When I told her that he asked me to hold him
Then said, “But don’t tell anyone I asked that, please”
And I cuddled him in my arms like a baby
He was 31, you made the ugliest eyes I’ve ever seen.
When a man fixed my knapsack, hiking
And tightened the straps, belted me in like a little girl
I felt protected and loved, like he was my Dad or saviour
I was 38, you made the ugliest eyes I’ve ever seen in the world.
When I told her what had happened in the morning
She scoffed said, “well, you delivered yourself on a platter!”
I was not looking for a fuck, just tender connection!
At 39, and she made the ugliest eyes on the planet.
These men I’ve known, with strengths and beards
Were sometimes weak, cried or seemed vulnerable and scared
And whereas I would pet them, wipe tears, you’d just stare
Classic: you’ve got the ugliest eyes by far.
These men I’ve cared for sometimes did dumb stuff
And I persecuted them for their apparent perceived wrong
Cried “You’re a Liar!” when their actions were beyond them (or partly my fault)
All Men loved, have the ugliest eyes when they go numb…
“When’s the last time you had sex?” he asked.
I cocked my head, stared at the passing red double-deckers
He laughed, said: “If you have to think about it
It’s been too long!” he cried!
“Who broke up with who?” he questioned.
I cocked my head, looked up at the London sky
He scoffed, said: “If you have to think about it
You’ve been dumped!” he jibed.
This coming from the man who said I’m the one sounded
Like a teenage boy at the pub, come round
To talk about his/her sexual exploits, said
“I don’t tell you about mine,” and
“What makes you think I want to hear about yours!
And there he was going on, NOT STOPPING, in person!
I was in my cups not seeing his Dali Aphrodisiac-ness
Green vodka globes pinned to his jacket neatly—villain!
I was too focused on the mystery of his c-c-cryptic pull:
His duality and his confusing dichotomies, to be sure!
Even when we were eating noodles, and the waters came
You said: “You don’t know if they’ve been spiked with date rape
drugs, what a thing to say a jet-lagged Canadian!
Was he preparing me for what would come later at the Jesmond?
You’re the one who yanked my pants off, man!
(But I bet it’s cause I couldn’t put them back on, eh, OK fair enough.)
How did I make it the toilet and back, too drunk?
Lost my phone, on your stack of shirts, socks and pants!
What were your clothes doing in a bunch by the hearth?
I would never in a million years or here on planet Earth
reckon you’d be sat naked in my hotel room
As I stood there in alligator underwear at the Jesmond!
I can’t even remember when my American Apparel bralet
came off; just laughing about a wayward trek home in a rickshaw!
And you blaming ME cuz I wouldn’t stop?
But I recall redirecting your beard North from going South.
Standing there naked at first talking about God knows what!
You said TWO HOURS, how the hell & what was I on about?
Did you turn on the TV or just observe me like an obtuse painting
Did I have sense to stand straight, my posture, hold in my belly in my panties?
And in the morning – how fucked up was that?!
No alarm clocks set, but managed to get us up.
For the record, I initiated nothing just looked for tenderness
Where the fuck did my alligator-print underwear go,
The couch was also soaked in wet!
Who spilled the water?
How on earth did we peel off my jeans?
You had to have slept on the granola bars,
they were there in the morning.
And fuck, you made me miss my Jesmond B&B breakfast (sorry Glyn)
Irony is there would have been orange juice
Rubbing it in that I didn’t even suck
the juice from your lemon.
How could I? I didn’t even know how I got there, mate!
It was bad enough you confused me being nice for a change!
The whole fucking morning went hot, sexy Dali:
Yes, sexy D[u]ali[ty]:
Anomaly | Comedy | Fantasy | Fucky.
I made small talk: “So, what will you do today?” And you said:
“Get some breakfast” as I went to give you a gift
I really did buy those books with you in mind
You said, “take them,” and left them behind.
Morning was mistaken identities like a hot, sexy Dali
Where you started and I began: forever a bloody mystery.
