car, and a license. She comes home on Sunday, she hugs me. She bought me an Allen Iverson jersey, and I wear it to death. I hug her, and she’s quiet. She’s normally talkative when she returns home from trips, giving me the scoop about every bad driver, the water on the beach, the cottage, the music stores, everything. But she doesn’t say anything. A couple weeks later, she says she’s leaving. And I suspect she’s going on another trip. I ask if she can pick up another jersey, I need Iverson on the Pistons to complete the collection. She says she’s leaving but she isn’t coming back. I don’t understand, my father says I’ll never see grampa again, and to get that through my fucking skull. My mother cries, and I wonder if I did anything wrong. She says she’s leaving Sunday, my brother and father both say they won’t be here, they’ll let her have the house to herself. I have no place to go, so I stay. She has two suitcases at the door, and she’s crying. I tell her she doesn’t have to leave if she doesn’t want to. But she says she does. And she hugs me. She leaves and I watch her pull out of the driveway, and I’m alone. The silence so absolute that if it wasn’t peaceful, it could drive a kid insane.

Insecurities

I meet a girl who lives next to the elementary school in a little one story home. She’s pretty and straight forward. She speaks her mind, and laughs when she hits you in your deepest insecurity. I’m skinny, and the hair on my chest is coming in miles ahead of anyone else, so naturally those are the two areas she attacks. She curls my chest hair and laughs, and puts her thumb and forefinger around my wrist. She says things like I need to eat a hamburger or I need to shave. But when I’m about to get upset, she shoves her tongue in my mouth. She swirls it around, and I’m on another plane of existence. It doesn’t taste good exactly, but it feels great. I’m only 12 years old, and she talks about having a threesome with a friend of hers. They rip my belt off one afternoon at her place, and she throws it across the room. It hits a lamp with a loud CLINK, and I’m nervous. They kiss me, but I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m visibly shaking, and they laugh. I feel like Kass in the trailer park with Nate. All they’re going to say after this, is he was skinny as a rail, and he should have shaved.

Midnight Video

In the summer I rent movies. 3 for 3 for 3. 3 movies for 3 nights for 3 bucks. The movie store is called Midnight Video and it’s in a strip mall next to Tim Hortons on Roseberry Street. I’m living in the house with the red roof before the boonies, and my mother is screaming at me. She tells me to go outside and play with friends and I tell her I just want to watch movies in the basement with the air conditioning on. She huffs and puffs because she wants the house to herself. I walk up the steep incline of Dieppe, past the skatepark where Jake shoots hoops. I wave to him and say maybe next time when he asks if I want to play. I keep going down and hang a right at the funeral home before heading down the street through the alley next to the movie theater. Then across the street is the movie store. I go through the seven aisles of movies a couple times each. It’s a time when artwork and actors I like, judge the movies I pick. I don’t know if they're beloved or amongst the worst ever made. I just look until the three feel right in my hand. Then I head over the counter where a sort-of cousin of mine works. He seems to have a couple screws loose, and his hair is sticking up like alfalfa. I hand him the movies, and he scans them. It’s the dream job, I think. Two TV’s on either side playing kick ass movies all day. The smell of popcorn, and getting to talk about the most important thing in the world. I leave with the movies in a bag, and head downstairs. My mom is cursing upstairs, I can hear her, and I say, don’t worry mom, I’ll leave the house tomorrow, when I rent three more.

Europe Bound

Pat is a natural athlete. One of the best ball players to ever come out of Campbellton. He dribbles effortlessly, shoots effortlessly, and never loses his temper, in a game where many do. He’s my friend and we sit on the thin line of grass between the fence and the asphalt. He says we should go to Europe after high school and play ball. I say that sounds tremendous. My father is a railroader and his is a fishing guide, and laborer. He tells me that his future needs to be ball and I tell him the same thing, though I know I’m not cut from the same cloth as he is. But it’s a fun dream and in late July with a basketball on the back of my head, staring at a deep blue sky, drinking gatorade, I can almost believe it. Europe, I say, can you imagine? Last time I talked to Pat, I said what’s going on with you? What are you up to? He says he quit school and he’s working with his old man. You? He asks. Railroader, I say.

