Simple Sentences

Tanks of diesel and thick denim, bare girth arms goose pimpled – he’s cold.

Blue eyes lurk under a baseball cap morning, a mouthful of fruit chewed with molars.

Simple sentence of a man. They all are.

A kisser of kisses. A smeller of smells. A longer of longings. A flinger of flings all flung now.

And me with no longing for longing left.

Unmoored Days

The city will swelter later, but now just the light baby-breath morning. Everything has to begin. And this begins with the unmoored days, and I’ve no sense of how water moves except that it comes and goes.

Days made of lint and dust bunnies, rolling around under the sofa without syntax or fabric softener. Things come up. Things get done. On the bus, I sit down beside the gap in the sentence again. It hasn’t showered. I walk this selection of streets not seeing the underlined signs on the corners, not seeing the roof growing over now all ivy and thick bark, shelter and worry. I fall asleep without seeing the ceiling. I’m not getting out of here.

We are white pages and binding lack, we are the bus jostles and quick stops. We are the empty plate on the wide blank table.

They are the distraction boys with the right nose, the right slope of shoulder, the good shoes. This is the itch of all you would lick clean if you could only make it dirty.

Good Boys

If you sit here long enough all your crushes, your flirts, your longings will come back to you. Boomerang or palindrome you ask the crewcut boys, shaved and ready, answers to a different question. Even the good boys need sinkholes, vertigo, entropy, need to feel the misstep, the chance they could fall.

Though that one has a way of filling out his pants, if that’s saying something. Bumpy in the right places for bumping. And other details like the length of time it will take my hands to run down the length of him, how many of his eyelashes will tickle.

Traffic outside the window, breath of everything going elsewhere. The city has become just this. Just the small practices and preparations of the lost and untouched when pressed to speak.

The other side of a kiss

"What's on the other side of a kiss?" you asked at the hotel room door, another province, some conference on some theory or another.

This was before your metamorphosis, your thickening, the bark crust nights and days, back when we were pulsing stainless skinless grubs.

Never told you it was not an easy no, how I avoided your mouth, circling the room to find some way not to see you circling the room while you chewed a whole roll of lifesavers which seems so Freudian now.

I wanted to throw a blanket on you, throw open a window like some Bronte heroine.

"What's on the other side of a kiss?"
A question given to you by two women in the downstairs lounge wanting to kiss one another, wanting to kiss you or me, licking the rims of their martinis, thick lipped and beleaguered in the heat wanting something, the kind of something that caesarians the room. Looking for the wake of a kiss.

The deferral of a kiss, indefinite grace, and yet perhaps not so clearly fear when you factor in my actor and your dentist, the open arms of clumsy men waiting at home though they never saw this moment, this image, two men in a hotel doorway chewing a question someone else gave them, faithlessly wanting to slip.

R.

The Other Guy

He smiles at me in the cafe. where did he get those lips. I'll bet he doesn't even know he has them.

It's a funny smile, flirt and guilt in one I find out later. He dated A. after I did.

A.and I loved one another like a reckoning, all thumbs and left hands, empty pockets and shrugs.

All three years erased by that afternoon, the last, him sleeping on the living room futon his back to me, the white curtains closed to the afternoon, breathing to let something in.

The movers had taken everything but him and the futon.

I was late for work, but could sense this was the last time, and that he wanted it even though it would hurt him.

He was bare, half there, half gone.

Smaller kisses now, mouth half open, his smell again, once more, for the last time. I will leave after. Won't say goodbye. I am a half-eaten orange, nothing left to peel.

This guy in the cafe, the one that knew A. later, smiles again. Tells me he loves my writing. I wonder if he knows the whole story.

R.

Swimming

Stepping out of the theatre tonight, the rain, the lightning, the deluge. Wet right through so I’ll never get dry again. Feet soaked, hair tendril washed to forehead, I’m swimming home alone. We’re nothing but guppies in the tank. Nothing but coy in the pond.

Wrestling and chewing, tired of something. Been a long time since this itch. Things broken open tonight, pieces of bowl on a wooden floor. Something about home, the unmade bed, the open window, the worn clothes despairing on the chair.

Lightning here, and there’s never lightning here. Flashes of lightning, thunder playing catch up. I want to kiss more people. I used to kiss more people. Streets running river.

I’m going to leave. Not a plane. A train, moving fast, leave and wash my face clean twice a day, become a stranger walking the aisles on a fast train. I will eat more oranges. Become a quiet man who says things quietly and, surely, one who doesn’t say the wrong things so often. I’ll be the stranger in the café window looking out at the rain, paying attention to his sips.

I stop at the corner store for a litre of milk. Not two litres, because I am leaving. I’m probably leaving. In the morning.

Lips

Sandwich days. Wednesdays. Smiles and lasting brush strokes. I'm no longer the boy you fell for, so stop falling.

Five weeks since I inhaled. Since the one with the broad hands and the need to climb things. The sleepy mountains tolerated us like flies on beasts. They had found the water first.

