Need no overcoat.

This great bush in my back yard houses more than a dozen sparrows, and some cardinals, maybe seven but I hope eight so that each has a friend. I am provided a warm mulled wine for contemplation while I watch, its branches bundling about themselves in the cold, that kind of air you can only feel for some few minutes as the morning sky begins to brighten. A tender hug of frost. In the bush's late summer leaves, and now in its briar-like winter dress, the little things make the bush look to be constantly bustling in its same place. From inside my house I can hear their persistent chirping, even now, in the Christmas cold. Everyone home for the holidays.

Roll in from the whistling buoy.

Only because Bazan says that he does, I listen to those three songs from Time (The Revelator) on repeat for a few hours. Tracks 5, 9, and 10, that last one fourteen minutes and forty seconds, my goodness. "Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand."

Throughout the fall months you talk to a few strangers every couple of weeks named Rob and Barry, and sometimes named Suzanne and Peter--whoever is home, really, during afternoon drop-ins--who for the last stretch have handed cups of sugar, have offered me a way to gain a long-churning simplicity I have yet to sing out, though it's what I've been building.

And, precipitously, I think of grandparents now. Fear can be everywhere, it can be provided for by all things, but not now when, as that one under his "Pigasus" symbol has said, the world is glassed over.

Always sleep with them out.

Fog shows before your every breath, and you walk for blocks. Miles of air so cold you can't feel your hands or the bend of your cheeks. You can't know where your fingertips end and wind begins. That's your nerves in the air, a burning sufficience, where you walk with hands suspended to indefinition.

Wrapped in piano strings.

Ed turned from his computer and told me that I could conquer mountains, that I could conquer the world. That ten years from now the likes of Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth will be asking for my audience. And if only he had someone telling him twenty, thirty years ago what he was telling me now...

He said that two years ago his wife divorced him, and he gave her everything. Fourteen million dollars worth, coming from six patents to his name and four PhDs, and he gave it all to her. He told me that he does not regret it a bit, and that he knew that I would do the same. He could see it in my eyes and could tell by my face. I did not respond, but I think I knew my answer. After they divorced, he started having strokes. Now he has cancer, he said, and next week at the doctor he will find out whether he lives or dies.

It is a flattening sense to feel the world change around you and tell you that you may no longer live as the person you had been. That you have to somehow relearn yourself to fit the contorted shape that those around you are giving. The way that you breathe your air is made obsolete, and every word you use it for is elegiac. I left thinking about that next mountain, and supposing it to be unclimbable. Caged as a man who is told that he now lives only in anecdotes and stories, because your whole being, your breathing body's thoughts, have a status that is not situated anywhere else now but within those tellings. A sudden past, since their location no longer exists for you to live in, and since the present one demands of you a new way to walk. What is a person's location, then, when they walk through days though they know nothing of the path of their upward steps.

For a few habit forming years.

Something slurred, of course--through whisky with coffee and dashes of shoplifted maple syrup, cups enough to never see their bottoms. Something of the peculiarity of performing songs about dying and drinking for an optimistic fundraising event and at a faith community, and new songs that carry shapeshifted disguises, but really about the same things as always. Someone I have known had told me that I have predictable ways, as if saying every silent moment now in this room is known, and the fact that it is scrapes rust into the air with any movement. While watching my dog twitch in his sleep, my own knowing and never knowing what goes on over there, worlds away now. Now you can watch the room fill with my own dust.

Into each similar scene.

Hints of an inverse constellation come about to surround, oppressive winking holes upon a thick whiteness, and tell you to take that flask for a walk into the deep night. Anywhere is surrounded by everywhere, so you sink on your back upon the pitch black of park grass. Fog mists the air above your brow and seeps into the creases of your knuckles. As you lie you feel your kneecaps pucker within your skin like the grass that you feel stiffen and frost around you. That sea and its noise surrounds to silence, but never quite for that long enough moment. But then you see the black skeletons of trees, their steady colour against the night's upward progress from lighted hues to blackened blue--skeletal stillness, and when that's all there is, that is all there is.

Once your leaves turn.

