skonen_blades

He said "Oh my God are you actually a poet?"
I said "Well, yeah."
"Fucking why?" he responded, incredulous and mocking
"Well let me answer your question with a question. Why do you make money?" I responded.
He stood there, a little stunned.
Like no one in his circle had actually asked him this directly.
Like they all had an unspoken understanding in his part of the world.
He arrived in time at a conclusion.
To his credit.
"Security" he said.
I liked that answer. I liked his honesty.
I said to him "The next fifteen years of your life is my answer."



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You flower all over me
Rustically hurling petals
A million soft tongues
Licking gravity away
Memory luxuriates in oblivion
Vacationing by abstaining
And now, now, now slams softly
Into every corner of me
And all I’m capable of experiencing
Is what’s happening
Existing purely as a sensory unit
Without the capability to record
And I wonder what animals remember
And I think forgiveness exists in nature
More than anywhere else
I am aloft
Adrift in time’s current
Gliding by being
I pillow home base
As round-trip tickets pile up in the basement
I am the ghost of an arrow
The daydream of a javelin
A missile of silence
Rock still in my quivering

And this is just
When you look at me



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Today it’s under the toast.
Yesterday it was hiding behind my left eye.
Tomorrow it might be in the prime minister’s favorite chair.
All I know is that it calls to me.
And it says absurd things.


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Half of my life is conversations I was too afraid to have
Conversations I rehearse even though the moment to have them has long passed
Once in a while I get it right
I say what needs to be said
When it needs to be said

But sometimes
When I'm alone
I tell
The walls
That I love them
In clear ways that can't be misinterpreted
or
I am articulately angry at
Deserving people
Mute people
Shocked into silence by my eloquence and given insight by my clarity
A fantasy world
Of triumphs
Of clear communication
Of victories leading to victories
That make my real wins
My here-in-the-flesh successes
Fade
These conversations ghosts are powerful and sway reality
Much more than they should
And I can't decide if they are wise
Or stupid
Fuel for my engine
Or sugar in my gas tank



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You can BE a good person with mistaken beliefs.
The fact you can change does not make you weak.
If YOU try to COMprehend other folks’ views
Accepting them doesn’t mean “they win, you lose”
Invisible privilege is real hard to see
I’ll tell you a tale of what happened to me
Of the ignorant person that I used to be
Of the changes I’ve gone through. And I MEAN recently.
I grew up poor in a small BC town
We didn’t have much that was non-white around
But I grew up odd and was bullied a lot
Often lamenting the life that I got
Believing that I was a downtrodden boy
A victim oppressed without that much joy
A person in touch with ev-er-y-one
A judgement-free liberal, enlightened son.
BUT AT THE SAME TIME I was steeped in my whiteness
My maleness, my ignorant, cisgendered rightness
But still I allowed my young mind to believe
The rhet’ric of privilege didn’t PERtain to me
I thought I was kind and, ironically
I raged at the people who dared disagree
But as the years passed and experience grew
I realized that THERE’S less of ME than of you
That being locked into this skull is a curse
That bias is natural. And what makes it worse.
Is it’s easy to never examine your mind.
Cause we’re all the good guy. We’re all fair and kind.
My point is I changed. I’m still changing now.
I ask myself why. I ask myself how.
I try to unpack and in-VES-tigate
I try to reflect more. I try to relate.
I feel like I’m woke but I know that I’m wrong.
I know that the path to awareness is long.
I know that I’ll never be fully awake.
No matter how hard of a path that I take.
There’s racists that don’t know they’re racists out there.
Misogynists thinking they’re fully aware
I saw some graffiti down in the east end
In spray paint it said “If you ain’t white, pretend.”
Shutting off empathy can make you feel strong.
Certainty can feel like power. That’s wrong.
Rigidity can feel like pure confidence.
But that doesn’t make any actual sense.
In closing, it’s hard to be called out on stuff.
No one likes being ‘accused’ and it’s rough.
But open your ears and your eyes and your mind.
No matter how woke. No matter how kind.
‘Cause while you can feel so enlightened you’re glowing
Stay humble. The process is always ongoing.
I was born on lost ground. There’s a lot to make up.
And miles to go before I wake up.



