skonen_blades

And this is the dream
And the dream is always the same.
I'm on stage.
Talking to you.
Traffic is outside
And my voice is loud through the speakers
In the dream I'm narrating the experience but the audience is reacting like I just said something interesting
Or funny
In my dream I am a tall man with a small family
In my dream I am temporarily financially stable
In my dream I am middle aged
White as a plastic spoon
Dangerously ignorant
With friendly eyes
A kitten on stilts
Surprised at the world around him
But too focused on keeping balance
I don’t know how to work the controls
So I've settled on watching the wheels turn on jackpot machines
Letting luck take the wheel
While Jesus raises his hand to ask a question
In time I end my poem
With a weird flourish of my hands
To a confused silence
And a few laughs
It feels like a competition
But I know it's an offering
To time itself
And this is the dream
And the dream is always the same



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To be "me too" or not "too me"
or even try to measure

The two mes tombing me too soon
To make me buried treasure

To fight with me; to be two mes
That barely get along

Is me dueting dual duels
In quite discordant song

But when two mes both sing on key?
But when we harmonize?

When both of me, when ‘us’ agree?
When we both synchronize?

Inside us both/us two/us one
A true equality

It’s me to me and I to I
A sing-ularity

Hand in hand and arm in arm
A selfie smiling true

A friend indeed. A self high-five.
Before fights start anew

In and out of sync we ride
To be, me too, too me

But that’s existence’s weird price
But that’s humanity



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I
There are three layers
The first layer is rushing
Like rapids over rocks
This layer is closest to the surface
Churning, changing, exploring and receding
The second layer is moving placidly
A slow, powerful river
This layer is deeper
Harder to course correct, slower to shift
And the last layer, the core
The core barely moves
Like the deepest, calm lake
The core is still
Unfathomable
The largest and the most unreachable
Barely conscious
Maybe the true self
I don’t know if it’s what’s left over
The distilled reality after experiences
Filter through the first two layers
Or if it’s the untouched rawness
That was there at the start
and will always barely be affected
By anything outside
Perhaps it’s both

II
I still feel her hands
The warm peace of her energy
Branching into me and staying
Fading like an afterimage
Inside

III
A lot of tension is kept in my forehead
A lot of tension is kept in my lower back
A lot of sex is kept caged in my heart
Just when I think I’m totally relaxed
I go a little deeper
And then when I am at my most relaxed
I go a little deeper
Making me feel like I am incapable of total relaxation
Like the most relaxed I’ve been is just scratching the surface
A lot of my life has been built around
Living with exhaustion
Living with regret
Living with tension
It’s a lot to unlearn

IV
I need to be kinder to myself
Not lazier
Not weaker
Not a liar
But kinder
Criticism is no longer a fuel for me
Carrying more weight is no longer inspiring
The fire is no longer a crucible I enjoy

V
I am not falling apart.
I am completing.
The clash and shedding
The falling away of certain scales
The gaining of some new limits
The loss of some old inhibitions
It’s not a descent or a climb
Or a molting with an end date
It’s just the ongoing rate of change
That only hurts when resisted
It feels like dilution
It feels like spreading
But I am not disappearing
I am only revealing
And ridding myself
Of what I no longer need
Smaller and lighter
Isn’t less



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I dug a hole in the garden of eden
And buried myself up to my steeple
But it turns out that the garden is quicksand
And if I swim slow, I can still make it out

When I was young, I was young forever

Now I am well on my way to becoming a cautionary tale
Now I play a game of ‘the past is lava’

I need reminders that the river hasn't stopped
That choices are still possible
That the precarious stack of plates I’m carrying
The person breathing on the back of my neck
The staring-contest of weakness
The sled I drag, the world I backpack, the rock I shoulder,
The leers that know my lack of worth that agree with my inner self-disdain
The critic that scoffs in my heart
The flimsy barrier of my skin not helping
The dying from exposure just by being able to interact with people

Is all imaginary

My life and all I am is not a cake sliding off the tray of a clumsy server
Hypervigilance is a scarecrow
not a suit of armor
Racing with myself is lose/lose
My tortoise and my hare can learn from each other peacefully
That I’m the only one in the boxing ring and there are no spectators
Set up a deck chair and have a ginger ale

