My recipe

One footpath, two country lanes and one alameda laden with green palms. Two back alleys, one foothill, and three yawning moors. Two pebbles, one quartz castle, seventeen boorish carabao. Two zebu, four burly bruins and nine tipsy taffy-like rolling dales. One petal, two stems and maybe a bit of artichoke. There’s one cygnet, two St. Laurent clad v-neck hipsters, and one arborescent squigy punk. Five winks of a firefly electric circus, then one parading of hawthorns and haycocks, looking like mountaintop ruffians, like Crescent street gangsters. One hyphen, one sunlit pother of trans-galactic space-skin particles, dallying about a window frame like acrobats tossing. One coffeepot moon, one spoon pate as a hubcap, nineteen thousand rocket ships, whirling whizzing and pissing. One staccato snort of a cicada, one palm reading session with a seer by the overpass, one forest growing out of the back of a homeless man, one inbox, one billion gay people, three drunkard towers of pancakes for every Sunday from now until the eventuality of sometime whenever. And don't you dare forget a lot of midnight crying, toilet bowl psychology sessions, orangutan guffawing, pit-a-patting hearts lessons, speaker-to-ear-to-brain-connections, mid-Marbollo affair regressions, and to turn off the oven when your done.

rugs

washable, washability you can trust

Whatever happened to Piccadilly moustaches. To racist STM bus wonderers. To stay-at-home Mac and Cheese luncheons with Bob Barker, pretending to be sick, pretending to be old. Is he dead? Someone said that he’s been a corpse for years and they have him suspended by strings playing Plinko. His lips are probably harder than old breast implants. I don’t remember whether my first cat was half-black or mottled. I sometimes read books in my sleep, and wake up while eating sandwiches, or talking with dead relatives on the telephone. My shoes and stomach are filled with gunpowder. If I move or feel anxious, I might rocket off. I have to confess, at one point or another I probably pictured you naked. My mom says I have body dysmorphia, I think I’m just young. Once, I realized I was a gay vegetarian and nearly keeled over laughing. Naya’s bottled Evian water. Have you ever been licked by a cow, or misspelled independent, or fantasized about Alexandre Despatie, or killed a cockroach with a hammer. I haven’t either. When I was little, I used to hide for hours from my mom in the grocery store, until she was neurotic and flailing in the meat section. I am, I am, I am, I am. It’s incessant. Did you catch the reference? Some companies only allow their employees to write in blue pen. It’s such a relief to be rid of form. Garden gnomes are conspiring again. Eyelids have adjustable shutter speeds. Virginia Woolfe never had a formal education. 78% of people have traveled elsewhere without their cat. Mormons are mostly left-handed. We turn right 51% of the time. Hamster’s blink one eye at a time. A frog’s favourite color is blue. Moose can pee for fifteen minutes. Nick Ward can pee for nine. A Creatine-pumped frat once lay a 33 inch terd. There’s nothing worse than bathos and machismo. Sentimentality’s pretty bad too. What is it about men in plaid that just gets me. Do you think we could use a calorimeter on a teenage heart, to see how much energy they waste on angst and bad poetry. The world’s been imploding ever since sniglet became a word.

brain freeze contest

Totting tot between tall jackets at Wal-Mart, clothing racks as stage curtains. Then a heave, a plastic hammer, he’s screaming and then the nanny rushes down the staircase with the Lanocane. Grazing shins with old men on the bus. Yellow stained fingers from organic chemistry class. And then it folds over and the moon, pale as a Canadian palm, sighs. We ramble, we tic-tac-toe with two-bit talks, the lint between your toes. Like an alien cloud forest. We were launching a lunar mission, though somewhere in our gasp between satellite and earthen crust, we slipped sidelong into a wormhole, and became a grin as Orion’s belt. There’s no sense
tossing loose change off the CN tower and killing the cavalcade of a preschool march beneath us. Are we tied? Geriatric ward jig of a bus engine, propane soup. Battery acid ice cubes. Alkaline-powered merry-go-round. I wish everything was as it was, powered by a shaft, a turbine, a crank, powered by the church, by the host, by the sermon, by flimsy fags tussling in a hay stacked barn, by palm reading, by codgers adjusting their belts, by Mr. Rogers espying the waste of a soon-to-be nubile nine-year-old, by shoelaces untangled like tree branches, by miss-buttoned overcoats, by the flanks of his horse, by a giant heap of banana pie, by a 9X9 square matrix, by a plasma shotgun, by those three footless birds on the McGill flag, by my grade three teacher who smelt like old coffee, by intestinal turbulence, by our carbon footprint on the boreal forest, by our lives expressed in hyphens and flicks and one drawn out semi-colon that can hardly breathe. The ocean’s an expanse of sometimes extending into never, that’s how far away the horizon is. Until you’ve been to Quebec, and sought after fruitlessly for the one English stop sign, then you’ll know how wretched it is. Speaking French feels like holding your breath underwater. The earth tries to breath, but it orbits too close to and asteroid belt and often chokes on all that dust. I remember talking with a harvest moon, and conversing with my cat. Countries are like soda labels. Yemen. Nova Scotia doesn’t actually exist, unless stumbled across. The East end is a myth, a corporate ploy to up oil prices. Old maps depicted continents as if they were chunks of Nicaraguan cheese. I mostly ever feel things so I can update my facebook status.

wraiths

STM

Belly filled train cart, then a jolt. Totting tot topples over, wheeling round woman like a whorl, the fox trot and click of a metro rail jerk and joggle. The red-nosed man swells like a coffee pot, thrown over with the surge, then the geriatric ward jig of wayworn bodies shaken to shambles. We unpeel. Then a heave, hefted from the undertow of a gullet, hands sprawled out like ferns, bent-backed, furrowed brow and stern. Regenesis on the railway, we unfurl back into uprightness and rearrange, reassert ourselves, and the tunnels swallow us back into that gorge. I’m that reflection there, light diffused on the other side of a Plexiglas window. That disorder of small body noises, hollowed out cavities like a turkey dinner. But it changes now, between Atwater and Lionel, arguably bumpier than any swath of Montreal asphalt. I pour into him like water into a bay, even if it’s just the press of my back into the denim of his jacket, it’s a secret kept inside a chest and the crowdedness offers some gauze of pretense. And in that one drawn-in inhale of the metro submerged between stations, the flick of his zipper nearly makes me keel over dizzy in a tizzy. Then the snap back and clack of a briefcase, the outpour, the disembark, the shuffling of Dock Martins, the sloughing-off of our underground skins, Lilly-white in a bus terminal, behind us the chuffing carries on. The STM parade, a nether-world cavalcade, just an asteroid belt of moonish mugs circled round and round again in the digestive track of the city, churned into mulch. Skyscrapers sway like boat boughs, those masts; sidewalks matted with cigarette bud pâté. No more balloons, just plastic bags caught and swollen in tree branches. We carry on.

Senior Citizens Aggressively Dancing