skonen_blades: (Default)
There's an event called A Day at the Races where poets go to the horse races and they each pick a horse name at random from each of the seven races and then use that name as a prompt for a poem. At the end of the day, we read out the 'winning' poem from each race and then whatever other poems we think turned out pretty good. It's a fun day.

This is poem 03 from race 03 and my horse's name was Tam Tricky. He came in first! My father's name was Tam and he grew up in the violent streets of Glasgow (gang member, bouncer, military policeman) before emigrating to Canada with his first wife and three daughters and the moving to Toronto and meeting my mom. I always found my dad pretty fascinating and his ability to break the cycle of violence with my brother and I is something I'll always admire.

-------------------

Tam tricky

Found his way through the maze

Tam clever
Tam strong

The gutter’s hand slipped off his greased spine
His father’s fists only molding his clay
until he could fight back
and become his own potter

Tam long

Bird bones stork long but steel strong

Tam traveler
Tam gardener

Five children
Two wives
Citizenship in two countries

Tam resting
Tam never gone
Tam bus driver
Tam glazer
Tam human church
Tam holy memory

Tam throw me
(light javelin son)

Into the deep
unknowable
future



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skonen_blades: (Default)
It’s astounding to me that someone
That took up so much space
Can be gone
And then, years later,
Still be gone




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skonen_blades: (Default)
Daughter

I’ve heard it said that
An easy way to understand
quantum entanglement theory
Is through a pair of socks.

If you put one sock on your left foot,
The other sock becomes the ‘right’ sock
No matter where it is in the universe

When you were born
And we observed you for the first time
I was redefined instantly
Collapsed into a different state
As the probability of you
Became a certainty

Which is to say

Because you exist
No matter where we are in the universe
I will be your father





tags
skonen_blades: (Default)
I saw a father and a daughter
On the bus

Both goth-adjacent
Him a thick-bodied 80s punk
settling in to his foundations
Emo hair and rock concert shirt
Black Levis and jean jacket
Sporting embroidered patches
of bands with spidery, dripping letters

And she was graveyard normcore
Monochrome checkered shoes
Midnight leather over dark nail polish
Enamel buttons clustered on her inky canvas bag
Dark-dimension skinny-jeans hipster

He kept asking her questions
And getting one-word answers
The tennis of every conversation
For any parent and teen
He would request clarification to these syllable answers
And get confusion first -
“What? Who?”
Followed by more one-word answers or -
“I don’t know.”

No phone, though
She wasn’t sunflowered to a device
Like most people are in transit

She looked out the window or at her father with
Not annoyance or embarrassment
Not rebellion or anger
But just banal adolescence

The dad stayed pleasant
Patience having become a lifestyle
The daughter stayed standoffish
Like there was no longer any other comprehensible way to be

Like polite fencing but only one person was defending
Like people stoically digging through a mountain with a spoon
Like a raven and a crow on a road trip who didn’t know how to relate anymore
But still peaceful and loving

It was inspiring to see them
Matching styles
And trying to get along
To snake a connection to each other
through that dense foliage of years

They talked the whole time I was on the bus with them
A conversation of sorts

As well as one could ever be possible
When the churning soup of puberty
Had robbed her of being able to be fluent
with anyone outside of her age bracket
And the freefall scare of middle age
Had gifted him the memories of what he was like back then
And the wisdom, hope, faith and acceptance
to not take it personally

But both having the sounds of metal and rock to help them along




tags
skonen_blades: (Default)
Sonja’s Dad talks about his best friend Don Lamont.
Sonja’s Dad talks about his best friend Don Lamont who killed himself in 1982.
It’s 2018 and Sonja’s Dad talks about his best friend Don Lamont who killed himself in 1982.

Sonja’s Dad was a race car driver
Sonja’s Dad was a race car driver in the fifties.
Sonja’s Dad was a race car driver in the fifties who was so cool that he was the first person to teach all of his friends how to do the twist.

Sonja’s Dad lives in the past.
Sonja’s Dad still grieves.
Sonja’s Dad is in his 80s.
Sonja’s Dad was the life of the party.

He is still alive but he isn’t here.