Stop worrying my entrapped soul
Let the Trojan rocking horse lullaby the soldiers in my heart to sleep


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Webster’s dictionary defines Webster’s dictionary as:

1. A current living snapshot of a tree with a spidering of moving branches and calcified roots that go back in time to the fadeout onset of recorded mouth sounds.
2. A tree that is not evergreen, coniferous or deciduous but rather temperaneous, pruned regularly during more forgetful times, growing new arms as culture swells.
3. A window on a train through, exposing only the current frame of the journey’s landscape.
4. A core-sample cross-section of today’s expressions.
5. Only one book amongst thousands of languages and millions of dialects.
6. Pretty and limited.
7. Missing more than it holds.
8. A futile claim stake.

Webster’s dictionary defines you as:

1. A pink furry razor with a heart made of affectionate snakes and the soul of an octopus.
2. A concept used as an excuse too often for violence
3. DNA ropes of television static and failures glued together like the studio of a messy artist.
4. Simultaneously the fork of lightning, the branching of blood vessel, the ivy of cracks forming in stressed earth, and the evolution of the path of least resistance.
5. Survival of the strangest.

Webster’s dictionary defines me as:

1. A concept refrigerator.
2. An illusion wearing a suit of decomposing clothes.
3. A gust of life encased permanently in meat.
4. A delusional trick of data processing that, through reflection, accidentally becomes a self.
5. A beautiful aberration capable of both ugliness and the perception of ugliness.
6. A present for death, gathering layers of experience like layers of a gobstopper.
7. Caught memories that time throws.

Webster’s dictionary defines we as:

1. The haunting, uniting knowledge that we are not our memories.
2. Defined by “What are we?”
3. Broken cameras with nowhere to download the recorded input except into each other
4. A consensual mass hallucination (see also: economics)
5. A tidal wave

Webster’s dictionary defines:

1. Salt as dessert.
2. Hope as a cat.
3. All motion as circles.
4. Every horse as a universe.
5. Sasparilla as sorcery.
6. Tautology as Webster’s definition of tautology.

Webster’s dictionary defines defining as:

1. A defiling by filing.
2. A grasp for power, an attempt at dominion, a naming resulting in perceived partial or total ownership.
3. Something that bounces off.
4. A tacit acknowledgement that if the name of thing disappears, the thing still exists.

I still exist.
You still exist.
We still exist.
Regardless of definition.


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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 consciousness is merely a fender on my brain. Much like my skull is a helmet. I see what I’ve been told I should see, I hear what I’ve been conditioned to hear, and I interpret the world as a tall white man living a life of comparative luxury in the first world.

It’s a straddle and no speakers about it. I have airplane lottery tickets dangling in the dozens around my neck, backstage passes from all the concerts I’ve ever wanted to go to. My eyes are twin modems and I see the world downloaded through my vision. My skin is a camera. My bones are made of glass and it’s only a butterfly wing away from reminding me how mortal I am. Diseased meat stretched around a filament of bone sticks and bone pegs.

I am a median. I am a traffic cone. I am yellow lines painted down the middle of basket-weaving courses funded by professional distractors. My voice, when unified with the rest of the voices, is powerful. My voice, when given the ability to change the opinions of many minds at a time, is powerful. That goes for all of us. Keep us down. Keep us segregated. Keep us entertained.

This is not news. This is what my eyes say to my brain all day. This is not news. I am on a ferris wheel and the ride is getting monotonous. I am not bored. I am not ungrateful. But I am worried at the gathering speed.

I need to remove my filters. I need to uncondition my hair and bequeath bare feet to my soul again. The gravity of time has me. The gravity of this planet has me. But I need to life up my mind. I need to light bulb higher. My thinker is gathering precepts and defaults. It’s accruing a mess of ‘knowledge’. It’s becoming glutted with facts, making it too smart to realize, making it too stuffed to think. My brain is a saturated sponge in need of a wringout or a drying.

