2022-15/30 - Home is Where

I’m with my people
Home is where the herd is
All my stuff is here
Home is where the hoard is
I don’t freeze to death
Home is where the heat is
I plan and dream and think
Home is where the head is
I can reach out when I need to
Home is where the help is
People compliment me
Home is where the hype is
I’m not alone
Home is where the hearts are




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2022 - 16/30 - Eulogy for the Video Store

I got the news the other day about Black Dog video on Commercial Drive shutting down.
I've been renting there weekly for years.

An elegy is a poem that reflects upon a subject with sorrow or melancholy.
Whereas a eulogy is meant to offer praise.

Well, I come to praise the video store, not to bury it.

This one’s for the DVD
The commentaries from the cast, director, and crew
Giving insight into so many levels of the film
That obscure niche-horror B-movie
That noir foreign film one-shot from that writer-director’s short ‘magical realism’ phase
That divine experimental five-country co-production that’s no longer in print
That hard-to-find music documentary

The transition from Film to Beta to VHS to DVD to Blu Ray to digital
Already filtering out too many movies forever
But video stores were where so many of them could be captured
Collated and hoarded
Caught and preserved
Held in amber
An entire library of culture
A snapshot of the medium itself
A specialty shop of our collective dreams
And voices from the entire planet

Not these weak offerings that have the gall to call themselves services
Offering only the last decade
of only the greatest hits
While furiously churning out their own productions
And ignoring history
Split between a dozen companies that cost fifteen dollars a month
The math is clear
It’s the return of cable
They’re busy recreating the reasons we went to the video store in the first place

I feel like a history professor watching a library burn
While the people in the crowd around me talk about how
the property would make a very valuable something else
Once the lot is cleaned up

Streams are shallow and they have a current
Rapids pulling things by swiftly and then they’re gone
They’re supposed to lead to large bodies of water
Stable, deep repositories that in turn inspire the clouds to rain more ideas
Instead of just endlessly refreshing with the latest offerings
And there’s so much disposable pollution floating past

I’d have less of a problem
If they crossed the streams
And it led to a torrent
Which in turn led to a bay
That wasn’t run by pirates
Streams offers sips to a traveler
But you can live on an ocean
And you can dive so deep

The video store clerk is that elusive sibling
To the comic book store cashier
The record shop worker
The bookstore owner
All arbiters of culture
The person who you go to for a good recommendation
With an entire cathedral of material on hand to offer

I’m worried at what’s to be lost with the transition
As these businesses starve to death in the streets
The libraries do what they can
And I’m grateful they exist
But I worry it’s a band aid on a cut throat

The video store was an entrance to another dimension
Where couples went to pick out films
As a litmus test of compatibility
Where your mind emptied at the door as it faced countless options
Where the counterperson’s encyclopedic knowledge
Could steer you in the right direction
To walk through the shelves and see
The end products of unfathomable hard work
Where the lurid covers vied for your attention

The video store was where the question
“Is this any good?”
Could be answered with honesty
And would lead to a tour of other delights

To conjugate
Like the old man I am
I will miss the video store
I am missing the video store
I miss the video store

And I have so much love for them

So pour one out for all the independent purveyors of fading mediums
And if you happen to see a film buff crying silently in the bar
Consoled by someone with a crate of vinyl
And a person with a bag of zines and comics and old books
Hide your ereader and your iphone
And ask these ghosts of the echoes of the memories of gods
What their favorite anything is
And luxuriate in the ten-day answers

Here’s to Black Dog.
The latest domino on the Drive



tags

2022 - 17/30 - A Good Us

As you
So much
Yellow page through
The different we
Us over there
In greener grass
Flower petal kisses
Brushing ghostly
Sent through
Eyes half-lidded with love
Our fogged perfume comfort trance
Hand painting wherever we go
The flock of it following us
Into every building
And privately
Secure hands on willing hips
We lifeboat in the dark
Too hungrily

Or you turn to find
And change the channel
To sink and
Swerve into the sting
Watching it darken
Curdle sour into
Coliseum Friday nights
Rainy sidewalks capturing
Our reflections fighting
Perhaps the flowers of bruises
The blades of words
Our claws hungry for throats

If there’s a multiverse
And every decision creates new realms
If everything that can happen has happened
If our alternate universes
Are for better or worse

I still prefer it here
Sweet blessing of smooth sailing
Solidity of an average
Not given to thin heights
Or crushing depths
But only tasting each

A good us
Commonplace but no less special




tags

2022 - 18/30 - Ignore the Apocalypse

Ignore the apocalypse
Even though it’s banging pots and pans in the kitchen
Screaming on the airplane for the whole trip
Painting the towns red one by one
And death-metal guitar soloing
Over the supermarket speakers

Don’t pay it any mind
When it pulls your hair during the movie
Laughs and points at you in the lunchroom
Can-cans through your idle thoughts
Stubs your toe with carpet bombs
And cranks up your ringtone volume

Just plug your ears
When it’s the elephant jazzercising in the room
And you need to climate change your vacation plans
When vaccines pound on the flimsy hotel wall
And nukes get all dressed up for prom night
Quivering in their quivers with anticipation

Look the other way
When it makes invasion faces at you
Rattling saber-tooth clown-makeup threats
Dictates letters in countdown
Promises a falling out before the fallout
And asks if it’s hot enough for you

Stream more entertainment
Until it tsunami-drowns out the news
Become your own pharmacy
Until the future blurs into something promising