My dad talked about magic
My dad talked about magic, the nature of evil, and the power of art
My dad talked about magic, the nature of evil, and the power of art and he continually wondered what the future was going to be like and his one-legged father was horribly abusive

My dad was a bouncer, gang member, and part of the military police
My dad was a bouncer, gang member, and part of the military police in poverty-stricken Glasgow before emigrating to Canada with his wife and three daughters when he was in his twenties.
My dad was a bouncer, gang member, and part of the military police in poverty-stricken Glasgow before emigrating to Canada with his wife and three daughters when he was in his twenties before he got divorced and met my very young mother in Toronto

My dad lived in the now
My dad grieved but only as one of the variety of available emotions
My dad lived to be 68
My dad was the life of the party.

He is dead but he is still here.

I talk about my daughter
I talk about my daughter and my partner
I talk about my daughter and my partner and I tell humorous anecdotes

I was an animator
I was an animator and a cook
I was an animator and a cook and a writer

I live in the future
I grieve that I am prone to grief
I am 46
I am the life of the party

I am alive but sometimes I feel dead



tags
skonen_blades: (meh)
The universe is ending
The stars are going out
It's taken years for the light if 50s stars to reach me
My fathers stars
He watched them die as he grew up before death got him too
And now I watch the stars die
Hollywood's white dwarfs and quasars, red giants and blue pulsars blow up, go nova, and turn into black holes
Stars are said to have heat as they get famous and I am watching the heat death if the universe
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long and a lot of stars die young. The Phoenix nebula. The great Ledger cloud. The Hoffman Spiral Galaxy.
Some new stars are born but these are not my stars. They belong to the the youth. I no longer know their names. Their light is faint to me.
My dad's stars preceded him to the other side. Edward G Robinson. Errol Flynn. Robert Mitchum.
And now mine are starting to go as well. Their deaths change the movies they were in. Patrick Swayze is a literal ghost.
Soon, most of my favorite movies will only hold memories of lives, records of performances from dead stars.
In the entertainment newspapers and TMZ, we watch the stars go out before they go out.
The universe grows and shrinks with every generation of performers.
It's an ebb and flow.
But I live for movies. The triumphs of those actors stories were my triumphs. Their sadness was my sadness. Besides my parents, movies were my parables, my teachers. Life imitating art.
As my teachers die, so I become a teacher.
And soon I will follow them into the blackness of space.
The universe is ending. The stars are going out.
Credits
The end
Fade to black



tags
skonen_blades: (dark)
1/30

And then the ghost of you arrives. I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop, hanging out in a bar with friends, even reading a book by myself at home. You’re not actually there, of course. You haven’t been here for six years. But there’s a feeling I get when I know that a person who really knew me would know how much fun I’m having and then it makes me sad because now I’m the only person who knows. It’s like remembering that one of the Beastie Boys is dead after rocking out to their music for a few minutes. But this isn’t about my sadness or the idea that I’m lonely. Because I’m not.

It’s just that when you breeze in, it’s unexpected. I’m happy to see you but I feel a little tainted that you’ve chosen such a good time to show up again. I miss you so much. I miss you to the point that I wish I’d never met you but only for a second. You cross my mind and I immediately remember how much better right now would be if you were actually there. It’s a stroke across my heart from a cold paintbrush.

And this is where I live. At this crossroads of memory and reality. A yearning for a past that was never as good as this present. I have plenty of people to share my life with but I want to share specific parts with you and that’s impossible now. It’s possible in the way that hopefully you’re in the universe somewhere or maybe heaven exists or whatever but not in this earthbound corporeal way that I’d like to happen.

So in the middle of telling a story or really enjoying the sound of the leaves outside, I’ll go silent and you’ll be there being silent with me. My other self. The mixture of what could have been and the helping hand I need more than ever. Your absence is more than a hole in my life, it’s a halving of it. Your departure turned me into a different person and that journey is still happening.

I’ll have so much to tell you when we reunite. Hopefully you’ll have a lot to tell me, too.



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skonen_blades: (hamused)
Father’s Day or What I Wanted to Say to My Son
by Darth Vader

I killed the emperor; a man who, in many ways, became my father. I did not know my father and so I latched on to any authority figure, any vestige of control. Luke, in you I see what I could have been if I wasn’t so weak, so angry. I reached out to you the only way I knew how. I wanted you to be my right hand man but instead I cut off your right hand. I had no idea how to be a father because I didn’t have one. Some slaves have no idea what to do with freedom. I see power in you but I also see balance. Love. Compassion. The thing to remember is that I’ve never been happy. You have your mother’s eyes.


tags
skonen_blades: (dark)
The weather hammered down outside and all eyes were on me. It was silent except for the rain crashing into the windows and slapping the street outside the open doors of this forgotten subway station palace.