That I turned something “cool,” possibly
Into something controlling and ugly,
That you knew I was easy prey
Skinny, arty and flighty,
That you said “you wouldn’t stop bugging me”
We went full hot, sexy Dali – eccentric and batty
A highly attention-grabbing exchange
At once fucked-up
But “interesting.”
That’s right: hide that bald man’s eyes!
Prepare to take him away now:
He’s the culprit but don’t tell anyone his name.
You will know him from the trail of his women
The ones he rates as sevens
Unless they’ve got great tits, then it’s 8.9 and sometimes 11.
I’ve been annexed, taken over by conquest
By the man who likes science and Mars
Whose chest shot out bone and pains to the stars.
Like the song he sent: “My crimson liquid so frantically spilled
the ruby fluid of life unleashed,” lyrics said
Well, head bowed, are you currently dying The Death of Ivan Ilyich, yes?
Announcement!
Sylvie was annexed by Rhy…nchocephalia
Breed: tuatara – god of death and disaster
“M?ori women can’t eat them; but I’m Canadian,” Sylvie commented.
“No wonder I perished, while she lasted, eh?!”
(No wonder you knew it was a newt!)
I should have known you were tapu: sacred and restricted!
Mamma mana! Was there ever serious consequences
For crossing boundaries in London, England?
In this, I was attached to something more important
Serving as the brief 18-month wing addition to his building of sinew
wood, and supernatural: I was annexable.
Yes, amidst your bone, your wood, and supernatural
red passion and word violence, you left a mess
On this grey nightgown: I still haven’t washed it.
Shit’s blowing out your side like Ivan’s!
(My side still burns where you grabbed it.)
Is your third eye, blind?
For a man with such big bovine eyes of chocolate and stylish glasses
The bar is clouding your vision, yea?
Your carefree life is most simple and most ordinary
and therefore most terrible, maybe suggested Syndey
for you seem annexed by this world apart
ill fit, Ilyich
from the one you dream to live in.
I’ve been making progress.
Been driving through the city lights.
Burning up so many goddamn tires
Leaving them at the dead-end streets
On fire.
But I keep on trucking.
Until tonight.
Feeling, just feeling
Hormonal, not sentimental.
Pregnant (yea) with emotion.
Godammnit, I was looking for your rage
Feeling in a blue lake
The thickness of your fight
Wanting to take your kind of bite out of this life.
Like when I slapped you on the arm,
Said: “Holy shit, look at you!”
And you hit me back not holding back,
Almost fell into the blooms.
on Bloomsbury.
You don’t know this, but
Your Twitter is sending me notes
To join your account
Follow you there
Stupid Twitter doesn’t have a clue
What it’s dealing with here.
It’s time.
Then tonight on the feed
Up pops up your name and a vid
Of my San Francisco memory band
And a song with lyrics
About “how people change.”
In moments like this,
I punch the fucking walls,
Spit, fierce, shouting: “See that! Jesus Christ!
I don’t make this shit up at all!”
Tonight I was brewing up a poem
Didn’t know what it’d be
But my last thought a week ago
Was to write about what the song did:
The time we walked toward Covent Garden
On some bridge from the South Bank of London
You said: “you shouldn’t write people off, they change
A person can change in 10 years,” you said.
I carried that with me, thinking that you
talked more than you did 13 years before
And 13 years later, you scare the shit out of me
Will things be better when I’m 53?
It’s time.
It’s time to not listen to the music, and I haven’t
To remember the arrangements that maybe I helped in.
(The records spins
and the wheels in the mind keep turning)
It’s time to not think anymore of this
To not get too excited you answered another “Code Red”
Request for a fighting.
I’ve been making progress.
Been driving through the city lights.
Burning up so many goddamn tires
Leaving them at the dead-end streets
On fire.
But I keep on trucking.
Until tonight.
It’s time.
It’s time for nothing to change
Except for my direction.
I keep spinning my goddamn wheels
Chasing something.
But I smile, breathing deep
That our journey has ended.
It’s something I’ve fully accepted.
And the place it took me
Was exquisite.
