The Weakerthans

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.

> I want to call a request through heating vents,
And hear them answered with a whispered no,
To crack the code of muscles slack and tense,
Let every second step in boots on snow,
Complete you name in accents I can't place,
That stumble where the syllables combine,
Take depositions from a strangers face,
Paint every insignificance a sign.
So tell me nothing matters less or more,
Say whatever we think actions are,
We'll never know what anything was for,
If near is just as far away as far,
And I'm permitted one act I can save,
I choose to sit here next to you and wave.

How I don't know how to sing,
I can barely play this thing,
But you never seem to mind,
And you tell me to fuck off,
When I need somebody to,
How you make me laugh so hard,
How whole years refuse to stay,
Where we told them to bad dog,
Locked up blindly in a word,
Or a misplaced souvenir,
How the past chews on your shoes,
And these memories lick my ear.
I know,
You might role your eyes at this,
But I'm so
Glad that you exist.
How we waste our precious time,
Marching in the picket line,
That surround those striking hearts,
And the time is never now,
And we know who we should love,
But we're never certain how.
I know,
You might role your eyes at this,
But I'm so
Glad that you exist.
I know,
You might role your eyes at this,
But I'm so
Glad that you exist.
I know,
You might role your eyes at this,
But I'm so,
Glad that you exist.

Well I'm lost,
I'm afraid,
Rope tied down to a leaky boat,
To the roof of a car on a road in the dark and it's snowing.

If I'm more,
Then it means less,
Last call for happiness,
I'm your dress near the back of your knees and your slip is showing.

I'm afloat,
In a summer parade,
Up the street in the town that you were born in,
With the girl at the top wearing tulle,
And a Miss Somewhere sash,
Waving like the queen.

Beauty's just another word,
I'm never certain how to spell,
Go tell the nurse to turn the TV back on,
And throw away my misery,
It never meant that much to me,
It never sent a get-well card.

And I broke,
Like a bad joke,
Some bodies' uncle told,
At a wedding reception in 1972.
Where a little boy under a table with cake in his hair,
Stared at the grown-up's feet as they danced and swayed.

And his father laughed and talked on the long ride home.
And his mother laughed and talked on the long ride home.
And he thought about how everyone dies someday.
And when tomorrow gets here where will yesterday be.
And fell asleep in his brand new winter coat.

Buy me a shiny new machine,
That runs on lies and gasoline,
And all those batteries we stole from smoke alarms,
And disassembles my despair,
Never took me anywhere,
It never once bought me a drink.

Let the waitress put the chairs up,

let the glasses that you broke,
form a picture of our leader
with a halo made of smoke.

Let the golden oldies station
crackle and come through.
With a final benediction
we'll hum along to.
Before we say goodnight

Let our talk about the ball game
and the weather show we care.
Like a sound we didn't notice,
until it stopped and left us there.



With the traffic and our heartbeats
beating in straight time,
let our hatred and affection
march in the same line,
Before we say goodnight.

Oh, protect our secret handshake
once more with feeling.
Let the toast to absent members
push through the ceiling.
Before we say goodnight.

Why don't you ever want to play?
I'm tired of this piece of string.
You sleep as much as I do now, and you
don't eat much of anything.

I don't know who you're talking to
I made a search through every room,
but all I found was dust that moved
in shadows of the afternoon.

And listen,
about those bitter songs you sing?
They're not helping anything.
They won't make you strong.

So, we should open up the house.
Invite the tabby two doors down.
You could ask your sister, if
she doesn't bring her Basset Hound.
Ask the things you shouldn't miss:
tape-hiss and the Modern Man,
The Cold War and Card Catalogues,
to come and join us if they can,

for girly drinks and parlor games.
We'll pass around the easy lie
of absolutely no regrets,
and later maybe you could try
to let your losses dangle off
the sharp edge of a century,
and talk about the weather, or
how the weather used to be.

And I'll cater
with all the birds that I can kill.
Let their tiny feathers fill
disappointment.

Lie down;
lick the sorrow from your skin.
Scratch the terror and begin
to believe you're strong.

All you ever want to do is drink and watch TV,
and frankly that thing doesn't really interest me.
I swear I'm going to bite you hard and taste your tinny blood
if you don't stop the self-defeating lies you've been repeating
since the day you brought me home.
I know you're strong.

Just one more drink and then I should be on my way home.
I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about.
I've had a really nice time, but my dogs need to be fed.
I must say that in the right light you look like Shackleton.
Comment allez vous ce soir?
Je suis comme ci comme ca.
Yes, a penguin taught me French back in Antarctica.
I could show you the way shadows colonize snow.
Ice breaking up on the bay off the Lassiter coast.
Light failing over the pole as every longitude leads up to your frost bitten feet.
Oh, you're very sweet, thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida,
But I must be getting back to dear Antarctica.
Say, do you have a ship and a dozen able men
That maybe you could lend me?