I was wearing my father’s ring. It was a little silver dragon wrapped around my finger. I wore it because I thought it would bring me luck at the board meeting.

I wasn’t supposed to be there but I couldn’t stop myself from arriving here. I woke up with a fire under my skin and a need to walk. I didn’t have a destination in mind but I drifted from main streets to side streets to alleys with an increasing wonder at my own actions. I didn’t stop walking, even long after my own danger meter was in the red.

First and foremost, I’m white. Very pale and this was the old-iron, alleytown, cops-don’t-come-here part of town. Now, I was one of five white people at my company and there were fifty people there so I’m not too concerned about that in most instances. We had a lot of Latino, African and Asian people. I didn’t see race for the most part.

But I’d never been the only white person in a room full of black strangers. And this was a church of some kind. A church with a lot of jewelry, very old clothes, some bones, a lot of musicians and about a thousand candles.

It was raining like a hot tub had ruptured in the sky. Warm rain had soaked my cheap suit and plastered my hair to my skull. I had even worn beige because I read that it would help combat the heat. I was like a sliver of bone drifting through coffee, caramel, chocolate, and licorice.

Conversations stopped when I walked by. I walked by a stabbing and the victim and the attacker both paused to watch me walk me pass. Kids paused in their playing. Old men stopped laughing and telling stories. Barbers stopped cutting hair. People who were reading put down their books. A cloud of silence had followed me here to this place of worship.

And here I was. The ceiling sagged, growing fat with the water. It looked decades old but I couldn’t believe it wasn’t cracking open as I stood there. Old newspapers wadded up along the molding and corners of the floor, rounding off the corners with rat havens. The walls were paneled in cracked and peeling tin squares. Even with all the candles, most of it was lost in the shadows.

And a hundred pairs of eyes were looking at me out of deep-south faces.

I don’t know anything about voodoo except what I’ve seen in the movies. I don’t think that’s what this was. I didn’t see Jesus anywhere, though. And there were bones. Lots of bones.

I walked through a rusted iron squeeze gate like the kind on elevators from the 1920s. As I walked through the doorway into the room, the heat from the candles started to dry out my suit.

I noticed one empty seat at the front of the congregation. My feet kept moving. I had gone so far beyond my limits of fear that I felt like a passenger now. With one echoing step after another, my feet touched out a damp rhythm all the way to the front row. As I walked, the heads in room tracked me while they fanned themselves calmly. There I sat down in the one empty seat and waited. I felt as if the capability for surprise had vacated my body entirely and that the very real possibility of my death had arrived.

There had been people waiting outside. The one empty seat in the front row felt like it belonged to me.
There were six people on the stage. A beautiful woman in a lace black dress with a grayish cast to her skin, an ancient man with white hair and one blind eye, two young men in new suits that looked like brothers, a veteran in a wheelchair and a child. The child sat in the middle with a small gold crown.

As soon as I took my seat, the room came alive like nothing had ever happened. Play was pressed and I watched. The musicians started playing again, people talked to each other, and there was wailing and laughing.

People with ailments were brought forward to be cured by the people on the stage. There seemed to be an order but I couldn’t parse it. I saw a boy with crutches go to be touched by the old man but then I saw another young woman with crutches go to the brothers to be touched by them. People with nothing obviously wrong with them would walk up, sway, and then walk towards one of the six.

I saw the dead body of a policeman brought in to be touched. He was not brought back to life but the woman in the lace dress touched him and her eyes rolled back in her head. She spoke in gutter creole patois and the widow of the man exploded with joyful crying.

A man brought his dog to the boy in the chair with the crown. The dog howled when it was touched but appeared unchanged even though the owner thanked the boy through blubbering tears of gratitude.

I might have sat there for a half hour. I might have sat there for two weeks. Time became elastic in the way that only happens when important things are going down.

