The Weakerthans

I count to three and grin.
You smile and let me in.
We sit and watch the wall you painted purple.
Speech will spill on space.
Our little cups of grace.
But pauses rattle on about the way that you cut the snow-fence,
braved the blood,
the metal of those hearts that you always end up pressing your tongue to.
How your body still remembers things you told it to forget.
How those furious affections followed you.
I've got this store-bought way of saying I'm okay,
and you learned how to cry in total silence.
We're talented and bright.
We're lonely and uptight.
We've found some lovely ways to disappoint,


but the airport's always almost empty this time of the year,
so let's go play on a baggage carousel.
Set our watches forward like we're just arriving here
from a past we left in a place we knew too well.
(Hold on to the corners of today,
and we'll fold it up to save until it's needed. Stand still.
Let me scrub that brackish line that you got
when something rose and then receded.

Takes a dried up ball-point, lemon juice and water, keeps a diary invisibly, In the kitchen corner of a basement bachelor suite there's a certain search for certainty, you know we'll never see her hands touch her childhood home in photos that she took. It's one more omission from a high school history book; how whole lives get knifed and pushed aside. To whom it may concern...

Take a broken bottle. Take a rafter beam. Take a needle and a tarnished spoon. Or just words to kill off one more unheard statement of another dying afternoon. She says she's leaving soon. So so long to ten hour shifts and faking sympathies. Farewell to piles of bills, unpayed utilities. All rolled up and unfurled like a flag. Wake up and pack your bag. To whom it may concern...There's a bus that's leaving half an hour from now. It won't take her where she really wants to go. So she sits there with her luggage at her side. leaving empty stations, leaving empty lives.

Had one of those days when you want to try heroin,
Drunk driving, some form of soft suicide.
Sitting in silence and staring at ceilings or peeling the paint off of things to confide.
Teach me to wiggle my ears like that,

Show me the scar that you got when you fell off your bike.
Ask me the questions you never want answers to.
We can re-write them however we like.
Stop the hardwood floor's lopsided grin.

Leave the dirt and dead flowers in a brown coffee.
Let your hand melt a hole in the frost.
Peer out under a sky that looks just like a shirt I lost.
Maybe someday the lies we've led around will crawl under our beds and sleep off the years.

The night's a spill, a permanent stain;
the city soaks in silence, salt and dirty snow.
A blue glow from the tv again,
the cutains never open, faces never show.
And every time a light is turned on there's a light that's turned off somewhere.
For every failing feeling that's lost there's a perfest cost,
there's a debt you can't share.
And every night they play the same song to the same offbeat believers.
And everyone is singing along wearing blueblack eyes,
wearing dead men's neck-ties.
Clocks stopped at the corner of Albert will show your last bus left an hour ago,
so stumble down the stairs again,
pretend you're not to proud to understand
and still know when your voice cuts through the crowd that lonely people talk too loud.
Numbers on a washroom stall.
There's always more then one last call calling you.

You always stole all my last words. Here's no exception then, one more for me to send. And nothing happens in the end. I'm thinking of you less, more concerned... and more is less, I guess it doesn't matter now. Maybe we'll never go insane. You always said we would, sometimes I wished we could with you lying naked in the rain and singing Boney M, cutting down all our old friends. I talk to them again now. So here's the last one I have left. We fell a little deep, I watched you fall asleep. And nothing happens in the end, but I remember when I could remember when. Seems like a long time ago.

Knock so I'll know you're still there, half listening, interpreting the air. Full of failing foreign tongue, my dialect of stammer come undone. I've got these threads of you and I that I use to tie my doubts down, and from four times-zones away, still yesterday, still talking to the past: from the front seat of your car, gravel road and falling, falling hands and falling star.

Start the engine up. I'd like a new identity. A pseudonym. Some plastic surgery. Or just a way to disappear. Someone to write me out of here. I hear you hum an unfamiliar song. Thought maybe you would come along. Perhaps you'd like to see some piece of this; my new philosophy is that a crappy tape deck somewhere plays a greatest hits collection of strange and tender moments, lost, stranded, and forgotten. I'll meet you there. (Something I forgot to say: can't find a way to make this mark more clear. So crack your skull before you weep, and I'll try to keep some part of me sincere.)

