Toronto Poetry Slam

alas what sweet delights have passed us by,
as we wait on another’s fickle whim,
the flower blooms and dies again,
as summer turns to fall.
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What frozen blooms
From rooftops hang
That glitter at their point
Knives of ice float overhead
And drip their stainless blood
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River thoughts

Lazy dreams

Meandering trainwreck

Taking the country by storm

Crumpled cars like dogs fucking

Piled one on another a long line of fornicating boxcars

Loudly lurching from station to station

As a nation cheers endless noise and damage

But never total destruction

Only dislodged railties and gravel

Only twisted metal and reality

A day dream

Beside the tracks

Drinking over twig fire with punk rockers and travellers, hippies and rappers

A place we call the quarry
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I am inconstant

Sometimes I wonder as the subway train passes and I see my reflection, what would happen if I head butt it.
Will my head explode like a dropped watermelon, or will I fall backwards gently bleeding from ears and nose with my brain scrambled like a still born chicken in its egg?

Collette cringes coldly from calloused fingers caressing, I’m sorry

Collette does not exist

Derailed I fall from Hollywood bridges in fire balls on broadway

Or I fall into money bought lies in jillies with strippers on broadview

Or I die again, every night, to awake unfortunately alone again, and again off to work,

Or sleeping all day to drink at night waylaid by a psychic bum knowing not only my age, to the year, but my ethnicity and finding it matching his we are brothers. “Never give in.” He says, hitting his chest over heart as we shake hands, an accent appearing from imagined nationalist fervor. I say “Catholic blood and true.” I lie, but it suits him, placates this drunkard, good byes and stay safes echo as I depart.

Or I dream again of zombies again, slow walkers stumbling like so many drunks I’ve seen, and they're chasing me, but I in ski boots am incapable of gaining a safe lead, and so in fear incessant, as I thump th-thump away, wishing I had time to take off these fucking boots but I don’t, never far enough away to be safe, never close enough to be threatened. A hellish limbo too obvious a metaphor, too horrifyingly true

Sometimes, I see myself in windows as I walk, and I think “I am not terrible.”

Sometimes, I see myself in windows as I walk and I think “fuck that guy.”

Sometimes I don’t think as I walk, and my reflection stares lonely from windows.

Sometimes I think my reflection and I have issues we should sort out.

But then I think my reflection knows less than I do, and I don’t know much.

So I let my reflection do what it must.

Sometimes I think; what if I am a reflection, and I realize I am.

Let the dead drop, and the hopeless rot, let the dying die, and the living do as they please, but don’t tell me, where I fall, in these categories, because I hate them all.

I’m sorry, I love you socks.