wildcat

Uncertain, how many commas and/or semicolons have been used as yet; word count remains (for the moment, by which I mean now, as it stands, simultaneous with current time, et cetera) at 3313 words with a minimum (indeed) of white space, only (per se) one scene break in ten pages.

I stopped a few hours ago, after starting, to go to the market (one package butter, asparagus, one onion, one chocolate-orange bar) and then make dinner (asparagus risotto). Distracted after that for a few hours, as a writer is (on occasion).

How do you read parentheses? Do you ignore them and then go back over the sentence to take them in? Or do you just lower your voice (subvocal articulation) when you take them in, as part of the sentence?

I'm using too many of them, I think, and I'm sorry about that. Grammar is properly about moderation and consideration for one's reader.

Rather: back to work, back to fingers-on-keys, back to the file, back to the Great Work, which is probably at best sub-average and maybe a little uninspired, depending on one's point of view. BUT I PROMISE that I'll let someone read it before I randomly delete the file. Because I'm a real boy (growed-up real good, hyup) and can salvage something, certainly, from the inevitable wreck.

Current word count is: 4754.

Mostly the problem is those brief, exhilarating moments where the ideas sputter and you're left with a blank line waiting to be filled, occasionally even halfway through a sentence, only then you fill it and keep on going. I'm unsure if the violence was well-written enough, but this is just a draft.

I think I'm going to take a scene and flesh out the main character a bit more; yes, it's time for a flashback, maybe. Or something. It also gives me a chance to flesh out her family a bit more, as they're only mentioned indirectly rather than appearing, so far.

I just burnt through the Semi-Louise I've got programmed into Media Player, and now we're onto Old Lenny Cohen. I finished off the Semi-Lemmy with "Boom or Bust," the song that Steph and I turned into a music video, once, with hours-and-hours of driving around, dealing with actors, technical camera difficulties, me muttering obscenities under our breath and then wandering over to the Camosun Street House to drown aggravation in too much red wine (often opened in inappropriate fashions).

I have a letter ready for Joy, I'll be sending it in the Post tomorrow morning. I still want to type one, though, my handwriting's shit if I try to do too much over a long time.

Word count's at 5777, midway through a scene, the flashback's in there but it was shite, I swear, absolute shite, but I'm still going. I'll be writing at the Vietnamese place with Christian and Dan tonight, Christian probably working on grading papers and Dan probably working on his rants. I expect to have a much headier flow than the last time we went out to write - I was severely blocked at the time, but it seems to be coming quite well (trickling at times, or fast-and-furious), although certain mechanical issues have cropped up, like the proper hand positioning to fire a shotgun (or rather, the improper positioning). I'm bring Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber with, for inspiration. Her dripping verbal swelling does wonders for my brain.

Anyway! Unto the night I must go, now, bundled up in toque and coat, with too many commas and a cold in my sinuses and it's occasionally a miracle that I'm not single, what with the stupendous bodily snot issues that so often consume my life. Damnable biology!

The start-of-the-day word count is 6471, and I'm midway through a scene on page 20. A narrative direction snuck up on me, with actual character movement, and I have a better sense of where I'm going now. I already know the ending and some of the major events, but there's still quite a lot of open field to move around in. Certain characters have left the narrative and will return, others won't, and I still need to flesh out some of the background stuff. I might do character-building exercizes in my head while I'm at work. I'm pleased with the names, so far.

I need to get ahold of Steph, only of course she's moved and has some new, mysterious phone number. I can't remember her work number, either--

(Cover by Jack Kirby)

BEASTS THAT ACT LIKE MEN! MEN WHO ACT LIKE BEASTS!

By some coincidence, Kamandi is the great-grandson of OMAC, because what's better than one post-apocalyptic future? Two post-apocalyptic futures. But don't worry, Charleton Heston isn't related to either of them.

Tragically, Kamandi couldn't get a date even though he was the very last boy on Earth. Not that he was really into the whole "Doctor Moreau" Crazy Manimal scene.

(This is me when I was very, very wee. Nudist period. Father's photography work)

Accidentally turned twenty-six yesterday. You know how it goes: It was 9:36 in the morning and then it was 9:37 like that, and I completed another solar revolution (ONE LONE BOLSHEVIK AGAINST THE NIGHT!). It happens. Casualties of the revolution were low, happily, possibly as a result of Rumsfeld resigning.

