From Godard's "Breathless"

Q- "What is your greatest ambition in life?"
A- "To become immortal, and then die."

37

My poetry has always been amateurish at best,
but I wrote this last night on the countdown
to midnight and feel like sharing and not being.
a grabby five-year old. I was in an Irish pub,
The Galway Bay, up in Lincoln Park.


I sit here
Two-and-a-half hours to go.

Thirty-seven
In the city alone.

What have I created?
What have I done?
Maybe it's already started.
Maybe it's already begun.

I sit here
Existing.

I sit here
Drinking.

I sit here
Wondering.

I sit here
Wondering where it goes from here.

I sit here
Writing

I sit here
Watching

I sit here
Watching lives move on about me

I sit here
I sit here

I
sit
here

as an aside, i plan to start writing more.
i watched a documentary on allen ginsberg
tonight and his life has inspired me to
write again. like kerouac always does.

first thought, best thought...

"Broken, Beat, & Scarred" - Metallica

Things move in strange ways. Pieces shift and
rearrange like a cosmic chessboard. And I find
myself wanting more than ever to return to Nova
Scotia, where I'm from. A call from my roots.

My cousin died this week. Judy MacAleese. She
was...unique. She worked for probably 30 years
at Mountain Lee Lodge, an old folks home in my
hometown. She was a nurse there, like her mother,
like her niece. Never married. Never a boyfriend
that I knew of. A singular individual that seemed
to exist beyond what most people would call a
normal existence. She loved cats. I painted her
house one summer when I was younger and suffered
the sever nausea of heat stroke because of it.
For a time, I mowed her lawn also. Judy was...
could be...gruff. Slightly dour, but under all
that really a beautiful person. Oddly enough,
one would say she hardly ever smiled, but looking
through all my photos of her, she was smiling in
every one. She gave her entire adult life to caring
for the elderly and dieing. Unbelievable.

Cancer. Less than a year and she's gone. She was
fine at Xmas. Around Easter is when they all found
out. And then it was all downhill. The family all
rallied around. My cousin, her brother, took a leave
of absence from work. Her other sister, who lives in
Cape Breton, was down almost every weekend.
Her mother buried her this week. I can't imagine
having to do that.

I wish I could have seen her before she died but I
chose not to make the journey. I don't face death easy.
I accept it as part of life, but I tend not to walk
up to it as someone I love or care about is going. And
maybe that makes it seem as if I don't care. But it's
not true. Maybe I just see it like anything else in
life. A toothache. A cold. A broken limb. Maybe it's
because I always feel the need to say something, do
something, but at that point words or actions can do
nothing, and so I feel why bother? My parents
never let me attend funerals when I was a kid. The first
funeral was for a schoolmate, Belle Ward, who died
in a car crash when we were 16. And I still think
of her.

And so, in this hour, as my parents age and wither and
the other members of my extended family face the
oncoming darkness also, I find myself wanting to return
to the home I grew up in. It's not the same as it was,
of course. But part of it still exists and I want to be
closer as the rest of them all go on. I ache for my
family, for the ocean, for the rolling tree-crowded
hills, for the fog, for it all. A return is in the air
and in my heart.

I think I needed the distance from everyone, including
my dear friends in Ontario, to realize this. I need to
return to Nova Scotia to live. I would never have said
that one year ago.....

So, if anyone still reads my backfiring stutterings of the
mind, please raise a toast of your favourite beverage of
choice, whether that be wine, beer, or grape soda, to one
of the most beautiful people I've ever known, even though
you didn't know her, but trust me on this one, my cousin Judy.

Cheers....

"You rise, you fall, you’re down then you rise again
What don’t kill you make you more strong"

tired

just got back from visiting friends in T.O.

for the most part a good time. my anxiety and
panic hung around most of the time making it
so i was unable to completely relax. ok, i did:
sitting on the dock, looking at the sky while
camping. 20 billion years of the history of
the universe unfolded above me. humbling.

first day back at work and i can feel the
anxiety creeping stronger. i can't do that
again. like al said, i need to start
loving myself and taking care of myself.

i was a mess when i came to canada and i don't
want to return to that. i have to do something
to make myself better or risk losing friends and
myself. i've been so destructive to everyone
around me for so long. that destruction is
killing me. i can't let it.