Bitter

It may not be appealing--
the taste of seeding rocket

But. . .

your apology

Has no more weight than

a crumb of

Angel cake.

How can I trust the mockingbird
to deliver on his promises?

How can I forgive this smouldering coal
While his brothers raze the forest?

Rosetta Stone

In the golden days, we wondered.

Hands out

reaching

in the dark.

Our curiosity lead,

we flourished.

Bright and shining everything.

Our eyes,

fixed on glimmer,

faltered.

Lead astray.

Lied to.

In the end,

We knew.

But we were too confused

and too afraid

To move.

April 22nd 2015

Poetry is all that comes
When the pain is so deep
It squeezes the lungs
Choke-holding throats
Punctured and poked
Felt thoughts
Form sentences

Sour gas cowsualties
Smiles before bed
Sign off on your safety training
Before you're dead

Side-stepping spills for
toxic PR
Touch it if you're not afraid,
But of course you are

Budget shoes
Budget look
Who cares about the budget?
In the budget book

Squeezed and choked
Hunted and broke
Emancipation never did come
From boats

Essays could be written
Trails blazed down winding roads
There are plenty of words
To explore with

But instead please accept
These
sardonically simple
tear drops
For mother's day

Gaia forgive us.

Sincerely,

Clueless Wonder

Voice

So often I feel like I am still finding my voice.
Approaching 30, I wonder why this is not yet something nestled snugly under my belt--a voice that I am confident to call my own.

By now, I should be certain and self-assured--about at least something!
But I have not learned to lay my certainties strategically. They seem to fall short, always on fault lines that shift with the ground beneath my feet.

This is not intentional. I am well educated and well traveled. I have learned things. I have seen things. I have thought and believed things. But everyday brings a new reality, a new challenge, a new question. And when I hold up my convictions like offerings to the alter of my voice, they are tiny balls of hail--collected through the storms and melted by the sun. Their watermarks make far less convincing an impression.

I question my memories and reconsider. Perhaps these beliefs and convictions were only the manifestation of an emotional state of being. Then, how can I be sure about something so transient? I shed another skin and those beliefs shed with them. Transforming to my next state. Butterfly, egg, caterpillar, cocoon. Endless.

So, I've been attempting to dwell in uncertainty. But this is dangerous territory. It is scaling the edge of a rocky canyon, tightrope walking across a fiery pit, exposing your heart, naked, to the elements. Hoping, always, for a favourable wind and encouraging words.

The trouble is, dwelling in uncertainty requires an element of conviction. A certainty that this is the final resting place and no further movement is necessary. Becoming sure and comfortable, starts to feel unsettling. And we find ourselves in a conundrum, which I imagine, is the door to the next phase. A trap door at the bottom a very very deep well.

Where on earth does it go?

All bets: to my voice.

General Help Wanted

I am a barely contained scribble
That I could draw when I was 3
Deemed a masterpiece
Before I knew the word
And have since been weaned
To see lines
order
status
like Escher staircases
chronic aspirations
to compare dreams

And the colour
was discarded
And the meaning
misinterpreted
And the masterpiece
dated:
A scribble
By a 3 year old
Who didn't know any better

I am seeking a translator
A teacher
of my other tongue
Before my mother
Before the words usurped--
Ordained the shape
the texture,
the outline
Of this world
That is not mine

When a scribble was more honest
When the truth was heard in hums
When thoughts were in a language
I've forgotten

Antiques

A live wire

A lit fuse

A spark in a crude world war

A bullet hole

Collective crimson consciousness

in perpetual motion

A rising tide

To wash away

All that has been named

Reclaiming relic mysteries

Of centuries

To come.

On an Airplane

I am on a flight to Cairo, examining the criss-crossing stamp of natural oil that someone else's hand left on the oval window beside me. I am returning from my Nana's funeral.

I flew back to Canada last week, unexpectedly when she passed away. It wasn't entirely unexpected. She was almost 90. Everyone says "she lived a good long life."

Out the window, the clouds are thick. A different kind of thick than the giant grey puff clouds that floated above Toronto when I landed last Thursday. They seemed more threatening somehow, but fluffier.

My window overlooks the engine. Here are the things I am trying hard not to think about:

1. Some bird flying much higher than is probably possible, merrily exploring the upper atmosphere when suddenly our jet engine slices him into an explosion of feathers, propelling us to our doom.

2. The missile that hit flight TWA 800 and the CIA and FBI cover up that ensued. Like might happen to our flight if some stray missile in some practice missile launch was miscalculated or mistakenly decided to propel us to our doom.

3. Climate change accentuated severe and novel weather conditions that might throw the plane out of the sky and propel us, slam-dunk style, to our doom.