Having managed, finally, to put on pants, I got my gear together and took off for Chinatown two minutes after the revolution and met up with Pirate Jenny at the Silk Road tea shop for a day-spa - we had back scrub / massages done. The whole procedure took maybe an hour and a half but was fairly invigorating - afterward, I felt better than I have in years. The feeling's continued until today, and I highly recommend pampering yourself at the Silk Road some time. They had different modes you could choose from - I went for an energizing scrub but "relaxing" was also an option, and a more nebulous "balancing." The massage aspect was fairly deep, which I prefer, and the whole thing was amusing in its West Coast qualities - the whalesong playing in the background (they import their own whales, I suspect) and the stress put on whispering over making any noise. Spas are interesting because of the vulnerable position you put yourself in - I was sitting around in my underwear with some complete stranger while she did things to my skin. But the end result was extremely positive.

After that we boarded the pirate ship and set sail on the High Seas, by which I mean downtown, and by ship I mean foot. First was the comic book shop - this being a Wednesday, and Wednesday being the "new comics release day," and a surprising number of comics that I was waiting for. Secondly: post office on Yates, the big one, THE POST OFFICE (as opposed to Postal Service thing) to send a letter on spritely air currents to Japan. Surprisingly affordable (I had, I admit, pictured comically large bills and forms signed in triplicate). One trip to the bank, one trip to the Lotus Pond for lunch, a foray into Munro's to look at books, and then we went shopping for an argyle sweater. Argyle! Only, tragically, it was very much a Goldilocks routine: either it wasn't there or it was Too-Hot-Too-Cold and Too-Soft-Too-Hard. No-no-no Just-right. I made do with a fantastic olive green zip-up hoodie with almost no brand name logoing anywhere on the outside. Hot damn!

After that, Pirate Jenny left on her ship and I took a bus up to Michael's house, stopping on the way to buy stuff for the night's entertainments. Michael baked me a cake with Daniel and later Penny while I read comic books and then talked-talked-talked: to my mum, and my dad.

The evening was spent at Dan's house; Daniel, Christian, Penny, Beth, Vicki, Steph, Dan and Michael all gathered for a potluck with the cake and salad and various-and-sundry cheeses. WINE! There was too much wine, but oddly in respectable amounts because most everyone had to work the next day, being as how we all became adults while we weren't looking. I especially, having revolted and become OLD, OLD, OLD AS THE HILLS, which is to say: I age in geological time. That isn't gas I'm passing, my fault lines are unsettled.

And, you know, there was the present. There was the card, signed by everyone, with a picture of a bitter old woman on the front and a Julie Andrews quote: "Sometimes I'm so sweet even I can't stand it." There was the present: an iPod. Michael got everyone together and they all contributed to buying me an iPod, which is ridiculous and sweet and too much, really, but it was awesome because everyone got to put songs on it for me. I've been blasting around to Nina Simone all of today as a result. It's fancy. You can play movies on it. It's like ENIAC's super-model/rocket-scientist cousin. All is full of love. I switched it up and found "Four Women" on my way home from work tonight. "My name is Peaches!"

Last night was a good time. Great time. Vicki was getting ready to go to San Franscisco for her birthday, and Steph and I chattered about things. I was invigorated by the spa treatment. I shouted things, mostly because I was drinking wine and you know what that does to me. Dan showed us his Complete New Yorker DVD set and we listened to "Tambourine Man" while we did the dishes afterward in Dan's tiny, oblong kitchen. After that, Michael and I shared a cab with Penny - who has moved into the new Elusive Number Six, and swaggered home for the night. Dot dot dot.

Michelle left me a voice mail and we emailed back and forth today, which was great, and she's going to phone me tomorrow night while Michael helps me set up iTunes and figure out how to set up the iPod's full potential and, you know, recharge it.

And the good day has turned into two good days, and I'm going to pound out a couple hundred words if I can so that the novella regains momentum and I can go to sleep happy tonight.