Remember what your parents told you:
It’s only teasing you because it likes you




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2022 - 19/30 - Good Things

Sometimes it’s hard to recognize
the reward you get from not doing something stupid.
We work so well with punishment and bonuses
So when nothing happens at all, it’s like a swing and a miss
An echo in a canyon
The same dinner as before
Life continues to be the slowest roller coaster ever
And only on some level borne of wisdom and experience
Can we sort of tell we avoided something bad
Like broken radar we can hardly make out
I think it’s a flaw
When the jump scare doesn’t happen
And we’re disappointed
When doing the right thing offers no immediate payoff
And we look around for the camera lights
The prize money and the trophy
But it’s just more days of the calendar
With okay weather
No theme music kicks in
We take another regular step
The same as last hundred thousand
But after this particular one
We’re supposed to say “Whew, that was close.”
Even though our heartbeat hasn’t changed at all
“Mundane victory” shouldn’t be an oxymoron
So many things we quietly don’t do,
That we avoid by continuing straight forward
They’re worth a celebration
If only we could feel them more powerfully
So for now we live off of faith
The knowledge of what it is to be just
Counting the blessings
And urging ourselves to be grateful
But that pull is always there
The high diving board and the lake of fire
The need to burn star bright for half as long

For now we stay the course
Thrilled on some level to be safe
But a little haunted



tags

2022 - 20/30 - Spectrums

There are two ways to get money;
One takes half of your soul and one takes all of it
Greed rewarded is greed encouraged
The meek will inherit the earth
Because all the alphas will have lived by the sword
And died by the billions

Too many people see the world in black and white
Outside of computers,
there has never been a binary anywhere
There have only ever been spectrums
Rainbows from extreme to extreme
Watercolors that blend
And nothing’s pure when you look deep enough
It makes any ‘us vs them’ rhetoric corrode immediately
And drives dictionaries and lawbooks mad
Every classification has an asterisk
Leading to a footnote the length of a human life
As specific and unique as a fingerprint
So many exceptions to the rules
That the rules evaporate

The opposite of order isn’t chaos
It’s freedom

But here we are
Cosplaying as adults
We all know that it was actually Cameron Frye’s Day Off
We’ve joined what we can’t beat
Mouths sour with the ghost of leftover lemons
Waiting for angels to declare war on factory farming
Getting the sinking feeling that
Heroes are just a temporary bridge between swords and dragons

We’ve sparked enough joy to start a forest fire
Sometimes we can’t resist
Putting the peddle to the meddle
Having a hair of the dog
From the world’s hairiest dog
And listening to the accelerator
While our eyes reflect the bonfire

But it’s hard for us to turn the page
Trying too hard to be what we used to be
And something’s got to give
We’re a rising sea of half-realized realizations
Every promise of security sounds like bad advice from a cowboy
The meantime continues to be mean
The sound of extinction is the best alarm clock
And our dreams too temporarily rescue us

We think we’re coins and light switches
Imprisoned by money and electricity
But we’re actually rainbows
And we always were




tags

2022 - 21/30 - Toot Fairies

If you toot while asleep and no one’s around
Then all of the smell and all of the sound
Are bottled by fairies that come in the night
Who capture the toots and they seal them up tight

Their fairy sedation makes sure you won’t wake
As flatulent nocturnal gusts they all take
They abscond with the breezes from one’s derriere
And none of you will even know they were there

You’ll be none the wiser. You’ll stir not at all.
They’ll gather their jars and fly off with their haul
And bring them all back to their kingdom of gas
And judge all the vapours from everyone’s ass

They’ll judge them on timbre and mouth feel and whiff
They’ll open each jar. And then listen. And sniff
These toot connoisseurs and sommeliers of scent
Will parse every present from each anal vent

Uniqueness and power. Complexity. Strength.
Severity. Tone. Musicality. Length.
Both decibel volume and volume in weight
Ejection velocity leaving the gate

Airspeed and spiciness. Dampness and reek.
Octaves from basso profundo to squeak
Tangy bouquets couched in turbulent flows
All deeply inhaled by each keen fairy nose

No matter how subtle. No matter how stealthy.
No matter how pungently, deeply unhealthy
No matter the diet and gas composition
No matter the potency of each emission

They’re collated, classified, labeled and filed
They’re judged on their grade and their level and style
And then the best ones of each jarred broken wind
Have a bright ribbon to each of them pinned

Trophies are given. Awards handed out.
The winners retrace their night’s previous route.
Back to the buttholes, each toot fairy flies
They leave for the winners a nice little prize

It might be a dollar or toothpick or toy
A paper clip. Maybe a sweet to enjoy
And then in the morning when sleepers awaken
With zero idea of the farts that were taken

They’ll see a new thing and they’ll sleepily stare
A bedside addition they swear wasn’t there
They’ll quizzically blame it on slow morning thought
Not knowing that it’s an award that they’ve got

So if you awake in the morning and see
Anything out of the ordinary
Just know that your gas passed the toot fairy test
And bask in the knowledge: Your farts are the best.




tags

2022 - 22/30 - As Much As

I love you as much as
Vampires loved the 80s
Comic books loved collectors
8-bit music loved arcades
Books loved independent bookstores
And video stores loved people who rewound
Which is to say
Regrettably
Other than powerful nostalgia
And rare sightings
I don't love you anymore