Different weather falls down upon people on the single same day, and that's strange. Seasons change faster in some places than with others, and that's strange. That's strange. But what's strangest is that it's all the same; winter is comin'.

--

Reading Aristotle and the end(s) of human nature as social, yet private, beings. It is strange how home means to you when you leave it behind. It continues to exist, maybe glowing a little, in your memory. But when the home left behind no longer houses the ones that made it, it does not seem fit to be called a home any longer for those behind. I don't know if there is a word for that state when one still remains, a kind of complete inverse--nostalgia is always for something that can not be returned to, but what is that, then, for the one that is left, who has not left. Some kind of desert, quaking familiarity.

Anyone who does not / betrays them again.

This is one of the most beautiful, inventive publications I have ever seen. It is filled with an agenda, short stories, to-do lists, party planners, and incredible art--and, holy moly, one of those stories is mine, by the way.

I love this book and want you to love it too. Buy it over here.

Inasmuch as which.

A long story cut short leads me to being at a petting zoo recently, where were kept hostage some goats, alpacas, and silkie bantams. The birds were in enclosed, transparent tents to keep people out--somewhat like those flynets that people enclose themselves in to keep nonpeople out--and this pheasant kept squawking out. An old woman stepped up and asked of it, "Now, what are you talking about? What are you talking about?" She was wearing orthopedics and a cashmere sweater, with dangling earrings and brightly painted fingernails. A few children ran past her, wearing their toddering run which at any moment could become a stumble. They were given ice cream cones filled with pellets to feed the goats and the sheep, and chased them around trying to do so. "C'mere goat! C'mon," a soft, high-pitched coax that was not seen so convincing. I leaned against the fence and said to the donkey next to me, "People sure are funny, aren't they. Talking to animals as if they know and will respond in the same language, while knowing that they won't." He looked at me without saying anything, and rubbed the goop of his nose against my sleeve. "Well, I don't have any treats for you. I just meant that it's strange, is all."

Hares in the open.

From every moment of exchange we leave each other with baskets of impression amidst our empty cases of expression. We have these weights hanging about us as we rub about one another.

After one of those moments, while walking my dog home on a late afternoon is a woman with random, useless objects like signs and old license plates for sale on her front yard. And she beckons and calls me to come over to purchase things, and asks me whereabouts I live. Oh, over on Oliver Street, I say, next to Alice Street, and yes, it is a very storied neighbourhood I have moved to, you're quite right. She asks me what I am studying at school and then returns my answer with that blank face: her features seeming to all gather towards the center, mouth closing and eyes changing to give that usual reaction that makes you realize your tedious description has gone farther than they wanted despite the fact that they asked. Then she asks me, with a bit of a titter, if I am gay--well, no, and what made you think so? What does a gay person look like, anyway? My shirt, with the top button undone. My glasses, which I have still been getting used to myself, and am now standing a few steps back in that process. I ready myself to step away and to bid her a pleasant evening, but she preemptively blurts out how frank she is, how she is just very frank, which had made her lonely in China and lonely here, too, when she moved from there years before now. And how this frankness was also given example by asking a lover if he was going to kill her while he was angrily driving out into the night's countryside long ago, after she learned firsthand that he was involved with another woman. Now she is very afraid and very hurt, for she is forbidden to even knock on his door.

Here I am thinking now of the ways that people attempt to drive straight through moments of discomfort which they have produced by papering over it with their own deep and personal objects for discussion. As if to stamp out that ruddy grey distaste that flickers and is brought out in the other person, to accede and peel themselves in ways explicit and sweet rather than implicitly deleterious. The way people make jokes about themselves after giving insult or tell these secret wrinkles to ones who in any other conversation might have left with only a basket of hi-how-are-you's. What I am thinking now is an unfinished thought, but, as with our Danish prince, there's the rub.

As almost all hats are.

Public transit is the most tremendous liminal space, where people incise others--their bags, bustle, and temperature revising the atmosphere, and everyone is frictive but pretends like they are the only one existing there. Estranging themselves, looking out the window, at the floor, their phone, the advertisements, anywhere but the person whose knee they are leaning against or whose noise and breath are curling around the back of their shoulder, with every other existing for the others as abstracted phenomena.

