Sanitation

Depression struck me low and hard that night. I was perched on my bed, with a glow in my face and in the center of that source a news emerged that had me floored, desperate for the destitute and other miserable beings on Bloor, I fled.

There is no treatment for psychosis

Flight, endless flight!

Began, down Madison

Past a line of cabs: a funeral procession

They will absolve the empty puppets

Thrown up, from the belly of a maddened beast

A carnivore pouring out vomit onto the sidewalk,

Strike out the dirge

Lament for the years of folly, the lager, and grub

Spent, spent, spent is the cow of enlightenment; her poor tits have gone dry.

A negation of everything living and spontaneous

The human being moved out long ago,

The rigid doll faces, the angry lout are here to stay.

And in all this madness, I turn and look at old Tengye Ling, across the street from the Madison Pub. I ask him for an explanation. How? How does he get up in the morning after the brawls and vanities of the night across the street, to wash his face and begin the Puja? Your face, it is so, placid and attentive. How?

"Quiet is a state of mind", he replies, pensively. No! I cry he is not in deep thought! This man, Tengye, he is clearly doped on Rohypnol! Sedatives! YES YES!

Elms on Lowther

The white van parked outside their newly renovated Victorian house reads, "Hartt & Son - Certified Technician & Chimney Sweep".

She opens the door for him - a pause at the threshold - reaches for his hand and leads him past her lazy-eyed brother, who is engrossed with his Nintendo DS. Up the stairs they go. Last wednesday it was the Pizza Pizza delivery guy, today it's Kevin. Her mother is out enjoying the all-inclusive spa package her husband got her to quell suspicions of an affair with the realtor.

As Kevin unbuttons his coveralls, Judie dreams of the day when the guy on the fifth row of her thursday class, "Introduction to Frederico Fellini", finally turns around to ask her for notes on La Dolca Vita. She would comply graciously with a flutter of her long eyelashes. Then maybe after the ritual coffee date, she could ask him to return a favour, and walk her to 15 Lowther. They would walk through the Huron street playground, where they would stop for fifteen pristine minutes; Judie would take out D.H. Lawrence - in the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark elm tree - and read it to him.

O' but till the day that these dreams come to fruition, she will carry on in anonymity, for she does not know his name, and him hers. She will slip out every thursday before the end of class, during the 10 minute break, and walk over to the Manulife Centre, pay 11 bucks, and watch the images flicker across the great wide screen, in solitude.

She will heave a great sigh as her lungs, like the trees, fill with air.

Vomitus

The shifting tectonics of my thoughts are dangerous tonight.

It all finally snapped the other day, when I stepped out of his truck onto the cold asphalt at the corner of Lippincott and something. She greets my approach with an accusing stare. I have something written down on a napkin that I intend to hand over to her, tonight before I leave for FSJ - the last laugh.

I yell, "you're looking radiant today, love".

She responds angrily, channelling all her banner-wielding female empowerment, "all objects in the universe radiate energy. "

"Is that right, well let's see to it that you're chock-full of the stuff. C'mon I know a place; they serve freshly squeezed OJ and right sizzlin' bacon."

"NO! I'm not going to hear you indulge about the fields and self-apathy. I'm going with the girls to Donna LaFramboise's book signing, over on the eastend."

"There will be plenty more opportunities to trade tips on growing out your armpits... [trail of low-brow humor].."

"You are INSUFFERABLE!"

"Aaaaaaaaaaah, insufferable! That's why I love you."

"That's it, I won't be buttered over by you. I lost you a long time ago. Now I won't render myself useless and sit around moping, because you have decided to up and leave us."

"I'm glad, your fatalism will keep you company, while I'm gone."

She turns around, but before she does, I grab her and we embrace. I feel her tears soak right through my denim lapel. I decide to hold onto the napkin. We separate.

Saturated

My nose and sinuses have had enough! They have been raped and annexed pugnaciously, by the putrid smell of fried burgers, again and again. How can I come home after witnessing my team throw away a lead in the 89th minute, at home, when my house is infested with bastards devoid of culinary skills? Rancid... rancid fucks!