The little girl that walked in caused a commotion. As she walked down the aisle, people pulled away from her suddenly and involuntarily. They recognized her as a human but it was almost as if a poisonous snake or man-sized spider has walked into the room. She wore a white dress with mud on the knees. She was barefoot and kept her head to the side. One bright pink barrette nestled in her hair. She walked slowly and confidently up the six. She had hazel skin and her eyes glinted in her sockets like obsidian reflecting flames.

They showed no fear but the intensity in the room amped up as she got closer to the stage. She stopped and looked at each one of them in turn.

And then she turned to me. The six people on the stage nodded sagely as if my arrival had been a mystery that was now revealed to them.

She came close to me and grabbed my hand. As if high on a drug that removed all care, I let her take it, feeling mildly curious. I felt a smile on my face and I raised my eyebrows in a greeting as she brought my hand slowly up to her lips.

My ring felt hotter.

In the winters in Minnesota, I used to breathe on my bedroom window at night. The white condensation from my breath would spider out at the edges on the glass, already turning to front.
When she breathed on my hand, it was like that except black. Like cracks in the shell of a hardboiled egg. Like an airbrush of pure panther darkness. My hand furred with velvet where she breathed. She exhaled powerfully, emptying her lungs over and over again on my hand.

I watched her eyes change colour from that startling black to a dark green.

The blackness on my hand coalesced like a sheen on a pool of gasoline. I watched it, entranced by it. Parts of the blackness scabbed over. Parts it grew black hair. It shivered across my hand, ebony goosebumps flickering across my fingers. I could feel it climbing up my shirtsleeves.

I have to maintain that I did not feel panic. She watched me and I watched her and the rest of the church watched us both.

She let go of my hand, empty of whatever she’d breathed onto me. I brought my hand up to see what would happen.

The blackness swirled, finding veins and cracks in my skin. Coal dust shook out of it, puffs of night spores wafted free. My body was fighting it. Then the blackness found my father’s ring.

It coursed forward like inky rapids, overlapping itself, concentrating itself in a stampede to get to my ring. The blackness circled and shrank as if it was going down the drain of my ring. All of the blackness found it’s way into my father’s dragon ring. The ring turned black.

I took a very deep breath. I felt very exhausted.

The little looked very startled and started crying. She didn’t know where she was.

The little boy came forward and held out a box with the skull of a bird on top and red velvet on the inside it. I held my hand over the box and he closed the box on the ring, pulling it forward and off of my hand.

As soon as it left my hand, I pissed myself and screamed. I stood up, my heart hammering and hyperventilating. The boy went back to his seat.

The woman and the brothers came forward and held my arms. I felt calmed by their touch. They guided me outside and left me there.

An ancient taxi waited for me. It took me back to my hotel free of charge. I swear we drove through a swamp for part of the journey.

All told, I was gone for four hours. I left at nine in the morning and was back for a late lunch.

I have no idea what it was about. It feels like a dream. All I know is that my father’s ring is missing.

And I feel like I barely knew him.





tags
skonen_blades: (bounder)
A lot of people bear their parents; love them in spite of their faults. See them as old and misguided but well-meaning. In all the parenting books, every man says that they have a scary moment when they’re talking to their child and their father’s voice comes out.

I do not fear that day. I welcome it. It hasn’t happened yet. I love the memory of my father. I yearn for the day when his excellent counsel comes out of my mouth and into my child’s ears. I miss his calm thoughts now. His voice has not yet taken up residence in my tongue and teeth yet and I don’t dread it moving in.

(I mean no disrespect to my mother. I have similarities with my mother and I welcome her advice when it comes to my daughter. I don’t mean to be sexist when I say that there is a difference between mothers and fathers.)

I wish to channel my father when talking to my daughter in matters of philosophy, creation, love, art and solitude. The glory of reading. The path of self-discovery that artistic endeavors reveal. I want to teach her to play the long game, not the short con. I want to tell her that the losing side is not always the wrong side. I want to her see into people and to know the value of listening to everyone.

I want to encourage her in her dreams, whatever they may be.

I feel as if I’m in stormy waters these days.

And I miss my guiding light.




tags
skonen_blades: (meh)
His mind was a fraying rope.

He dug at any imagined issue like a wolf on the scent of a rabbit warren.
His rational mind was the spike for his mental leash, an anchor for circles that didn’t always have the strength to hold his insanity back.