I can hear you now.

I returned home from a short trip of shopping errands for an axe, a large roll of duct tape, and some packages of garbage bags, and set them out in my bedroom at the rear of the house, whose large sliding glass doors are uncurtained to the new neighbours I have across the backyard. Someone must think someone is up to something.

The concept of that which does not exist.

When you get the mean reds.

Walking my boy late at night with whisky in my mug, and on the sidewalk I pass someone a few years younger than me singing an old punk song--actually, sneering it, a spat at the air between herself and her next steps--with her face painted, streaked black like a spiderweb or some KISS tryout. And she is carrying an umbrella and a stereo, with great and long, thin sheets of plastic tucked into her ball cap, whose beak is upturned. I nod as she interrupts those lyrics to say hello.

And curiously, on my way back homeward she is a block ahead. I can hear her shouting toward nothing, even her muttering is loud enough. I pause when she stops for a moment to trade the stereo's hand for the umbrella. When she starts again she swaggers, tapping that umbrella on the concrete to flare its grey up with attitude. Like seeing a sashay out of Breakfast at Tiffany's, though her song streaming back has changed to those do-do-do's from "Low Rider," and nodding my head at that, because everyone deserves that feeling up there.

The only desert within our means.

One evening not long ago, while walking through the park I saw an old man in clean shirt and slacks pull up to the curb and calmly walk over to a young tree. He leaned down and scooped his grocery bag full with mulch, then placed the bag into his trunk and drove down the street.

Yesterday afternoon I watched a woman crouching in the thick heat and following a pigeon as it hopped along the sidewalk, she trying to pour water onto it out of a plastic bottle.

This morning I listened to the basement dwellers beneath me argue about something that got lost as words progressed, becoming a drone about the other's persistent argument and nag, both voices sharing the perfect moaning characteristic.

And I sit beneath a ceiling fan, watching its strings push, my little one flopping over in his sleep and letting out his little dog groan. Holding a book and alone in this apartment, I miss my lips and spill coffee on my shirt with no one to see.

Summit.

There are two very different voices about state ideals here, but it is not difficult to know on which end there is an active comradery. Endless hundreds of police officers in riot gear who box in both protesters and bystanders on public streets and detain them without explanation is not in the interest of what the Toronto mayor has described as that city's and this country's "democratic ideals." I am interested in the tone behind these people's show of national interests by singing their anthem and what that means for them--and what it means for the riot police who interrupt a peaceful protest, swinging their batons only once--or as soon as--their anthem has finished.

Someone I know pointed out something valuable. Two police cruisers parked across from one another on Queen West were torched yesterday, but only because they were entirely abandoned. Media caught video of people vandalizing and then setting fire to the cars, but there were no police officers in sight. The fact that this is what is constantly shown on television programs such as CP24's enables the legitimization of a 1.2 billion dollar security bill for the G20 summit, so the police cruisers were abandoned there purposefully, like bait. And public, designated protest zones, are squeezed out of the geography.

But the evidence is in the shoes.

Because they know but do not tell.

Here is that wiggling responsibility, then, and my following him around to watch him do bad things on the floor, or hop after our cat, or fall asleep on his back has been making me me wriggle out of my own. I have stacks of books sitting behind me and in front of me, and beach sand still stuck to my feet. I have to retrieve a few hundred dollars for rent and write a few papers, but I am buying brews and writing songs. Responsibility, along with its constant pluralizing, is a difficult gravity to stand under. But this guy swam for the first time, he chews on his leash, and I think he might like me a bit.

In the non-place, a new place.

Replacing a grand disappointment is often made with the adoption of a whole new, wiggling responsibility. It replaces a distant hope with an immediate presence for letting one feel one's worth. Reading Deleuze and Hardt, and thinking that cultural capital very much includes the requirement of a certain level of mentality, gives a picture of our anxious Western world as a place of immaterial power that makes a mind into a discourse. And so a person such as you or such as I may whine in our lives, but only should if I am doing so with the realization that I have been given the gift of having such a place for it. Because of this, that mentality is a burdensome struggle, and a pleasurable burden, and that (soon to come) wiggling responsiblity will be a lovely reminder. And so, in the middle of this, there is a still holding resolution for this still relatively new year, which hopes not to attempt to keep my spirit so abidingly still--and to suppose that all else may as well--but that things flow, and the best footing to look for is only the ability to ride a wavering world.

