Praying

2006

There’s a road I drive on when I’m on my way downtown that passes through a bleak, desert-like place which I've always loved the looks of. Traffic there is sparse, if existent, and the road goes on for maybe a good, straight kilometre before it shits you out back into the city. It's a great stretch of road for driving while listening to grim, twangy music of the old dead west.
This wasteland has always intrigued me, and I always kept it in my mind to go and look through it. Walk around; get a real feel for why this desert area, with its old, dead trees and abandoned spirit houses has become what it is. I wanted to skulk around and see the place. So today I drove out there with that purpose. After a mostly uneventful trip there, I parked my scooter on the edge of this dusty scape and began walking inward, toward whatever was there.
I found that there was, as to be expected in this land, a scattering of litter all about the area, as well as larger piles of refuse, their places marked by fledgling shrubs gripping outward from the ground, as if something beneath the land was being suffocated by the trash and was attempting to claw its way out. The aforementioned spirit house was seated diagonally on the clumped dirt, all the praying dolls splayed about its radius. Praying, knocked onto their sides into the fetal position.
Further along, there was a large, crumbling concrete foundation of a building either once there or to be there, lined with bent and twisted rebar spines. A great rubble altar flanked by divine offerings of modern life's waste.
A few green, scummed-over ponds pocked the area, around which bushes and flowers tried to grow. Large patches of ground were covered with a mesh of flowered vines. Morning Glories, by my estimate, which may indeed be wrong. In one bed-sized span of charred dirt, a dying fire, perhaps lit the previous night, softly crackled to itself. A breedless dog loped near, but having no territory to defend, did not display aggression.
I was being driven out by the day's heat and the cloudless noon sun, so I made my way back to my scooter. The dog followed in a friendly cautiousness, and I took note of a strong, ripe scent I had caught brief wind of in my entering this newly explored slab of world. Though it was an unpleasant odour, I felt that I should find its source. It was an awful smell, but not outstandingly chemical nor fecal. Under an overreaching arch of brittle bushtwig were two legs, spread wide open, exposing a coarse-haired, deflated belly and sticking out between, a dog's tail. Between stomach and tail was an awful black hole which looked almost as if something had exploded out from that region, leaving a cavernous, sticky, fist-sized cavity of stench volumes more revolting than the canine asshole and genitals that it had replaced.
As one panned up this centerfold of decomposition, one noted that above the hips and first, lowest pair of darkly shriveled, cracked nipples was nothing discernably dog. Instead the viewer is met with a large hole, much like the first one, only larger, as though this cur had been cut in half, either pre-or-posthumously. Only out of this hole stabbed a spine and slightly disheveled ribcage, all covered in many greasy, maggot-busy mouthfulls-worth of pungent, glistening black jam.
Upward, dog began again, briefly. The two front legs had yet to be dined upon, and contained not the gasses necessary for such a repulsive, detritivore-aided explosion as occurred on the body. The head, however, was hidden. There was a bag made of a material seeming to be a plastic adaptation of burlap covering it. I leant over to pick the bag up and pour out the contents, but as my fingers touched the end farthest from the dog, they felt a warm squish tell them to leave the bag alone.
My fingers thanked the squish for its advice and I walked back to my scooter. While halfway to my bike, the smell revisited me. I turned and to my right I saw another carcass, this one not so liquified as the previous one. A dog again, of the same sandy brown colour, with its face frozen in a peacefully joyful grimace, lying on its side, in the fetal position, front paws together.
Praying.

The Sweetest Peach

Ever eat the sweetest peach?
No, it grows too high to reach.

Bravado and Downfall
A Guilt and Fear Society
Hunchbacked and Half-Blind
In the End…
…Blame the Device
Exploit fears.
Shoddily produced
We howl for sin
Useless excuses
Mai Pen Rai

Living a long life
Licking a long knife
Sick to my mind every day
Sick of listening to They
Don’t believe what people say
They don’t care
Know
Think
Feel
Anyway

for X and Viktor

If bored with most of humanity
And in need of a friendship more potent
I find my best advice to thee
Is to select a fitting rodent
Rats have kept me company
But I’m not the only one
Victorian Uppercrust England is
Where rat fancy begun
Smart as any pet you choose
And capable of tricks
You blame them for bubonic plague
When you should blame their ticks
They grind their teeth to show their joy
They chirp and squeak and fight
It’s just their game, boys will be boys
Above the belt’s alright
They eat what I eat
Sleep when I sleep
Help me bug the cat
I’ll never need to raise a son
So long as there are rats.

Another Day in the Crossroom

A long steamy box of
Stifling pressure and
Stuffy pastoral quaintness
Bored little dabblings
On the walls of some
Dentist-grandfather’s
Catholic soul made hardwood
Outside shitty weather
Blusters
And branches scratch in
At a frustrated little
Cross-shaped box.

The fishbowl ass
Of a bluebottle fly
Busts through the ceiling
Between a broken sink
And a table of sticks.

Crossroom

An oblong, doorless
hall-like enclosure
ending in a window,
warmly-dimly lit and a
deep cherry hardwood floor.

Snowfall out the window
Bright grey pale sky
A view segmented
By dead branches.

The walls are or seem yellow
Due to candle-like lighting
From an unknown source,
And a roughly stuccoed ceiling.

Indigo and purple
Decorated glass
Of an unlit chandelier
Three-quarters down the hall
Whose walls are sparsely
Tidily adorned, with
Rural watercolour scenes
Of late summer days,
The Idle Responsibility.

Toward the window
The chandelier denotes
An intersection in the cruciform hall.

To the left, an old chipped white sink
Cracked with a dusty film.
The Right holds a table
Draped in red cloth
With a careless simple centrepiece arrangement.
Flowers and stems sleepily stacked
Nostalgic and trapped but safe.

Exhume the Tombs

I could start a thousand verses
Beginnings for great works
Well I could start but know
My curse is finishing: it hurts
Beginnings without ends
I have so many, you know why?
They all are little parts of me
And none wish yet to die.