We emerged from youth all wide-eyed like the rest. Shedding skin faster than skin can grow, and armed with hammers, feathers, blunt knives: words, to meet and to define and to... but you must know the same games that we played in dirt, in dusty school yards has found a higher pitch and broader scale than we feared possible, and someone must be picked last, and one must bruise and one must fail. And that still twitching bird was so deceived by a window, so we eulogized fondly, we dug deep and threw its elegant plumage and frantic black eyes in a hole, and rushed out to kill something new, so we could bury that too.

The first chapters of lives almost made us give up altogether. Pushed towards tired forms of self immolation that seemed so original. I must, we must never stop watching the sky with our hands in our pockets, stop peering in windows when we know doors are shut. Stop yelling small stories and bad jokes and sorrows, and my voice will scratch to yell many more, but before I spill the things I mean to hide away, or gouge my eyes with platitudes of sentiment, I'll drown the urge for permanence and certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement.

They called here to tell me that your're finally dying,
through a veil of childish cries.
Southern Manitoba prairie's pulling at the pant leg of your bad disguise.
So why were you so anchorless?
Shoebox full of photos;
found a grainy mirror.
Sunken cheeks and slender hands.
Grocery lists and carbon-copied letters offer silence for my small demands.
Hey how'd you get so anchorless?
Got an armchair from your family home.
Got your P.G. Wodehouse novels, and your telephone.
Got your plates and stainless steel.
Got that way of never saying what you really feel: so anchorless.
A boat abandoned in some backyard.
Anchorless in the small town that you lived and died in.

Wait until the day says it's closing, and public is put away. Write by the light of a pay phone your list of "I meant to say". Like "Winter comes too soon", or "Radiators hum out of tune". Out under the Disraeli, with rusty train track ties, we'll carve new streets and sidewalks, a city for small lives, and say that we'll stay for one more year. Wait near the end of September. Wait for some stars to show. Try so hard not to remember what all empty playgrounds know: that sympathy is cruel. Reluctant jester or simpering fool. But six feet off the highway, our bare legs stung with wheat, we'll dig a hole and bury all we could not defeat, and say that we'll stay for one more year. Bend to tie a shoelace, or bend against your fear, and say that you'll stay for one more year. With so much left to seek, the lease runs out next week.

Garage Sale. Saturday.I need to pay
my heart's outstanding bills.
A cracked-up compass and a pocket watch,
some plastic daffodils.
The cutlery and coffee cups I stole from all-night restaurants,
a sense of wonder only slightly used
a year or two to haunt you in the dark.
For a phone call from far away
with a "Hi, how are you today?",
and a sign recovery comes
to the broken ones.
A wage-slave forty-hour work week weighs
a thousand kilograms.
So bend your knees comes with a free fake smile
for all your dumb demands.
The cordless razor that my father bought


when I turned 17,
a puke-green sofa, and the outline to
a complicated dream of dignity.
For a laugh, too loud and too long.
For a place where awkward belong,
and a sign recovery comes
to the broken ones.to the broken ones.to the broken ones.
For the broken ones.
"Or Best Offer."

Measure me in metered lines, in one decisive stare,
the time it takes to get from here to there.
My ribs that show through t-shirts and these shoes I got for free;
I'm unconsoled, I'm lonely.
I am so much better than I used to be.

Terrified of telephones and shopping malls and knives,
And drowning in the pools of other lives.
Rely a bit to heavily on alcohol and irony.
Get clobbered on by courtesy, in love with love, and lousy poetry.

And I'm leaning on this broken fence between Past and Present tense.
And I'm losing all those stupid games that I swore I'd never play.
But it almost feels okay.

Circumnavigate this body of wonder and uncertainty.
Armed with every precious failure, and amateur cartography,
I breathe in deep before I spread those maps out on my bedroom floor.

And I'm leaning on this broken fence between Past and Present tense.
And I'm losing all those stupid games that I swore I'd never play.
But it feels okay.

And I'm leaving. Wave goodbye.
And I'm losing, but I'll try, with the last ways left, to remember.
Sing my imperfect offering.