tags

2022 - 23/30 - My Kitchen Body

My kitchen body
Has a hot pink rolling pin
In the junk drawer
My liver is a toaster oven
The hot cavern of my heart
Is good for warming up pizza
And baking muffins
Cupboard lungs swell with crackers and soup
And empty before the next trip to the store
Breathing groceries
My cold brain is where I keep everything that rots quickly
That gets moldy if left out
Mostly cheese
The light goes out if it’s not open
And part of my mind is frozen
Where I keep things suspended for months
Or years
In the ice
Furring with frost
Burning in the cold if ignored for too long
My countertop skin needs constant cleaning
Crumbs from recipe attempts
Attract vermin if I don’t wash
And we don’t talk about
What’s under the sink
My plates and cups and cutlery
Are how I process
When what’s been combined inside me
Is served and consumed
Smeared and experimented with
Chewed and mopped up
Swallowed and talked about
And put dirty into my dishwasher mouth
Before coming out clean
My blenders and the mixers
The powerful muscles that tear things apart
Are scary and dangerous
Not often used
But useful
I’m happiest with guests
A little embarrassed at the upkeep I need
And functional



tags

2022 - 24/30 - Disco Ball

A disco ball made of rearview mirrors
The size of the boulder that chased Indiana Jones
Lit by Batman’s spotlight
Turning my crime-ridden body
Into shining ocelot spots of memory
That haunt me while I’m dancing in the club



tags

2022 - 25/30 - Old Enough

The Ship of Theseus
Frankenstein’s Monster’s Body
And my sense of self
Walked into an old bar
That had been bombed flat
In four separate wars
And had changed hands a dozen times
But kept the same name
In a city that didn’t have a single original building
Still existing from the city’s inception
When it was built on the ruins
Of the culture that was there before
On a patch of land itself scoured clean several times
By ice ages, floods, and meteor strikes
On top of fossils that, when alive,
Already had a layer of fossils below their feet
With other levels below that
Each stripe a million years thick
Whose genetic ancestors were separated
By continental drift a few times
Crashing and mixing the soup
After life sparked here
Restarting again and again
And the bartender said
“I’m going to need to see some ID”




tags

2022 - 26/30 - Moth

You left me a message once
Your voice trapped in my phone
A moth in a jar softly hitting the edges
Telling me about a poem you thought I’d like
Reciting it
And you were right

Later you became a poem yourself
Leaving beautiful evidence of yourself behind
A finite wake of archaeological shards
Video clips and photographs
And a couple of books

I found a poem the other day that I thought you’d like
And I left you a message
By reciting it softly to the air
A moth free to find its way
To wherever your light is now



tags

2022 - 27/30 - Love

If you fall in love the same way every time
You might only be falling in love with yourself
Love is an amphibious tiger
That can do an impression of a shark
As easy as it can ambush you with
500 pounds of purring
Plato said that love was insanity
An amplification of reality
That charges every interaction
With the kind of electricity that powers both
Spotlights and electric chairs
Love is a flat unicorn
Able to be letter-slipped under the most locked of doors
It can chameleon into something
Succubus irresistible
Making you laugh as the wax in your wings melts away
It can be of the order Ephemeroptera
Living for less than a day
Or it can pyramid for millennia
Long after the earth has shed you
Maybe a frequency that can only be detected
During a full blue moon during an aurora borealis
On a solstice during an odd-numbered leap year
As rare and as trusting as a Dodo bird
It can flaunt snake-shed skin
And call it evening wear
Some people are painted in targets
Exhausting cupid’s ammunition over and over
Frustrated by the constant experience of it
And some walk radar invisible
Begging to be used
Love is as unique
As the combination of the two people feeling it
Never the same twice
And changing over time
If it isn’t,

It might be a mirror



tags

2022 - 28/30 - Gander

I’m not a person
I’m sentient plumbing
Halloweening as a man
Gelatinous ghost prison
Tall water balloon
of my ancestors’ DNA
A silly goose
With delusions of gander




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2022 - 29/30 - This is the way the world ends

And this is the way the world ends
Not with a squawk but a clatter

Born with a uranium spoon in my mouth
Tongue more fool’s gold than silver
I radiate confidence
In half-living words
From a reactor I can’t shut down

And this is the way the world ends
Not with a honk but a sizzle

“Yes, but what of the turquoise herring?” he asked
“The dreaded black herring?”
I tell him
You’ve always been the plaid sheep of the family
And the fish near the tailing pond
Have always been that color

And this is the way the world ends
Not with a squeak but a ding dong

As sure as that holster is holding a method actor
As sure as monsters are often more famous than their victims
As sure as leaders are sometimes caught green-handed and red with envy
As sure as honesty is becoming just a shade of paint
And the ones in charge have started charging

This is the way the world ends
Not with a boom but a sploosh



tags

2022 - 30/30 - Intensely

She came up to me at a party
This stranger
Talked to me for a little bit and then
“Are you always this intense?” she asked
“I don’t know.” I answered honestly
We stood in silence for a little bit, looking at each other
“Jesus Christ.” she said, and walked away
I didn’t feel much
I stood there like a curious heron
Unsure what had just happened

I’m not sure if intense people know they’re intense
In the same way that some great leaders have no idea
What the secret of great leadership is
Or prolific artists don’t know where their ideas come from
And self-saboteurs don’t know
the call is coming from inside the house

Some great musicians are horrible teachers
And chameleons don’t learn how to do what they do
I can’t pass on the knowledge of how to be tall
Anymore than I can truly know how I’m perceived

To be on the outside of ourselves
Just for a little bit of time
To outer-body-experience watch us
Through the lens of someone else’s baggage
Would be so valuable

I never saw her again
But she lives in my attic rent free
Where I’m still standing
Lumbering oak
Dog-confused
Storking quietly
Head cocked and processing
Uncomprehending

Intensely



tags

Loch Ness

I am nothing if not restrained.
I have a rich inner emotional life
that rarely pokes its head above the waterline
My ecstasy and rage are Loch Ness monsters.
Mythical to outsiders
My feelings live in the depths
Under darkness and pressure
Calmly existing in their environment they’re used to
Exploding if brought too quickly to the surface



tags

Ark

There are two wolves inside of you
And two llamas
And two zebras
There are two of every animal
You are an ark
It’s been raining for a long time
It’s a small zoo and tempers are running high
It stinks inside you
The smells are rich
But this is survival
This is important
So much will die
If you sink




tags

Here Be Monsters

(a short story from the point of view of a criminal con man)

I’d seen her across the spaceport and targeted her immediately. I knew her type. She stood out from the crowd in her colorful peasant clothes. Possibly a runaway, definitely in a hurry to get off world. Young. Not as dust-ridden and dull as the rest of the people that lived and worked here. It wasn’t immediately obvious to passersby minding their own business but she was like a beacon to me. I’d done this before and I had an instinct for it.

