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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The pillars of the church that I actually believe in
The lion, the tiger, and the bear
All rolled into one wizard
The clown prince of poetry
A cannon of compassion
A fire hose of hope
Not too many people do ballet during uphill struggles
Not too many people slip on banana peels over and over again
as they climb Mount Everest
This sage of the gumdrop
This improvising whirling dervish
This, this, this…moment enjoyer
RC stands for Radio Control or Random Chat
Both appropriate seeing as this DJ loves to talk
Talisman of my heart
What I think of to combat my fear of the dark
A candidate for sainthood
But better than that
along with Mr Rogers
The humble dragon
The happy chuckle echoing in my silent canyon
When you say your spells
Even the microphones are surprised
They turn to the audience and say
“Are you, like, hearing this?”
With licorice undercurrents
With a dark undertow
Allergic to pedestals
A man who stands in the storm for far longer than I ever could
A comical understatement of integrity
With a dash of sorrow
Let’s go drowning together
SWIMMING
I mean swimming
Somewhere where the water isn’t over our heads
And no metaphors cloud the blue sky
I only want to hear the sermon of your laugh
My patronus
The platypus of hope
An underground railroad that smuggles me to a freer place
Just by opening the tunnel of your mouth
I’ve mistaken a few anchors for boomerangs in my time
But I’m happy to be anywhere near your garden
The blasting furnace of your love
I can’t speak for everyone
I can barely speak for myself
But from the bottom of my polluted heart
And with everything I have to give as a person
You make me think that maybe, just maybe,
A nuclear war isn’t the answer
Now, I know that’s a lot to lay on a person
Just like I know poems have to end
Like all things must
But I am incapable of ever feeling different about you
Even if I stop talking


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The shaved arugula that makes up my excuse for a hangover ex-wives the plantation owner of my receding hairline.
It’s not like there are tiny pinatas in my eyes that look for children with sticks.
It’s not I’m made of diplomas from schools that don’t exist.
It’s not that I’m all kite and no string
It’s not that I’m all string and no kite
It’s that I’m a ravaged hippopotamus caving in on himself.
And excuse for an ostrich to refuse to stick his head into the sand
I’m wet and cold on the beach
Cancer Christmas-lights my organs
I have measles on my easels
I’m a foot long horndog
I eat pieces of shit like you for brunch
If it wasn’t for my oversized sense of fair play, I would have beaten you fair and square a long time ago
I’m not a macho man
I’m a ring leader
I’m not a ring-tailed lemur
I’m a horse trader
The other night I made out with a lamp
Tomorrow I’m getting engaged to electricity
I’m underwater and I’m an electrician
I’m a shock to my own system
I self fibrillate
If it wasn’t for stormclouds and patents I’d have eaten my own pancreas
I don’t deserve a medal, I deserve an anchor
Colds catch me out of the corner of their eye
I click-clack on the porthole to the universe
Morse coding a crossword to the powers that are benign
I’m a rattling passive question, hoisting my own petards up and going pantless down the marriage trench
If it wasn’t for Star Wars, I wouldn’t know what mysticism and religion were
I’m a Christmas present wrapped in fur for a peta orphanage
I laugh in the face of spaghetti
You’re not a number. You’re a square root.
You’re a peg-legged bumblebee
You’re a windshield rushing at an idea before it caves it’s own asshole in through it’s own brain on impact against the clarity of the glass
You could no more avoid it that you could avoid a moose of destiny
At least it’s not fatal, you cry to your pillowing crash bag as it breaks your nose
At least it’s not a siren lulling you to the big sleep
You dance and you sway
You pull the door open
This is needing a taller desk.
This is needing a keyboard that’s more ergonomic
This is trying out new things.
I’m not the one the ocean sings for.
I just translate.
I take no responsibility for greatness
That is the mantra
That has to be the mantra
You need to force the steps until they come naturally
You need to horse doggle the flindars until they hump up the stairs on their own
You need to lullaby the snakes until they ties themselves around your wrists
Making planes stand at attention until the rap lyrics write themselves
You’re no Michaelangelo
You’re little more than a Jobs
I’m sold darkness to demons and pictures to photographers
I’m a book on how to find your way
Reading itself
The translations are pending and so are the patents
I’m not a parent but I play one on tv
I’m Troy McShure
I’m a happening cat but in actuality, all cats are happening
So I guess I’m not that special
But I am the common miracle that every person is
I mean if only statistically
I wish that my paper balloon animals wouldn’t origami popcorn
And that my home movies would stop being so filled with promise
I with that Oscar nominations weren’t a curse and that churches weren’t afraid to walk the street at night.
I wish that every lift ticket had a job to come home to
And that I didn’t want to be a porn star in night vision 3d VR films
I wish my green scales looked better on dragons
I wish my fish breath worked better as a spine
I wish that everyone’s struggle wasn’t such a struggle even though I recognize the gateway
Some doors don’t open and we beat ourselves bloody by knocking face first until the funeral wraps our impact in its graveyard catcher’s coffin mitt
Not to baseball death
There is no metaphor
There is no time
There is no friend in me
I left for another place a long time ago
And I can never come back
But I can parallel
I can go forward/outward
I can reach
I can shed fear
I can be impossible
I can help
I can answer the riddle
I can dance until the broken wheels of my legs become whole again
I can Chinese food the fortunes back to the stock market strength again
But first I have to realize that I was never strong
And I was never here
I don’t have to be the biggest or the best
I just have to last
And persevere.

