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Sleeping at the power plant,
curled up behind the machinery.
No sounds anywhere, except one:
the dusty, electric hum
of machines more powerful than I.

You’d said, between mouthfuls;
“You’ll make new friends.
The new house: even bigger,
It means we are more important.
You see? You understand?”

So bag packed,
and I’m off through the woods.
Contents: one sandwich, one mix tape,
one walkman, one blanket,
one pair of batman pajamas.

Some more sounds:
Me eating my packed sandwich,
the far-away sound of my walkman headphones
resting on the floor beside me,
and the ghosts of yesterday,
tapping along on the green sheet metal.

She smokes cigarettes but calls them fags.
“Everybody’s doing it,” she says,
and I look around to make sure I’m not a supporting actor
in a public service announcement.

She’s talking about the band Steely Dan
and I wonder how they got their name.
Someone’s wife yelling; “There’s a bug crawling on the ceiling fan!”
sounded like “Your band should be called Steely Dan!”

and there we go.

The smoke’s a cruel mistress,
and my lungs reject it immediately,
my lungs, having higher standards than I.
But I inhale again, and they settle.

“Settle down you inside bags,” I say to my lungs.
“You’re just guts and stuff; you’re not the boss of me.”
I inhale again and they protest again,
“No guts, no.” I’m saying, my voice, strained with smoke.

And she’s all like, Teeth, Teeth Tuesdays, and here we go.
And I don’t know what she means most times,
but I’m not sure I’m made to.

Ice cream hands and short,
short skirts and all that.
Know what I mean? Know what I’m saying?

She had this walkman and we’d listen together.
Loud and static and lemonade grass stains.
The sun was always setting,

always, always setting.

Can you smell the air? Fresh.
Or as close as you can get.
A real hard try, anyway.

Pavement and pocket change.
Corner store sugar candy. Sugar,
on the outside and the inside.

Teeth, Teeth Tuesdays, and here we go.
She hurt me but didn’t mean to, didn’t mean to.
I don’t think.

He’s struggling with the postage stamp math.
A 25 cent stamp will get it to Kitchener
but he doesn’t know what will happen after that.
Do they just throw it out of the truck?

A 5 cent stamp, a 50 cent stamp, a 57 cent stamp
over or under 30 grams, over or under.
Dirty fingers and dirty hands,
dirty pennies and nickels and teeth.

Clinging with a desperation and hope
If he can just figure this out,
if he can add it up, and piece it together
then things will be better and things will make sense.

He’ll have this one thing under his belt,
this one thing that he set out to do, and was successful
and then walked away from, just like regular people do.
Score one for the home team, for the good guys

The lady behind me sighs deeply, and loudly,
causing him to look up at her and I, standing in line
before quickly turning back to the glass counter
to slide around more of his change

Her sigh is deeply humiliating, and disgusts me.
I think she sounds like bubbling deep fryer.
An ugly, stupid, basket of frozen french fries
sliding into a vat of bubbling hot ignorant grease.

*

We’re outside sitting on the curb with our legs crossed
sharing a sandwich and a can of root beer.
I want to apologize for her, tell him I’m not like her
tell him I’m not a dumb deep fryer, full of bubbling grease.

He doesn’t say anything though, and so neither do I
We just sit in silence, two men sharing a sandwich
Then I swallow some root beer, and it goes down the wrong pipe
and I cough a lot.

She’s talking to me on the telephone
which I hate doing, but she insists.

She is crying or eating marshmallows,
and her voice sounds like packed down snow.

“I just don’t know what to do anymore,” She is saying.
She’s talking about her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend

I lose track of his prefix status daily
and it’s direct relation to the given situation.

I am sitting in my kitchen, in my underwear
the microwave clock is trying on 1:37 am, it fits.

My elbow rests on the table with my head in my hands
I am watching the cat eat tiny, brown and orange X’s and O’s,

Only occasionally looking up at me with a look
that might say, “You want some?”, I do not.