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My storm is blind. It has no eye. No calmness at its center lies.

Your language has a laughing root. A bird in the hand is worth a three-way in Vegas and what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas so nobody really comes back from Vietnam. This is a message in a battle. A Shakespeare play typed throughout eternity by recess monkeys. This is the magic-trick fairy dust for when all your rom-coms become non-coms.

I’ll be Octoberon. You be Titanuary. Together, let’s develop a crush on crutches. Let’s star as twins that look nothing alike in our own doublemint western. When you say love I’ll say “how high?” We’ll be well-wishing wishing wells collecting wishes and change.

I’ve seen the devil comb his hair. We were supposed to live off the fat of the land, not the muscle. Not the bone. Take me away from the ad campaign. Take me away from the trailer. I drink so much that I have a chugular now. But you can’t put fires out with whiskey. Sometimes I feel like a ghost haunting my own life. I make people puke the future. I am a prophetic emetic.

Art is an upside-down moustache. Call me the fragrant vagrant. The beanbag priest. King Joffrey Dahlmer. The telescope. Look down the wrong end of me to make me look further away. From my end, you look closer than you are. The actor that does the voice of Eeyore also does the voice of Optimus Prime. Heroics can mask a deep depression.

Indie films are getting indier and blockbusters are getting blockbustier. So let's mess things up. Let's give the cleaners something to do in the morning. Let’s paint the shark jaws camouflage. Let’s put the gin in ginger, enjoy some tepid living, and have some close calls at low speeds. Turn our ankles into anchors and smile more.

I’m a pessimist having a mid-life crisis and the hour glass is half empty. All I know is that some people watch Titanic and sympathize with the fucking boat. I am embarrassed at how angry I get and then I get angry and how embarrassed I am. When everyone’s a zombie, it’s like no one’s a zombie.

The three M’s of life are mothers, medicine and messin’ around. When it comes to censorship, the penny is mightier than the s-word. All I’m saying is that in this life, you have to know the difference between rowboats and robots and that if you’re a trucker, you’re never homeless.

We’re all looking at history through the very specific forced perspective of a Jack O Lantern’s face holes. Imagination can take us further than what we can merely comprehend. So do yourself a favour and picture something.






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Why we fall in love:
Cupid doesn't shoot arrows.
Cupid pulls carpets.

Brendan and Alison, think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as the two of you. You’ve waterski-crashed into a different life that you weren’t expecting and I hope you’re infinitely grateful.

This might sound crazy but I believe that if the two of you were born a thousand years ago in what is now modern Uganda, to different parents than you have now, with different skin than you currently possess and were raised to speak a language other than English, that you would still fall in love.

The first time you met, your seventy-five year old selves recognized each other and all that was left was the talking and the stumbling as your younger selves, these bodies here, were coaxed towards that older couple.

My advice is to be each other’s hiding places and play hide and seek with the planet and with the expectations of society. Hide in each other and tell the entire world that it is ‘it’ and to go count to 8 billion. Then turn your faces inward and look at each other through that reflecting prism of your hearts, a light-bridge connecting you wherever you go, no matter the distance.

You’ll still be able to see the buildings and the faces outside. You’ll still be able to hear the traffic and the conversations, but a part of you should face forever inwards, a sun beaming down on the new piece of each other hiding in your chests.

Add today to the collection of good days in your hearts. These memories will be proof that life was good. They will be insurance against the onslaught of age. These memories right here.

Brendan, a crinkling at the side of Alison’s eye and you’re hers. Regrets should go unregarded, unimportant, fleeting and useless as a weather report for next year. When you’re not touching each other, it feels like the circuit is broken. Be it hips, lips or fingertips, that touch makes the reasons plain.

The times you’re around each other are already so valuable. You both know the face of loss, false hope and boredom. You both know the bad decisions, the dreary sentences of days without end, the impending aimlessness of just another week on the fire.

Your relationship is a unicorn on the bridge of the starship enterprise.