She looked around for pilots or captains in a way that she probably thought was sneaky. It was clumsy and obvious to me. She had no gift for slyness.

Luckily, I myself was a captain and a pilot.

The suns were going down. The blue and red of them melting into the horizon threw purple light up into the clouds. That’s when I approached her.

I bumped into her roughly and caused her to drop her backpack which opened and spilled some of her belongings into the dust. I apologized profusely and helped her pick them up while the foot traffic begrudgingly made its way around us. I asked her what her name was. Mino, she said. I told her mine was Pryet and that I’d love to make it up to her.

At first, she wasn’t agreeable, until I offered to take her back to the foyer airlock of my ship for some tea. At the word ‘ship,’ she perked right up.

I don’t consider myself an artist but sometimes I think I almost deserve that title. I gave one of the best performances I’d given to date. Non-threatening, mannerly, dropping hints about my wealth, complimentary, kind, generous, and soft. I took the long way back to my ship so that we’d have more time to talk. In some ways it was like lockpicking a safe. I could sense her moving her small hand further and further away from the knife she had hidden in her belt. I could see her smile moving from polite to genuine. Her gait loosened just a little.

I hadn’t completely won her trust but it was a start.

I’m a pretty big guy but I know how to shift it. If I’m in a tavern brawl, I know how to make it all seem like brawn by sucking in my gut and standing straight-backed, letting my height help the illusion. But here I let myself seem out of shape. I needed to seem weak. I let it all hang out. I pretended to be clumsy. I seemed foolish and awkward. I fumbled my keys into the dust. A type of clowning. I laughed at her small jokes but not enough to make her suspicious.

The rest of the evening was like a dream. I was inhabiting the role. In my airlock entry, I served her tea and got her whole story. She had domineering parents plotting to marry her off to a land baron she’d never met for a generous dowry and land annexation rights. She worked hard on the farm with the cattle and the crops. She taught herself to read. All she wanted to do was get away from here and see the stars.

I’d had a dozen just like her.

It was me who brought up the idea. Like it had just occurred to me. Why, I had a ship. And I had the space to take her! I was going on a short jaunt two systems over for supplies before a long haul to the core. I told her that I knew I didn’t have beautiful quarters for her but I did have an extra berth and I was ahead enough in my savings that it would be no trouble to take her with me on my supply run and drop her off before the big trip.

Get this. She cried. She cried with gratitude at finding such a generous stranger. It was destiny, she said. It was fate, she said. She just knew she had a good feeling about me, she said.

For just a moment I felt guilty but it passed.

That’s probably when I should have realized what was happening. But I was too lost in self-congratulations on a job well done. Too proud. You know what they say about pride and falls.

We strapped in together in the cockpit. I wanted to give her a view through the front windows during takeoff. To people that had never been offworld before, this was usually what sealed the deal. Clearance was given by launch control and vectors were defined. The green light winked brilliantly on the dash and we were off. I pushed forward on the thrusters and gripped the stick. This could all be automated but I wanted her to see me pilot it. I wanted her to think of me as a valiant space captain. In a way, I thought I was entertaining her and giving her what she wanted. Pumping up the fantasy before I closed the trap.

Her fingers tightened on the armrest as the ship shuddered with acceleration. The violet clouds came closer and then smeared across the glass until parting and revealing the maroon night sky. The stars revealed themselves as the atmosphere thinned until the points of light glittered alone across the black universe.
I had to admit, even I never got tired of that transition.

I put it in autopilot, offered dinner, and prepared to get down to business.

I showed her to the cargo space and mattress where she’d be staying and the meager bathroom next to it. She said it was much bigger than back home and I shook my head. All too easy. We both freshened up before I came back to her to her room and showed her to the galley.

She’d put on a different shirt for dinner. The same style as her other shirt but a darker colour and a little lower in the front. Perhaps this would be easier than I thought. I served up the stew and we sat down.

Occasionally they were grateful enough that my proposition wasn’t met with outright hostility. Not that it mattered either way to me.

It was after dessert when I let the mask fall.

I told her that space was a lonely place driven solely by power. I told her that laws were for planets. That here in space, all that mattered was strength and weakness. The strength of hulls, the power of vacuum. That people bartered what they had and that there was no shame in it. Defense and offense, supply and demand, strategy and execution. It was the eternal law of the universe. Predator and prey, if you wanted to look at it like that. I preferred, I said, to look at it as the economics of force.

And no one rides for free.

I reached across the table and rested my large hand on her small one.

At this point, the penny drops and they realize that they only have one thing to offer me. They also realize they’re alone. This is where the second act begins. Do they scream? Is there a chase? Would there be tears? Demure submission? Perhaps an attempt at bartering? An offered reward, maybe? Or maybe there would be scratching and a true test of athleticism. A purer, physical flexing of the universal law I attempted to educate her about earlier.

I’d yet to have a passenger be happily surprised. I wonder if it’s me that causes this. I wonder if that’ll ever happen. I don’t even know if I’d like it at this point. I’m too used to the other way.
But while I was thinking all this. I realized that she hadn’t said anything yet.
I looked at her face to try to read it.

