Random things I’ve written that are part of nothing except themselves, at least for now, and that I think have enough cohesion to put up here.
.
He stood beneath the yellow flickers and disjointed buzzes of the electric sign, unmoving; his shoulders hunched so the collar of his coat covered as much of his ears as possible. The rigid cold hung over the night like a sheet of glass. He thought if he moved, it might shatter and fall to pieces. On the dark road beyond the darker parking lot, a set of headlights drifted by and, for two brief moments as it passed, illuminated the clear, sharp cold. A shiver slid down his body and through his shoes to the dirty pavement.
September 21
On the bridge. Leaning against the cold metal rail, a lone silhouette. Black on black. A car sweeps the air in a ripple behind it, and is gone, leaving a trace of red light on the pavement. Inside. He can feel internal organs rearrange themselves. Twisting. Sinking. There isn’t anything worse than “I love you” and seeing in her eyes that she doesn’t believe you. Won’t believe you. Can’t believe you? The faint chill of summer night creeps beneath his T-shirt, slides its fingers along the pale skin and presses hard against a thudded heart. Below. The water crawls smoothly past and under him. The stark cold of the river slips off the rippled surface and approaches him, sinks beneath cloth and skin and muscle. He stares at the water. Staring. Captured by its mesmeric weave and flow.
He stared at the water and saw it turn to death. Detached. Rushing toward him.
He contemplated the height of the bridge, both in metres and feet. The whistle of air. The impact. But not the pain. A different pain.
He draws his eyes up again. Blinks away unwelcome dampness. Remembers to breathe. Deep breaths. Even breaths.
He jams his hands tight into the pockets of his jeans, and leaves. Away. Over the lifeless cement. Gone.
A Penny For My Thoughts
A little thing I wrote for the Oracle. They wanted an article. I didn’t know exactly what to write about. Someone said “write a story about a penny, man, haha.” I did.
In the morning, the dull shuffle of sleep-deprived teen sneakers and sandals brings me back to my tedious senses. And so the cycle begins again. From my vantage point, safely away from student’s soles beneath a white, mostly inoperative water fountain, I watch as the crowds gradually thicken and the chatter increases almost to a tumult. Then the bleep of the bell heralds the daily running of the students. As they stampede to their various classrooms an unwanted banana peel is flung to the ground and trampled. Five minutes later another bleep clears the remaining stragglers from the hall and I am alone, except for the concussed fruit husk.
I count myself lucky to have been unceremoniously dumped in the halls of this school. It might not sound all that great, but when you’re a penny the alternatives are usually even less appealing. Try drowning for months at the bottom of a synthetic fish pool right under the sign that quaintly states, “Please. I can’t stand copper. I hate all coins.” The initial agony is at least somewhat thrilling, but inevitably tedium takes over. Piggy banks tend to suck, and wallets are hardly better though sometimes you luck out and get to rub up against a shiny young 1984 for a while. Lying in a dirty school hallway isn’t particularly glamorous, but at least you can see and hear your surroundings.
As always, midday brings lunch break. The boisterous students fill the halls once more. The banana peel is kicked toward the wall before the inevitable slipping can happen. But who do you know that’s tripped on a banana peel anyway? I get my fill of marks, hair, dates, and parties from the hum of conversation around me.
When you’re younger life is always more stimulating, the terror is more vivid and excitement is easier and more, well, exciting. Piggy banks are always dark and scary when you’re freshly minted, but at my age they tend to be stuffy and boring. It’s not just age though; we live in changing times. Nobody wants pennies anymore. The long slide down into a candy machine used to be worth the long wait for it to be opened up. Now you couldn’t use me in any sort of machine if you tried. It seems my whole purpose is now to be given as change and then ignored, shunned, and hated. Sure money is the most important thing to some people, but these days pennies aren’t even worth the time it takes to pick us up. Sure the new pennies are shiny and clean, but they haven’t lived! Young people are the best companionship for a penny though, and that’s what makes this school so… I can’t say wonderful, but at least less dull. We get the excitement of penny hockey, the dizziness of twirling on table tops. If I’m really lucky I’ll get thrown at someone, or even a car.
Today I am kicked around the halls by few niners who are evidently pretty easily amused (the most excellent quality of a penny handler). Then I’m thrown down the stairwell onto my tail, where maybe I’ll end up spending a week or two.
Uncle Shanks
I did a series of silly articles for the oracle allegedly by Uncle Shanks. This was the first, and the only one that didn’t suck.