In the woods he pressed me down, moss and fern. He said, "You can lick your lips all you want, they're not going anywhere," smiling like he knew what I'd moan. I touched my lips to make sure they were there, to see what he meant.

He was fine. But he had a peculiar way of rolling his eyes sideways so he always seemed on the brink of leaving.

Tuesday

Tuesday's a sink full of dishes, a quiet man with blue eyes on the bus, the homeless woman on the corner doing what's left of a tango.

In the cafe, I see I'm falling for people in the customer service industry again.

I miss the nape of your neck. A place to snuffle. Unspoken vowel of your back pressed against my front. You're the type of boy I eat my wheaties for.

There's this barista on Hastings Street who brings me glasses of water even when I don't ask for them. A close shorn boy with nimble hands and a thirst for tall glasses. Carpenter jeans that never saw a saw. Evidence that he cuts his own hair, from boredom more than thrift. He has your scent. But he doesn't know it.

Monday with M.

Another waking up, the slow longing of blankets and fickle pillows here and there (one flung itself from the bed but won't tell me why), the blinds pressing against each other again, blindly.

On the next street over, the daycare lets the children out to run and scream. My sleepy mind wanders to the kitchen, remembering there's no espresso, then wanders back, remembers there's no you, then lays down again to talk to pillows.

Later, through the rain, lunch with M.

M. the one-man conga line, sheet lightening, lemonade without sugar, then sometimes sugar, throw-your-head-back laughter, damn the espresso.

The kind of man who makes you forget a week of rain and takes the edge of your grump and snark. The kind of man you'll forgive for cheering you up on Monday.

On the first day . . .

Sunday, the rain, the grey-slant of clouds. A trace of unquiet, like we're all farm animals sensing the earthquake the day before.

Various friends message me various words. We're all a little lonely today. So three of us grab breakfast early, a side order of bacon to stave off the afternoon.


I friend's boyfriend and I have been flirting. Today, we end up sitting on a stoop, waiting for another friend to come downstairs. We smile sideways. He won't ever cheat on his boyfriend. I'll never ask him to. But lately, I can see, we each find our hands forgetting that we're not lovers, almost forgetting not to reach out for a waist, almost forgetting not to wrap around and pull the other close.

If I was being a proper writer, I would write my friend as uncaring to his boyfriend, so that this attraction, this allure, would not seem unkind. But he's not. So we're unkind.

Leave the windows open to the rain, a half-glass suggestion to the longing, a chance for it to leave. But it won't. Yet.

I am I am

These days,

I am falling asleep, no longer so afraid of not sleeping.

I am waking up with a tumble instead of a jolt.

I am waiting for the woman to make the espresso.

I am finding new ways to look at people. Really look.

I am putting my head in my hands.

I am putting his hips in my hands.

I am showing him there are no words for the way he looks when his head is thrown back.

I am letting myself be held without holding him less.

I am getting used to the sounds of someone sleeping next to me. Again.

These days, I am dreaming in temperatures, from cold to warm and sometimes I get warmer. Sometimes.

the backward waltz

This morning there’s nothing but questions. Standing on the corner, a guy walks by, a Saturday-morning-rumpled guy, with a board game under his arm but I can’t see the title.

Then night and I feel bigger. The sky a wide collection of stars blinking truth by truth, the trees billowing the wind, birds fighting in the branches. People walking quietly in the dark.

I’m happy with this. If this is what I get. Picasso warm-butter nights and days of pieces and places. It's a backwards waltz, but I can show you the steps.

Faintly

He's there in my office, talking like a sprinkler, telling too much and not noticing all the words spilled down the front of his shirt.

He tells me he hasn't fainted often, but then from his mouth a catalogue of faints:

once from running too fast, not after romance, but after a baseball

another time, from the sight of a man bleeding on a moving train

the time he held his breath, one boring afternoon in the tall dry grass, late summer, scaring his younger sister. She ran for help until she thought her lungs would burst.

once, when he was six, cutting oranges for his hungry little sister, the same one who would run for him later.

He's a grown man in my office, his wide biceps, his comma stance, a mural of his unconscious moments before me.

And for some reason I can't explain I'm thinking of my bed at home, realizing I've been forgetting there were ever two sides to it, the sweet inconvenience of a him as he moves and grumbles, the pretty trust of sleep. All this forgetting under my distraction habits.

He asks me what I'm thinking.

I look at his thick bottom lip, and wonder how I can ask him. Ask him to faint.

Waterlogged

Rainy Sunday, waterlogged. Seems the summer forgot this one. The flowers gorging themselves outside lay around like fat ladies on the green grass despairing.

I message you, send you two songs. I tell you that if you listen closely you can have the same Sunday.

There’s the smell of the rain on the windowsill, run your hand this way and you can feel the texture of the sheets on my nap-waiting bed, and, there, the sound of the newspaper pages trying to get comfortable on the floor.