Strike flat the thick rotundity.

A flock of leaves streamed across the street like a chorus call as my car passed between afternoon and evening. Dribbling past several driveways more, a woman stood in her flower garden near the curb, raking leaves in a windstorm.

Round to rounds / The break in half.

This summer, like two summers ago, I will be living by and beside myself, stretched alone for months on a decades old wood floor, my spine digging, wishing for a horse to ride through the surf, straight forever along this place between everything and nothing, no saddle, but aching for a cat I've barely known to step across my shins or my neck or anywhere, please, and remind me or take me away, fixing.

After that, who knows but God, and it is of little consequence today. And, of course, today is the first time since when that I write something that is not academic, and in wishing to show it today is the day that determines it not to be shown. So those essays, then, where everything is giving way to nothing, where the next weeks of nothing blot everything.

Conceive man without thought.

I wonder about the careers people have. There are baseball players and actors, yes, who have the opportunity to do what they wish to do for however long they like. But the others, everyone else and their daily bread, is who I wonder about, and whether they were consciously chosen or were assumed out of necessity, either for family or for the disappointment of losing the paid pastime they would wish for. Not in the sense of being a six year old who wishes and wills to be a pilot when they grow up, but when they are that grown up, faced with the moment they have to really choose--yet can do so only when that choice is shortened and the very sense of choice disappears because what they, as adults, may have been hoping to do, have been needing to do, is disallowed. Suffocated from that wished for choice either by lacking qualifications or discrimination or whatever inability. Oh-for-six means that one's aging, dry hopes, sitting in a gravel mess, can but live only in embarrassment beside the fresh seeds around him being carried off by their warm winds. Those baseball players may say that there is always next year, but if, what if, there is not. And what does one do with a gravel mess but learn to become a stone himself.

To cease upon the midnight.

Long ago, here, I wrote about levers and pulleys, and the sudden opportunities to dance when one is on your floor. The world whisks in such a way as to make a man's hands shake. Captured by circumstance, back then I had missed an element perhaps more impactful, it seems, to note of the world's wind that of course one must have come from elsewhere before, and by that course would see fit to step upon new floors, for new feet, where the dances differ and the company appeals. For, from head to toe, somewhere the steps must stumble here--perhaps the goofy hat, perhaps the lack of proper shoes, or somewhere in the length between. Even these materials can only poorly cover the drawings one may acquire across one's skin. Their ink has a weight that may spill in the desired direction, pushing one's body to make its wished moves, but if come upon a mountainous obstacle its weight makes one to tumble back, stumble down. It is right out of that stumble, perhaps, that another's shining doors appear, and one bows out. The appeal of loose toes, yes, of quicker steps. And here one must meet that, bow out, or otherwise break in half in trying to stand with the winds and their pulleys.

Compression.

Incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue.

Someone I know asked me, unknowingly untimely, what I think my future will be. What I said was, is, a nice tall kitchen. One with old wood floors and painted white, cupboards to the ceiling, and a bright, tall window with some hanging plants streaming down its sides. And I would be cooking soups and baking cookies, singing softly to some songs. My cat, Peter, strolling about my bare feet, and one of my doggies, Henry, laying a happy watch from the kitchen's doorway. Oh yes, but.

Wheel about the steeple of my dreams.

I've got these beige walls and curtains that can drive a person crazy. It spoils all else. It is, they are, a loneliness of lacking which saps the colour out of the objects it holds. All of the things within, these glasses, those pictures to the left, these little notes, my plants, several dozen midterms, myself, all sit in a solitary stillness that is anxiously stirring within the madness of this neutralization of vigour. And the funny thing about a person's head is that its encasement is somehow both within and far beyond whatever room it sits in and the incessant body it drags about, so that to itself it can really hear the music out in the living room on the other side of the door and on the other side of town, can really see the movements of hands and eyes and all the real colour there that moves them. But in here all these exhalations, everything, is painted beige.

