the fisherman

every single day
after your one hour commute (on the GO train)
you come home to me

and there stands this crumbling statue
framed by the doorway to our loft
such solid stone
so cracked and broken

oh god, babe

and I just sit you down on the couch
and I turn on the hockey game /
turn on ‘Dancing With The Stars’ / turn on ‘The Bachelor’ /and we eat take-out / watch movies / upload photos / upload music / read Wikipedia / read celebrity blogs / quit smoking / get drunk on Friday afternoon / resume smoking / fight about rent / think about moving / take a nap / watch Dr. Phil / feel better about ourselves / go to a bar / go to a club / go to a strip club / feel naughty / buy new lingerie / fall asleep / wake up / get stuck in traffic / read women’s magazines / go on a diet / buy cases of VitaWater / go to Home Depot / renovate our kitchen / fuck in the kitchen / watch YouTube videos / go to the mall / eat at Harvey’s / buy more records / take up yoga / do a cleanse / get drunker than ever / fuck in the kitchen on the new granite counter tops while watching ‘The Bachelor’/ sit in the den / watch the game / smoke some pot. / fall asleep / upload photos of all of it to Facebook

once in a while
maybe every other July
we go up north
rent a little boat

we float on thick black water at dawn
breath in this minty evergreen wind

and you tell me
you always wanted to be a fisherman

The Death of the Book?

This year, the theme of ‘The Scream’ (Toronto’s annual literary festival), was ‘the death of the book’. This challenging theme had a lot of people wondering; can the book survive in our fast-paced and ever advancing technological landscape?

The tired elderly book must now attempt to exist alongside flashier and more youthful forms of entertainment (how many among us even consider a book a form of entertainment?) such as, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, DVDs, TV, and the latest gadget, ‘Kindle’ (a handheld device on which you can download and read books).
But before we rent out a church basement and hold an egg–salad-sandwiches-with-no-crusts sort of funeral for our fading friend, let’s look at a more joyful event: the birth of the book!

After Gutenberg developed the first printing press in the early 16th century, it wasn’t long before the modern book was developed. Innovations like pagination, punctuation, paragraphing and indexing soon made up a standard format and this, in combination, with translation (ie. the bible could now be read in common languages instead of exclusively in Latin) lead to the widespread diffusion and distribution of information.

It is easy to argue that the birth of the book was also the birth of the information age. Books meant that information was on the loose and available! In the 150 years following the introduction of the book, the number of schools in England rose from 34 to 444, in an attempt to direct and control all this wild info. Suddenly people could acquire information themselves and could make their own decisions, without the ‘help’ of community authorities.

So if that sly old book actually spawned the information age, could this modern information age (you know, the one birthed by computers) really take aim at killing the book?

My guess is: no way! Books, in their infinite ingenuity, may change and evolve but they will live. Books will exist online, expertly embedded with active links to other relevant texts (how convenient!), they will exist as little Kindle files and fragments, and they will exist on books.google.com!

But most importantly, they will exist as they always have, as a tactile consumer items that we can buy at a store, hold in our hand, and display in our home. Technological advancement has yet to hinder our rampant materialism!
So long live the book! ☺

The Wake

2. somewhere in the city:

she arrives home from work
at six am
and in this bright grey bedtime hour
(he calls it morning)
they read to each other

she opens the tiny window
Toronto cold comes quick and fresh
a sharp intake of breath
the snap and shake
of a clean white sheet

they huddle together
smooth mattress of ice
warm tangle of skin
they are refugees camping in caves of cloth
and winter will surrender to them

if he so wanted
he could read the crumpled take-out menus to her
for his voice is the safest darkness
a warm towel on the forehead
a heavy hand on the belly

there are words that chink
like cups and saucers

strings of sounds
that crackle like sparklers

a pop and a hisssss

a low rumble
(marbles on hardwood)

the rustle and fade of sentences

papers on a desk

scrappy leaves on frozen asphalt

the crack and suck of the refrigerator door

sometimes
the thin red wail of a siren
snakes round their heads
crosses words off his lips
a teacher’s marking pen– making tidy omissions

these blank spots
stuffed with the sounds of the street
poke holes in the prose
and pull it apart

but she makes meaning
from the missing bits
then falls asleep
to this lullaby of lost words

to this poetry of the city

lines on sky

autumn dreams

baby…

baby?

You were asleep.

Did you not realize?

You were dreaming.

You dreamed that it was a dry peach morning in early October. You woke up on the couch (we’ll call it the bed) in your tiny basement apartment and the first thing you saw was the mass of dishes in the sink directly across from your bed-couch. This meant that the itchy image of a rodent was the first thing to enter your heavy head.
I am going to get rats. That’s what you thought.