4. The chances that the air traffic controller on duty has small children and was up late last night because one had a high fever, one got food poisoning and the other is obsessed with the new video games he got for his birthday last week causing the air traffic controller to fall asleep at their post, failing to catch the two planes on a direct crash course hurtling towards each other at 970 km/h, one being ours of course, that explode upon impact and propel us to our doom.

5. The odds that one would survive in such a situation.
No. that's a lie. I know those odds are close enough to 0 that I don't need to bother wasting my time not thinking about them.

6. My nana.

7. How sad it must be for my mom who just lost her own mother and who's kids are on opposite sides of the globe now more often then she ever could have possibly imagined when she held me in her arms for the first time.

8. How hard it must be to be a mom when the uncertainties in the world already threaten to devour you every minute and then you go and have children, that you would kill to protect, and you still have to accept that their safety is never a given.

I think my own kids would eat me alive.

I know that all I can ever do is give up
and hope for a while
but finally accept that even we are not permanent
and that everything must die.

Our life on earth is a gift
With all the joy and beauty and suffering and ugliness which would lose meaning and purpose if it continued forever.
So I breath in,
deeply.
out,
deeply.

Wipe my tears away and enjoy the clouds out the window. Their undefined edges and wispy tails. The ocean of whipped potatoes that won't catch us if we fall.

Whistleblower: Rap News 19!

Finally! Whistleblower: Rap News 19!!!!!



Informer: Whistleblower as Snow:Snowden?

:)

There are no Capslam finals in Abuja

I wish I had been in Ottawa yesterday!!!



Congratulations to Bruce Narbaitz, Capital Slam Champion of 2013!

Whom I have never met.
Whose poetry I have never witnessed live.
But if I had been judging that performance, I think the 10 would write itself!

Poems from all the beautiful and amazing poets that made it to the finals here!

Clear

I feel that recently the voices I've given my attention to have brought a lot of clarity to issues that are very muddy. To me at least.

I am rarely convinced of anything unless I am convinced of the core and sometimes it takes a lot of time, observation and experience to understand what that core actually consists of.

And even then, what is best to do with the understanding of such a core?

I still feel like I'm travelling through a cloud at the moment but I'm trying to enjoy the scenery this time.

When clarity comes, as I'm certain it will, I think it will be crystal.

Abuja pace

9ja.
What has been going on lately?

Entrance to Millenium Park

Well, I've started to get my life into some kind of rhythm. Of course, it's not perfectly complete yet. But the essential bits are there. The congregation of birds that sing sun salutations from the trees outside my window, the rising but muffled call to prayer, the jangling beats shoe repairers drum out on their tool boxes to attract those in need of their services, the tapped horns of wandering taxis signalling vacancy, the drip of the leaky air conditioner in the office, the droning buzzzzzzzzz of the generators whenever the power's out, the more aggressive brrrrrrrrr of the community vegetable grinder who has his business just outside of my flat, the hiss of the gas pressure when I open the tank to light the stove, the click of the lighter, the whoosh of the flame. . .the thick silence of the nights.

I remember noticing, specifically, the sound of highway traffic from my bedroom window in Canada before I left. I was lying in bed around 3am (my usual bedtime when I'm at home) and I could hear transport trucks and cars speeding across the asphalt in that low familiar hum. The highway is more than a kilometre from my house but it made no difference.
I remember wondering if it had always been like that. If the highway sounded so busy at that time even 5 years ago? Was everyone always in this much of a rush to get somewhere else? The hum stayed with me until I woke (around 11am) and even grew to include the attitudinal wheeze of aircrafts forever landing or taking off.

Aso Rock at Sundown

Here, I love watching people sitting on benches behind corner vegetable stands. Security guards watching football all day sitting back, teasing each other, doubling over with the kind of uncontrollable laughter that makes it sound like something is caught in your throat. Girls and boys and men and women walking with perfect posture and balancing a day's earnings worth of peanuts or 'pure water' on their heads while they dodge in and out of crowds and stopped traffic. It really makes you reconsider the limits of willpower. I've seen someone accidentally brush shoulders with a girl carrying a giant tub of something and the girl was able to turn her head back and scold him without even the hint of a wobble.

It doesn't mean it's easy, or better or even more desirable necessarily. . .but it is a nice and eye-opening change.

Anybody?

Nagarkot, Nepal

Searching high and low

for anything

any kind of anywhere

to step

any sort of anyway

to proceed

any type of anyhow

to live

any part of anyone

to believe

and every heart

speaks

only

.^.   .

     V

 

Square vs. Circle

How long will we walk through wildness
Paved over before our time?
How long will we try to find
Connections through concrete?
How long lost?
How long found?
How long now?

