Dreampepper

producing sounds like Stephen King's nervous system caught in a mousetrap.
The line broke, the monkey got choked, they all went to heaven in a little row boat, clap back.

I recieved a letter of "immediate termination" today. Not unexpected. They had been vague about my schedules and their phonecalls were increasingly paranoid and contradictory. I have a job interview with Telus tomorrow. I did a test for them today, scantron style, all tiny little ovals that you fill in with pencil. I'd forgotten the sound a pencil makes on paper, the little swish sound as it softly grinds itself into the paper like a subtle dancehall pick-up, how the scrape of it travels up your hand and tunnels into the fingertips. There was the same personality test that I had to fill out every year of high-school. More True/Less True. Chopstick marks, one after another. Question one, old houses, familiar territory, question two. IQ measured in how well I process a pattern in a row of shapes. Personality measured in yes/no questions.


I did well. I always do well with those. It's in the taste of them, how fast I read. Print chewed up faster than waking up in the morning. Twenty minutes and mine is done. The expected smiles of surprise on the other side of the door. "You're finished?" "Yes." Blue carpet, blue walls. The walk to the skytrain is nice, under trees. I wonder if I'll ever be homesick for these clouds and think no. I walk through the Central Park playground that was one of my only memories of Vancouver as a kid. The signs are dirty now and the little train doesn't run. Half of it is torn up, under reconstruction. The water fight fountains are gone. It all feels appropriate and meaningless, all at once, like a pop song resonating to a false mirror flare of nostalgia frequency or a boring music video.

breeding like Starbucks.

Four Years

The smell of him went soon
from all his shirts.
I sent them for jumble,
and the sweaters and suits.
The shoes
held more of him; he was printed
into his shoes. I did not burn
or throw or give them away.
Time has denatured them now.

Nothing left.
There will never be
a hair of his in a comb.
But I want to believe
that in the shifting housedust
minute presences still drift:
an eyelash,
a hard crescent cut from a fingernail,
that sometimes
between the folds of a curtain
or the covers of a book
I touch
a flake of his skin.

-Pamela Gillilan.

I have just stumbled across some utterly unbelievable pictures. Thank you Nikkyboy, you're fabulous. Why didn't you tell me??

Jesus.

Right, well. I did have something to say but it's been utterly wiped from my brain. Now I'm back to the fingertrap pondering of relationships, trying to find in myself the endless young girl snakeskin shedding of this belief for that.

See, I know I have a problem. I'm aware of quandary and fire, that salt tears erode spirit faster than the weather in winter. It's all old news, a headline that travels back farther than my family name. Simply put, I love a man who doesn't love me back, not in any optimistic way, not with any modicum of respect, not enough. This is a star misalignment of being and need. My make-up requires more care than they give me, my building blocks want and they scream at me, going catatonic with infuriating logic, if he wants a whore, he should have hired one, it's not like he bloody well isn't a hell damned slut, not that I even know who's he's fucking or that he'd tell me, but see, here's the kicker - I can't make it matter. Something's wrong with me.

He's just a man, flesh and bone like the rest of them, two eyes to see me as something less than I am, two lips from which to fall back-pedaling excuses, but in some intrinsic way, he's caught in me. He is my sweetest lapse of sanity. To me he smells like rain and tastes like the crackle of an endless static pattern, no matter how he hurts me in his selfishness. It hasn't been relevant that with/out him I've been dying. With my heart, my health has taken a dive, the two tied together in an uncomfortable treaty. I fall now, dizzy from being unable to care for myself, and my eyes can't close at night without filling with sky, not a beautiful twilight filled with glittering wonder, but a particularly empty span, lending no reason to move in any direction.