But you didn’t get up to do the dishes. You scrunched your eyes closed, defiantly rolled around and smacked your face into the couch cushions. You breathed in the dusty scent of tweed and tried to think about not rats.

Pointless. The smell of the dishes is thick and mustardy and it fills the room. Without opening your eyes you stuff your hand under a pillow and feel around for your cell phone. You wrap your fingers around the cool silky plastic, but then a pang of anxiety bolts through your barely awake body. You pull out the phone, flip it open and scroll through your list of contacts. You want to make a call, but you don’t want to phone anyone that will pick up and answer. You see the number for the health clinic. You know it doesn’t open ‘til nineish. Call. You listen as the phone rings once, twice, three times. The answering machine picks up. “Hello, you’ve reached the Toronto Community…” You close your cell with a quick click and smile. Your phone hasn’t been disconnected yet. You have at least one more day before Rogers cuts you off from the world.

Within the next hour you are up and walking to school. Clean white wind nips at your flushed cheeks, which are still warm from your pillow, from sleep. You go to class and you sit with some people that you recognize as friends from Facebook, but you’re not totally certain of anyone’s name, so you don’t say too much. The professor’s words make you feel dazed and sleepy, and you wonder how you can be tired when all you do is sleep. (Last night you got almost 13 hours). You get your essay topics and the one that you choose is pretty cool. You feel excited about it and think about maybe doing some of the research this afternoon. Somehow you know that this will not happen, and that, despite your interest in the topic, you will end up relying on Wikipedia and feverishly writing the paper the night before it is due.

After class you think about heading home, but it’s only 1 pm, and you don’t have anything to do for the rest of the day, and you don’t really want to spend the next 11-12 hours sitting in your apartment. (You don’t have cable). You decide to stay on campus so that you won’t have to feel so all alone. You go to the university library and take the elevator up to the sixth floor, a floor that has five private computer desks that no one really seems to know about, or at least nobody uses. You step off the elevator, round the corner, and sure enough, there’s not a single person at the desks. You take the desk on the far end, in case some other clever student shows up later, and you sit down, put your feet up on the desk, and let your chin fall to your chest. You close your eyes. You like to sit here all by yourself, surrounded by the movement of campus, it makes you feel, at best, sort of productive, and at least, calm.

You think about one hot night in mid-July when you and your brother sat up on the rooftop smoking cigars and waiting for a thunderstorm to break. The night air was dark and heavy and wild. The shingles beneath your bare feet were still warm with the heat of the day’s sun and the air was smelled of sweet vanilla smoke and muddy rain.

You think that if you could only re-visit that evening for one moment, if you could just feel that electric humid air right now, then maybe everything would be okay. Yes, things would be okay…

Wake up now, baby.

It was just a dream.

Wake up
Wake up

I’m here.

dance, baby

hey little girrrl

shake your perfect Pilates bum

prepare your deadly Friday night party dress
turn up the beat

tap French polished toes on glazed cherry hardwood floor
that thumps with base all the way to city skyline windows

little goddess
adorn your tight tan skin with crystals and pearls

slick lotion, lingerie
wet wild perfume oil

now put on your Vuitton, your Jimmy Choos
put on your eyelashes, your wet plasticy pink lips, your rubber tits

call your friends and mix some sparkly sloppy drinks
at midnight emerge into a neon parade of blurry beautiful people
in this damn dress you giggle and you shine and you bypass every guest list line

show off those thin tan legs, let that soft shift of silk swish and sway
you can make them do whatever you want, in these sweet snake skin heels
hum and glow and grind, shimmer in this club, you’re looking so

cokey
and foxy

oh baby

swing your hips
twitch your shoulders

flap and fold those arms
snap ya neck

dance
dance

a bedside prayer
‘cause she lay sick now
yeah she got that virus

can she see you shaking?
and dancing’?
she don’t blink no more but her wild black eyes, well  they don’t move together
and she staring at nothing but the same muddy wall

gulp down this tangy fermented air of rusty tin buckets stewing sour bloody bile
no fucking peep show window in here
but oh the rotten humid stench of dead dog on the roadside flesh

see her gnarled thumb stuck to leathery ribs
damp vomit bed sheets and those damn buzzing flies
they love the thick shit and her wide-open eyes

when she goes she won’t be no different
than those hairy chicken bones in the dusty black fire pit
so twitch your skinny legs in prayer and keep yo mother safe

yeah dance baby dance

the most caring robot

While listening to CBS radio’s ‘The Point’ one afternoon, I was not surprised to hear about the introduction of robots to yet another sector of the Japanese market. I was surprised to hear, however, that the robots would be caring for the elderly (who well out number to youth due to a sharp decline in the birth rate). I immediately summoned up a horrible mental picture of a junky 80’s movie robot trying to guide an old lady down a hall, it’s silver mechanical fingers scratching and tearing at her loose saggy flesh. Ugh. I was absolutely ready to flip open my laptop and write about the horrors of technological dependence and the decline of human intimacy. But, I am trying to be a little more open-minded, so I flipped open my laptop and went to Google.