It happened to be a sunny day in the city, where Sheila lived and worked. She loved her little apartment because it was the thing dreams were made of. She loved herself and her life, and she loved everything about the crowded little Boston suburbs.

Sheila was starting to be spiritual about life. She loved to have her cup of tea during the afternoon when it wasn’t as hot during the day. She loved her tea with a little bit of Cinnamon and mint leaves that she got from the supermarket close by

Sheila Daugherty was a curious reflective individual. She had completed her high school education a few years ago and was dreaming of doing college. She knew that getting through high school was not as easy as it appeared.

Sheila realized some harrowing experiences seemed to make it obvious why so many dropped out. She wanted to make writing her career because she was naturally talented at it.

One fine day, when Sheila was sitting down at her desk near her bed in her cosy little room she started to daydream. She happened to be working on a fictional story about a young woman who was in love and at a crossroads in life.

Sheila was lost in thought for a few seconds when her mind came back to what she needed to be focusing on. She stared at the laptop screen and realized that she had typed nearly 6000 of the 10,000 words of what was going to be a short manuscript.

Sheila tried to type at least 500 words every day. She never bothered too much about how much she was writing, she wanted to write something that her readers would appreciate her for.

Sheila happened to have a little pocket Bible that she carried with her everywhere she went. After she was done writing, she liked to pause, take a breather, and show her gratefulness to who she thought was God by reading the Bible. She did this because she was grateful to God for allowing her this much freedom to be creative with her time in her Life.

Sheila flipped to a page in the bible and there was a phrase that she loved so much that resonated for some reason. “You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” Sheila knew her past was something she could put behind her, and her writing career seemed like the perfect way to make a new start.

She looked at the verse and examined it. She wondered if through it, God or even The Universe was going to align to make something new happen for her. She knew she wanted to follow her Christian faith and be true to her roots.

As she sat down at the table in front of her laptop screen. She wondered about the protagonist of her story and what sort of future path she was going to write for her. She decided to turn off the laptop and decided to look at her phone for a little while. She enjoyed using the laptop because the screen was larger, and it was perfect for doing her work from home job-related assignments.

While Sheila was busy scrolling through her phone, she fell asleep without touching the cup of tea. She was asleep at her desk when she dreamed a strange dream about young Moses in the desert and when he thought he encountered God.

According to the story, young Moses was true to what he thought his calling was and insisted on being who God made him to be despite all kinds of peer pressure. Sheila suddenly woke up from her dream and thought deeply about whether perhaps was a sign from the universe, or perhaps even God. The thing about this dream was it was so realistic, it was almost as if it was sent by God, and when she woke up she pinched herself saying ‘it was all a dream’

Sheila decided to get back to work on the Laptop and had a small sip of the tea which wasn’t as hot anymore. She thought about her book’s protagonist whom she had precariously named Jill Lisbon. She wondered whether she was going to do college or not. She had inadvertently based the book’s protagonist on herself, and she had many of Sheila’s qualities.

Sheila knew for sure the dream had something to do with the biblical words she had read before she fell asleep. She wondered about their deeper meaning, and how they would help her in the big bad world.

She thought about how the main character of the book, and herself were in a similar dilemma. She felt as if she needed the story she was writing needed to have a social conscience, just so she could be true to the voice inside. She almost felt as if Jill Lisbon would be a more believable Heroine if she looked like she knew what she was doing with her life.

Sheila started to type the rest of the story and enjoyed the tea as well. She decided that she would make sure that Jill was serious about her College education. That way Jill too could be a writer in future parts of the same story, and maybe people would relate to her.

Sheila wrote around 1000 words that day, which was a lot more than she was used to writing daily. She knew the surge of inspiration came from the bible verse and the curious dream she had.

She knew that as a budding writer, that was trying to make a living off her writing she could write just about anything. Sensational writing seemed to sell, but it also made a writer question the fabric of their existence.

When people asked questions about the whims and fancies of a protagonist a writer created, sometimes it would leave the writer feeling guiltier than ever. It was not an easy feeling to go to bed with at night.

That night before she went to bed, Sheila whispered a small prayer and thanked God for another beautiful day. She re-visited the bible verse You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” which she read before she worked on a crucial part of her fiction story.