Caught between every rib.

When I was young, perhaps around nine or ten, Oprah (yes, that's the one) long ago changed her show's theme from something upbeat and fabulous to a more solemn celebration of "spirit." This was still long before Dr. Phil came along, though here she was already largely focusing her shows on miraculous stories and self-improvement. She did still have those episodes where she gave away cars like pieces of gum. But there was one day where with a guest she proclaimed that every person should look at themselves naked in the mirror every day. She does it and this, she said, was the best way to get to know oneself, and the truest way to see one's own beauty. To see one's body without any form of clothing is, I think, a nice point of advice. Clothing, material or metaphorical, can hide a person from even their own face.

There is a further element that I have been thinking of. A mirror shows us ourselves, it shows me my furrowed brow, my shoulders freckled like paint flecks thrown from fingers, but what it is doing best is showing us that we are not a flat reflection of a world we can stare at. But that we have bodies--that it is because of them that our lives must move, bodies with which we can taste food, hold puppies, and see the spectrums of the bright grey sky. Bodies through which (or in which, or with which, or as which) our souls can grow in goodness or whatever other direction. And the only way to do those things and to understand them best is by looking at oneself in the mirror without clothes on. Thanks, Oprah.

It's me and the king and the beast.

On account of my scheduled creativity being sapped or invaded by PhD rejections and MA coursework such as reading about humankind's coevolution with technology and textuality, self-reflective novels, and Derrida lately, here is a story.

I have these dreams about God. Where God is that majesty, and I am this speck. And there is a demon who chases after me, bounding over coal-coloured mountains. God does not move, and the only way I may reach him is to chase after, while being chased by that snarling and morphing being. The one whose energy reaches and claws at me is one that I do not want to be devoured by, and my energy is as if reaching toward a cool pillar, unmoving, and one that turns whichever way required to face anything but the curling tips of my own fingers.

Driving along the Highway of Heroes a few days ago, the overpasses were populated by what must have summed to be several hundreds of people, accomodated by firetrucks, ambulances, and whatever other municipal vehicles. I thought perhaps there was an impressively organized Olympics protest going on that stretched over a good number of kilometres. I wondered, while listening to Andrew Bird and then Rancid and then Interpol and then an old mix I gave someone, why all of these people were hanging or waving their flags and only facing the direction opposite to what I was driving. Why not both sides? Was I and the dirtied white Volkswagen that just cut me off not worth advertising to for protest? This was before I realized what kind of a highway I was on, and I apologize Northumberland. But I began to think of the forms one must take to be celebrated, the types of deaths required, the commitments one must make and keep. I passed the oncoming hearse, then, and the procession of unlabelled police cars. And considered the unlabelled velcro stickiness by which we keep our presentative selves.

Of course, those citizens were repatriating a young soldier and memorializing the goodness that his absence has produced. That would have been a related news item, if I were to have read the news. This worldly neglect of mine is one thing which creates such horrendous analogies. And that, of course, followed by a related dream where some ones I know were chasing me with bloody mouths, equipped with shouldered artillery and eyes like slits in an endless Team Fortress 2 sequence of ridiculous yet terrifying animation. My thoughts were that I was driving away from these things so that I could better understand them upon my return, but they followed me anyhow. So now that I am home, and that they are elsewhere other than their homes, makes me really wonder about my understanding. I can sense that there have been "meantimes" which have altered these situations in my absence--meantimes of circumstances that involve and are shared by myself, but which my self is not present to be interacted with--and am now sensing those meantimes as existent throughout all the parts of life. So there is my own present, then, where I can roll along for an evening and let my treads fix momentarily upon thoughts that have placed me in a sense I might previously have been unaware of. Because I am a part of some thing which is beyond me, where my reach, mine, is truer than my own arms' immediate wingspan. While I am gone and reading in a different city, people back home can be refereeing a hockey game, or getting surgery, or enjoying a movie with their siblings by an old windmill, or out dancing downtown, or at home cleaning the bathroom, and these are things that occur because I am gone. These are things that can occur because I am gone. And my nervousness for each of these, in being gone, is then without consequence. The gone-ness is a goodness, then, where the hope of my substantive fluidity can finally dissipate into another's. That is where the heroism is, at least for these next seven or eight minutes--in being bitten by the beast, to be gone for some goodness to go on.

