Rabid Dogs

I keep my feelings for you on little leashes like rabid dogs

I dig a deep hole and scream them in hoping no one will hear

I splash them across the walls in carnelian paint and sit down breathless to observe them 

Drip

Then lap them up with a sponge lest they ever hit the ground. 

I keep my feelings for you in a dusty old jar at the back of the cupboard 

But all my meals taste of you

I open my mouth in my sleep and they crawl out and mess about the room

But when I wake they are gone.

Just an echo of a flutter 

of a blue wing catching the light

and then silence 

I drive them into the desert and bury them under a eucalyptus tree 

but when I open my bedroom door they greet me. 

My feelings for you - they move under my chest while I read a book or sing a song. 

They are like children that play. 

They laugh at my jokes and harmonize with my whimpers.

I'd give them to you but they would be lost. 

So I keep them - rumbling in my belly. 

Murmuring and whispering to me. 

Keeping me company. 

For now.

Fusion

Fusion

Noun

     1.     The process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity.

A History of Lessons on Fusion

A little boy stands on the steps of his house looking out at his new home of Stoney Point, Ontario. His father sits inside on the familiar brown chair pouring whisky on his anger. His mother is lost and he can’t find her. He closes his eyes and longs for fusion.

A woman lies on her living room floor staring up through the tears at a crack in the ceiling. I have to fix that, she thinks. I still have to fix this home even though he’s gone and the home inside me has fallen apart. She falls asleep and dreams of fusion.

For a brief moment - a wrinkle in time - my mother and my father fused and they made me. I grew up in a house that was coloured with Jungian vocabulary. I would sit in my father’s car as a teenager - eyes painted black, swaddled in dark leather and lace - and he would tell me about the male and the female psyche. He would talk about pushing through the wreckage of his childhood by attending Mythopoetic men’s groups before I was born. I would sit in my mother’s office with my legs dangling from her desk and she would read me her journal entries about how she recovered her lost self after her marriage fell apart by dreaming of love - the unconscious union of her male self and her female self - coming together in effortless fusion.

Six months ago I had a dream that I was falling in love with a blue-eyed man in a cabin on a beach. I pulled out a leather bound book and I wrote, “I was yellow and he was blue but then we fused.” When I woke up I knew the process had begun. Years spent riding on the back of the beast, hiding myself under defense mechanisms and painting the walls of my soul with Jack Daniels. I knew my days of reaching inward were over and with or without my conscious consent I was now reaching outward. Saturn returned to the place it was in the sky when I was born and rebirth was under way.

Today I am 29. I sit on my bed with wet hair and the sun on my back and I write this. I think about Vajrasattva in Union. When I first saw the image I rubbed my fingers over the laminated edges of it and pictured it as me. I remembered my dream. I remembered all the transient and temporary loves I’ve had – that seemed to fall apart at the very moment that union was reachable. I wonder now if those things were meant to fall apart. If I went on quests looking for him and all that really reflected back was me.

My dad once told me that when a family falls apart, when mom and dad fight, when they give up on each other, a child’s male and female psyche are severed. He said that when his father left his mother and took their children to Stoney Point my dad began his search for his lost female psyche. I wonder if a part of me was lost that night at age 8 – watching my mother on the floor crying as my father packed his car and drove away. I’ve been searching ever since. I swam in pink oceans, I rode sticky hot trains in India, I unzipped my skin by candlelight and showed a stranger the skeletons in my closet, and in all of it I was looking for him. I wonder now if I never found him out there because he was always in here.

In the images of Vajrasattva in union he touches the small of her back with two fingers. He looks forward and she looks up at the sky but they hold onto each other with their arms and their legs. They sit atop a lotus draped in silks with flowers that grow all around them. Vajrasattva is one person – one whole person – a male and a female fused together to become whole. What an insight the Tibetan Buddhists had when they created this image. An insight into me – into what I’ve lost – what I yearn for.

A woman sits on her bed with the warm fingers of the sun touching the small of her back. She closes her eyes and listens to the whisper of a life growing inside her. Something new.