Staring out barred windows
To wall lined streets
Sneaking green
Disobedient empire

We've caged ourselves for security
From the wildness that grows
Despite heavy machinary
Despite all of the code
Despite all of the ways
conceived to kill it

Rather than praise tenacity
We'd make God
A comfortable life

Aljazeera interview with Binyavanga Wainaina

Interview with Binyavanga Wainaina, one of my favourite writers.

Apart

The melancholy absence of a toothbrush
Solemn empty hangers
Lack of footsteps padding down the hall
A breeze that no longer carries wisps of your scent. . .
This is the power of nothing.

Predeparture

My snow cloud rolling
frozen land
What secrets do you hold?
What parts of you will time unfold
When I return to you?
Points that never seemed so sharp
Comforts to sink into
Memories forgotten
New habits I've grown into
What parts of me will wear away?
What parts too essential?
Pare away these layers of time
to reach the differential

An Experiment

There is an experiment I am conducting with trust.

It has to do with expelling doubt and trying to trust completely.

It is not easy. Especially with so few allies.

It is entirely possible, in their minds, and in most rational, logical people's minds, that it is naivete, idealism and ultimately, stupidity.

It is entirely possible it will end badly.

It is entirely possible I will be hurt so badly, I will never be the same again. I may not ever recover.

I may not ever have that idealism again. I may not ever be able to trust again. . .

For a long time, I didn't.

A long time may only have been five years, but that is nearly 20% of my life.

For a long time, I doubted love. I refused to give myself fully to it because knowing it had burned too badly. It had pulled the ground right out from under my feet. It sent me scrambling up self-righteous mountains then cast me off of their peaks to spiral into the fault lines of isolation where they spawned. It was a war between the control and chaos inside of me that I tried to cut myself off of completely.

Tried to ignore its existence

And live in ignorance

Turned away from the free fall

That comes from trusting them to be careful with your heart

But they still came for me

Haunted me

Cried and screamed until I listened

And realized in the end that they were twins with different names that started from one egg and returned to the sky, the same.

It was only when I found the egg they hatched from, that I was able to drop it.

To smash it to a million pieces and eat it up.

It's name was fear. Fear of falling into an abyss that has no bottom. Fear of loss of the familiar and everything I loved. Fear of death because it is unknown. Fear of the unknown because it has the potential to be evil which must be synonymous to painful. . .eventually. Fear of being wrong because if I am wrong than I have to return to the beginning and reevaluate everything. Fear of self because I am human. I am imperfect. I am subject to believing incorrect information and I might not be strong enough to climb back up if I fall. . .

. . .into love

Which means trust. Which means making a bold pact with uncertainty. Which means freedom because control, to love, is like the first malignant mutation of a cell that multiplies and weighs down so heavily that it chokes out its natural expansion and makes it impossible to survive. Which means wildness. Which means possible destruction. Which means hope. That it doesn't.

But without the possibility being open, it is impossible. . .to feel completely. To love completely. To know truth. . .

And what is life for. . .if not to open our hearts? Despite them being broken so many billion times before.

To stand strong again, after so many falls, on constantly shifting earth, under inconsistent sky and cry from the depths of our pain full tears of joy.

I believe

I believe in magic.

I believe in the extra ordinary

The sur real (and the sous real)

The wonder full

De Light Full

Fabulous life

That doesn't necessarily mean money

But needs provided for in abundance

That would mean work

But creative work, that is truly enjoyable and fulfilling

That I love to wake up everyday to do

That means beauty

That means good healthy wholesome food that is delicious

For every meal

That doesn't hurt other life in the process of creation

That gives back to the soil and the people and the ecosystem that it came from

That builds strong connections to people and healthy communities around it

That cares deeply for the well being of others

That is honest and strives to learn more to increase the depths and heights of truth

That loves and loves and loves

believing fearlessly and fiercely

That doesn't give up hope

But faces adversity

That can be overcome

By standing up, and starting again.

To This Day by Shane Koyczan

This is a beautiful spoken word piece by Shane Koyczan.



but I think I like this one better, actually:




I haven't written anything for a long time. I keep posting videos (which I think are awesome!!) but hopefully eventually, soon! I will write again.

I'm heading off for my volunteer placement in Nigeria in a week and a bit!  Then I will have lots to write about!

Directionless expression

Senses sleeping winter
Frozen pastel sky
Unfaltering flame 
Suspended smoke
Flickering florescence.

Neon icicles
Glowing glass enclosures
Sticky-sweet displays
Blip Beep heartbeats
No-face metal voices

Devouring transactions
Momentary satisfaction.
 
Directionless expression