A firm conclusion.

For those of you reading this in Ontario, my band Banquet is having an EP release show next Thursday, Februrary 16th. And I would love it if you joined. Click right here for the event information.

No art to find the mind's.

Near the bus stop I wait at, about a block or two away, is a tall apartment rise being built. I was thinking, watching the people drive their cars past, wondering about all things. And I heard a shout call through the air--"Where's your hard hat?" I looked up to that building and saw one man standing atop it and large against the sky. And I thought, maybe he is talking to me.

Is silence not quenching.

Today, while out walking about the neighbourhood blocks, I approached a couple arguing loudly on the sidewalk ahead. I tried to step around them, but as I did the woman grabbed a package of cigarettes from the man and threw it at me. I caught it, but when I started to ask to give them back, she told me to shut up, and to tell her boyfriend to shut up too, why don't I. But I didn't do that, and instead I turned and kept walking. So, that has been my day.

You are still at Anthony's temptation.

Outside for a moment so that we can take a break from dancing, really dancing, and in the cold and close quiet of the street we are approached by a few young men who have also just exited. They ask, Hey, do you guys have some dru? We do not know what that is, but it turns out that it is weed, and we do not have any. They say, that's okay, but man, I just want some, and how's your nights going? Ours are great. And then she asks of them, or of the one still talking to us how his New Year's Eve was, and did he get to kiss his truest love? No, no way. He said, I'm too young for that. And on the walk back to the car I thought how absolutely opposite, while thinking over the last ten years of my own life, or really, even the last fifteen or something like that, and how absurd to be sure of yourself that you are too young for love. He said he was too young, and that he is young, he wants to live life. I thought of myself, and then thought, does he not ever think that he is actually missing life, is that not what life is? That has been mine, surely, it has been life. But then as the car went I thought, well, you know, maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Standing there on a chair.

The last time I was in a hospital was to kiss my brand new nephew, his soft hands curled while he started his world in a small maternity ward, lit with primary colours. The time before that was with Evan, where we spent the night in the waiting room. He lay on the floor, his body curled in a wish to fold in his pain. After about seven or eight hours, he was at last let into observance only a short while before the sun came up. I spent the night sitting still in a plastic chair until an unimaginably cheerful morning news program came on the television at four o'clock or so. I share a commonly held distaste for hospitals, with their wishful sterilization of the real parts of a person, the blood and abject leaks and breath. And there is always a clutter along every hallway, of carts and basins, and machines, poles of barely indentifiable occupations that sit beneath poor, pastel coloured landscape paintings. Somewhere in the anaesthetized bowels of a hospital, probably behind doors and doors, where paintings are no longer hung, lay my mother. I always think about what people must be thinking in hospitals. I wonder about the approach of despair that comes out of the pain of their bodies, of their awareness of something broken about themselves beneath their bandages or swimming within their mysterious flesh. I do not think that the stiff sanitary can keep away these thoughts when one closes their eyes.

Once again and innumerable times more.

The other day I was outside on the library steps, sitting with a coffee and the cold, and a young woman sat down beside me. She had dark, good eyes. Her boot laces were coming undone, and she pulled them loose next to me. I have a demon inside me, she said, as she pulled the ropes open. We know what you mean, I said. But she didn't get the joke. And I saw her then, and said, what does it feel like? She pushed her hair from her face and said with all her breath that it feels like something is always pulling her laces apart. I watched. I can tell that you know, she said without looking up, tucking her jeans into her boots. We send ourselves. The waves of hair fell over her face again, and she looked to me. Her mouth parted, but without saying anything she got up and walked without turning back. And I watched my fingers reddening in the cold air.

Devorans tempora.