So when I’ve feared you could be replaced
Just like you did that morning —
Tonight — you asserted your place
Secretly, unintentionally – maybe you knew what you were doing
Regardless of whether I know where you’re going
Do you know you take me to exactly
Where I need to be?
Wives, Unsatisfied: Shifty shades of the “Great 8”
Is the success of best-selling novel, Fifty Shades of Grey (dubbed “mommy porn”), testament to married women’s appetite for erotica, or a barometer of bedroom romance gone awry? Need or want more? Meet the original desperate housewives; what this course calls—the “Great 8.” The tragic, yet inspiring, stories of unfulfilled women across eight classic and modern novels who shifted their marital beds and nuanced their prescribed role as Wife to handle their tenuous marriages.
Learn more about this non-credit, Personal Enrichment Activities course $100 at the University of Ottawa.
Hey. Thanks for stopping by. Here are a few pieces I’m working on for a new collection following HOXTON SQUARE CIRCLES: Starfucking tales of sexless one-night stands. That book documented this woman’s journey thru the sexual landscape of Ottawa (Ontario), Canada. So it was a short book. I’m a tattle-tale. But the book was sparked by a fated evening in London, UK — I went there in November 2000 to follow my heart.
I met some folks that time in London — I went back there in November 2013, 13 years later to the month, to follow ‘friendship’. I(t) got fucked. These are the unpublished tales of what went down: stories that cross borders, and through which you’ve maybe travelled too. Its working title = RUSSELL SQUARE STATION: Mine the Trash.
Some highlights:
***
I like the view,
Not to plummet.
I like the sun,
Not a burn in summit.
Kundera said the heaviest of burdens
Is life’s most intense fulfillment.
It’s not that we do not know how to love
It’s not that we suffer dysfunction
It’s not that we are obsessed with some
It’s simply hard to tread through garbage.
The piles of shit that lay at our feet
In which we wade knee-deep and daily
The piles of crap that make us need
A certain kind of grace to deal with it stately…
… well it just exhausts us, does it not?
Please call my hands, take me out of this rot.
But the unbearable lightness of / Being so fucking stupid as to drink with him / To have been swayed by those chick feelings: / of compassion and of nurturing? READ: Red-dress
***
“You’re doing my fucking head in!”
remember: it’s what you once said
sorting our mess: “I’m gonna tear my bloody eyes out!”
Must have been for real: where were they when we met up?
Warm Bloomsbury, the smell of bar / Wood, warmth by a radiator / at the window, Marta watched / when you entered. READ: Tour Guide
***
Did you ever have a nightmare become a reality only to be rescued by someone? Do you think you’ll see them in your dreams next time you dream the nightmare, or has it been exorcised and what did it mean … ? READ: Dark Alley Dream Death
***
Do you ever question what circumstances brought you into someone’s life? Do you minimize their importance or do you believe in their grand design …
What would happen if you met someone who really “got” you to the point of giving you both danger, and saving you from it. What is the word for that safe-danger space and the meaning with give to the person who grants it us?
What happens when you’re supposed to go to a Motörhead concert with someone and it gets cancelled? READ: The Story of O … my God! (aka The Fuckers Cancelled Motörhead)
***
Excitement, provocation, feeling the headbuzz
Of a million electrified nights of
Fights
Hurts, between lovers
Kind of shaken, not stirred
More settled after the shake
READ: Rupert Martini …
***
I think I let you take me because up until that point, you seemed not taken by me. / So many times I felt guilty for feeling let down in your company. READ: “Panting Up River, Getting Down With Shitty Creep”
***
I had gone back next day in the day light of Brick Lane
The olive tree was gone from the flat, did I tell you?
READ: Olive Tree (Mystery)
***
C’est l’histoire d’un mec unique qui porte les similarités à Russell Brand — avec un poppy Muhn (c’est ‘meh’ en français)
You did not see me for who I am.
But a clue was in exactly how I moved my hands
On your back (I remember that), and on your ass,
I’ve touched no man like that …
But when I had, there’s a man who said
“No woman’s ever touched me this way”
Another said: “No woman’s ever loved me this way”
Another still: “hold me like you hold me that way.”
