191. Marius à Javert

hours & minutes

après minuit,

your call

dings

several times in my

barely lit

apartment

smiling in spite of myself –

I check and answer

other messages,

stalling before I answer yours

yet –

out of fear, and

excitement

the purple & white

square

glows sunset amidst

notifications

I check the little litany of

messages

once,

twice,

thrice -

still in

queenly

defiance

your photos

illuminate my screen

once more –

I imagine us together

by that twilit

lake, your

dark eyes smiling

into

mine

the first

touch of your

tender yet

strong

hand

hours –

minutes –

past midnight

I am ablaze and

afire with

pangs of new love?

infatuation?

or is it precisely

the mystery

that keeps us –

me –

enthralled?

is it simply

friendship you want?

my own crazed

heart spinning

imaginations and

prophetic

fantasies?

I think of at the love

my partner

and I

share

finally, a

deep and

trusting bond

safe and perhaps

not so

intoxicating

isn’t all love

a thrill at first?

perhaps I only seek

these virtual

sparks

which will always

dissipate

I muse on

love and

faith

in the darkness,

on options

and time seems

such a feeble

foe

to

intensity

buzz

buzz

goes my

phone in the

dark

beckoning,

taunting

innocent

conversation,

I tell

myself

April 24, 2020

Montréal, QC

159. XP

A child with Xeroderma pigmentosum.

Photography By: Sarah Leen

Image Source: National Geographic

So.
much.
Sun.

beekeeper
alien

Black mesh:
mask
hijab

Swirling laughs,
sliding up and
down

Regarding
all alone,
shoes upon the
gravely
lack of
ground;

GO
Mom
says –

bare arms and
open smiles,
twirling pigtails;

Red:
burning,
metal igniting in the
toxic
leaden
rays

Sparkling in the noontime heat:
rectangle,
mass-produced,
delectable –

another
leaps to the
sand;
pounces, pummels:
siren sounds;
a group occludes,
greens and
blues and
reds too –

150. Com’è bello!

Unassuming,
silently presuming –
Two arachnids
tranquilly enslumbered:

Victim huntress,
paused the murderesses;
gentle yearning,
mute the Mother doting:

Golden doubles,
resting, still as marble:
Eight-fold digits
still and softly sun-gilt.

Se il destassi?

In the noontime daybeams
Venetian spun,
Gemini lay, Roman.

143. The Sublime

From: Jan Axel's Blog

swarm of vultures,
high in the afternoon
sun;
slow and circular,
like a baby’s
mobile, suspended in morbid
listlessness above the
Florida
flats:

restless,
tension hovers in the
unoccupied molecules
buzzing between the
unfashionably active
fat mosquitoes;

boxed-up fish suppliers and
phony Chinese restaurants;
ghetto Black-men at the
7-11:
tank-top children in the
avenues and
dried-up yellowed
grass
roasting in the
sunburnt air.

142. Temporality

Like the morning dew,
here
and gone tomorrow:

3 flies lay,
spent
on the
plastic
desktop.

Having seen
them live and
breathe and munch on
dead skin cells;
buzzing now and again
on my face,

strange to see them
immobile,
almost sleeping or in
a trance-like state

It is bizarre,
sweeping them into the
garbage bin,
nestled among the
used tissues:

thinking,
this is what things
come to?

We try to live with a little
dignity, die
with a little
dignity.

Artistic visions,
dreams, and
loves:
sometimes it seems so
meaningless;

yet we carry on,
filling our lives with
things,
as if this will
somehow fill the
hollow restlessness,
or at least cover it,
like a soggy
glow-in-the-dark
bandaid

140. Visiting the Fly

In the midst of the
height of spring
robins bob their
crimson heads across
the earth again:

In a moment of
inspiration,
I am perched myself
at the hot metallic
school desk,
placed so wondrous
in the centre of such
impossible
artistry;

Flies rest calmly
on the spots beside me;
it is not mine, but
theirs:
having no place in our
domain -
here, we are reunited,
all at peace with our
own
ephemerality –

I wonder on our
hypocrisy,
the strangeness of our
condition, our
species,
our cruelty in the midst of such
serene hospitality?

"Dual School Bench" (2002)

Verne Harrison

Donald Forster Sculpture Park,

Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Photo by the very talented Hanneorla

139. Grandma’s

Dust is everywhere;
so is dog hair, cat hair, granny hair.
Old monochromatic photographs,
black and white, rest beside giraffes;
dollar-store dolphins on the mantle
complete the odd ensemble.

Orotund, magnanimous reminders
of a foreign past of hers
finds stasis in this irony:
grandiose relics in harmony
with cheap trinkets,
purchased as tourists do from over-eager merchants.

As if to eradicate
longings for another place,
they are placed, souvenirs,
living with the present, ghosts, for fear
that memory is not enough, that
physical mementos are evermore more apt;

Rummaging through this
strange apartment, it is
odd to feel small
in the magnitude of
such frailty.