1. I wanted to review X3: The Last Stand but I was too appalled by the whole thing to even bother, other than to say that they mined about six different story arcs in making the script - many of which either didn't mesh together properly or needed to have space of their own - and that golly gee, the overwhelming message of the movie is that Powerful Women Who Go Crazy really just need a deep-dickin' to make them feel better. I could have just watched that one scene with Jason Lee in Chasing Amy to get that and not be both bored and offended. Jean Grey has to be cured/killed by thrusty-grunty manhood penetrating her via Wolverine's claws, followed by an extremely distressing post-coital expression on Famke Jenssen's face as she dies. Woo-fucking-hoo. And apparently they forgot how important Rogue's character arc has been, serving as the backbone of the trilogy, and they send off the superior actress Anna Paquin for three quarters of the movie instead of giving Rogue some story time. There wasn't character development so much as a series of character cameos. It's really irritating to have a decent batch of actors (Jackman, Kelsey Grammar, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, Paquin) often in the same scene together but given absolutely nothing of value to do or say.

2. Mostly because I've been haphazard and busy for the past couple days, my word count is only 9776. I'm going to push to break an even 10,000 by the end of the hour come hell or high water, and then pound out some more tonight.

I'm certainly not procrastinating or anything.

Well, it's nearly eleven-thirty and I've accomplished absolute zero in the word count category. The apartment, on the other hand, is cleaner than its been in weeks - I cleaned out the fridge, reorganized the cupboard, cleaned up the closet a bit, organized some comics, shuffled some stray furniture around, et cetera-et cetera. I bought groceries, and had a proper meal. I'm going to give the stove a scrub in a couple minutes as well. If I can get that done quickly enough I'll try and churn out five hundred words, but I think this evening has ended up being more about practical human-adult-minded things than it's been about the novel-writing. I feel like I have accomplished something writerly, though, as I've spent time thinking about the story structure and plotted some things out in my head a bit. Some of the more emotionally charged plot threads have dropped off the radar a bit but I've worked out how to focus attention back on them in what will probably be the second half of the novel. Novella. Whichever.

I definitely think I want to have a larger cast of viewpoint characters in the next one I write; focusing that much attention on one character is driving me mental and seriously impinges on the whole project. You know: learning things.

Since yesterday was such a hopeless failure regardless of how many bodily things were dealt with, the only acceptable word count for today is two thousand words. And I can't just go "blah, blah, fishcakes" over and over again. Because that would be ridiculous. Ridiculous like someone filling up two pages with a character repeating "HA!"[1]

Either way, as I have jasmine rice coming out of every possible cupboard you could imagine, I'm going to steam some for dinner and then supplicate myself at the Temple Called Literature until the goddamn words make themselves known. It's not like I don't know what I'm going to write, honestly - I even have plans, albeit in my head. It's just that initial impulse to actually carry the act out. Goddamn[2] literary paralysis...

[1] - Damn. Lorrie Moore already did that in "Real Estate."
[2] - I like cussin', dammit.

(Artwork by J.H. Williams III, after Terry Gilliam)

Threw together a "writing" playlist to stick on my iPod later. I've written a little over one thousand words tonight, and I'm not done. Still have forty minutes before I turn into a scandalous rumple of pajamas and quilts, before I'm submerged in the outer seas of the Land of Nod. And still...

"Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves’ birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through." - Angela Carter.

"As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional." - Margaret Atwood. (The whistling you hear is the sound of me being PRETENTIOUS. Fuckers.)

"Portable culture is crucial to any society in motion. Manga in all its indigenous forms has been a thing built for Japanese commuters. Part of why that style of anthology doesn't play so well in America is that it's a culture of private cars, not public transport." - Warren Ellis. (Yes, I read comics on the bus. Shut up.)

"Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do — like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy." - Martin Amis, in a Playboy interview. (The excerpts from the interview are HILARIOUS given that he's being interviewed by a softcore porno magazine)

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky." - Alan Moore.

keys not working properly on my keyboard at the moment. seems to be a mystery. uncertain of my next move. novel in jeopardy? future uncertain. restarting computer.

Coming to you (live?) from the brain-hacked basement computer (bright lights! dark room!) at work. This keyboard -- the keys function as expected, no loose wires or improbable spurts of violent orgasmo-vowels as soon as the cursor appears. Instead, precision and control.