And I couldn’t.

In fact, I couldn’t do much of anything. Nothing was coming off of her and I suddenly felt very content to just sit and watch her shoulder.

I felt my mind split into two. One of those moments of being in shock where you watch things happen with a detachment that tells you just how bad things have gotten without allowing you to feel true alarm.
I understood that my plan was a bad one. I understood that she was off limits. I understood that this ship was now her ship.

I knew with the sickening clarity of hindsight that I’d fallen into her trap, not the other way around. I’d gobbled down a lure. Like a greedy riverfish, I’d arrowed toward the bait without a second thought.
In space you hear rumours. Myths in the black. A lot like sailors of old. Reality bends when you’re in a small craft at the mercy of enormous, uncaring nature. There can be madness in long transit. Superstitions arise that seem silly on land but become iron-hard rules on a long journey. Travelers come up with things to explain the unexplainable; mermaids, krakens, harpies, gods…

…and sirens.

She spoke to me then. In a different voice. A beautiful voice. I could almost see the notes of it. The crystalline shining elegance of them. I felt the pull of addiction and dove in. Like I was doing a smiling, languid backstroke down the sides a massive whirlpool. Not a care in the universe as my mental being disappeared.

I was allowed to keep a kernel of myself in a small corner of my mind. Otherwise, I became a tool of hers as much as any hammer or wrench on this ship.

I knew that I would never tell another soul about her. I knew that I would never attempt this kind of plan again. I felt the tendrils of her song reprogramming me as we traveled through the dark and I was grateful for it. I knew that if I broke any of her rules, I would happily gouge out my own eyes and cut myself in the smallest, most painful ways for days until I died.

She left me that small pocket of myself so that after she left, I would have a role to adhere to. A personality to keep me from drooling in a corner for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be truly me so much as a costume I’d never be able to take off. A different mask that she’d let me have. She didn’t do that to be kind. She did it to avoid suspicion. So did it so that I could still speak to tower controls during takeoff and landing.

She did it to avoid leaving a trail of victims that would lead back to her.

Maybe the worst part of it all was that I was content about it all. The horror I should have felt was missing. No panic. Just passive witnessing. Watching myself disappear. Looking at my own disassembly and reformation in an image she preferred. I even helped her here and there when I felt she’d missed a spot.
I wasn’t privy to her long-terms plans. Would she leave me at the next outpost and find a new captain to prey on? Or would she let me resupply and take me up on that long-haul journey I’d told her I was going on? Would I be food for her journey? Would she lay eggs in me? Was I a short-term or long-term investment? But puppets don’t ask questions unless they’re told to.

I wasn’t wrong about about the economics of force and strategy. Clearly. It was all that mattered out here. I suppose in a lot of ways that the old maps had it right. The space between lands is deep, mysterious, unknowable, and dark.

And here be monsters.




tags

The law of averages

(a short story about a species that amalgamates others, not unlike the Borg)

The last thing I remember was the ship overtaking us.

I call it a ship but it was the size of a continent. Asymmetrical and biological. Crusted with horns and glowing holes. The closer it got, the more our ship started to shudder. I don’t know what kind of field, energy, or radiation would do that through the nothing of space but it got to a point where I felt like my teeth were going to rattle out of my head. The whole crew, now bathed in the glare of the red alert lights, clutched the sides of their helmets in panic.

It had appeared above us in an instant and then started closing the distance. If it was an attack, we’d already lost.

We were in a deep part of the sector, far from a base. Nothing like this thing had ever been reported. It didn’t look like we would have a chance to get to be the first. We could barely hear each other shouting over the noise. Our distress calls would bounce off a few antennae in a decade or two but the object came up too suddenly for logs to be recorded to supralight. Some passing freighter might accidentally pass through the waves of our basic broadcast feeds. They might see us screaming over the racket and hear the sound of our entire craft stressing to the breaking point. But space is big and that could be in thousands of years.

Or never.

There are always disappearances and tall tales about what happened. Later, when the wreckage is found and analyzed, it’s almost always obvious piracy or mechanical/pilot error. Whatever was happening here was new to us.

It floated over us, making our research vessel into a quaking little speck near its hull. I say hull but it felt more correct to call it skin. On my viewscreen, it looked like a scab under a microscope. Like we were a dust mite getting close to a face.

I remember feeling a pop inside my skull. Not painful but definitely alarming. I feel like I could see clear space through a crack developing in the hull but I wasn’t feeling the pull of vacuum. There was a brief feeling of weightlessness as the gravity turned off. We all floated up a few inches with our papers and tools. There was a brief whirlwind and then blackness.

I awoke in a haze on a bed. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. I couldn’t move. I felt heavy. The ceiling above me was far away. I couldn’t see a light source but the room seemed bright. The air was layered and foggy. A few streaks of the fog had colours drifting in them. That couldn’t be healthy but I seemed to be breathing fine.

“This one’s awake.” I heard a voice say to my right.

I could feel the bed motor buzzing as it became more a recliner and adjusted my body into a sitting position.

I couldn’t identify the being in front of me now. Presumably the owner of the voice.

Part mantis shrimp, part boa constrictor, part octopus, part lionfish. Copious technology jammed into it at odd angles here and there. Was that a respirator? Ski goggles? A bright stripe of fur over the crest of this odd collision of flesh and plastic like a roman centurion’s mohawk except the hair had glowing tips like optic fiber. Lights blinked like monitors in the crevasses of its flesh. Iridescent crystals jutted out at several points, glinting. Were those a few tubes of neon? Long, thick, bird legs jutted down to the floor ending in rugged, nimble, ten-toed feet like tree roots come to life. The legs were banded with color that kept changing and mottling in no apparent pattern that I could detect. First, they’d be zebra stripes and then they’d look like ink spilled on a page. The many tentacles of the creature poked out between the fur, scales, and nooks of its body and drooped down to its knees.