Last Night

Last night sleep refused me entrance into its anodynic domain with increasing resistance. Intermittently I would turn on my side, reach for my bedside lamp, turn it on, and read Headbirths. The Turks and Asians are milling around in the Führer's room. They are setting up their Döner Kebab stalls and selling six tees for ten marks, respectively; as Helmut Schimdt pontificates on the virtues of the pill. The non-practicing Lutheran has taken over the pulpit and the altar will remain, barren.

They keep a cat and still have no child.

They give birth to Athene at the crest of their skull. They shall nurture her. An immaculate conception.

Why push little Karl or Gerhard out of the poor unsuspecting cervix, when Germany is severed at the head by ideologies: communism and capitalism. No, once conceived, let them fall off the precipice, desperately grasping at the inhospitable uterus. They shall all meet again in the Rheine.

Thirty years later, give or take, I sit here contemplating the rise of Jewry, and how Europeans are still grappling with their sterile wombs after all these years. Take a pill, once more, vanquish this thought, take these palpitations and allow me to sleep.

Auto De Fé

When 'me' became rapt in my immediate carnal desires, and myself was the end of those desires, the raison d'être; I sought and intended to exhaust my flesh.

To rid myself of these demons. In the process I pierced my eyes, wore gloves over my hands, stuffed my ears with bright orange ear plugs, and held my nose with my right hand. My tongue I held too dear. Instead I walked with a pair of black sunglasses over my bandaged eyes, holding a cane and a top hat to boot, and I walked to the nearest tea house. There I sat down at the furthest table from the entrance. I asked my good friend, the waitress, Luise Dorothea, a large stout lady of Bavarian descent, to bring me a cupful of earl grey tea every hour on the strike of the grand clock behind her ancient Samovar.

I asked her to describe the tea with her powers of perception that I had so willfully forsaken. She said the tremor over the surface of the tea was like that of a great stygian lake, fuming with prehistoric fumes that would surely scald and incense my tongue. I nodded. She knew that 'it' had started. I was undergoing the last procedure.

You see, Dorothea had been the ear to many of my musings and eyes to the chalk sketches in my large notebook. She fought it first, tried to persuade me, but she learnt very soon that "my flesh had to go." My heart could not bear to beat underneath all this sin. It had to be shed.

My cerebral hemispheres, they alone were capable of instructing me. I yielded to them.

Frozen

On my way home: my muscles and sinews cling to my bones longingly, dreaming of summer days sprawled on the beach, in the good company of Les chemins de la liberté, my body bare to the radiant features of Apollo, except for my groins and face, the latter cool and shaded by the undulant brim of an emerald green bucket hat.

I walk past a white land-owner as he waits in the glacial conditions; waiting patiently to deny the bare grass, the warmth of his dog's shit. He will place the polyethylene bag carefully over his hands, nonchalantly thrusting his hand to grasp the newly produced excrement of this overtly fecund, recto-anal canal. I see four separate pieces of shit aligned like the stars on the curbside grass. The dog moves along a bit, not caring to inspect the colour or shape of his production, but to sniff the grass further ahead. Likely to spare himself the stench of a close encounter. This man, however, willingly stoops to clasp the brown manifestations of digestion. Shit, dog shit on the ground, yet he will laugh and scorn at the immigrants who wash their own ass instead of wiping it. He will sit around his poker table, enjoying his brew, speaking of his "paki friend" who uses water to clean his ass.

I walk along, making my observations, moving hurriedly past Cody, outside the frathouse. I move swiftly to the sound of an orchestra, raging in my ears. Here's Mike, he's got a job, he drives a car manufactured in Canada. He stands, slothful, outside the rehabilitation centre for alcoholics. His wife is not with him. She pays a man. Enters a room, decorated to resemble a Hindu temple, as accurately as it can be perceived on Queen street. She's wearing her tight-fitting yoga pants, purchased on Bloor. Now she's doing the upside down dog, and learning the eight pillars of Ashtanga, from the Swami. Swami, goes and takes a bathroom break, as he charges Mike's wife 30 dollars an hour. Swami now washes his ass with water.

I look at Mike, and then move along, still swaying to the voices and instruments in my head.