It’s perfectly OK if you’ve been led astray by yourself or someone else, but mostly yourself. You got pissed, shit happened, you can’t handle your alcohol. It was nowhere near love, and don’t blame yourself for wanting … abandon. Read:It’s Settled Then (AKA A Band Guy Did One On)
***
With one hand on her heart
the other reached out
she’s made beautiful on a sardine can
that otherwise would be thrown out.
You arrive just like you come
Mysterious, secretive, dark-sunglassed, slight-smilin’ Devil
someone shakes down, your crowd shivers some…
We all sit, fucked, not knowing what just happened.
Bang, bang, bang you’re still the one
Who when he takes aim with his gun
– Kills people
And blames them for getting in the way
Smiling sickly cuz he said simultaneously, ‘stay…’
Two heads at a table
Bus on the old streets go by in
New Edinburgh
Do you see them in
living rooms lit for dinner
Soft studio lighting golden, like caramel
As if it was vapour?
I am poor – I do not live
In an architecturally beautiful
Neighbourhood
Where the brick facades
And decorative lintels
Shelter families sat on hardwood
Watching movies on big screens
Or enjoying good food at a big table, which
a loving father prepares
Together, with his family
And for his kids’ friends
As they gather on a Friday night
To laugh, talk and share,
Happily.
I pretend to live there in the rich houses,
With character, as the bus goes by in
New Edinburgh.
But I am poor – I have bought a cement condo
It is all I can afford.
And if you Google map/street-me
You’ll see it’s ugly and deplorable.
And the view is spectacular.
I can probably see more
Beyond, and above to the mountains
The stretch of Ottawa River to
Fortune
Parliament Hill
Little houses
lit up in Overbook
Where the rockstar families
Moved to.
But what is it all worth when
A view can’t be shared
And you console yourself with things like
“at least I have eyes
and legs!”
until I fall sick, that is,
or end up in a wheelchair?
Milan Kundera says the person who wishes to move
Is not a happy person.
I realized that in my flat
In Paris,
I had it all!
And yet I still questioned
Is it sudden death from a leap from the 4th floor?
Jane Birkin’s daughter did it.
Two heads at a table
Bus on the old streets go by in
New Edinburgh
Do you see them in
living rooms lit for dinner
Soft studio lighting golden, like caramel
As if it was vapour?
You would once have seen me
In the dim light from soft flea-market
Mismatched lampshades, glowing
Peacefully in my cabin
If you drove along a quiet road
Connecting Lanark
To Highway 7.
I was not alone –
I had frogs, earwigs, bats and spiders
Walleye, birds, geese and crackles
From a campfire.
A cousin playing Kathleen Edwards’
“Sure As Shit” filled our dusk
While we heated water
To wash our cottage dishes.
I am not cosmopolitan.
But I would choose a big city
In which to be anonymous.
I want sweetest remoteness
To feel enveloped by a Universe.
How is it —
How do we become —
Why can it be —
That we are more lonely around people
And houses
In cities
Where technology has replaced delivery
Of chicken noodle soup from a friend
When you’re sick
With
Nothing…
See, this is where you —
Having sat around tables
with a thousand candles,
photo from outside the
home showing
your festive faces lit,
Could tell me to
“Get a grip.”
Do we all think
Some other place will make us happy
And how do we go about
Finding it?
Is it in Paris?
Perhaps if it were available,
It’d be another planet?
No: because people don’t exist there
So we look to the block,
The house or the bay,
We are looking for someone
With whom to spend our days
And our nights after supper
Like they do in
New Edinburgh
Do you see them in
living rooms lit for dinner
Soft studio lighting golden, like caramel
As if it was vapour?
I didn’t know this in the land of the Swiss
When an old Egyptian boyfriend
Invited me to Switzerland
To meet his family and travel to Paris
For a holiday for two weeks in spring.
I did all the planning.
He did nothing for my birthday
While we there, instead he said he was going to see
A chick he used to fuck called
Sally.
Then would go on telling Everybody:
“I took Sylvie to Paris for her birthday!”
No you didn’t, you jack off,
and you cost us $250 in a delayed flight
to Vienna cuz you didn’t pay any attention
to itineraries.