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I feel like a discarded camera.
Like the lenses still work but I'm not recording anything in a permanent manner.
Like no one is using me to witness.
Like no one is looking out through me anymore, marveling at Earth and life and relishing the experience.
Like a character in someone else's dream
A movie extra
An NPC video game character idling on an AI course.

Two people were jostling for control within me during my youth;
one biologically present at best
and one unimaginably powerful;
a changer of destinies.

It's not that the weak one won, its that the powerful one left the building.
I am not half a person as a result.
I am more like 1/8th of a person.
The universe is indifferent to me now because I am no longer part of it.
And I am floating through it.


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The biological drive to serve dessert to tigers is unknowable and not evolutionarily beneficial to our race as matter of kites and slander.
In fact, each bandana that back-pockets its way to a lure for a solution becomes just another good-intention brick on that road.
Corrals for hope don’t exist on the minimal-gravity desert planet.
Brass discipline rolls the dice in a sunken ship.
No snakes, says the sign.
I can’t hear the trumpet when I try to be human.
My frontal lobes are soaking in a cave sweat.
Black plastic helps.
Juggle me this, juggle me that, who’s afraid of the atanarjuat.
Hard passes on hard lefts.
Grow more fingers if you need higher numbers.
Sleep in a bucket to get to heaven.


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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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As long as I stay busy then I never have to think.
And if I ever have to think then I can always drink.
The common earthworm has five hearts that beat at different speeds.
I like to think that every one of them has different needs
I don’t believe that everything is valid and I’m wrong
The radar pings that I have sent have all come back as pong
I try to stay in tributaries ‘cause I hate main streams
It’s easier to row my boat so gently when I dream
If truth is stranger than the way I use a dictionary
Then I am not a writer, rather, I’m a fictionary.

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My doghouse future lives in updates and site corrections that will never be current. I’m a word salad giving birth to car tires, spinning old helmets into war stories that never happened. I’m a wind dodger, a slippery riot shield, a tensor bandage wrapped around a bunch of bananas. If it wasn’t for my thinning hair, I’d punch a hole in the sun.

I’m sprouting silicon. I’m the woof of a blowfish. I’m an unsent absentee vanguard. I want to inject the hourglass with molasses. I’m pouring sugar into the gas tank in the hope that it’ll bake a cakes. I am an enchanting shade of beige. In the morning, I am a giraffe trying to eat a grapefruit.

Nosequills. Smelt wipers.

The ache of the Antarctic as we break it’s back. It’s just a conversation we’re having with the earth and it’s a real icebreaker. We’re really getting to know each other.

My shadow glitters in the dark but luckily I was born with a removable blade. I’m a newsstand in the basement of an apartment building. I have keys in my mouth and a tavern on my shoulders. I am an alias with no true identity anymore.

I’m caught in an upward spiral but I’m afraid of heights. The topology of my life is peeks and alleys. I’ve seen forty years go by between my fingers.

But snowflakes invented brandy. I’m a lifetime clutcher and a post-codeine baggage porter. If you’re a hotel, I want to be your bellboy.

Take me to the hell of you.




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I’m so pale I get moonburn.
Tonight I’m a cobbler. Stitching soles to the bottom of my feet so I can walk up to heaven.
A raven’s stunt and a crow’s feat.
I don’t think I’m cut out for happiness.
Resign has two meanings and right now I am both of them. I have quit and I’m also just going with the flow of life’s river, jigsaw puzzling my way through the floor space of my mouth.
These are the storm windows to my soul.
The world drains through my eyes into the hole of my mind and parts of it get stuck in my memory.
Sometimes this haunted house gets so full that the ideas defenestrate right out onto the page.
Sometimes the ideas need a little help so I throw rocks in this glass house.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Well according to the big guy, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission
So I ask for guidance but when I pray, I feel like I’m talking to myself
When the windows break, I separate the glass from the plastic and the paper,
Thinking that the easiest way for me to recycle is to die in a forest.
With all the corporate waste around, I feel like it’s useless to use less.
When other people die, we say they pass. I guess that’s why living sometimes feels like failure.
These days, all my arrows have turned into boomerangs.
Sometimes you get happy and all it does is remind you of how long it’s been since you’ve been happy and it makes you sad. Sometimes you get happier that you’ve ever been and all it does is remind you of how you’ve never felt this way and it makes you REALLY sad.
But at the same time, I feel like I’ve had this astounding revelation that ‘slow and steady wins the race’ means that you’ll live longer.
There are lions in the reeds and I want to be the reed between the lions.
Because getting angry about being angry is like putting knives into a blender.
Because if you don’t eat for a while, your stomach gets smaller and you feel full after not eating very much. It’s the same with your heart. When you’re not used to it, a compliment can fill up your entire chest.
I feel like I’m a former Canadian child star, like there’s a connection between graveyards and schools, like a part of me has been on fire for my entire life and I never noticed.
I used to say, “Don’t take it personally, I’m just dead inside. There’s a skinless mattress where my heart used to be.”
Mirror, mirror in the well, tell me my story isn’t over yet
Tell me I’m more than just another old man boy band.
If you reject authority well enough and long enough, you will end up in charge of something. So be careful.
They say that computer monitors use up more power on standby than they do when they’re turned on.
I know exactly what that feels like.
I’m going to ride a bike because I have Taxicabin fever
I’m a puppy in wolf’s clothing. I’m a sheep that only counts on himself to fall asleep.
I’m here to kick bubble gums and chew asses and I’m all out of asses
I’m up here standing on my own six and a half feet.



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