“We’ve been together so long I forget what it’s like,
to be single, you know what I mean?” I do not know what she means.

I lie down on the tile and let the cold sting
come on strong then slowly subside.

I stare at my cat from a new, much shorter distance,
watching cats eat close up is kind of disgusting.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do,
I just don’t know how I’ll go on with my life.”

Crying, marshmallow, marshmallow, packed down snow,
Tiny orange X, tiny brown O, purr, grumble, swallow.

“Thank you so much for listening to me,
I think I need to call him, to straighten this all out.”

Marshmallows, packed down snow, brown X’s
cold kitchen tiles, 1:49, dial tone.

You are getting on ok,
but your landlord is a difficult person
to arm wrestle with.

The food store near you is large
but doesn’t have grapes worth a damn,
or the toothpaste you like.

It doesn’t have faux-Italian pizzas either
as if faux-Italians are not native
to this particular region.

The police are good to you though,
and the drunk tank is roomy,
the kind of place a man can be proud to wake up in.

The kind of place you can talk to Albert,
The cop on duty, about his disrespectful kids
and failing marriage.

I finger the lined paper, picturing the two of you
on either side of the metal bars,
and wonder which one I should feel sorry for.

My friend who talks in code is on the phone
it is early morning, and he is delivering a message:

“The brown bean soup rides In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Click, Dial tone.
He wants to meet for coffee in about twenty minutes.

And so I’m all eye rubs and slow grey sweaters.
I’m all feeding the dog and front deck cigarettes.

The sun is around but hasn’t quite committed,
she thinks the day could be good for her,

but the day picked her up late, and swears a lot.
Oh, also, the sun is a woman.

Feet plus pavement equals progress
and I stroll past newsstands and hot dog stands,

short children doing hand stands,
and short-tempered women working fruit stands.

I push the door for the coffee shop and find our usual table
My friend is absent and in his place is a note:

“In the eye of the white hurricane, signed, The Ramones”
He’s in the bathroom, he’ll be back in a couple minutes.

Apparently I have an allergy to Splenda, er something cause I ate (drank) some of it and it made my heart feel like an inspired greyhound, racing down the last stretch while eye of the tiger plays in the background. Then it hurt for three days. Awesome!

Going to Cuba tomorrow. It will be hot. There will be beer. It’s kind of like getting an advance on your summer, except hotter and with free booze all the time. Not really free. But you know. Convenient. Here’s the mug we all have, http://reviews.canadiantire.ca/9045/0422608P/reviews.htm.

Mug Reviews: 5 Star.
Would Buy Again.
Comments: “THIS MUG IS HUGE AS SHIT.”

The world ended on a wednesday afternoon, and by that friday morning we were all bored again. So easily we slip back into a daily routine, wake up to a grey sky and cough the thick ash. Spend all morning filtering grey water, and eating rotting apples, build a fire, pray for death, sleep. Wake up the next day and do it all again.

The world ended just like everybody feared it would. It didn’t explode or disappear or get swallowed by the sun. Nothing like that. Nothing silly like that. Humanity simply reached it’s magical milestone. The critical point were few controled the lives and lively hood of everyone.

And once this point was reached, we all fell victim to the off handed comment that this political leader made about the way this other political leaders wife looks in a bathing suit. Some red glowing buttons are pressed and orders are given, and suddenly because the first lady just can’t say no to Chicago style deep dish frozen pizza’s, we’re making mittens out of burnt car seats and gearing up for what looks to be a long, cold, nuclear winter.

But we learn to adapt. This is human being’s greatest asset, adaptation. Before the bombs fell we drank water you could see through from the same plastic bottles that paid for the bombs. We paid people to cook us food, and sent it back when it wasn’t the right temperature. This is what we knew.

But now we know something else.

The best place to find sleep is under bolted down subway benches. Hand held, battery operated fans are the new Lexus. A sac of potatoes and some know-how will get you drunker than you’ve ever been, and temporarily blind. And in this world, this ugly smoking pile of whatever’s left over, the blind are king.

word.