> So you watch the sunrise sinking
And she's talking in her sleep
A dream of how alone she was
Tomorrow when you keep
All those promises to someone
In a mirror you will find
At your parents' house in 1989.

Terrorized by the ruling party: calendars and commas.
Small request, could we please (Turn around and around and around) turn around?

Then you whisper your arrival
walking backwards to the door.
Wonder briefly what it is you're hesitating for.
All the streets lie down, deserted
in the darkest part of night,
To lead you through the evening to the light.

Pulled along in the tender grip of watches and ellipses.
Small request. Could we please (Turn around and around and around) turn around?
(Turn around and around and around)
Turn around?

Doctors play your dosage like a card trick
Scrabbled down the hallways yelling "Yatzee"
I brought books on Harper in the Arctic
Something called "The Politics of Lonely"
A toothbrush and Quick Pick with THE plus
You tried not to roll your sunken eyes

And said "Hey can you help me? I can't reach it"
Pointed to the camera in the ceiling
I climbed up, blocked it so they couldn't see


Turned to find you out of bed and kneeling
Before the nurses came took you away
I stood there on a chair and watched you pray

The mirrors and the unacknowledged nods.
Dial tones and license plates.
The words you didn't choose.
Everything the day's too small to hold spills on to the dusk,
and shorts the evening's fuse.
So you fumble for a voice and sing "Happy Birthday."
Read it to yourself again.
The stories always end the same.
He can't stay and she won't run,
and fear is where they're calling from.
Staunch the blood from countless tiny cuts.
We're all out of bandages.
The heaters rattle taunt.


Sifting through translucent shards of glass,
looking for a filament that lit the life you want.
So you stumble for the phone, grasp the cord and pull.
Will your readership complain the stories always end the same?
She can't stay and he won't run, and fear is where they're calling from.
Afraid is where you're calling from.

When the bus shelter windows and napkin-dispensers surprise with distorted reflections, it's never the someone you're hoping to recognize. When the rent is too high living here between reasons to live and you can't sleep alone and your memories groan and the borders of night start to give. When you can't save cash or conviction; you're broke and you're breaking - a tired shoelace or a wave. So long past, past-due. A new name for everything. When the one-ways collude with the map that you've folded wrong and the route you've abandoned is always the path you probably should be upon. When the bottle-cap ashtrays and intimate's ears are all full with results of your breaks and the threads of your fear are unfurled with the tiniest pull. One more time, try. Stand with your hands in your pockets and stare at the smudge of a newspaper sky and ask it to rain a new name for everything. Fire every phrase. They don't want to work for us anymore. Dot or Dash our days. Make your face the flag of a semaphore. All you won't show. The boxes you brought here and never unpacked are still patiently waiting to go. So put on those clothes you never grew into and smile like you mean it for once. If you come back, bring a new name for everything.

> late afternoon another day is nearly done

a darker grey is breaking through a lighter one
a thousand sharpened elbows in the underground
that hollow hurried sound of feet on polished floor
and in the dollar store the clerk is closing up
and counting loonies trying not to say
i hate winnipeg

the driver checks the mirror seven minutes late
crowded riders' restlessness enunciates
the guess who suck, the jets were lousy anyway
the same mood every day
and in the turning lane
someone's stalled again
he's talking to himself
and hears the price of gas repeat his phrase
i hate winnipeg

up above us all,
leaning into sky
our golden business boy
will watch the north end die
and sing 'i love this town'
then let his arching wrecking ball proclaim:
"i...hate...winnipeg"

So you don't get to be a saint
Martyrs never last this long
Guess I'll never be the one
To defeat desire in song
Here's a marker
Here's my naked skin
Our 'exhibit A'
Put a small x where I lost my way

All the actors broke their legs
And it's to late to postpone
The producer's getting high
And the audience went home
Smile and take your awkward bow
Turn and stumble off the stage
Let the rain be your applause
Every encore sooth your rage
Squint with one eye


Hum a show-tune
wait for your right to say
oh that's where you must have lost your way

Megaphones in helicopters squeal ??짖€??"hey are you okay???짖€????
Searchlights circle, where we lost our way

All our accidents were purposeful and felt
Stripped of providence or any way to tell
But our intentions were intangible and sweet
Sick with simple math and shy discoveries
Piled up against our impending defeat.

the sirens woke me up again
i know they're coming for me someday just a matter of when
count to 25 and yawn
touch the clock and turn my back against the dawn
and hope for that one dream of hardware stores with checkered floors and buckets full with nails
we're floating effortless over the apartment to the boat
im rowing past the office windows
mother, mother may i cry
father will you teach me how to die the right way someday
i don't want a second chance to turn my stuttering reluctance into romance
with these documents and kindergarten anthems with my drunken liturgies


tune the fm in, to static and pretend that its the sea
but four words fumble for the microphone
you should have known
you should have known