Later, you write back to tell me it’s like that there too.

Falling

The pottery places in memory we run our hands over, more forms in one place, The moment of you on the corner, your smile stepping off the curb then the ocean, the bay, the freighters, and then you on the dock you put on your glasses, apologizing, explaining you are slowly losing sight in your right eye, tricking me into loving your right eye more than the left. And telling me how it happened, the moment in the fried chicken place, your boyfriend in the jeep outside, the tilt of the floor, your cheek cracking the tile and the tile cracking your cheek.

It all happened on the first day, a Friday, sun and cold, and it began with you on one corner, me on the other. Your smiley sign language, crooked smile, asking me If I want to cross or will you. The slow signs of a waltz in your hands and fourteen words for your smile but one missing, the one word for this, falling and rising at the same time, and maybe that’s another reason your smile’s crooked. The things that escaped me standing on the corner looking at you on yours, the bloodflow of traffic between us.

The First Date

The end is in the beginning and this beginning is about the paintbrushes he bought instead of flowers, the ferry across to Granville Island, expanding time to avoid the shortening, and maybe, just maybe about how he never looked back when he walked away.

But for the first date, it was about the way he laughed and flirted with the woman who sold him canvas a half snort, my first favourite noise, watching him from across the store, smiling at the cashier wanting him to find me in the store again, smile that way.

The aisles of paints all waiting beneath their plastic berets, and he walking through with his hands, he knew them all before. I choose three and make him choose one: ultramarine. Look at me the way he looks with such air and ground and now I have the water to paint between the two.

Dear M.,

Dear M.,

wish you were here – the blossom cherry trees snowed under gaudy, men as boys in shorts all happy dogs with new haircuts, all set against the ponder or wonder, the empty espresso cups, the stranger sideways looks in cafes, on the other side of the window the gnarled tree stretching past its set ways, shuddering a little deeper into the soil, no mention of lost face, inside chairs scrape floors, chatter traffic home and back, commute as longing, his pretty hands waiting to move on the table, a second place café on a third place street somewhere near another place, if you look for it –

Love, R.

Siesta

Mungy heat now the rain’s gone, asphalt sweating in the dark, this slack torpor, world reeking sepia.

Each of us has time. We are practicing doing nothing except this, no place to go except our mouths. In the park across the street, heat swoon, herons scream delirious in their rookery treetops, big gestures for small things.

Your open-mouthed yawn in among the siesta sheets, mouthful of bicep, long lick of lats, salt-sweet candor of your smile.

The fan passes across the room and back again, metronoming breath between sheets and your broad back, a long longing pressing up against boredom. Pressing harder.

We are everything, even our false faces, the underwear on the floor, the blinds restraining themselves, we are the sideways errors, mistakes, our down-turned mouths.

It’s not sleep, it’s a mouthful of velvet, swallows minutes like water. Time for that later, but no room for it now, air full of this small breath as you snuffle into sleep just below the swelter. I’ll kiss you later, when I can breathe again.

Barista Longing

Yesterday, a day fluttering, windy with the sun tossed here and there like ravaged newspapers. Spring groans under the pavement blocks.

He is lean like limb as I watch him cat stretch in the cafe window. Blue eyes black hair. And he makes the perfect espresso.

He walks like dark chocolate is melting in his mouth, if you like that kind of thing.

I like that kind of thing.

My hands are already on his hips, my cheek on his neck. If only he knew.

Second Beach

We are walking on the sea wall, a first date. We talk and steal sideways glances, collect snapshots to pour over later.

Near Second Beach, summer seeping through finally, the couples dance to the blare of a portable stereo. I watch to see if I know how it goes, see the pavement crack where they might stumble: the man who loses count too easily, the woman who always steps too wide, unable to get back to his arms, and the other woman on the stone steps waiting, nodding to the music so someone might see she's ready to dance.

Nearby the sun keeps setting, the rhododendrons gasping the air, cedar chips fresh on the paths.

Tonight I will kiss you on the paths.

Tonight the flowers and I will stay awake waiting, another night here on the tip of our tongues long after the couples have bowed and walked away home, long after the earth has quietly rumbled along. The birds will wake all night to the reek of blossums and you somewhere sleeping, will turn over and over, the sheets winding tight, wet still, the breath of that kiss.

Breakfast

I am a pound of coffee beans smattered on the kitchen floor, like stars, like big bang theory on the linoleum.

It’s not a question of cleaning up, of better handling, or of caring. It’s not clumsiness, or ennui, or the interruption of car alarms. It’s just that he always looked the same way while he slept, always sounded the same small low growl and snuffle love.

We all hang around: the half-eaten orange is whining again, something about missing pieces and clumsy fingers; the toast crumbs have drawn themselves melancholy and sit and stare at the blank surface of the plate, bothered and confused. The day’s over before it’s begun. It’s like that with holidays. They can be anything so they often become nothing.

Breakfast shouldn’t be so complicated.