I realized I was assigning it earth creature archetypes as a mental layover to parse what I was seeing but I honestly couldn’t grasp the biological chaos I was looking at.

“It sees itself” said the voice again. It wasn’t the creature in front of me who was talking.

I turned to the right, towards the sound of the voice and saw another creature identical to the one I had been looking at.

Then I pivoted one of my many eyes over and noticed the creature in front of me had turned its head towards the sound of the voice as well and that’s when I realized it was a mirror.

That bizarre freak show was me.

“He’s not imprinting. He’s going to thrash. Get a team in here.” I heard the voice say as I started to try to scream. It came out as a thin, soft dog whine. Evidently, I was still under some sort of anesthetic. I strained with all my might to move and could start to feel the tips of all my tentacles and fins and claws. I was the organic menagerie I’d seen in the mirror.

I felt a pinprick and more darkness.

That was eighteen months ago.

I’m more at home in this body than I was a year ago but I can’t think I’ll ever get used to it. Two of my crew committed suicide. The other ten seem to be adjusting slowly like me. Only Alison seems to be thriving in this new form.

We’re part of the Church of the Galactic Average now.

This race started as “research biologist priests” on a quest to find the perfect xenobiological form. They had developed a religion stating that once they could mix every intelligent life form into one, they would find the form of God. They’ve been doing it for sixty of our human millennia so far. They’re on their eighteenth galaxy. Which, if you know much about galaxies, means that they’re still about 200 billion galaxies short of their goal. Luckily one of the perks of the upgrades is near immortality.

Voluntary death keeps the numbers manageable. It’s not an easy gig after a few thousand years and people get tired. The ship can bud more quarters as necessary with the waxing and waning of the population.

They only need a small sampling of a race’s genome. They’re satisfied with the cross-section of humanity collected from our ship so that’s humanity off the hook. I’m lucky I had a pretty diverse crew. I’m not sure they all see it that way.

Forced converts. Considering the crusades on old Earth, this feels like humanity got off lightly. We are the sacrifice and they’ll leave the rest alone.

The one that woke me up I called Peggy. Her actual name is a collection of scents, squeaks, and sparks I can’t write down, much like the name that’s been assigned to me. They call that form of communication True Talk but they let us speak our own language through translators until we’re ready to transition away from our form of speaking. Like we’re being weaned off of who we were.

Peggy actually told me that I was lucky that humans were so close to the galactic biological mean. A nervous system, multilimbed, visual and auditory sensors. She was actually surprised that I noticed that much of a difference between my original form and what I saw in the mirror. Once I started to take a look through their astonishing library of previous converts, I could see why. Last year I wouldn’t have been able to see what Peggy meant but now I see.

Imagine being the size of ten whales and then being crammed into something roughly the size of a human. Imagine being an insect first. Or a gas cloud. Or completely silicate before being introduced the smelly wetness of biology. Or a being that takes a year between thoughts having to be brought up to our speed.

Echoes of all of them are in me in some small percentage.

The first change is the hardest, they say.

Whenever a race is absorbed, updates waterfall through the entire collective. We’re all an extension of the ship. Our sleeping cocoons update us as more beings are noticed and introduced. Since we’ve been here, they’ve grabbed and disseminated 26 species. They grabbed the locations of the six known intelligent species we humans have discovered from our records. I honestly can’t say I’ve noticed too much of a change except for some of the gas composition in the air we breathe and a slight flutter of expansion in the spectrum of colours available to my sight. And I taste mint when I get sad. That’s new.

But that first change, yes. That’s the hardest.

I’m a little less clear on the role of the ship itself. Is it a manifestation of all gods made flesh? Do we worship it or does it serve us? Is it a tool, a mere form of transport and library, or are we the ants and the colony itself is the point of all this? I’m still not clear on whether or not the quest itself is the church or if this living ship is the cathedral. Conversations down that pathway can quickly get out of my philosophical depth so I’ve stopped having them for now.

I’ve been a little bitter because of the cures they could offer the known universe. I think of the friends of mine who died from diseases we still can’t fix. They could change all that. What they do with biology is magical.

But they don’t. It’s not part of the quest. All inquiries to that effect are directed to what appears to be a FAQ list they’ve prepared. Not an uncommon query, apparently.

Surprisingly, the Church of the Galactic Average wasn’t very interested in our entertainment media or history. The culture of the races they absorb isn’t part of the quest. To them, the biology IS the culture.
There’s a section of the library devoted to it but it’s not very big compared to the rest. I spend a lot of time there, looking at the plays and shows of the cultures that had such things. The ones uploaded from our ship weren’t comprehensive at all. Just what we had downloaded before the trip. Probably the same with these other ones. That seems a shame to me, to not have that as a similar priority.

They’re a fascinating people.

Them. I still think of the people of this ship as a separate race. I need to start saying we.

Because, after all, I am now one of the most average people in the universe.





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Mirror, mirror, off the wall

I wrote this poem after seeing a vanity mirror desk left in the alley with nothing left in it's frame.

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Mirror, mirror, off the wall
Now you do not see at all
When the queen asked truth of you
You answered with a voice TOO true
Now, abandoned on a ledge
Your empty frame holds but a hedge
Without your face, it's painful how
People see right through you now
Looking glass, you cannot see
Therein lies the irony
Seven years bad luck belongs
To that queen and all her wrongs
Not that that is comforting
To your empty, silent ring
Abandoned in the open air
The truth you show now: nothing's fair.