Doctors play your dosage like a card trick
Scrabbled down the hallways yelling "Yatzee"
I brought books on Harper in the Arctic
Something called "The Politics of Lonely"
A toothbrush and Quick Pick with THE plus
You tried not to roll your sunken eyes

And said "Hey can you help me? I can't reach it"
Pointed to the camera in the ceiling
I climbed up, blocked it so they couldn't see


Turned to find you out of bed and kneeling
Before the nurses came took you away
I stood there on a chair and watched you pray

Doctors play your dosage like a card trick
Scrabbled down the hallways yelling "Yatzee"
I brought books on Harper in the Arctic
Something called "The Politics of Lonely"
A toothbrush and Quick Pick with THE plus
You tried not to roll your sunken eyes

And said "Hey can you help me? I can't reach it"
Pointed to the camera in the ceiling
I climbed up, blocked it so they couldn't see


Turned to find you out of bed and kneeling
Before the nurses came took you away
I stood there on a chair and watched you pray

Why don't you ever wanna play?
I'm tired of this piece of string.
You sleep as much as I do now,
and you don't eat much of anything.
I don't know who you're talking to,
I made a search through every room,
but all I found was dust that moved
in shadows of the afternoon

And listen, about those bitter songs you sing;
they're not helping anything,
they won't make you strong.

So we should open up the house,
invite the Tabby two doors down.
You could ask your sister if,
she doesn't bring her basset hound.
Ask the things you shouldn't miss:
tape hiss and the modern man,
cold war and card catalogues
to come join us if they can.

Girly drinks and parlor games,
we'll pass around the easy lie
of absolutely no regrets,


and later maybe you could try.
To let your losses dangle off,
the sharp edge of a century.
We'll talk about the weather,
or how the weather use to be.

And I'll cater, with all the birds that I can kill,
let their tiny feathers fill disappointment.
Lie down, and lick the sorrow from your skin
Scratch the terror and begin to believe you're strong.

All you ever want to do is drink and watch TV,
frankly that thing doesn't really interest me.
I swear I'm going to bite you hard and taste your tinny blood
if you don't stop the self-defeating lies you've been repeating
since the day you brought me home.
I know you're strong.

Morning bright, rise.
Go over your lines.
Iron your carefully crafted disguise.
We'd all like to sing.
It's easy to sigh; to sprinkle a handful of plausible lies.
Our buildings will rise,
poke out our own eyes.
Publicly smile and privately frown.
A weeping reprise.
Please hear my cries;
I'd like to pull just this one building down.
So turn off the sky.


Head in my hands.
Night keep me warm.
White window-sill.
Blinded by heart.
Cut my hair short.
"Eyeless in Gaza with the slaves at the mill."

I have a headache. I have a sore back. I have a letter I can't send. I have desire, it falters and falls down, it calls you up drunk at three or four a.m. to wonder when...wonderful. All the cheap tricks I tried too hard not to pull. Pulled along or pulled apart. The diagnosis of a foreign frame of heart. I have a story that I'd like to tell you, it's littered with settings and second takes. I have a feeling that hums with the street lights and hides under ice in always frozen lakes. My mistake to make you cringe. Another greeting like a broken creaky hinge to oil and push or pry apart. The diagnosis of a foreign frame of heart. Found a cure for being sure, and, sure as anything, I'll smile for my reckoning.

Held like water in you shaking hands are all the small defeats a day demands.
10-6 or 9-5 trying, dying to survive.
Never knowing what survival means.
Leave the apartment to buy alcohol.
Hang our diplomas on the bathroom wall.
Pick at the plaster chipped away,
survey some stunning tooth decay,
enlist the cat in the impending class-war.
Let's lay our bad day down here,
dear and make-believe we're strong,
or hum some protest song.
Like maybe "We Shall Overcome Someday."
Overcome the stupid things we say.
Say I needed more than this,
say I needed one more kiss.
We left that light on way too long now.
Let's plant a bomb at city-hall and kill an MLA.
We'll talk the night away.
You call in sick, I'll quit the word-games that I play.
I swear I way more than half believe it when I say that somewhere love and justice shine.
Cynicism falls asleep.
Tyranny talks to itself.
Sappy slogans all come true.
We forget to feed our fear.

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.

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.

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.

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.

we're rolling neon lights and slinking purple skies squeeze out soft regrets from all our lives as i greet another door that opens in to that place that we repeatedly begin i'm tangled up in tries slipping on i wonder why i face affection not embrace another urban wasteland thick with fears i see lights that shine like frozen television tears or dying embers of another day please tell me what it is i i wanna say i'm tangled up in tries slipping on i wonder why i face affection not embrace affection not embrace