Ah Google, the friendly ghost who knows everything. I found photos of elderly people being washed in robot bathtubs — a bit car-washesqe, yes, but probably more comfortable than being bathed by a pimply high school kid, no loss of dignity there.

There are also these cuddly new robot teddy bears. Each resident of a nursing home gets a teddy, and the teddy asks grandma a question every hour or so. Grandma’s response time determines whether or not teddy should alert a human nurse. This part fell into the ‘creepy’ category for me. I mean, are these bears used in the palliative care unit? Is teddy just checking in to see if grandma is dead yet?

Oh, surely my slightly-luddite mind is jumping ahead and assuming the worst again. These new additions to nursing-home care don’t seem too intrusive. But the Japanese elderly of the next few years will have to battle an entire army of robots. Currently, mechanisms are being developed to serve as automated nurses, food-administrators and bathroom-helpers. The jury is still out on how much care should be left to RJD2 and Gork.

If my grandma feels confused and angered by the TV remote, then how well is she going to interact with these possessed teddy bears? Imagine a war veteran waking up in the night to a glowing-eyed teddy demanding: “What – is – your – name?” I think I can assume (with a sort of pride) that this teddy would not survive.

When I am elderly, it might be a different story entirely, for I will have come of age in a technological world. Google and me are like, bestest buds. So if the ghostly hands of technology care for my elderly body, I might not mind so much. I might feel comforted knowing that the robots and computers will not make a mistake in my care.

It would be me, the old human, who was mistaken.
Mistaken in my assumption that I could die happily, surrounded only by machines.

Powder Dolls

electric cityscape

chemical love

time means nothing
to children of the city
nighttime finds us at play
in magical attics and candle-lit tents

we laugh our way through pretty purple dreams
palms unfolding with candy of all colours
empty your mind into my lap
you are my favourite bedtime story

lovely blurry boy
put on your ball gown
for our party with no people
and keep my tomorrows away

white wicked sunlight
always interrupts our storybook night
the conversation falls asleep
my mind is full of sad things

numb and lonely day has come again
we stick together in a sweaty sunlit bed
run your hand along my thigh
fill me up with careless fingers

oh daddy
carry me up the stairs
lay that hand on my tiny spine
whisper prayers into my hair

the strong and graceful fingers of time
will not sweep us away into middle age
we laughed, no cackled
at life’s mundane mercies

and so I will not meet you there
in the land of wisdom and age
that is only the theme
of my murky opium dreams

I will never watch you work in our garden
on a hot and quiet summer afternoon
I will not have your babies
I will not do your laundry

because we are nothing
but heartless children

1. somewhere in the city:

a young wife sits in an empty streetcar
on this dark winter morning
rows of T.V screen windows
show the flash and blur of a neon street

five am is a terrifying time

is it good to ‘get used to things’?
she wonders

is there a child alive
who could value this future?
these factory nights ?

once there was man who sat next to her
and did not speak
the slick   slap   slip
of silky parka sleeves
the swish of a whisper

two days later he left a description
of thin icy fingers
a pink hand-knit cap
and the fragility of her long pale neck
amid the clutter of the craigslist ‘missed connections’

there was no good reason to make contact
though she often thought of him now
months later
on this lifeless streetcar
on these haunted journeys home

what loneliness
to lust after a breath of potential

what could they have given each other?
but warm flesh
for the cold bone of teeth

cold cold morning

The Smell of Dusk

The summer that you turn twenty-six years old, you move to a new apartment. Your television is broken in the move, and there is no point in getting a new one, since you can’t really afford the cable bill and you feel like you should read more. In the evenings, because you don’t know what to do in this hot breathy apartment, you walk down to the new housing projects. Amidst the skinny brown towers there are jungle gyms, pink and yellow tubey things, young families at play. You sit still and watch the children. You imagine that you can feel the hot weight of buttery dusk settling on your tired shoulders. You think of baths before bed, of cool cotton pajamas hanging from dry golden limbs, your mother with a bowl of washed cherries in her damp garden hands, your father writing the word porch on your brittle back.