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Mashed Poetics - Midnight Oil - Whoah

Every so often, there's a night called Mashed Poetics where this house band covers an entire album and a group of poets are assigned, in advance, a song from the album as inspiration to write a poem. During the show, it goes song, poem, song, poem, song, poem. It's really a great night. This time, I was invited to the show based around Midnight Oil's album Diesel and Dust. The song I was assigned was Whoah. The album is heavily left leaning and critical of the Australian government and in particular it's treatment of the aboriginal people. Lots of echoes to work with in terms of our own surroundings here in BC and Canada. So this is the poem I wrote inspired by that song. It's spoken from the POV of a colonizer.

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I cut down a forest to build a church
I cut down that church
Ground it into sawdust
Added water
Flattened it into paper
And made that paper into a bible
I ripped out the pages of that bible and folded them
Into origami children and animals
And I set them on fire
I spread those ashes on the ground
Trying hard not to think about the feeling
Like maybe
I had cut down one church to build another one
So far, the trees haven’t grown back
But I pray every day that they do
Because I still have the axe
And the word of god in my mind

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Here's the song if you want to check it out
https://youtu.be/QUATwzVmvLc


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NYC Midnight Rhyming Story Challenge 2022 - Round One - Horror/Imaginary/Courageous

In the closing days of 2022, NYC Midnight had a rhyming story challenge that my friend Sam Dulmage signed me up for. It was a lot of fun. Each writer was given a genre and two adjectives that needed to be embodied in the poem. There were several groups of writers given lots of different themes and adjectives. The top ten from each trio of prompts would go on to the next round. Myself and Sam made the cut, making it into the top ten. Here's my submission for the first round.

The first round had a word limit of 600 words.

My prompts were Horror, Imaginary, and Courageous.

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It Was All In Your Head
by Duncan Shields


A monster huddled, terrified
Of fourteen ghosts that lurked outside
Sometimes, these ghosts came floating in
Exclaiming he wore stolen skin
He was The Doctor’s work of art
Each and every body part
Exhumed from nearby graveyard’s earth
And shocked into nightmarish birth
A patchwork man. A flesh collage.
Complete with spectral entourage
The monster was just one month old
His body massive to behold
A shambling zombie, huge and sad
Amalgamated by a dad
Named, you guessed it, Frankenstein
And brought to life by mad design
Fourteen corpses he purloined
And then, quite brilliantly, conjoined
And animated with a shock
He made it stand. He made it walk.
When asked about the birds and bees
Doc said, “’Twas more like grafting trees”
And told the beast of sewing skin
That night the hauntings did begin
His monstrous child racked by fears
He traumatized his son to tears
The doctor built a haunted man
And that was not the doctor’s plan


He told the beast the ghosts weren’t real
But then at night the guilt he’d feel
When his creation screamed and cried
Would make him die some more inside
These fourteen ghosts were torturing
This stitched-together infant thing
The doctor knew the ghosts weren’t there
Just figments conjured from the air
But nonetheless his boy would cry
The ‘ghosts’ just wouldn’t let him lie.
Awash with existential dread
‘Cause he was made from stolen dead
He wanted so to help his child
Before the anguish drove him wild
He moved him to a different room
But ghosts still followed in the gloom
Acupuncture, yoga, teas
Meditation therapies
Aromatherapy and diet
Every new approach, he’d try it
No matter the attempts he made
The ghosts still made his son afraid


Until “Eureka!” one fine day
The doctor woke in disarray
His clothing wrinkled, hair a mess
He knew a cure for this duress
He mixed a heavy sedative
Which, that night, to his son he’d give
And, later, would enact his plan
This doomed and yet courageous man
This brilliant yet unstable dad
Was, as a scientist, quite mad
He gave his son the bedtime drink
The potion that would make him sink
Into a comatose-like state
And prayed to all the gods of fate
He took an axe, and wild-eyed,
Committed an infanticide
The monster now in pieces lay
The doctor’s plan was underway
He brought the pieces to his lab
And placed them back onto the slab


The morning sunlight trickled in
And warmed the monster’s sleeping skin
He woke, surprised, mid-monstrous yawn
The ghosts that haunted him were gone!
Now cured, he stretched and stood to see
The mirror in the lavatory
And there he saw an eerie sight
His face had changed deep in the night
His eyes, once blue, were brownish green
His nose reshaped like plasticine
His hair now sandy blonde and thin
And down below, a wider chin
His lips more thin, his cheekbones high
He didn’t recognize this guy
Scared, he ran to find the doc
And there they had a breakfast talk
“Well, it’s alive!” the doctor crowed
And over scrambled eggs he showed
His monstrous, shambling, tortured son
The terrifying thing he’d done
“Your brain was bad. There was no cure.
Until last night I wasn’t sure
But I’d forgotten what you are
You’re not like me. You’re like a car.
Last night I disassembled you
And bribed the mortuary crew
To bring me someone freshly dead,
I swapped out your defective head.
This new head’s happier, my child.”
The monster stared. The doctor smiled.



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nyc midnight rhyming story challenge 2022 - round two - drama/pollution/flustered

In the closing days of 2022, NYC Midnight had a rhyming story challenge that my friend Sam Dulmage signed me up for. It was a lot of fun. Each writer was given a genre and two adjectives that needed to be embodied in the poem. There were several groups of writers given lots of different themes and adjectives. The top ten from each trio of prompts would go on to the next round. Myself and Sam made the cut again in the second, making it into the top ten for the third and final round.

Here's my submission for the second round.

The second round had a word limit of 500 words.