Give your good judgment a head start. Make your bodies into flint and spark fires to give love a chance to see in the dark. Make prank calls to your past. Get the future good and drunk and cheat at cards until you’re all naked in a dirty motel room laughing. Spend the rest of your lives colouring inside each other’s lines. Burn your flight plan with your left hand and reach for each other with your right.

Your days have become dreams in between the dreams you have at night that are made more vibrant by the fact that you are sleeping beside each other. You have taken each other’s present, both sleeping and awake, and made it better. Not to overshare the obvious but I bet that there are times when you are lost in this unexpected goodness, this lack of drama, this windfall oasis of peace.

When we are at our loneliest, we are at our most common. That’s why this love, this altered state, feels so special. I hope you feel parts of you that you didn’t even realize were tense start to uncurl, daring the sun. Today is springtime finally catching you in a pillow fight.

You’re turning the strings of each other’s hearts into an orchestra. I hope you swim forever in the high-tide line of each other’s eyes and keep reminding each other that there is such a thing as a safe place. Be thrilled you make each other happy.

I hope you go forward, hand in hand like kids at a playground.

I hope you skip until you break a record.



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You are no longer a werewolf because we know exactly where you are.

You have become a whenwolf
Because we don’t know when you’ll attack us.
Your outbursts are not dependent on the full moon.
We don’t know when you’ll become a herewolf.
A now-wolf.

We are a family made of commercials.
Much like some of the stars in the night sky are already dead but the news hasn’t reached Earth yet, that is the family that people see when they see us.
They see a nice twinkling group of people getting along.
They don’t know we died a while ago and it will be months or years before they see the explosion.
We live in fear but we smile.
We have a public to fool.

Hours after daddy hits mommy at the dinner table, we laugh with our friends.



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And the shadows come downstairs.

I’m wary of the air of celebration
I dislike the atmosphere of elation that retroactively might look like grave-dancing.
I’m off in a quiet corner of the party hoping that the cops don’t come.
Even though this no longer feels like my house.
I feel like getting everyone’s attention and giving them a nice, big, condescending
“Easy. Easy. Let’s all take a step back here.”
But the train has left the station and momentum will do what it does.

And anyway, that is not my call.
And anyway, to express nervousness over the proceedings is to expose my own swallowing of the rape culture pill.
And anyway, to fear the repercussions of our actions is to disrespect the victims.
And anyway, to be a man in this situation makes me feels as helpless as I’ve felt in the years leading up to this.
And anyway, I’m angry.
And anyway, I’m afraid of being outed as the sexist, demeaning pig that I am.
And anyway, I keep the potential rapist inside of me hidden from the world as all men do and that rapist is scared and since he is a part of me, I am scared as well.

I know the truth is out. Or to be clearer, I know that’s what is out is the truth. I know the central basis of what’s happening is supposed to be healing and is supposed to have a goal of welcoming back. I’m not sure that’s realistic or possible.

All I know is that I’m searching for balance and as a result, a devil’s advocate is stuck in my Adam’s apple as I look at what used to be the Garden of Eden.





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Brains carrying clubs in their squishy fists patrol the cartoon world. Bugs disguise themselves as cars while long-legged valentines run down Chinese-restaurant hallways. Kings clumsily stab bear corpses with swords and hold the pose so that photographers can make royalty look ferocious.

She is tiny but she is hard. She bounces up over the hood of the car and through the windshield, right into the driver’s snarling teeth. An entire wedding runs away from the oncoming destruction. It was the type of the day that let you walk on walls. Long, dangling ghosts refereed drag races while goats did their best to sell lava lamps to sheep. Wrestlers had off-duty eating contests while all the stuffed animals did their best to have a party in darkness of the dungeon.

The photocopiers turned wild and roamed the countryside, cutting down trees and trying to make children’s books. Apples became infested with butterflies and condoms were rolled down over the number one. Princesses texted each other while android babies screamed like they were programmed to. Satellite dishes soaked up the excess while fat geishas relaxed.

Boulders dream of being drummers. Flying cars have rose-coloured headlights. A deer made of matches taunts alcoholics in the liquor store. And over here, near the bus stop, is one elephant that can walk on its hind legs to fool humans.




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