I need a cleaning. And I need it soon.


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The gorillas we’re using to power ships to the moon are on strike.

Mail me a heart. Make sure it’s perforated and easy to tear apart with instruction on how to squeeze lemon raspberry juice of it. I want for to slip up the forgive on the tantrum engine of my own skull. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t reach for the stars. People who wear black hats shouldn’t try to save people from cliff-diving in canyons. Pets who wear dresses just shouldn’t.

Rebel against the tyranny of government-sponsored free dessert. It’s not free. Suspect keys and only give lobsters a second chance if they’re missing a claw. I’m no swimwear store but I am a wardrobe full of lions and lessons hiding a winter of a past. It’s hard to handle balloons and cutlery when one’s claws aren’t retractable. I have a small need to pit cherries in the darkness and hate in basements. I need to fight the flags that keep threatening to spring out of my pores. This isn’t magic, I tell myself until I believe it. I have to keep reminding myself of Versailles ceilings and Roman church promises that crown to the one point of proving that God looks down on you.

Shatter me home. Take my bark-driven hand and Smokey the Bear my love lottery ticket to the forest fire accident I run from, on fire, into your arms so we can both go swimming. Wet clothes stick to commitment the way applause sticks to lonely singers.

Your eyes track trajectories the way that no one else I’ve met has the knack for. You see existence play out like toilet paper unrolling and police-confiscated fireworks going off like a human life. You are an amusement park speaker. I am a grave of laughter coming down like a famous trilogy on a populace of eager tweens. You are the not-scary kind of future. I’m a wheelchair enthusiast with hang glider dreams. So become my love twin. Whistle me up the dark staircase to the attic full of light and let’s get used to this unicorn together. Wiggle me peaceful until the last remnant of rat leaves my bloodstream. I’ll keep showing you the funny side of darkness if you keep showing me that light is all around us. Let’s trade peaches until the military needs a lemonade stand. Show me a grape juice future.

School courses through my veins and it causes prom night promises to spill from my love-stained lips.



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I am half-umbrella and three-quarters curtains. The soles of my shoes are made from the floorboards of the stage I’m going through. I’m a three-ring circus in a bunk bed. I’m a good mood tied around a candy cane quivering in an arrow hole. Pull back my eyelids to see if I’m sleeping soundly. I am show-business finger-pistols at a funeral.

I am enjoying this brief respite from death. I am a wild goose in a travel cocoon swinging through eighty assumed years of living like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. I am the arc of the covenant. I am a blow-up doll that blowed up real good.

I asunagize. I’m starry. I want to make it down to you. Onwards and upwards. Back and to the left. I can’t fine the words.

You know men better than I do. All I know is that I am not all men but I don’t know if I’m wrong about that.




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I am the chronic doorman lapchild that makes success as improbable as trout lice. I walk into the room like a greasy high five and people immediately want to wash their hands. They have their beard theory ready as I throw the net of my calendar out over the month, fishing for dates. I cut a fine figure dressed in my barbeque smock and carrying my pink axe. I feel like a Turkish jackalope. The sadness in my eyes is becoming permanent but I’m fighting it. I want to be mean, efficient, and ready to go but I end up being a ripoff artist with swollen, tattooed hands. I’m a bearded, poolside drink girl getting jug burn.

You are my mile highness. When you left without saying goodbye to me, I knew it was love. You’re a beautiful day in the poor part of town and your sunshine is fermenting my mind. When you walk across the room, the men’s heads track you like sunflowers. You are a radium rose shining brightly in the darkness. There have been too many classic rock songs, topless vampires, and all-day buffets in my boot ransom life. You are a reminder that aspirations are necessary.

Replace my collarbones with your wishbones. Show me that fingers have no sense of smell. Ignore my unpheromones and touch me. Let the identical twins of Trashy Outskirts and Dusty Suburbs become a smooth city under your hands. We can become the two-headed lama. I’ll be the moth. You be the big pink sea snail. Call me Misty Spoon. Sure, my pillows are stuffed with money but I still can’t sleep. Let’s let dreams rent out smiles for a while. Come closer.




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