john writes

Starting life as a graph

Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut explaining the shapes of stories.

and based entirely on an idea my roommate had after watching this, I wondered what different shapes real life takes. We’ve jointly decided to graph our days on a giant whiteboard in our kitchen. In a moment of rare insight on prosperity of information, I manually made a copy of my first day of the experiment in a moleskin notebook my girlfriend bought me months ago. So here it goes. 

Day 1: January 16th, 2012
 

Penmanship be damned, I had a bit of a roller-coaster Monday. 

night poem

The day is at constant war with the night.
Just as packs of wild children haunt the empty downtowns
(While the moons winks above with cunning mischief)
Are turned into an army of lawnmowers,
Sculpting the manicured lawns of the suburban prisons,
When the sun glows hot as a menace.

Meanwhile at the pub,
A convergence of fiddlers solidifies with the night
And orders another round
They have a man in the corner with sad eyes
He is slapping his knee.
He is singing about poisoning the pigeons in the park
My feet tap-tap-tapping with the free rhythm.

I’m in the washroom taking a piss
An electric machine is kind of blowing warmish air on my wet hands.
A sticker reads “congratulations, you just saved a tree!”
When I leave, wiping my hands on the back of my jeans,
I wonder how much electricity that damn thing pulls.

To Decline a Refill on a Cup of Coffee

The android in dark sunglasses eyed the waitress with a secret lust.
A fire raged like the sea behind his electronic pupils.
A mathematical equation with infinite possibilities.
A never-ending algorithm as vast and ever-present as the ocean.

He wrote about her in his mind and described her as such:
she was short with long hair and big tits.
He wished his mind came preinstalled with a thesaurus,
tits did not sound very writerly.
Enough cleavage to make a man forget,
but not quite enough to crash a car.
Cleavage, he thought, was a much stronger word than tits.

Hidden eyes followed the path of her bounding tits,
(a veteran navigator, plotting the course of least resistance)
bounding between costumers. Her tits seemed to laugh with her smile.
He liked that.

He sipped his coffee, black like his glasses,
so every time he moved the cup from his face,
it was a separation of atoms, a nuclear blast of colour
exploding into the dingy roadside truck-stop diner.

He always thought these places would have better coffee.
He never quite believed these places existed past the movie frames.
Sitting in the middle of a desert in the middle of nowhere.
The rusted wood shack on a sparsely populated highway
used to haul goods in privacy, and avoid cops.
The broken buildings only companion was a guidepost,
indicating the next sign of civilization.
“Last place to fill up in…”
The mileage was dulled by the years.
Made illegible; predicting the upcoming oil crisis.

He sipped his coffee, and imagined their life together.
Him and the short waitress with the big tits.
His wife wouldn’t understand, but these days she didn’t understand anything.
She was a tempest on shattering stilts; no closer to solving his programming.

There was no ring on her finger,
so he looked for a tan line on her ring finger and found none.
We will only have to tame one tempest

The android in the dark sunglasses eyed the waitress as she took an order.
As she twisted around, her tits defied her motion so elegantly,
“Adam and eve on a raft and wreck ‘em, Leo”.

She must have sensed the eyes behind the two oval voids
“Can I top you off, hun?”
“We could love each other with a lust turning us into children of the streets who have just been granted an eternal buffet. We could grow fat off each other. Our tongues hungrily coveting our flesh and our souls and our desires, our dreams and ourselves. My devotion to you would be mechanical in its guarantee of a worry free warranty.”
He wanted to say that, but instead shook his head,
covered the cup with his hand, and spoke softly,
“I should be going”.

I’m so into romantic shit lately

Our tongues are constrained in this brutalist language of war.
Words are politicians, never living up to the promise of hope.
Content with their totalitarian rule over our hearts.
We search for ways to express the drumming in our bones;
We only find songs, “There must be a spanish word for this feeling”,
Marching from the lips of old souls who know the beauty in limitation.

Instead, we write each other poems. 
Struggling to make, “I love you”, mean as much as:
Je t’aime, Ik hou van jou, or mahal kita. 

In our failure we turn to breathless silence.
Eyes locked on eyes while the background fades.
My rough hands, calloused and broken from years of not knowing you,
Caress your silken skin, smooth from, I hope, years of waiting for me.
Fighting against the moments we open our mouths again.

And it’s enough to know our silence speaks clearer than English,
Sharper than shrapnel, louder than bombs.
It says, “our love is not a battlefield”.
Breaking the truce of closed lips will only betray the sentiment. 

So then I write you another poem,
(Baby,
These hands of mine,
These blistered and calloused hands writing this right now,
These strong and shy hands of mine,
These hands have finally found a home in loving you.
Screw retirement, these hands are automaton in their joyful task…)

I always forget to tell you, with these little words at my command:
I could listen to you speak, in any language, forever.

april 5th

I guess you could say there are sheriff badges on the buttons of his brown vest,
Fitting snug under the navy blue overcoat covered in images of anchors.
Small town Alberta facing the winds of the Halifax Harbour.