My prompts were Drama, Pollution, and Flustered

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Loved and Lost
by Duncan Shields

A plastic water bottle bobbing sadly in the waves
Alone and used, discarded, it’s the type that no one saves
It drifts across the ocean, empty, crushed and thrown away
It’s moving with the current, inch by inch and day by day
No message nestled safe within. No hope resides inside.
Created. Shipped. Then bought. Used once. Then roughly thrown aside
Drained in but a moment of its lifespan here on earth
It briefly held the water that so briefly gave it worth

One morning the horizon clutters with some little things.
A floating shoe. Some Styrofoam. A six-pack’s empty rings.
And soon the waves are crowded with a plastic potpourri
A festival of grocery-bag and bottle-cap debris
A hundred other bottles nudge this one that has survived
It’s to The Great Pacific Garbage Patch that it’s arrived
The hubbub is tumultuous! So many of its kind!
A soup of microplastics help it to become entwined

It was a day like any other in the garbage gyre
That Bottle’s heart was smitten, quickened, fluffed, and set on fire.
Across the crowded patch of flotsam, Bottle spied a mate
It nervously considered how to ask it for a date
It willed the waves and currents there to push them both together
It hoped that they’d be unified by beneficial weather
And what exactly was this gorgeous object that it saw?
It was a used, disposable, transparent drinking straw

The ocean pushed them nearer. Nearer. Nearer. Nearer still.
Until the bottle’s flustered nerves vibrated with the thrill
Suspense and longing thrummed throughout the bottle’s singing soul
Until, at last, a wave shoved Straw into the Bottle’s hole

The times they had! It felt like they were made to meet this way!
The Straw stirred up the insides of the bottle every day.
The Bottle felt fulfilled, from bobbing bottom to its lip
And though the Straw was skinny, it filled Bottle like a ship
For months they stayed in bliss conjoined, united and as one
A gentle sliding in and out on waves beneath the sun

Recycling trawlers came to cleanse the errant garbage isle.
Their hungry mouths collected everything within a mile
Their teeth pinched Bottle’s bottom, yanked, and Bottle was collected
Upended, raised, and to its horror, Straw slid out, ejected
Then Straw plunged to the surface of the patch and slithered through
And down into the depths it sank until, in inky blue,
A passing turtle snapped it up and swam with it away
And there it still resides inside the turtle to this day
The Bottle emptied salty tears when raised up to the ship
Lamenting straw’s removal from its quivering, wet lip
It landed with the other garbage on the trawler’s deck
Awash with mourning at the feeling of its empty neck

These star-crossed lovers never met again and yet survive
One in darkness, one in light, eternally alive
Suffering the separation love can cruelly bring
Even to a lifeless, used, polluted plastic thing



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nyc midnight rhyming story challenge 2022 - round three - open/bashful/cross-country

In the closing days of 2022, NYC Midnight had a rhyming story challenge that my friend Sam Dulmage signed me up for. It was a lot of fun. Each writer was given a genre and two adjectives that needed to be embodied in the poem. There were several groups of writers given lots of different themes and adjectives. The top ten from each trio of prompts would go on to the next round. Sam and I made it all the way to this, the final round. Things kind of fell apart here. The genre was 'open' meaning you could write comedy, horror, drama, whatever you felt like writing. That lack of rule kind of gummed me up instead of freeing me. The other two prompts were 'bashful' and 'cross country.' Being a Canadian in an American-based competition made me feel like maybe 'cross-country' had better be about America and 'bashful' sounded like I should write about being ashamed of being American which didn't really get me going. But I gave it a go. Neither Sam or I made the top ten this time but it was a great experience.

Here's my submission for the third round.

The second round had a word limit of 400 words.

My prompts were Open Genre, Cross-Country, and Bashful


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Hitchhiker
By Duncan Shields

One summer I was dared
To hitchhike nude from sea to sea
For seven hundred dollars
I was only twenty-three

In nineteen-sixty-eight
That kind of money was a lot
And it would be a lark. A laugh.
A thrill. Or so I thought.

I had an okay body
I was young and dumb and free
I didn’t calculate
Just what the trip would do to me

I started on the west coast
(As you had probably guessed)
Intending to hit NYC
Still in my birthday best

I started in July
I figured one month, maybe two
Not knowing it would take a year
For me to make it through

I had a backpack with
some camping gear for late at night
A sleeping bag, a knife, some mace
In case there was a fight

The first few rides were funny
I laid down a towel first
The drivers laughed or blushed
Or stared or kept their eyes averse

When I left California, though
A change was in the air
A breeze of danger wafted past
My exposed derriere

The West gave way to Midwest
Reno, Utah, Denver, too
Conservatives there didn’t laugh
I walked a day or two

The cops were called a few times
They would jail and clothe me then
As soon as I was free from them
I’d just get nude again

State lines were my friends
As I streaked past from state to state
Becoming someone else’s problem
But something lay in wait

I’d made it more than halfway east
When I became ashamed
My body hadn’t traveled well
My dirty feet inflamed

Autumn was encroaching
And this silly bet or jest
Seemed just as stupid and as distant
As my friends were west

My stubbornness was guttering
My loneliness increased
My health was surely suffering
As I kept heading East

Autumn loomed its clouds and nudity
Seemed suicidal
I had to jog along for warmth
I couldn’t just stand idle

Bashful, I found East St Louis
A woman took me in
I stayed there until June with her
And kept myself within

I stayed unclothed but warm
Inside her small apartment flat
She fed me, loved me, let me go
Just like a sort of cat

The weather warmed and I kept on
In nineteen-sixty-nine
I hit the Eastern Seaboard
With a different kind of mind



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