All night restaurant, Norh Kildonan.
Luke warm coffee tastes like soap.
I trace you outline in spilled sugar,
Killing time and killing hope.

This brand new strip mall chews on farmland as we fish for someone to blame.
But we communicate in questions,
And all our answers sound the same.
Under sputtering flourescents,

After re-fills are re-filled.
Negotiations at a stand-still,
Spoon and rolling saucer stilled.
If you ask how I got so bitter,

I'll ask how you got so vain.
And all our questions blur together.
The answers always sound the same.
We can't look at one another.

I'll say something thoughtful soon,
But I can't listen to the quiet so I hum this mindless tune
I stole from some dumb country-rock star.
I don't even know his name.

It's like my stupid little questions:
The answers always sound the same.
Tell me why we sound so lame.
Why we communicate in questions and all our answers sound the same.

I'm standing on this corner.
Can't get their attention.
Facing rush hour faces turned around.
I clutch my stack of paper, press one to a chest,
then watch it swoop and stutter to the ground.
I'm weary with right-angles, abbreviated daylight,
and waiting for a winter to be done.
Why do I still see you in every mirrored window,
in all that I could never overcome?
How I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you.
How you don't know where you should look, so you look at my hands.
How movements rise and then dissolve, melted by our shallow breath.
How causes dance away from me.
I am your pamphleteer.
I walk this room in time to the beat of the Gestetner,


contemplate my next communique.
The rhetoric and treason of saying that I'll miss you.
Of saying "Hey, well maybe you should stay."
Sing "Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one"
like me remembering the way it could have been.
Help me with this barricade.
No surrender. No defeat.
A spectre's haunting Albert Street.
I am your pamphleteer.

Headlights race towards the corner of the dining room.
Half illuminate a face before they disappear.
You breathe in forty years of failing to describe a feeling.
I breathe out smoke against the window, trace the letters in your name.
Our letters sound the same;
full of all our changing that isn't change at all.
All straight lines circle sometime.
You said "Somewhere there's a box full of replacement parts
to all the tenderness we've broken or let rust away.
Somewhere sympathy is more than just a way of leaving.
Somewhere someone says 'I'm sorry.'
Someone's making plans to stay."
So tell me it's okay.
Tell me anything, or show me there's a pull,
unassailable, that will lead you there,
from the dark, alone, benevolence that you've never known,
or you knew when you were four and can't remember.
Where a small knife tears out those sloppy seams,


and the silence knows what you silence means,
and your metaphors (as mixed as you can make them)
are linked, like days, together.
I still hear trains at night, when the wind is right.
I remember everything, lick
and thread this string that will never mend you
or tailor more than a memory of a kitchen floor,
or the fire-door that we kept propping open.
And I love this place; the enormous sky,
and the faces, hands that I'm haunted by,
so why can't I forgive these buildings,
these frameworks labeled "Home"?

A soft breeze with the slippery concrete black and full of muddy slush,
contrasting with the hoarfrost,
clean and hung on a tunnel of silent shivering trees
(the ones you said you'd like to be),
and the birds that screamed at the sun
now buried deep down below the ground,
beneath the snow, I press my shoulder to this wall between us.
I know you are behind me and I press my shoulder to this wall,
determined not to turn around.
I do and see you standing,
still that statue that I molded in my mind to kiss,
so beautiful you'll never move again.
Someplace far away, at some sad table littered with chipped plates,
with bad light,
in 48 frames from a movie on the cutting room floor,
you said "True meaning would be dying with you",


and though I wanted to, I did not smile.
But now I will give up on this wall that I have fought with,
never uncover meaning behind our rich words.
If I could I would make you a raging river,
with angry rapids, supplied with rain,
so you could always meander
and forever be able to run away
without contending with myths wrongly interpreted, with pain.
A harsh wind.

My city's still breathing (but barely it's true)
through buildings gone missing like teeth.
The sidewalks are watching me think about you,
sparkled with broken glass.
I'm back with scars to show.
Back with the streets I know.
Will never take me anywhere but here.
The stain in the carpet, this drink in my hand,
the strangers whose faces I know.
We meet here for our dress-rehearsal to say "I wanted it this way"
wait for the year to drown.
Spring forward, fall back down.
I'm trying not to wonder where you are.
All this time lingers, undefined.
Someone choose who's left and who's leaving.
Memory will rust and erode into lists of all that you gave me:
a blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest,
the best parts of Lonely, duct-tape and soldered wires,
new words for old desires,
and every birthday card I threw away.
I wait in 4/4 time.
Count yellow highway lines that you're relying on to lead you home.