My life sounds like a car commercial some days -- "watch those sleek, controlled lines..."

Scribbled out three pages of novel this morning at a coffee shop, after a filling breakfast at Avalon. Makes me feel like I'm on solid ground after last night's mostly useless flail. I'm in the middle of writing a digression, a kind of ghost story that pops up in the middle of the bigger narrative, an aside, but it works well a developer of off-screen characters -- better than that awful flashback about twenty pages back. I'll input them directly into the evil machine once I have a reliable keyboard of my own. Although, I have just discovered the USB port on this basement monster so I could hypothetically bring my memory stick with me to this branch and use it at will...

Dinner tonight was an uninspiring vegetarian calzone, two extremely greasy dolmades, and a couple decent rumballs. The Patisserie seems to be failing more and more when I go there, and I'll have to find some dinner alternatives for when I'm out this artery of the city -- other than their yam & feta salad, which is delicious, the Patisserie isn't offering much in the way of non-baked goods that actually satisfies or is even, ah, tantalizing. They still make wonderful confectionary, though, but their lunch and dinner options are somewhat listless and mind-numbing. Maybe I'm just going in on bad days, though.

The new keyboard is all hooked up and useful now. It's cordless. I'm still adjusting to the placement and texture of the keys, but it's working out fine and I can get back down to work on The Novel. I went for breakfast with MIchael and Dan this morning before we went out and picked it out, then we shopped for Michael because he needed pants. Then we stopped in the Toystore which was too busy slash cramped slash hot for its own good.

Going to transcribe from my notebook and then think about dinner. Probably grilled cheese, I think, having not done that in a while.

As usual, the words come in bright spurts of electric blue and I put them down, as I do, one after the other in spite of all the other shit coming on down. I seem to be caught in a narrative digression and looking for a way out of it and back into the main, ahem, thrust of the piece.

I'm worried that this is going to turn into a swampland Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but there hasn't been any major violence in the last five or so pages so things are probably going to turn out okay. I know, structurally, that this thing will be in two pieces - not two novels, but two parts, two sections in one. There don't seem to be any easy chapter transitions within those parts, but we'll see where it goes in the second draft.

After people have seen the first draft I'll see if people think it would benefit from more view point characters rather than staying so firmly in Luanne's head.

More Burroughs:

"The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a seperate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to acheive even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word."

Speak lowly, children, for the rains come.

A small child of about three years stood on a plastic deck chair in the Sparklebright Laundromat and gabbled incomprehensibly and loudly to his father (who wore a pink shirt) while shoving a photocopied twenty dollar bill into the change machine; he was mostly gabbling because the machine wouldn't take his rather pitiful attempt at counterfeiting (Geez, kid, at least use the full colour photocopier for your petty larceny). Lucky thing I had exact change, no doubt, and could plug it all in to the machines as necessary. The kid kept sneaking up to peer at the cover of the comic book I was in the middle of reading -- some bland, incomphrensible (sense a theme?) X-Men shit that makes me despair that Chris Claremont is apparently being paid a lot of money to crank pointless comics out while I'm not. Thank god I borrowed it from work and didn't actually spend anything on it.

After I finished reading the dreck, I switched over to the Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, as edited by Johanna Sinsalo. Much better. I'm taking it in short bursts, starting at the beginning with an excerpt from Aino Kallas's "Sudenmorsian," which translates as "Wolf Bride." I'm assume Angela Carter read it before she wrote "The Company of Wolves," because the story certainly reminded me of Carter's. "Wolf Bride" was written back in 1928.

Headed up to Thrifty's to pick up about half of what I need for the dinner party on Wednesday. I'm going to make sushi and I hope it doesn't fail completely without Joy there to give direction. I expect way too much sushi rice to materialize and the Holy Spirit in the bathroom screaming "Where's the beef?" Because today's been about Leonard Cohen and that's probably going to continue for the rest of the week, as it does. I waited around for twenty minutes in the cold, then the bus came and we got about three stops before I had to get off while baby strollers were crammed on because apparently nobody at BC Transit thought that the high-volume Number 4 route could use, oh, a couple double-deckers during rush hour.