Everything here feels
disembodied and disconnected.
Stories of the “old country”
flit in and out of my
head as I finger aimlessly
though album leaves,
eyeing hopelessly
the digital clock on the
stainless steel
microwave.

I am almost powerless as I
realize I am in a shrine to
my past,
our past,
locked in a bygone
identity housed in
another which
makes even
less
sense.

I am trying to care, but
I am confused.

137. Icarus

 

Curious,
the brown and grey
fruit fly
slips quickly
into view;

perched briefly
on the
tumbler’s
edge –

Plip!
Hops, indiscreetly
upon the
untouched
water:

Terror at being
trapped;
or to human
eyes
trying to remember
the breastroke,
quasi-comically:
limbs flailing as
wings begin to
sink;
milliseconds
before the struggle

ends.

An imperceptible
hush
and there is
Ophelia,
laid calmly to rest
in the still
liquid

Thomas did not need
write a mad
scene;
Shakespeare, a
play,
nor Berlioz, an
art song
or
Delaroche,
a painting;

In grim
fascination
have I surveyed
this picturesque
suicide,
having the power to
inform, yet
powerless
to save;
a strange sadism and an
equal
guilt:

136. Erlkönig

Obsession, lust, desire –
these are things permissible
in moments such as this:

Quiet on a snowy night,
young man hunched over,
brow wrinkled in concentration!

In a moment of oblivion,
single-minded focus,
he is unaware of my predation;

In such a moment,
brief and fortunate,
all is possible –

Knowing there’s no second
chance; no harm in being
sinful for the present:

A glance or five is
nothing; a thought or two
is nothing,

For he is leaning here,
his coatless self
upon my car

and I, his captor
have no reason to
expect or wish –

but one may dream
in an instant,
only to laugh later,

in
smiling
irony!

120. Bell A23C

As all good actors,
I act so well I forget
the role:

All of a sudden, I
abandon self and
reclaim you.

Only after the
trance I look,
disgusted at myself.

Copy of a copy,
designed artificiality:

false grain repeating on
false planks of wood;
modems glowing in their
green domains,

chanting mutely in the winter breeze

We are all the same
only I am clever enough to
copy, copy
for I am too afraid to
disrupt this elaborate,
sickening
suffocation

for I
must

113. Carious

Long forgotten,
delirious memories haunt,
reclaiming us in
the exhilarated clutches of
terror;

things we would have said left
hanging in the jaws
of bloodied twilight.

Swallowed into jet black
night,
trapped in sparkling darkness
my voice collapses
into a mute,
crackling
whisper.

Discarded remnants,
fossils of another time
reincarnate:
all-consuming,
dangerous.

110. Wild Child

Photo by: Chris Langton

http://www.earthbook2012.org/author/999

Hairs stand golden,
glistening bristles on your face and
neck;
there is a certain danger,
exotic recklessness
drawing me to you.
I am afraid of you, and
enamoured of you;
I am your predator,
I am your victim.

Wild child;
cannot be tamed, must be put far away.
Lions in their cages
do not bite;
tigers in captivity do not
wound;

Wild child,
I love you.
But it is a far more
lethal beast
unleashed in me,
all-consuming, powerful,
which would ruin me.

Stay away, oh
wild child,
you are a foreign beast;
I must keep you to those who
know you well,
while I regard at a distance,
hesitant, curiously.

93. Eyes See Me

Eyes see me:
eyes see me walking
'cross the street;
eyes see me in my
dreams:
eyes see me
everywhere.

Eyes watch me
curiously, eyes watch
me, menacing…

Eyes see me as I
walk, I dance, I
slip, I fall:

Eyes are who I live for,
breathe for, die for;
eyes follow me everywhere,
eyes see me,
everywhere I
go.

89. “See you tomorrow”

Each time we part,
it is like an affirmation:
that we will see each other
again;
it is a hope, it is
a promise,

it is a guarantee.
Yet I must face the fact
that one day, it will
be a simple farewell,
because then –
our days together will have run
out.

On one hand waiting for the next
“tomorrow”;
on the other dreading the
finality of the past,
the austere future,
which instead tell me:
these little tomorrows
will one day be but
lost yesterdays.

81. Sitting on the Grand Canyon

I have a picture of you,
seated on a precarious ledge
teetering above the Grand Canyon.
You are smiling backwards,
thumbs up –
unabashed,
exhilarated.

I want to reach out to you in this dead, frozen
moment:
you are more alive than you have ever
been;
but I want to warn you, pull you back,
take you into my anxious arms,
and it saddens me:
you are happier here
than you ever were with
me.

Which reassures me
that I made the correct moral
choice,
to relinquish you,
to let you be happy
and dangerous
without
meddling
me.

Why must we love?
Why must we remember,
and never forget?
What makes us continue living
when there is so little
to live
for – ?