Hey kids! It’s me again. Old Uncle Shanks from across the way. I been watching you, and I always want to make sure you’re all taking care of yourselves. I’ll be derned if I don’t know it’s tricky being that age you are. What I can remember of me being that age, was pretty tough. But then again you folks these days don’t have to milk your cow right every day when you get yourselves home from school; and you don’t have to sew your own clothes and build your own tables neither. You’ve got your cars, and your music, and your fancy hairdos, and your wimpy little jobs. The easy life. Especially compared to what I went through at the institution.
But growing up, I still had Valentines Day. Oh boy what times we had. But before I go all telling you about the dances and the barn and all that fun stuff, you all need to know the history of Valentines Day. I’m sure your history teachers give you all that tripe about hows it’s all very important for you to know your history, so listen up. You know that fat naked little angel with a bow who goes around shooting people? I think his name’s Qtip or something?anyway, back in the day, he was shooting people a lot, and they were gettin’ pretty irritated. So they locked him up in a little box where he couldn’t do nothin’ except for writing dorky poems about roads and trees, and they only let him out once every year. Yup, you guessed it, they let him out every fourteenth of February, cause that was the little bastard’s birthday.
So while you’re all lovey-dovey and being Romantic with your special someone, or even if you’re all at home by your lonesome feeling like life’s a big smelly pile of antelope turds, don’t you be forgetting about poor Qtip, because he’s not very happy in his box the rest of the year and we must never forget the little guys.
The other day I got to thinking, just to cheer up the old bastard, wouldn’t it be nice to have do one of them there fundraising thingies that you see popping up all over the place these days? You know, everyone send him like $5 or whatever and then he’ll have enough money to afford a TV so he isn’t so bored all the time. Think about it folks! This is the spirit of love we’re talking about here. So anyway, send all your donations to:
Uncle Shanks
Qtip guy
PO Box 540
Farringdon County
F8L 7U3
..
A completely inane and meaningless stream of consciousness piece. It’s dear to my heart because it just.. fascinated me for some reason. I guess if anything it is playing with language, and that’s what I like to do! It was my first poetry not forced on me by school (if you can call it that)
A deep pounding.
The loss of inspiration.
Insipid.
Lurging through the empty masses of wilted logic.
Putrid.
What is it, then, that makes us tick?
Twelve to four.
Seventeen over.
By and by something will drop.
Something has been sent.
No one wants to.
Send a sign.
In the fortress of the king/the bards and minstrels they did cough/before they yawned and nodded off.
Twice in my life.
Catastrophic.
But then, who doesn’t?
When?
To chase a million stars.
Speaking only from inexperience let me inform this trinity of overachievement, in somewhat broken terms.
Chosen.
Bombing over infinity toward an end.
Twelve to four?
The burgeoning life in the marshlands of the southern plateau.
Try as I might, and I might not, I try too hard to tear away inside myself.
I hear the song about the soaring birds.
The one that goes.
Off with a bang.
On with a feather.
Twice now, but never enough.
Tell that to my girlfriend.
Threads.
Woven to the backs of friends whose burdens fall to ash.
A passionate sin.
Fury drives the horses down, screaming as they fall.
Into Destiny.
Near the beginning.
Far from television.
Into the nexus of stilted triumph.
And where?
Tell us now the thoughts.
The ingenuity that cracked.
Slip into the back.
Cry along the front.
Drug dealer on the side.
Toppled together without ever knowing why.
Two that touch as only one can.
Best value.
Best service.
What’s the deal?
That’s the deal.
Try it!
One’s as good as two in the business of playing the patterns of yearning.
Nonsense?
Face steeled against the lurid call of night.
Feet torn by wicker birds.
Plato tells us of the soul.
Turned toward the coming dawn.
Feel the rain through the darkness.
Plato ate a potato.
The northernmost semblance of unity.
Squeezing out the frank and turgid water.
The wiles of seven centuries of deceit.
Find me and scold me.
Scald me with whimpers.
Drown me in benign unpleasantry.
And what’s more.
I forgot to turn off the oven.
The roast will toast.
Dancing in a wiry, sticky way.
Much like in those old movies.
With James Stewart.
With Oliver Cromwell.
The lacking parent vows to expose yesterday.
Tomorrow draws on today.
Swirls down, away, with an unpleasant singe.
My tongue is missing.
Missing you like yesterday, but warning you of triumphs to succeed in earning.
Didn’t your mother tell you?
Deaf as a bat, blind as a loon.
Off his sofa.
Mr. Teddle is coming for dinner.
The most powerful word in this sundry language?
Last week a dolphin.
This week nothing.
Nothing to do but watch the leaning child.
Four letters.
Not of that sort, anyway.
Twists and knots.
Groans in leaps of agonizing.