But I got home, and I had spicy salmon pepperoni for dinner with lime sherbert for afters, and the upshot is that today has been a day of minor inconveniences and I may be exhausted but there's this novel that I'm writing, even if it veers too close (and too unexpectedly) to Fantasy Territory (I'll feel better when I get to the gun battles of Part 2), so I can't really complain but must soldier on.

But that's okay, because even with the occasional bout of Oedipus-Rex-blinding-himself anguish while doing it, writing is still the most fun thing I can think to do by myself, and that even includes the other thing.

Anyway, a couple sentences:

Two days, Luanne has spent two days locked in a shack out on Old Man Shackle's property, plotting her own sweet daddy's murder.

This is Eli, all elbows and very little neck; he's worn a light linen suit, mangy white in the squalid air already, and it can't be past eleven. Early in the day. Behind him, cracking his knuckles like always, crack-crack-crack like a rat scraping its belly along the bottom of a bathtub, Shamus snorts at the air with immense nostrils. The Shackle Boys.

I'm on page 46 and I have to burn through 1000 more words so I can call up Michael and see how he's doing. He's had a bad stomach ache for a couple days and needs some attention.

Rather than making sushi rolls for the dinner party last night, I made delightful sushi bowls (which rhymes) because of course I forgot the bamboo roller at home and didn't notice until Fort Street and it was pouring rain, the plastic grocery bag handles biting at the soft and flexible insides of my fingers and palms. BUT these sushi bowls were, as said, splendid from any angle - sushi rice on the bottom with a layer of nori; then smoked salmon chutes, avocado, imitation lobster, imitation crab, cucumber and gently braised prawns. On the side we had warmed sake and chocolate cookies for dessert. The whole thing went off rather well, considering my perchance for neurotic-seat-of-my-pants cooking. This was all achieved after a whirlwind seven hours in Esquimalt followed by madly dashing between the grocery store and my place and then Dan's apartment.

Expect posts on the following: Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo's Face, and Flann O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds (when I finish it), as well as the latest Wonder Woman comic book...

Gliding over top of zombified crowds, fucked to the gills on intravenously-delivered memory machines shuddering subsonic renditions of Ezra Pound's Cantos into my bloodstream.

For the sake of those not here: the snows fell today in great, scandalous clumps, mostly on the diagonal and I'm fairly impressed with Michael for handling it on the roads. We rounded up the Good Little Children in the Big Green Van of Death much like Big Man Odin gathers up his baby Valkyries before the final cymbal-crash. We rounded them up at various velocities (someone almost had to match speeds with the van to get in it because of the slide) and then trucked over to James Bay for the purposes of eating, because it was Sunday today and on Sunday we brunch (both verb and noun, thank you).

We went to Cafe Mulatta and chattered with the waitress who recognized Michael and I because we've made a bit of a habit of going there for breakfasts and she also was friends-of-friends connected to Penny, who was out with us. I begged off the Belgian waffles for once to eat scrambled eggs with brie, avocado, and red peppers; pan fries and fruit on the side. Afterward, Michael and I ordered slices of pie for dessert because let's face it, I've always preferred to eat as if it was the last meal I'd ever had.

After that I came home and sat in my warm apartment while the clumpy snow dolloped down upon the Earth like - well, let's face it - some diseased parody of Ansel Adams. I've never been fond of Ansel Adams, he's why I left Prince George.

I managed to get some work done earlier, and I'm going to make another push right now before I go to bed. I'm writing through one of the bad spells, when I'm not sure if I want to continue the novel or if it's too flawed for its own good, and what the subtext of it is, what the unconscious developments are. Partly I'm bored with the section I'm writing and partly I'm uncomfortable with some of the subject matter. But this is what it's about: the uncomfortable stretches, the awkward bits, the dirt and grit and shit. It's a horror story and it's got to be about the things I don't like. Discomfort will crop up.

1. There are apparently only six bus routes working today.

2. I got on a bus to get to Colwood in time for work. Huzzah! Only, we made it to MacKenzie and then there was this cop car and tales of downed power lines and subsequently closed highways and the bus turned around and came right back to town, thereby officially wasting forty minutes of my morning.