Save your applause for the end of the show.

Incense hangs upon the boughs.

To have your eyes open and to sit up straight. But you open your eyes too wide and for too long to see more than is good for your body. Your eyes dry up and strain and you have to squeeze them shut. Now your lids together feel like your hands do while on a washcloth's tight twist when wringing it out.

And I would say a plague is the opportunity to think far ahead of a moment. And that this is brought out of pasting together what drips out, into one interpreted picture, something which turns the crisp of that present moment into translucence. But it may just be a thing of this life, to see pieces that are floating about separately and severally, yet to see them as already come together. The image of this dimly lit metaphor I offer, this candle, would be of a figure looking at the parts of a photograph, standing still as if before a camera, and watching them fit into place. To see a lense through which to see.

The whole of the photograph already exists, then, for each piece to be fitted together. There is an inverse of this, though, and though still flickering dim and noiseless. As if it is that photograph's puzzling pieces that peer, and see the person as if they are instead the object of view. The photograph taking the person. Where, and only analagously, if you think of an intervening camera being brought into an event, when standing within the sudden frames of a candid photograph, one blinks, and suddenly that candidness means more than the moment being captured. As if that blink is letting down, disobeying the camera's flash that has shot out, reaching, choosing only you. There is, always, more than that. And those eyes can open as wide as they can to see as much as they can, only to blot it all out with the longest blink.

No sphere of immanence.

Someone I know said that Merleau-Ponty said, the best way to read things closely is to sit up with your eyes open.

Nothing where virtue is not.

A new child met his uncle today. I had never held a brand new baby in my life, had never thought I would or should. I had wished to, but the kind of shaking that my hands always have I thought would lead to some harm. But this, my young nephew, how could that be resisted.

A little boy whose sparking eyes looked up at me and whose hands grasped my fingertips. This perfect sort of thing, which made me think that I ought to tuck in my wrinkled shirt or clean my dirtied boots. Because it deserves the freshness it also holds. Such a change occurs in people when they hold in their arms this being that contains an entire long life in its freshly weighted lungs. They receive joy from the sight of the confident sleep of a baby.

Outside of his own blanket wrappings, surrounding structures and the hospital were under construction. All different sorts of objects on wheels were strewn about the hallways, incubators, computers, catheter stands, these things that seem important and like they should be in use or at least placed elsewhere, in a right spot. Sitting about, doing the things that they should not. Some rooms had those translucent, zippered curtains to seal them off from the hallways. And so now, of course, I am back over here on this armed chair with wheels and never elsewhere for use. There is that little baby boy, and if I could have carried him with me.

A giant's dead body.

Starting one of those very timely new year posts here, the sort where you begin to talk about spending your time really living this life, and Lord knows I'm trying. But writing that can sometimes not quite work when the year just past is made to be continually precipitating upon the moments in which my eyes can not be anything but awake, the year end's abrupt changes occuring one after another to where you almost want to let them pass by while under a most incredibly perfect wool blanket. To keep things wrapped up where things can be, that is where I type this from.

What I have been thinking and writing about for some while now is that, as persons among people, we gain a sense of ourselves from others, most often to a greater extent than from only sensing ourselves. They have themselves been woven, like us, and what they present then wraps around you. When, suddenly, you are no longer able to spend that close time with those people because they have moved away or because of your own move, you can feel your whole stabbing insides stop as a result. This happens at varying levels per individual, but this stoppage reveals the sort of dependence you have upon standing nearby those ones closest to your soul. And that is because they are not simply close, or near, to your soul, but are within it. In addition to what and who you are, what they are is what has made you become. I may say for myself, then, that I am so brokenly grateful for the containment of souls I have been given. It is a grace which, to my specific ones, is an inexpressible sentiment. One could whirl obliviously and forgetfully into a new January, but it feels best to sense that grace from within this wool. From right here is where I am able to do so.