One night, a tall dark skinned boy sits down on the bench next to you. He is wearing work jeans and a dull sleeveless shirt. He smells of bed-sheet sweat and earth and perhaps of coffee. You look at him out of the corner of your eye, stare at the shadowy tuft of hair sticking out from beneath his arm, and you are overcome with the desire to smack your face against the warm sticky flesh of his neck, to breath in the sun of a summer’s day, to kiss the smooth stone of jaw. This sweet humid scent of sea is what makes women fall in love, you think.

The next night you sit on the same bench. You study a pair of young Indian mothers, watch them move about in breezy tunics and thin faded jeans. You see the droplets of pimples along their cheekbones; brown staccato dots almost hidden by their lilac headscarves. The women reach beneath wispy fabric folds and pull out lip-gloss sticks like the ones you had when you were twelve. Dr. Pepper, Mango Madness, Cherry Cheesecake. Their soft lips smack and shine and the two giggle a giddy jumble of strange syllables. One of them reaches her arm out, shifts a stroller- back and forth, back and forth. You think of your grandmother at twenty-one pushing your mother in a pram. You think of your mother at twenty-five, a teacher and a wife.

And you think of yourself– you ate fruit loops for dinner and you have thirty-four pairs of panties so that you do not have to do laundry more than once a month.

Cell phones on the Streetcar!

Sometimes I have a problem or a triumph that I simply keep to myself. I don’t tell my friends everything, and I’m certain that they don’t tell me every single thing either. From the last words of a break-up and the greatest fears of my youth, to what I had for breakfast this morning and the weird ways in which I abused my Saturday night cabbie; it does not all need to be spoken of. However, when I ride the streetcar in Toronto, I hear everything from the lips of everyone.

No subject is sacred; break-ups, sex-tips, job complaints, sweet sentiments, party plans and medical problems are being yelled into staticy cells all the time! And whether in nail salons or neighborhood pubs, people on their phones do not seem to realize that all those around them can hear their ‘private’ conversation.

Why do we do this? How can we have so little regard for our own personal thoughts, feelings and actions? This undeniable disregard for personal privacy is especially odd considering that in the modern West, we, the public, have a strong interest in being peripheral. We have created a society that celebrates the individual and denounces the group.

British philosopher, John Stuart Mill is a well known for his views in defense of the individual. Mill was concerned with the amount of control or authority that a society could rightfully impose on an individual. He held that that each person has the right to be left alone, and that the individual is sovereign. For when each of us is protected against this ‘tyranny of the majority’, we are free to be creative. Of course, this innovation leads to invention, and the cultivation of new technology. The end result of individual freedom then, is inevitable progress for the society as a whole.

Mill’s defense of the individual is central to our Western thought. We believe strongly in our rights to privacy, and we enjoy being alone; yes, we are taught from a young age that it is best to be peripheral. Involvement with the group will only stultify a soul. Yet an overwhelming majority of the people on this earth continues to adhere to the long-held ancient traditions that place the premium on community, not on the individual. In the ancient world, and in the non-west, the public has an interest in being reliable because of the need for communal defense, agriculture etc. In these societies people cannot afford to be strangers because they all depend on one another. This means that each community has an interest in the good character of each of its members; personal development is the business of the village. When an entire community is involved in bringing up its youth, the outcome will be confidence and trust between all citizens, for all citizens.

Because modern Western technologies have done away with our need for a reliable community structure, individualism has flourished. Yet I think that if Mill were alive to see the sort of ‘individualism’, the sort of ‘privacy’ that we now practice in modern Western society, he would find it hauntingly flawed. Although our individualism may seem like a safeguard or an appeal, there is something wrong. Tragically, we have extended privacy rights to our children. Because we do not require our fellow citizens to be reliable, we allow our children to develop in isolation. This can only lead to under development and to poor character.

And perhaps even more sadly, in our capitalist market society, our children and our selves are not simply left alone with personal thoughts. We are left alone in a world saturated with mass media; we are constantly bombarded by commercial advertisements. The Western dream of the supreme individual has morphed into a nightmare: we are a lonely crowd of foolish children, stumbling in our shackles, rushing out to buy the newest toy, trying to feel whole.

And so this is where we find ourselves, both adults and children alike, relishing our individualism while at the very same time, annihilating the state of our personal privacy. It is my hypothesis that we yell into our cell phones, post revealing pics on our facebook profiles and speak to strangers of our problems because we were simply not meant to develop in such insidious isolation.  Individualism has reigned in the West for decades, and yet so many of us cry out– it seems we need to be heard, to be recognized, to be understood.

Please do not mistake me here, my point is not that these embarrassing public phone conversations create the intimacy and community that we did away with long ago, only that they exemplify our tragic struggle to regain that which we have lost and do not remember.