Those moments, he’d run off deep, howling naked out of the spotlight into his inner night on adventures both as terrifying as they were hidden.
On the outside, his eyes would unfocus and we’d wait for him to return.

Each moment of rational behaviour from him was like a wedding ring found in a meat pie;
Unsettling, unexpected, and only indicative of a much greater problem.

He called himself my step father. I had my own names for him written in small scars all over my body. I screamed that name down the chasms in my childhood memories and got back echoes that threatened to deafen me. Patches of black ice over the worst of it.

In real life, I got away.

In my dreams, I am always caught.
Hands deep in the roots of my hair and a probing insistence at my back.

All nights are dark.

So I came north, where the sun never sets.

That’s where I found her.





tags
skonen_blades: (dead)


With a Johnny Appleseed sweep of my arm, I make a summertime snowfall on father’s day in 2007 high up the side of Elephant Mountain in Nelson BC. I’m scattering my dad’s ashes a year and a half after his death. I’m surprised at how white they are.

With this decisive sweep, I’m causing the last vestige of my father’s material existence to switch over into an unseen spiritual influence spun from memories and imagined advice.

He is Kenobi now.

The extremely fine ash hangs in the air like the ghost of a rainbow fading.

My brother, his wife and I are standing on Pulpit Rock, the place where my father requested his ashes to be scattered. It’s a rocky outcropping a kilometer up the mountain that overlooks Nelson from across Kootenay Lake.

It’s been a hard climb and a lifetime in the making. It goes surprisingly smoothly considering how emotional my brother and I are.

If seeds are the symbol of a dormant beginning of life, I feel like I’m planting their opposite. I’m sowing ends. There are tiny chunks of bone in the ash that powder at a touch. I wasn’t expecting his remains to be so delicate. I’m sure many women said that same about him when he was alive.

It’s chalk dust from a blackboard, leftovers from a teacher. I thought I might be horrified to touch it but it’s comforting. I was expecting a Mount St. Helen’s grayness but this is icing sugar.

With the dispersion of these remains, my brother and I, two half sisters, writing, many pieces of stained glass, and memories in people’s heads are now the only evidence of his existence.

My brother and I are his echoes underlying our own voices, javelins he hurled into the future and rising sons.

I have a deeper understanding of the word ancestor now. I understand how deeply one person can affect another. I understand the impact one person’s life can have on the world. I miss my father but now he will never be gone.


tags
skonen_blades: (dark)
Please, please, PLEASE click on the words Burning Safari and watch this film. I laughed a lot. It's beautiful. It's from the french Gobelins animation school.

Burning Safari

Pee Wee’s playhouse is going to be aired again on the cartoon network. I watched Proof today starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal. Not the best movie ever. A lot of angsty arguments. I also watched Welcome to the Dollhouse finally. That was a dark little piece of work but it’s also refreshingly honest. Being a teenager is so intense. Intensely boring, intensely depressing, intensely violent, and all this crazy horniness coursing through it as well. It’s alive in a way that I really would never want to go through again. Maybe that’s only because these days I have the capability to be exhausted. I sure didn’t back then. I’ve been going a little crazy today. I was invited to go out to the beach and have a lovely picnic with Jhayne and Sam and some other friends but I just couldn’t get up the gumption to leave the house. I stayed in my house coat until four and had a nap. Don’t get me wrong. I practiced my piano, did some driving school research, did lots of laundry and got a fair chunk of my taxes sorted out as well as watching those two films. It wasn’t a lazy day but I do really feel like I missed out on experiencing a lovely outdoor Sunday. These are the Sundays where I don’t miss Scotland at all. This is Vancouver at its best. Just leaving the apartment seemed like it was going to be such a challenge, though. I feel like I’m going crazy when I feel like that.
Is it true of the human condition, do you think, to be always on the horns of a dilemma? Well, maybe not a dilemma, but standing at a crossroads? I have all these options. I’m paralyzed by them. I’ve always struggled but now I’m in a good place where I have a lot of time and money to do the things I want to do. I feel quite constrained as a result.
Plus I’m newly fatherless and the posters and advertisements for father’s day are starting to suffocate me.
But this is getting too dark. I was attempting to make myself happier but its not working. I’ll get the rest of my taxes down and try maybe calling someone or taking a walk. Hey I do feel better after all. It’s getting dark out.



toe

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