She realized that there was nothing better than being able to sleep with a guiltless conscience. She thought about how people in the Bible who looked up to Godly wisdom often enjoyed what seemed to be a fuller existence and an almost unreal contentment.

While it seemed fun to want to write something intense that readers would remember her for, she realized that writing with a conscience would save her from a lot of trouble. Sheila was happy she relied on the deeper meaning of the biblical proverb, and she slept soundly that night. She knew her book was going to do well too.

A reading from a Letter to the Corinthians, written on fine Corinthian leather.

(Extracted via the science of Numerology, sequencing together every 5th letter from the book of Genesis, and moving 2 letters back, listing the numerical placement of said letters in the alphabet, multiplying by the numerical placement of the next vowel, then picking the letter coming the closest in whole numbers to the square root of the alphabetical numerical placement of the answer. The punctuation could only be guessed at.)

Chapter One

It was a booming voice. And it said:

1. In the beginning there was nothing. And it's value was zero. And nothing was unstable.

2. And so it passed that something virtually happened. And it was big, and it rapidly filled all that there is. And into this expansion grew length, width, depth, and time. And a, and e, and i, o, u...

…and sometimes y.

3. And the infinitesimal gathered. And then there were clumps. And the clumps grew crowded and warm. And the clumps drew upon their surroundings to grow denser yet. And so it went until the clumps were dense enough for thermonuclear fusion. And then there was light!

And it was good.

4. And there were thousands and millions of points of light in all that there is, and the shadows blended into the blackness that lay between each point. And the giga-watt-centuries that arose from these points grew fainter as they lost all strength, until their girth could not be supported by their bellowing energy. And so they collapsed. They collapsed more so than is imaginable, until the very infinitesimal in the clumps could not withstand the constraint. And there arose from the centers immense measures of heat and density, which burdened the infinitesimals with yet more electron shells until there was...

Carbon...among other things.

And it was good.

5. And then, in the beginning, there was murk.And the new burning clumps shined hard and long on the murk. And atmospheric turbulence begot incendiary lightning, which fell out of the sky, and the ammonia begot amino acids and peptides. And there were bonds. And co-dependency issues.

And it was good.

6. It came to pass that there was sentience and self-awareness. And the soup yielded the four-legged ones who renounced their gills and scorned their blow-holes. And there arose wicked times, with creature devouring creature until only the smartest and fastest and strongest were fruitful and multiplied.

7. And there were those who stood erect.

Darwin and Pfizer would have been pleased.

8. And yea I say unto you that the flame was harnessed, and the wheel, and the pulley.

And the fulcrum didn't hurt none either.

Or moveable type. Or penicillin.

9. And behold, there were harnessed cathode rays which were displayed onto a tube.

And it was not good.

The booming voice continued:

10. And so it came to pass that the Lord appeared to an unknown face in the throng, and spoke thusly:

"You will put on a dinosaur suit of purple, and espouse only good virtues to anyone who will listen. But your faithful will only be children, for adults will want to kill you. And you shalt be called, Barney."11. And the chosen one appeared on the cathode ray tube, and preached goodness, and love, and sincerity, and friendship, and right from wrong. And the children listened. And Barney grew very strong in his followers. And he went into a prime time morning slot, and his ratings were high.

And this was very good.

12. And he appeared to many. He began appearing at supermarket openings, and mall celebrations. Until roving bands of hostile and acneiform teen-age youths roughed him up. And he walked up the steps to a CEO of a major production company, who washed his hands of him.

13. And Barney was no more. But his message lived on in syndication. And it was good.

Hooves of Hermes thunder across the golden- bronze sand

The sheer power of their gait echoes across the land

Pearlescent manes rippling like the waves of the sea

On they gallop, so wild, so free

Muscles tense under a shell- colored coat

Refracting the ocean’s spray in a kaleidoscope

Their eyes look on in a mystic gaze

As they ride off into the sunset’s watercolored haze.

water to wash

the flesh without

water to wash

the flesh within

but where in this world

is the water of love

to wash from my soul

the curse of regret

to lighten my load

to help me forget