So the fields are stubble,
the garden is done where the scary scarecrow stands
and sees her holding up horizons with her hands.
She's so tired of reading Daddy's lips - -that essay on a frown.
Watch her memories of human voices drown.
Let horsey bray break between the thunder boom.
Make grasses' swish meet the cricket's ring.
Let every sound consecrate our whispering words that Betta never heard.
The backlanes tie the city down; a mess of dirty string.
Winter dies the same way every spring.
As the skytries on its uniform of turned off t.v. grey,
and the way we watched her watch us walks away,


let every rain clatter down at groaning streets.
Make footsteps tick, talk to echoed walls.
Let every sound consecrate our whispering the words that Betta never heard.
Let every wind howl and creak the creaking doors
to rooms that too much has happened in.
Let every sound consecrate our whispering the words that Betta never heard.

There's blood in the sink, and he's plunging his wrists in.
A hangover halo is washing away.
Mechanic-school dropout stares into the mirror,
stands up in his derelict daydreams.
Always too tall,
always walked around wearing a smile that was never quite sure of itself.
Planning a future of failures inflicted in phone calls
from strip clubs and bail bonds.
Don't give me that look,
I looked harder than most did,
let details like sharp nails punch holes in my shoes.
Soft-traced to frown as I put the receiver down.


Where do I go for a pardon?
There's a light left on.
There's a pace to our direction.
There's a movie-still of a heart I'd like to mention.
We're listing what's left: a signed Slayer t-shirt,
a car up on blocks in his mother's back yard.

Her body is a difficult sister, and she loves her,
and hides her somewhere in herself safe from harm.
She's barely coasting into a paycheque, stuck on empty.
Her blue eyes frozen green in the low-lit ATM.
I need a way to measure the distance.
I need a way to say why,
out of breath or out of key, her voice resonated in me.
Her body is a difficult sister, and she loves her,
and hides her somewhere in herself safe from harm.
Her night shift is over,
she's writing you a postcard to say that she's okay
and it's raining there again.
My fury's rising faster than bus-fares.
Could someone clarify why there's no structured narrative?
No neat story-line to explain?
Wish on everything.
Pray that she remains proud and strange and so hopelessly hopeful.
(Wishes and prayers are the way that we leave the lonely alone
and push the wounded away).
She shoplifts some Christmas gifts,
and a bracelet for herself, and considers phoning home.
Has some quarters in her hand.
But she sits down on the sidewalk and bites her bottom lip,
and spends the afternoon willing traffic-lights to change.

They're tearing up streets again.
They're building a new hotel.
The Mayor's out killing kids to keep taxes down,
and me and my anger sit folding a paper bird,
letting the curtains turn to beating wind.
Wish I had a socket-set to dismantle this morning.
And just one pair of clean socks.
And a photo of you.
When you get off work tonight,
meet me at the construction site,
and we'll write some notes to tape to the heavy machines,
like "We hope they treat you well. Hope you don't work too hard.
We hope you get to be happy sometimes."
Bring your swiss-army knife, and a bottle of something,
and I'll bring some spraypaint and a new deck of cards.
Hey I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness.
Keep all those bad ideas. Keep all our hope.
It's here in the smallest bones, the feet and the inner-ear.
It's such an enormous thing to walk and to listen.


I'd like to fall asleep to the beat of you breathing
in a room near a truckstop on a highway somewhere.
You are a radio. You are an open door.
I am a faulty string of blue christmas lights.
You swim through frequencies.
You let that stranger in, as I'm blinking off and on and off again.
We've got a lot of time.
Or maybe we don't, but I'd like to think so, so let me pretend.
These are my favourite chords.
I know you like them too.
When I get a new guitar, you can have this one and sing me a lullaby.
Sing me the alphabet.
Sing me a story I haven't heard yet.