automatic writing: send in the clowns

care to test my limits? unhinge the breaths and scribbled works that comes with the day? you won’t like it. it's like rotten apples sitting stagnant in an open cupboard that stinks of cheese (the owners will never let us back in). the strings pluck arteries and veins sans fer, lungs itch into throat yet breathing isn’t difficult. no pain no gain. but there’s a blockage, obstruction, arret and it hurts in some part of you. crescendo of sirens and reversing salt trucks, the snow sticks to my hair even when I’m outside. rush in and the neighbour’s granddaughter trudges home from school. lavender jacket, lilac striped toque and a GREEN backpack, the strap over her chest holding the colours together. stompstomp shuffle click slam. a story over, closed by a door like the man walking a dog who never smiles at you, as though he resents his friend’s tenants. just go to sleep and it’ll be over – a butterfly pinch away from parked cars under blinking street lights. 

a. ayers

almost flipped over this while ripping out blank pages in an old notebook. i think written after watching the movie Closer.

She would’ve liked to give anything to be alice ayers. Rather she would have kept nothing to be alice. Plain jane jones with her jeans and sweatshirt, desiring in the finest thread of her mind a thrift coat and worn boots. Only possessions carried on your back are necessary because the rest will tie you down to this place you never meant to be, this artifice you never meant to become. I don’t need things.

There’s a frame she meant to stay in, of a mind she held to keep. She wore the same clothes to leave in which she came as if to leave behind not only artifacts but any changes to her person. None of it was necessary. Just the strength to be alone, but still reveal enough to attract the company you seek.

My name is alice – alice ayers – an identity I never meant to keep.

goodbye.

night time musings

I hear a drunken interlude of chorus and song. and melody. the wind carries most of it away (on the back of a storm which whispers of a downpour in the early hours of the morning)

it sounds broken, choppy. a man's voice after one too many shots of tequila, though lacking in a trio of background singers. it sounds like he is perhaps not as intoxicated as the usual crowd mulling the streets, yelling or cursing or laughing obscenely.

a textbook sits open in front of me while I try to simultaneously absorb a theory of capability and the song playing in my backyard - an open space of town-houses and parking lots and hidden drive ways concealed from the main road by a patch of trees

canvas bags and post-its and empty cups litter my floor. an ikea pillow sits in my lap. I discard the text for a moment, listening to his voice hit higher notes in a rough voice, then slow down some measures to a languid and lulling rhythm. like a poem in a song. like a poem in my head.

it stops like it began, slowly drifting, and pulled away by rustling leaves. lights scatter the windows of apartment buildings and houses, and I wonder where he went: retreating from a backyard after a private performance or from a quiet spot on the pavement?

the numbers click and tok to its consecutive partner, the night drawing to its peak. the house moves as it does at midnight - the hum of the fridge, the shuffles of the neighbour below, the slow spins of the ceiling fan. familiarity rests over my body like a blanket and I close my eyes.