Found Poem 8:20 p.m.

So it's a found poem sort of, I found it in an old notebook from a decade ago...

C'est la grande ville
et c'est
la belle et éclatante maternelle
Ma copine mélange
de la peinture
dans son verre de jus
et elle me promet, me promet
du noir
C'est la grande ville

an experiment in colour and god 8:10 p.m.

He was accustomed to walking
grey city streets, dirty silver
lampposts conspiring, black
Mise van der Rohe shadows
impending. He was accustomed
to pasty white bodies pounding
pavement, their peach-coloured lips
humming off-key tax returns tunes
under pregnant clouds. He was
accustomed to Toronto.

Convertible top down, prairie
wind, gofer children scurrying
golden wheat paths to underground
schools of sunset, he was

unaccustomed

to the country’s midsection,
its slender waist sweating orange
ceilings, he was unaccustomed
to the country’s expansive belly.

Scream the cranberry words
of ruby-red cross-country conclusions,
he wanted to scream the lavender lyrics
of freedom from the black-fabric seats
of his champagne rental.

Conservative dog-brown shoe pedal
to the metal, fast forward to purple ends
of possibility falling from the sweet
grass heaven. He was unaccustomed
to the road’s speed and linearity.

Dirty blond stubbled release from
frames, doors, the ninety-degree
angle pressure to pay bills on platinum
geometrics of plastic. Dirty blond
stubbled permission for faster.

He was unaccustomed to the flushing
hushing undulating currents of loud
navy dark wind, stars picking
birthplaces in ebony sky, to this.

Scream the blind midnight words
of irresponsible time sand syllables,
he wanted to scream the white blank
page erasures of urban burgundy
madness and did.

And God listened.

pinecones versus my new red shoes 4:33 p.m.

pinecones are small, brown crunchy things, not summer
creatures either. some were huddled together today on the
sidewalk and i stepped (shuddered) as they crunched
beneath my new red shoes. they were hiding from
the heat, i think, beneath the shade of some urban tree.

relegated to the IT room 10:02 a.m.

there is a cpu humming very loudly next to my head. two green apples next to my laptop are the only organic things in sight. i hate being relegated to the IT room. clement, the small chinese computer man, doesn't speak to me or smile. he likes keeping the window open so we can hear the lovely sound of traffic from finch avenue but he insists on drawing the blinds so that the only light in the room is fluorescent. i'm staring at my green apples and thank god they're such pleasing colour. the walls are grey, in here. so's the carpet. so are the cubicles. grey, all of it. grey, for heaven's sake! the man in the office next door keeps birds, because it's a marketing company, and people in marketing are quirky like that. the birds chirp and chirp and at first it was endearing but i'm just about ready to kill them now. the quirky marketing man also has an axe and several knives sticking out of his door, as though someone had tried to break in. it's a quirk thing. i have fantasies about using those knives. don't turn your back on me, clement.

microsoft paint says, "pride is coming!" 3:22 p.m.

a list of my favourite candy 8:15 p.m.

i know i've said that i don't like sweet things, but that's not entirely true. i mean, i don't like them now, but i used to. despite my parents' best efforts, i lived almost exclusively on a diet of sugar and citric acid for the better part of my pre-teen years.

• nerds (the tiny coloured ones in complicated boxes)
• hershey's cookies and cream bars
• the haribo candies that looked kind of like jube-jubes but had poppy-seedish thingys on them
• red skittles
• sour watermellons and grapefruits
• worms of all kinds
• some french sucking candy
• wunderbars
  

my feet are extremely dirty 12:12 p.m.

from spending the evening on the rooftop, going on prentensiously about colours and semi-colons. blue and terracotta. black and white. yale and harvard. the brick chimney sits at the same angle as the beer bottles because the tar surface is uneven. my hands hurt when i wake up to the sound of the cbc. pay cheque, coffee, yogurt, anxiety, lorazepam. a one hour biography about ellen degeneres on the star network. my superintendent has taken our ladder, our means of access. we're trapped on the third floor now, unable to get proper breeze, proper sun, a proper view. my hands are beginning to tremble, my palms red and rough from my adventures. i'm going to do something now - eat maybe, or lie down. i feel restless, unsatisfied. waiting is the worst.

excavations 11:43 a.m.

the three hundred yard walk to the subway in silence highlighted in pink our patterns of restraint, tight-lipped and stubborn we marched and i would normally have expected a toothpaste flavoured meeting of lips as we turned the corner to greet hayden street, his eyes wide and mine lowered. but not today. we marched on, instead, toward the mouth of a crowded cave guarding our words like unspeakable secrets, waiting to be swallowed.

the three hundred yard walk to the subway in silence weighed heavily on my heart as i travelled through the tunnels alone, forbidding anyone to share my bench. having made of my briefcase a wall i huddled, pretending to read, but truthfully watching the lights, from the corner of my eye, speed by in a frenzy of distance. i wondered if we would emerge, and when.

the three hundred yard walk to the subway in silence offered me a few solid breaths of reflection in exchange for the pained sigh of my conclusion: it would have been best if we had loved only in the echoes of sex. we are young, i thought, knowing us to be too deeply involved for such deus ex machina statements. too deep and still digging.

ou est benjamin rodger? 6:54 p.m.

::: perhaps he has been swallowed by the azur tides of the mediterranean, clinging a blank canvas, images of a canadian capital city in chartreuse swimming between strokes ivory-capped waves and a vengeful european sun his companions ::: perhaps he is painting with violet mittens, in the cold closets of a french art school looking to his well-bred compatriots in red woolen scarves for inspiration ::: perhaps he is collapsed grey drunk on the blonde floorboards of a month-to-month rental waiting for a dark-orange dawn to disturb his deep sleep ::: perhaps he is tired of correpsondence in blue ink with this black disaster and prefers the salmon smiles of more functional versions of the female form ::: perhaps he's given up on this dark-orchid life and has left us for olive dead instead :::

red is the new black 4:05 p.m.

hanging casually from your frame, tighter the in right parts
tucked awkwardly into the waistband of your jeans, you'll kill me
for not having told you but it was her idea not mine, i swear
we shared a few words staring at your ass as you walked away
and both thought (surely) how good you looked in red and vodka
and both thought (surely) how good you always looked in black and beer