Burning Lake

I hate the inadequacy of cliches. They can never even approach the true experience, the true feeling. Experiences, feelings, they're subjective and dynamic. Cliche is a blanket statement smothering all things small, original, simple, creative.

I won't tell you that I love sunsets. That's a cliche.
I love Sauble Beach at dusk, wearing sweaters, toes in the now chilly water, watching the sun slip into the horizon. This is my childhood.


Burning Lake

The sky's on fire
as the earth turns,
as the sun dips
and melts
into the lake
a blazing orange pool
bleeding into the still black waters.
But you can't touch a sunset--
so warm looking in the sky.
None of that warmth carries.
Cold wind
blows off the burning lake
and whips through dune grass and our hair.

Bad Mustaches

With a major essay deadline looming, sadly this is exactly how I'm feeling at the present:


Bad Mustaches

There's a brick wall in my brain
red brick I should think,
with pale grey mortar
put up between my skull and my mouth

I'm waiting on a wrecking ball
and sweaty hairy men with bad mustaches
and yellow plastic hard hats.

Shoreline Skin

his body is a map of

the cote d'azur
of vacation

in
beautiful blue ocean
eyes
and baked shoreline
skin

Seeing as you're just sitting there on that horse...

And now, a little insight as to why I've decided not to pursue a masters in English:

I hate research on 18th century English lit! It's just so fucking pointless! I can't imagine something more redundant! And even if I do come up with an interesting and original thought on William Cowper, who cares? What's it going to even prove? He's been dead for AAAAAAAAAAGES.

So on that note, something a little funny and a little silly.


Seeing as you're just sitting there on that horse doing nothing

I want to teach you
of my worth.
Sit you behind a desk
and pace back and forth
in high heels
and a pencil skirt
with hot pink cue cards with all my points on them
and make you see.
(You'd see.)

That I'm desperate for you.
You make me catch my breath.
Maybe if I stop breathing
and turn purple
from lack of oxygen
you'll notice me
and then save me
(mouth to mouth!)
And then we can gallop off into the sunset on your white horse.
Clearly,
seeing as you're just sitting there
on that horse
doing nothing
we should be together.

Greece for Stacey

There has been too much Homi Bhabha in my life of late. He's an absolutely brilliant postcolonial literary critic (for those of you who are not extreme englishy type nerds) but with brilliance comes complexity. Rather, it's bloody hard.

I think everybody has those moments where they just want to escape real life and all its Homi Bhabha-ness. For Stacey and I, this is escape is obviously and naturally to Greece.

One day, we'll live this:

Greece for Stacey

I sit here, with shoulders in twisted knots of pain, my fingers so cold they're practically numb, wearing four pairs of sock trying to write. Write about Greece.

Greece for Stacey who sits at her laptop in a different city, with shoulders in twisted knots of pain, her fingers so cold they're practically numb, wearing four pairs of socks staring out her big second story window. Staring at swirling and gusting winter.

We'd live in a white stone house with pink and blue laundry fluttering on a line, and set into a mountain, reached by wonderful winding steps. Every day stepping out our front door, and traipsing down the rock hewn stairs to the beach, sun burnt shoulders half hidden under floppy hats, wearing black bathing suits, to read Pablo Neruda, Margaret Lawrence, Mark Haddon, on the soft warm sand. We'd meet tanned, green-eyed boys--boys who are perfect because they're boys who don't speak English. We'd have a constant sun kissed view of jewel-bright sand and sparkling green water, edged with white waves, rimmed by the rest of that deep clear blue ocean. A view of Eden--of Greece, for Stacey.

Now

Odd practice, remember birthdays never to be celebrated.
For my Grandma Toth's birthday, it would've been 85 this year.


Now

Now
she's gone--
sickened body burnt into dust
and blown into the winds...
a fine powder, that's all that's left of her
once loving
living
breathing body.
Her dust finds its way into the wrinkles
and deep creases of his hands
as he spreads her on the air.
He brushes her off...

And we plod on.
We smile and don't feel guilt.
But birthdays will never properly exist again.
There will be no card with her
spiky black letters on it,
and it will be as though the entire
Earth
had not made it around the
Sun
once more.
Years
will never pass in succession again, because
my
Grandma has died.