3. Plus I forgot my toque on the bus.

4. Plus nobody's picking up at work so I can't explain why I didn't show up half an hour ago, which might mean that nobody showed up to work, or that they're flailingly busy running around trying to get things done before opening while understaffed.

5. Admittedly, they probably would have called to see why I wasn't there if any of them were there.

Current word count: 17,092. Fifty-two pages. Goal of a thousand words by midnight. I don't know what I'll end up doing with the rewrite, but the section I'm writing now may not finally make the cut. I'm not sure how many fantastical elements work with the story and there's the lacklustre quality of the description. I've fended off the delete impulse at least twice a day for the last week. Maybe it's an issue of point-of-view.

Either way I have to keep going: every hundred or so words keeps the Fear away. I can hear it, pacing in the hallway, going up and down the stairs; it never quite makes it to the front door and out of the Boarding House. Restless - the Fear is restless today. But so are my fingers.

By accident and completely without meaning to, I started to work out a basic geneological map of the characters at hand, which won't really be important, for the most part, until after I've finished Draft #1 and start in on #2, which probably won't be for another month but some of this stuff will crop up in the second half or so of the first draft. There will be more emphasis with the second draft, though, because I'm already thinking about the flaws in the version at hand and how I might want to change the structure (& characters & plot & pacing) to encourage the whole thing not to suck.

Don't worry, I haven't crossed over into Grady Tripp Land with detailed descriptions of everybody's brother's dental records and the geneologies of their horses, none of that, but maiden names have cropped up and certainly the deceased relatives which will be referenced at various points and who knew that the Shackle boys had a sister, and finally Luanne gets a surname which is particularly important given the significance of names in the story. Working out some consistent physical details in case I forget, as well as ages and particular events is worth doing.

I've still got about four hundred words to write in -- oh -- the next twenty minutes or so, but I'm feeling a lot more inspired right now and driven so I can't be begrudged a bit of planning and background work. It feels like it's about halfway through the story at this point in the first draft.

As the winds roar and the snow falls slash plummets earthward, the library is an almost empty corpse of itself. There are, at best, only meandering microbes at play. Mostly I listen to the insipid hum of about two dozen computers talking to each other via whirring fans while I stare (alternately off into space and at the screen, or at whichever body happens to come up to the desk as it stands, monolithic, up at the front).

Crash-landed alien in exile on a drab-and-dreary photorealistic planetoid devoid of the vibrant technicolours ze's accustomed to. Tragedy! Woe! Where is the extravagance? Lost in a sea of muddied newsprint palette? Even the exclamation points seem flaccid and lacking any sense of stylized interjection.

1.
Iced-over pavement,
every footstep tries to be showy:
to choreograph some unexpected
turn-of-fate for itself, ballet,
to be noticed.
The rest-of-me trying to hold a straight face,
but surprised (surprised!) by the antics
of Left Foot and Right Foot.

2.
The postman doesn't ring twice,
but brings packages for the woman
who lives in the basement suite
at the back of the Margaret Atwood Boarding House
who lives her mail to rot like corpses for days.

3.
The pie was an unexpected footstep
marked by the crinkle of a pie tin--
it is a day of plates and there are plates
in the sink after lunch and pie,
but only one fork.

4.
Leonard Cohen wonders what they meant, you know,
repent, but I'm certainly not going to tell him anything.

5.
There is too much concern with regard to line length.

6.
The expedition is imagined,
only, even with salt
on the front walk; errands
can be pushed back
until tomorrow.
There is a dark already.

7.
The landscape smells like apocalypse,
which smells a bit like rum, sideways,
or mud mixed with snow; the landscape
has grown fresh appendages and paths
made out of footsteps taken (surprise!)
by people who've moved on since then,
whether delivering mail into boxes or
walking on, walking on from home.

8.
They wear dresses embroidered with peonies
wedding-cake flowers iced on 'round their necks
permanent necklaces with dangling virginity
(always, flowers, virgins)
but they stamp their feet in gumboots
while ice decomposes (not melts)
into the parentheses. The camera clicks.

9.
Prospero drowns his books in the sea.
He will regret this, later, five years from now,
scouring secondhand bookshops
with an incomplete list.