The winds blowing out the flame he is trying to light a cigarette with.
The cigarette he is using as a vessel of nostalgia.
To the days he needed them to get by.

    Nights filled with coasters and clean surfaces.
    Good times squaring off with self destruction.
    Quietly yelling into the night “I’m still here you bastard!”

    Staggering home in the early morning sun,
    Wondering if his heart would explode in his chest,
    Or silently stop—not with a bang, but with a…

He met a girl who told him,
“I left my heart in the South Pacific.”
So he gladly gave her his.

He read some books and changed his views.
Became zen as fuck; the past doesn’t matter and the future is a dream.
A hypocrite with his cigarette.

“Do you have the dreams?” she asked.

When I was young I used to have these recurring, horrible dreams. Oh god, nightmares only wish they could be as frightful as these dreams were. It would be a bright sunny day, birds would be in the air singing songs I heard on the radio, cars would zoom past, fast with wheels spinning like golden spines and white-hot flames pouring from the exhaust. They would zoom through these residential lots with houses alternating between grand mansions and rotted shacks. I remember, oh god, it was the strangest thing, the broken homes would have the greenest grass, while the rich mansions lawn was eroded and brown with little steam geysers popping all over the place. Yet, they all somehow looked exactly alike. The rich and the poor all trapped in this suburban hell. Greedy eyes would hungrily lap up everything from inside their homes. Oh god, these eyes would stare at me like a lion stalking an antelope.

There was a sidewalk, and oh god, it never ended. It was cracked, white like the sky with an intense sun, and it waved like the body of a lost snake trying to find its way. The sidewalk was deserted except for one stupid fucker. That was me, of course. Oh god, I would be imprisoned between the devil cars careening down the street and the damn creepy eyes watching from the badly copy and-pasted homes resting on the patchwork yards. And, oh god, I would be walking this endless sidewalk twisting into eternity. I would be walking, and oh god, I don’t really know why. It went on and on and on, oh god, it went on and on and on. Things were real, but oh god, they twisted into something false but no less real.

Oh god, an unbearable pain jolted through my body with each step I took. My foot hit the decayed pavement and my shins shattered into a million pieces. Oh god, each step I took I envisioned my legs being replaced by vases being hurled through the air. In addition the legs of glass, I felt a strange force pushing against me, trying to hold me in place. Oh god, I was walking into a wind that had it out for me, as all the trees remained motionless, oh god, though their shadows swayed after me. After awhile the pain fused with that wind and oh god, I couldn’t walk any longer. My legs would no longer support my body. Oh god, I felt the hungry eyes eying me with carnivorous delight. I was forced to my knees, but I couldn’t stop.

I was sobbing on the sidewalk, oh god, on my hands and knees. Crying out to whatever was out there watching over us. Oh god. I couldn’t walk, so I crawled. Oh god. I couldn’t stop, so I kept going. Oh god. I couldn’t keep going, but I did. Oh god, oh god I thought, why won’t I stop? Why can’t I stop? Oh god, oh god I thought, my fingers were caked in blood from rubbing against the cracks of the sidewalk. Oh god, oh god I thought, the pain from my legs is spread to my hands, to my wrists, to my arms. Oh god, oh god I thought, where am I crawling to? Oh god, when will it stop? Oh god, oh god these eyes are catching up to me oh god oh god these shadows keep creeping up to me oh god oh god please let me stop oh god oh god oh god oh god.

“Everyone has dreams. Don’t worry about it.” I said.

(…1)

There was a time,
and I know, it’s a bad way for a poem to start — 
when we’re in our prime,
when we aren’t apart,
when the light in your wide eyes is shining with my heart.

There was a time when time wasn’t all time could be.
I was seeking, searching, striving for something,
(the feeling those get, I’m sure, when lost at sea)
but 404 error messages were all I found myself finding:
“What you are searching for does not exist, have you tried looking…”

There was a time
when I found nothing in the philosophy of the 404,
no hidden meaning in the coding crime,
just another empty bottle screaming “it’s about time we start a war!”
just another lonely apartment that once knew more.

But baby, I’ve been a pedestrian long enough to know
the man crossing the rushing street isn’t praying for an early death.
He is just acting the chicken in this joke-show,
some people call it life, some a borrowed breath —
Claiming you can’t have anything without imminent death.

I had everything figured out.
The joke, the punchline, like a light at the end of this hole,
the war the sad bottle was crying about:
Where there was always gin added to the punch-bowl —
On the street with all the cars wrapped around the lamp-pole.

I didn’t know a single thing,
until I saw the punchline shining in your eyes,
and the winter turned to a sudden spring.
You hate weather talk, I know, but when I see the clear skies,
I can’t help but comment on the calm I feel arise.

And baby, I never thought much of waiting in traffic,
watching boats in the harbour sail free.
Until, I was waiting in traffic,
watching boats in the harbour sail free,
with you holding my hand and shooting a smile at me.

There was a time, but fuck it,
time is nothing if not a memory in the past
and even those boats have a schedule and don’t quit,
and aren’t worth a damn because the sight of them won’t last.
While my eyes remain on you, and my chest thumps steadfast.