I am whole. 

I am Vajrasattva.

The Heart Sutra

I closed my eyes in Goa 
And opened them in your room
You sat there playing guitar - mangled fingers on smooth strings 
Making magic
Magic I felt you stole from me

A shelf with old books missing covers
Walls the colour of the deep ocean
That old familiar musky smell of a basement 
unattended and unappreciated for too many summers. 
Carpets covered with leaves that crunch under my feet 
as I walk to wash a mouldy cup to make some tea. 

I think of all the lives you've lived in this place
All the distractions - the obsessions that made you leave this place so unattended 
That made you leave me so unattended - in the end 

You are gone now but I visit this place in my head when I close my eyes
Scan the room for secrets - messages from my memories that might answer my questions 
Why did you give up -
Why did you let go - 
Why did you stop reaching for me - 

Form is nothing more than emptiness 
I sit on your bed swaddled in the purple sheets I gave you
Staring at the flame of the little green candle on your beside table - I bought it because it smelled like a Christmas tree
Everything beautiful here I brought for you
Everything I brought you didn't notice. 
But it's all empty
All transient
That moment no longer exists. 
What is beauty other than what I label so. 
Form is only the beauty or ugliness i project onto emptiness 
I projected you
And you projected me
So it goes 

Emptiness is nothing more than form
In the emptiness of my head I see your form
A golden face on a chartreuse pillow 
Peppermint tea and mischievous smiles 
Bodies empty of self and full of each other 
I opened my eyes and projected my dreams on to your insides 
And you watched them with fascination 
You kissed my shoulder while I slept 
and swallowed my nightmares 

In emptiness there is no form 
No taste, no smell, no consciousness 
Laying on a hammock in india I remember you
The smell of masala spice fills the air
A puppy sleeping on my shoulder
The wind is soft and the tobacco is strong 
I wonder if whatever you took from me was never mine to begin with
I wonder if whatever you gave me was never yours at all
I wonder if the miles and miles of emptiness between us
Is no different than the space I felt when you were lying right next to me 
We are empty of each other now 
I don't taste you
I don't smell you
I don't know you anymore
Perhaps I never did.
Perhaps in the end it will only be me I will ever know.
And that is enough. 

Kindling

Drifting apart like two sheets of ice.

Those were the days of Daughter lyrics

And tears in silence.

Filling the bed with white tissues.

Watching the snow blow outside under the street lamps.

Catching in a gust of wind while simultaneously getting caught in an up draft.

It seemed to hover there for moments caught between two conflicting directions.

Like some beautiful probation.

I watched in fascination

Hoping my phone would ding the wine glass with news of you.

Some perfect toast to a not broken thing.

I slept and dreamed the bed was full of white snow and I was digging my way to you

To find you sleeping on the other end of the tunnel.

Like nothing happened.

But I knew I saved you.

I knew I found you.

I lit fires and sat on the floor kissing my knees

watching the kindling catch with fury

in big flames that shot up the chimney

Crumbling to ash as the wood curled and deformed

A perfect lie.

A giant promise stifled for breath.

It started with a kiss on the face.

A vulnerable moment in the dark where I painted a picture of you with my hands

and turned over and repainted you over and over

Lest I never forget.

I danced my tragedy for you and you raised me kisses in your sleep and a wide eyed smile for every secret I reluctantly put in your hands.

You swallowed more and more of me with those kisses

And today you pressed your lips to my cheek and gave me back.

Endearing love becomes

Enduring love

And we don’t know why.

We play the moments in black in white like an old Ingrid Bergan love story

Hoping to find the very moment where we could have changed it.

The part of the story where the rain fogs up the window and the thunder crashes.

The pathetic fallacy

The poetic justice

I’m still picking up the shards like little mirrors into us.

The act like some great homage to loves to come.
The streets are painted with us and 

I’m still searching for you in the night and the quiet.

Listening in the crunch of the snow under my footsteps for the echo that says you’re still with me somewhere in here.

That you’re just around that corner ahead

Standing under a streetlamp in your coat with all the missing buttons

with that ear to ear smile you used to have when I opened your apartment door.

