A Tangent is a Pathway

...branching off, a street you walk down looking to be surprised by what would otherwise be considered mundane.

Sight is distorted A blown-out asterisk in the dusk The break of dawn comes quick Turning a rooster timer to hear its distinctive chirp at precisely the lapse of cooked meat In a townhouse In the vicinity of daydreams Your body is meat You could be described as fibrous The pie in the window waves back at you with its scent with its temperature All sensual and hyper-present The bird still hides her eggs in a gaggle of feathers Sitting resting waiting waiting to feel the rustle of birth beneath them You call people friends before ever remembering a name just syllables extended past two beats A dial tone calling card No one remembers where they’re from in this tainted imaginarium As if it didn’t matter where It slips sneakily through the tongue soothing your cut-up gums fraught with retained colloquialisms An exercise in selective

amnesia Home is

in constant motion You remember this when keys in your hand or glasses on the head you look for whatever it is that is missing Never being able to place the exact missing the exact subject of the sentence wiggling away from the borders of the page You just know something has in fact crossed over Run off the cliff of recognition The cat that jumps right outside our window with her black fur and tentative meow has double-paws A mutation Gets stuck on her way down the ledge A clumsy mess of limbs and appendages We’d named her Thumper from the distinctive thud her paws make when she lands I wonder what sound I make in landing Is landing as final as it sounds It feels perpetual I am landing I am actively landing I am always in landing That middle space the kinetic in-motion or illusion of motion lost among the before and the after place So presently now so urgently during Yesterday I was landing in the pub where the conversation steered too close to this wound A sticky valley of navy suited Mormons preaching love and understanding through gritting teeth tightened fists and sour mouths a valley of you versus us versus them versus anyone who has anything even remotely different A valley of god’s incredulous fools and Walmart’s indignant congregation A valley so focused on its secreting centre it forgets itself in the altitude I had to

clear my throat at the question Like I always do

with difficult questions I suppose you wouldn’t find Are YOU a beekeeper that odd in the land of the bees except for those who have been stung Uncle Sam’s gloved finger points direct The day before picture day 3rd grade I was riding my bike down the neighbourhood It was pink and purple with sparkling tassels on the ends of the handles I still had the training wheels on but I can’t remember if that was before or after my grandpa left Because I stopped trying to learn once he left Maybe before I was riding my bike in the cul-de-sac we lived in and I flew straight into a bee She stung my left cheek and the next day they immortalised it in a wallet sized photo I used to think my parents must have not loved me as much as the other parents loved their kids because they didn’t get the big pictures or the full packet with the keychain attachment I grew out of this misunderstanding shortly after primary Today I am landing in the park where someone lets language slither into their ear and die in the cavernous space it finds there Succumbed unable to communicate with the invisible thread that ties us together The sentence is strewn out-to-dry and meaning is lost among the pollen

True fiction is made in the minds of those who can’t listen

The canvas sheets rustle in the wind on the terraces of people’s apartments high-above me Flats they call them Flat packed closed corridors for East Londoners sipping cappuccinos or Aperol spritz You know I always wondered what the drinks of choice would be in other times Like when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald sat in La Closerie des Lilas in Paris Passed Hemingway on the way to the toilets or prophesied their futures between cocktails What would they be sipping Nick and I went down last year to Paris to those obsidian tabletops overlooked by palm fronds For Christmas he gave me an oblong present wrapped up in cherry red paper Tactile like gf-smith paper with miniature dots of a darker toned red forming stripes from the top to the bottom The thick paper doubling over with the objects’ oddly circular shape I opened it only to find a set of baguettes from the corner shop downstairs The kind they put in plastic injected with preservatives and I was confused but when I turned it around it had a heart cut out of the same paper saying we were going to go Three months later In the less than surprising month of February we sat at La Closerie des Lilas fighting over the typical service of Parisians Or when Allen Ginsberg in the film of him not in his real life but in the film where he’s Daniel Radcliffe and not really him What did pretend Allen Ginsberg sip with his movie-benzos when listening to jazz Watched it freeze time itself into the fibres of a moment What did the real Allen Ginsberg drink right before writing Howl Off his head on real Benzedrine to make sense of a city that was trying to eat him yelling Moloch! Moloch! Moloch! into the gash of a place so rubbed raw What do I take for the gaping mouth of London So hungry for my excess excess in language but I find myself an excess

am I language -- what do I sip What do I

sip The rain

comes on slow like the light hmmm in the back of the throat of a question before it knows to become one

I ask the sky where to go Palms towards its blurring blue and note the minutes it takes to run across the canal Evade the joggers and bike riders Or the less than pleasant walk to the bus stop across three active lanes with no zebra The zoo howls on You or I or us I suppose we’re in this together you as witness and me as grantor of secrets We yes we choose the canal and form a contractual compromise That a bath would be brewed if the rain drenched us before we got there Solve a drowning with another For a moment the light hits the water in just the right way Produces a bluish green tone A softness in the air For a moment you think this whole simulacrum is peaceful.