I moved in with him.
It’s OK! I know why I came!
But I really didn’t know why I was there with
the Carpenter boyfriend in the country
Invited me to meet his family
But then left me alone to
Socialize: it’s OK, they were really sweet.
But then back home, he cried:
“there’s no room for the two of us!”
And wanted to stay together, but move out.
Hunh? And amidst the disintegration
He thought it an excellent idea
For us to take vacation
To his family’s home in New Brunswick??
I didn’t go and he took two months
to relocate.
It’s OK! I know why I came!
But I knew what I was doing in the arms of my bushy-beard
He offered to make me soup when I was sick, Oh what a dear!
I knew I was in the right place in his big hairy chest
He counseled me forever, loved me and treated me his best.
I knew what I was doing in the arms of my punk rocker, too
He made me treats, supported my poems, school and made me a tattoo!
I knew I was in the right place in his long, slender arms
He loved me unconditionally, and really set the bar.
There were two others
One who said I was the best girlfriend ever
For buying him a Liverpool FC touque.
He moved to England,
He’s the quote in Hoxton
And after a few exchanges
Never spoke again, were through.
Then that wild one, the subject
Of my CBC poetry Face-Off
What a gorgeous cock
And a ballsy, supportive guy too
But looking for a wife and kid
Not a poetess academic with mystic values.
And with you?
There’s no time that was never unclear
But you kept lecturing me as though I didn’t hear
Are you retarded, are you not aware
Of why they call me Starfucker?
Your argument, my love, should be about SENTIMENTALITY
Not my issue but your disability
If dealing with people’s emotion toward you makes you freaky
It’s OK, you’re in good company.
You should have seen how I scolded a London man
who mused Me, I didn’t like it and got haughty.
Why do you think it looked like a bomb went off in my hotel room
I wasn’t expecting us to go back, get naughty.
Why do you think I couldn’t talk, remember a dumb fucking thing
Because, my friend, I trusted deeply
And I couldn’t penetrate you like a real dude
Cuz the fucking Internet got in the way
Noticed how when I said anything real
I’d always look away
I was talking to You in my head
The man before me was a stranger.
Don’t worry about not getting me off
No chance of that when I’m not in love,
“Nothing personal,” right boss…
It’s OK! I know why I came!
And it’s clear why you did the same.
“If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.” – T.S. Eliot
“Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” – my muse
Guilty as charged!
I got screwed.
I screwed myself, really
With no clear idea
Of what I was doing.
I was charged and guilty!
I wanted to screw.
I think I did, hm, not really
With no clear picture
Of how to do this.
I was charged up!
Ready with strength.
Said no fucking way
I’m hanging out with him again!
Yes, I’d eat my Paris treats, watch BBC
Rest up in the Jesmond Saturday night, instead.
Yes, those were MY terms
I laid out neatly, eating Thai
across the street the Roadhouse line-up
For my country’s Arcade Fire.
Feeling Canadian pride:
“I don’t mind if I’m boring and NICE at all!”
If to be a Londoner means
To be like him, full of piss and gall!
Eliot, I was strong!
But in my heart a weakness leeched
for your sad ones
So I agreed to another meeting.
I did that because I could almost hear him saying,
YOU KNOW WHAT I AM LIKE, I TOLD YOU, HUN
“If you met me, you may not like me, I’ve a sharp tongue,”
“I’m a miserable old bugger,” and “I’m generally rude to everyone.”
So I acted tough, while being meek, tried the beer
And received my beating
From the terms laid out for a weakling
who had cancelled a date to meet
an academic at the British Library,
sweet girl,
what on earth you were thinking?
You had no mind to ditch the tag-along
Did you feel he wouldn’t stick around
If you told her to get lost?
Guilty, as charged!
You got screwed?
Don’t think so.
As much as he negged
As annoying as you were
He never did let go
of you.
Except when he did
And you got lost but he
searched streets up and down five times
for you.
So, time to rethink your idea of “grim”
And if I recall the jury observes
You have never not loosened your grip on him…