O! Alberta, This is Not an Ode

O! Alberta,
This is not quite an ode from your forgotten son,
but I’d be a liar if I didn’t proclaim:
My first vivid memory was of your bright yellow fields,
Canola stretched out to the wide horizon
Painted by the brush strokes of the suns rays,
Bathed in light so distinctly heavenly.

O! Alberta,
Like those old grain elevators,
rotting on the side of gravel roads as tires flick mud and shit at them,
You once held a dream of so much promise.
But when I was younger, I also dreamed of monsters lurking in my closet.
It wasn’t until I was older that I dreamed of you creeping out of my future,
slitting my throat as I slept. Smiling as I gasped for air.

O! Alberta,
The suburbs of your two great and dirty cities
continue to sprawl along the Queen Elizabeth Raceway,
Keeping in steed with the trucks;
the Fords, the Dodges, the Chevy’s
the 4x4’s, the big rigs, the even bigger rigs,
Close behind the fast cars, those sporty red, and black, and blue, and silver, and green, and yellow devils on four spinning wheels.
The cities race, yes, and there is a morbid and strange curiosity I have:
Which city will devour the other first.

O! Alberta,
I wish I could say,
“As I write this, I am staring into the Atlantic ocean,
Watching each of my troubles ebb away with the rolling tide.”
But alas, I cannot for it is dark and cold, and the ocean is still a few blocks away.

O! Alberta,
The black blood of the earth glows hot in your north,
Luring wasters and stoners and sluts and whores and underachievers
Away from unbearable academic bullshitting
To a life of hard work and easy money.
Luring the nerds and the geeks and the already rich kids and the overaccomplishers
To four years in oil-funded prisons to learn philosophy and accounting and marketing and law
Only to apply this knowledge to managing the ignorant flow of oil from our land.

O! Alberta,
How proud you are of your tall and shining factories!
Your supreme steel of refineries, sparkling even on nights missing the moon.
How quick you are to forget,
Even those rotted old grain elevators,
Once stood tall, proud, shining against the future.

O! Alberta,
You did your best to get me down.
Pulling me back in every time I took a step out.
I follow a different light now.
In its wide eyes I trust the truth.

O! Alberta,
This is not quite an ode from your forgotten son,
but I’d be a liar if I didn’t proclaim:
My last vivid memory of you,
Was boarding an afternoon flight and watching you shrink away from me
In the dying daytime dim.

Today’s Forecast or: Boy, This Weather Sure is Something Isn’t It?

Whatever happened to weather only being a topic for small talk?

Once, I’m sure, it was reserved only for awkward first conversations with potential future in-laws, strangers at the bus-stop, the shy pretty girls standing behind counters wearing green aprons, old couples in the dog park, and so on and so on and so on.

I imagine these exchanges stopped dead after “boy, this weather sure is something isn’t it?” The only thing that followed was the wind blowing across an awkward pause seemingly lasting forever.

Now? Now, weather talk is the go to conversation piece. “How is the weather?” actually means, and this is true, “how are you doing?” Perhaps, we as a society, have become so scared of becoming personal with people that we would rather ask about an uncontrollable force than find out the inner workings of a person. It started slow. It started like this. Once, when asked how he was, a man of no noteworthy status or imagination replied, “terrible. I’m just terrible. This weather is snowy, the roads are covered in a blanket of the stuff. It’s a total white-out!” The next day he was asked the same question, and he responded with, “terrible. I’m just terrible. The temperature raised and all the snow we got yesterday is melting. The roads are a slushly swimming pool and my feet are soaked to the bone!”

This man unintentionally changed the course of the English language. What he didn’t understand is how his reluctance to adopt a more personal point of view was ground zero for a new epidemic. This epidemic flew under the radar; no one even realized they were infected with it. Most still don’t. The epidemic started slow, but eventually it caught on. It started spreading faster and faster, until it was easily paired with a wildfire in either a metaphor or a simile.

People began seeing the weather as a great topic of avoidance. No longer would they have to suffer through thinking of their own feelings when asked the dreaded “how are you?” They would just have to quickly glance outside and say “it’s sunny and warm. I think I’ll have a cold beverage.” Times of sitting through a long winded rant about someones mother passing away was replaced with “this wind won’t let up. It uprooted a giant elm tree on my block!”

It was only natural progression when “how is the weather?” finally replaced “how are you doing?”

There were no questions asked when “was it cloudy?” took the place of “how was your day?”

No eyebrows were raised when “I hope it doesn’t rain”, dethroned “I hope you start feeling better.”

And of course, the next logical step was when people assumed the assumed characteristics of the weather. People couldn’t help but smile during sunny days. No one will leave their bed during a heavy snowfall, they stay under covers cursing the day they were born. If it’s raining outside, raindrops are streaming down cheeks under shelter as well.

Now, when we check the weather network, we are really just checking to see how our hearts are feeling.

It’s a much simpler system. I’ll never have to wonder how to feel again.