Will the phone ring?
Haven’t we already been over this twice?
Twelve to four.
And not a second too soon, neither, not knowing what’s in store after the party’s over.
Depressed.
By illogicity.
By random inanity.
Profuse insanity.
By the river a dog drilled me with his placid eye.
The lake rolled over and fell asleep.
Dreamed of nothing more than everything else.
Rhymes with an ark’s whitebird.
To what end?
To what beginning?
Never forget those who wish to remember.
Why?
Angry?
Feel a leering jester.
Coughing on about stocks.
Chained to you in every way but presence.
Past a peppered leaf.
Jots of drooping, falling.
Tearing me apart.
Soft skin.
Cool breeze.
Lips.
Torture.
The masterstroke.
Shed your insecurities at the door.
Don’t dream of better days.
None exist.
Except now.
You are gone.
Not gone, away.
Not here though.
Anywhere but here.
Enough games.
Cognizance grinds to a halt.
Dull ache.
Missing the point.
Sharp and saturating, painful to the core.
Heart.
Beat you to it.
Enough trolling the recesses of misted hope.
LOVE.
And truer words were never spoken.
…
When I was in Kindergarten, I was so cool. Everyone wanted to hang with me. Not because I had any redeeming qualities or anything-I was after all a little on the fat side and I didn’t know my alphabet well enough to spell it, let alone Mississippi.
….
When I was ten, my uncle Neil told me that love doesn’t exist. He said love is one of those things adults make up so kids feel better about the insensitive world they’re growing up into. Like the Easter Bunny. Or Santa Claus.
We were sitting together on the front porch of his snug, white-sided house. Mom and Dad were still inside washing dishes and tidying up after supper.
“I think some grownups even convince themselves it’s real. But deep down we all know it’s just some clever idea that one of those Greek philosophers thought up thousands of years ago.”
His grey gaze kept my eyes locked firmly with his.
“Why do you think adults are so serious all the time anyway?”
I waited, expecting that crackly chuckle of his to cut through his solemn face at any moment. It never came.
A Beginner’s Guide to Skeeks
The first thing I ever wrote for my highschool newspaper. Back in grade 9, baby. This work has farreaching implications about my late childhood.
To most, skeek is merely “squeak” misspelled in an unlikely way. A way that could probably only happen to someone in a drug induced stupor or someone who is not at all proficient at the ancient art of spelling words close to the way they appear in a dictionary. To others, though, a skeek is something else.
Having said this I can now assume that some readers whose minds are more curious in nature would fancy knowing what this something else I referred to in the above paragraph is. For those of you who have no desire to discover what the something else is, I offer my sincerest apologies and suggest you stop reading this article before the beginning of the next paragraph.
The word skeek will not be found in any dictionary. Skeeks are (or are not, depending on your willingness to believe fanciful claims of a particular individual) creatures.
A skeek is small (six to ten inches tall) and is a curious hybrid between a feline, and a primate, with bits of other nasty or otherwise creatures thrown in for good measure. He or she will have large, cat-like ears, a long tail, and will walk about on two legs attached to a human-like body. The hands and feet are primatial but are proportionately large and have retractable claws. When content or luring prey, a skeek will purr.
Skeeks live in wilderness areas and form curious communities with a social structure based on however the members of the community are feeling. The diet of the skeek is comprised mainly of berries and berry juices and skeeks in general (excluding some young upstarts) are quite content with their diet. As with any idealistic fantasy folk, a skeek doesn’t have to worry about becoming obese because that will only happen if it is convenient to the plot. Plot of what? I have no idea.
The skeek is a rather eccentric little fellow. These eccentricities (too numerous to mention in a short document such as this) are highlighted by an insatiable lust for objects of high luminescence (Examples: diamond rings, valuable jewellery, metal rulers). This quirk puts the average skeek directly at odds with the stereotypical unfriendly farmer who tries to kill the friendly skeek. Conflict drives drama, so skeeks are a bunch of fun when it comes to Ping-Pong.
Another eccentricity of the skeek is his/her curious sense of logic. A skeek will for no reason take one thing to mean another or connect inappropriate situations together. This can be lots of fun, or very annoying. It’s no fun to fall off the roof of your house and have a well-meaning skeek go to fetch an ice cream sandwich. This behavioural trait is not, however, carried to the extreme, because that would grow redundant.
As well as the logic and amiability toward shiny things, a skeek is also quite mischievous and likes drawing on that pool of mischievousness to do all sorts of hilarious but nasty things to unfriendly farmers.
If you have read this far, I assume you know something more of skeeks than you did before reading this article and that you have been convinced of my insanity.