A warm chest to absorb these tears.

A fire in my belly so I can feel hungry again.

Some sign that this wasn’t all for not.

Those were the days where I said goodbye before you fully left me.

Forgave myself before I knew why.

Wished without believing.

Those were the days that winter came and took all of the things that I once had.

Suicide Letters

                                                                                

Thinking about the ones who’ve left Earth a lot lately. Torn between loneliness, jealousy, sorrow …so it goes.

I remember vivid how they told me you went away. A drunk on the corner told me you were gone. The feeling started in my chest and like a solar flare it spread to my shoulder blades, upper arms, down the blue and purple flowers of my tattoo. It reached my forearm, down to my fingertips and out onto the pavement. It poured out of me into the littered brown cigar butts you had in your warm oversized lips not 12 hours earlier. My eyes exploded and that was that. Everything inside burned up but my skin stayed cool as a cucumber.

I was loading a guitar amp into a sticky floored, dimly lit nightclub when they told me you were gone. I walked into a room full of pool hustlers betting on shots. I sat in a misplaced looking red chair in the corner of the room and placed my head in my palms. I pictured myself holding you from behind on a borrowed mattress in a moist basement all those months ago. Beaded dread locks and the smell of tide floating off your tie-died T-shirt. When I finally got up from that red chair my hands were so wet. I rubbed and massaged the salty grief into my skin like cool sanitizer and it evaporated – just like you.

I read you were gone…I saw on the news you were gone...a flash sentence then onto the weather. It’s going to be hot today – but he wont feel the sun on his broad tattooed shoulders.

Flashes of the last things they saw. The constellation mural on his bedroom wall while the drugs pinched his toes and dragged him down to their furry little cave. The cases of Dr. Pepper and Benson and Hedges 100’s as the rope burn became the last sensation he probably felt against his skin. The while tiled ceiling and the crisp starchy sheets while the morphine and pangs in his gunshot belly collided and made light.

You are no longer with us.

Last night I sat with you on a picnic table and looked at the lights of the buildings flickering on and off like fireflies in the lake. You said you weren’t gone at all, that you were just away visiting family. Yet still in the stillness I knew something wasn’t right. You took my hand and brushed it against your lips and I felt the hairs on my arm gently lifting and reaching for you.

It was only when I surrendered to this thought that I woke, opened my eyes, and smelled your cologne spinning around with the dust in the air above my bed. Dancing in the fingers of light that reached in through my skylight. I felt a oneness in this moment like yesterday and tomorrow, ground and sky, my soul and yours were all weaved together in a soft little ball in my hand. I held and caressed this feeling, rare and beautiful like the cardinal and used to fly and perch on a tree in our backyard when I was young.

Just the same,

Red wings spread and caught the light like garnets

And it was gone.

And this was ok.

5 Years

For 5 years I’ve swept up the debris of my life.

Addiction takes from you secretly and silently.

It covers your eyes and it steals behind your back

While you lay asleep

High in the tower

With your hair hanging down for a prince.

I climbed that tower when I was 13.

My nails cracked and bled - I slid the scaly walls and cracked under the brambles.

I worked hard for my death.

I wanted to die

And I did.

I slept while my life happened to me.

My body matured and walked the world

But I was asleep in that tower.

Safe – Safe – Safe.

Hovering above myself while I was stolen from.

Sticky floors and twisted sheets.

For 5 years I’ve mopped up the remains of my life.

Collected it all in a pile and inspected the remnants.

I loosened the fabric that covered my eyes, my face, my body.

Over years I gently and carefully removed it and allowed myself to see.

Afraid – Afraid - Afraid

I carved out a place in myself and let myself in.

A rough and inhospitable home I was for myself at first

My skin was like coarse wool and the wind blew through me

Cold – Cold – Cold.

But when I opened myself for me

The universe followed and lit me up from the inside.

No longer am I asleep

No longer am I in the dark

I have you inside me

I have everything I need – inside me.

5 years ago I gave myself life.

And for 5 years I’ve lived.