Thanks to Mindi and the good people at the amazing reading series known as Fascination Street i now have a live recording of "Him Go Lites Out" available for your ears to hear! If you wanna read the poem just check out my Blog as it was a fairly recent post.

Boom Boom!
SPENCER!

hello all!

so a few months ago i did this sketchy internet, video spot for that company iSkin (they do ipod..skins) for valentines day. the guy in charge was a total fuckin slim ball, tried to stiff me and the other poet (Krystle Mullin) on of our pay and just kind of dissapeared with the footage. well, as things would have it, they used it! i just stumbled across it on the internet, and while i can't figure out how to post it directly on this page here's a link incase you wanna check it out:

http://www.spyfilms.com/#george_vale/iskin-love_spencer_butt

tired as fuck,
spencer

A lot of people brought babies to the funeral.
The priest was ok.
I don’t usually like the god bullies that work these things
But this guy wasn’t bad.
I’m not saying I want him at my funeral when I die
But I think Dave would have been alright with this.
Dave is the ashes in the box with the photographs
And old, leather biker jacket behind it.
The ashes in the box used to be a tough guy with a bushy, handle-bar moustache
And he was my old man’s eldest brother
And after 30 odd years the junk caught up with him
And carved hepatitis into his back
With a syringe shaped like a switchblade
That just missed his lungs.
Now he’s light grey in a wooden box stained the colour of fancy floors
As a bag piper that we paid to be here waits in the wings and fixes his kilt.
The saddest parts are the eulogies that two of his kids deliver
While the other two kids,
The ones that live three provinces east of here and were all but
Completely ignored for most of their lives,
Sit in the front row and watch them like a sad movie that they snuck into.
They all have the same jaw line
And it’s shaking in unison.

My sister is crying to the left of me so I put an arm around her
And lasso her close.
I’m attempting to comfort us both
While looking like I’m strong.
Hours from now, we will be in an argument that
Climaxes with the all seeing “fuck you’s” that refuse
To look at each other
And then head back to the city on separate buses.
We won’t speak for the longest days that April knows
Until we run into each other in public and the tide takes our eyes.
And we wonder “what just happened here”?

My cousin Michael sits to my right
And plays with his car keys
And when he mumbles the responses that the catholic priest
Asks for he sounds Italian because he was raised by his fathers immigrant parents.
He always looks tired and bummed out.
He’s one of my favourite people in the room
He talks slowly
And likes betting on horse races.

Other than the rainy day Christians, echoing the priest
In their sloppy attempts at avoiding hellfire,
And these missionaries are few and far between,
All is silent.
No one talks out of turn.
Cooing infants chirp like crickets,
Diapered coyotes with cow licks and shiny shoes,
Serenade one another from the
Balcony of their parent’s lap.
In the name of the Father, the Son
And my Uncle's Holy Ghost,
Amen.

Television,
Be good to me.
You have dinosaur bone shadows
You're not everything you're not everything you're cracked up to be
Boogeyman shadows
Night sky smoke stack cityscape shadows
Fisherman dream catcher
Yoyo a go go limbo hobo cartwheel
Sanctity from the spider web loom
Odd doom
Mixed message
Received
Under ten radar
Received 19+ radar
Fixed focus
Hocus pocus
We're long gone
Batmobile boomerang
Wollongong
Uluru stamps
Strapped down with clamps
Who are you tramps
Hookers with holy halos
Hung harmlessly overhead
Better yet
Mosquito net
Bridal vale
Funeral waterfall
Babies first word waterfall
Graduation waterfall
Marriage waterfall
Divorce waterfall
Symptomatic of the struggle drought
The rough drought
Things will get rougher drought
Sandpaper shoulders
With Kleenex tattoos
With minesweeper freckles
With or without you freckles
Abortions being spit out with birthmarks
Unprotected hearts
Unprotected wedding ring thrust
Through the upper crust
Pie tin
Hobo digits with fruit compote
Street car composer
Bloor street Beethoven's
And mini mart Mozart's
We love until arrested
Hate until un-rested
Vaporous January talk steam
Skipping rocks across the thought stream
Calico Vision church clergy men
Choose our own adventure
Turn to blank page to decide
What is
Written page to see what was
Idiosyncratic autodidactic
Automatic apostrophe maker
Exclamation point faker
Air quote vaginal manuscript stapler
Wonder undone Houdini conundrum maker
Death star targeting,
Back space marketing,
Mulled dull seagulls, light bulbs sparkling.
Problem solvers of my youth,
Sooth my bleeding gums
With your low rent smiles;
I can't afford not to love you.

It was the thought
Of not thinking,
Swallowing my last tongue
And being surprised that it tasted like Buckley's and the first time
I said the word "shit",
Chipping away at my teeth
Until fossils appeared in them,
And we're looking and we're looking and We still can't find a unicorn.
My smile looks like
The last slumber party in Pompeii
I'm sweating the bullets that took Kennedy
And sent fragments of his skull
Into orbit with the cosmonauts,
Sweating a bullet train
Full of Bernard Goetz's,
It was the fingerprints
As smooth as an adulterers pick up lines,
Dirt floors that sparkle like a wet car in August when compared to my mouth and It's matching mind.

It was legs that ache like
My mom and dad's cauliflowers,
Sitting next to the telephone as
My once familiar ring
Runs laps around the drain in my bathtub.

It's the "no, not tonights"
We force to wear "I'll be right overs"
As we make it like
Spanish R's  in a hobo's bindle,
Rolling around in the sack
As our backs become the cold pool
We ease ourselves into,
Our arms start to look like ostrich thighs.

We're the 21st century
Guilt hum
Dirty computers whine.
Truth is the stranger my parents warned me To steer clear of, as fiction
Invites me over to make
Secret movies in his basement
As he pulls up out front of my house in an Old van with windows
The colour of hockey pucks.

I wanna drive a gas-guzzling monster car With my eyes in the back of my head
And wrap it around a bike rack
And call it
A Christmas Present for David Suzuki
And college kids will call it performance art And use pictures of my fiery death as
The wallpaper on
The MacBooks their parents bought them.

I got a heart of gold
With tan lines like surgery scars

I hope I get crucified
Just so I have something to hold me.
I wanna fuck the poetry scene up until my Dick shoots exclamation points
Into the sun.

I'm 13 years old
In gym class in shorts
And being bummed out that
My legs don't have any hair on them.
I'm 25 and being bummed out that
I have such a hairy stomach.

I'm 10
Getting out of the shower,
Looking down and being worried
That I have a small dick.
I'm 24
And I just saw Eastern Promises and am Again worried that I have a small dick.

I'm 14 and trying to hide my bad posture With a hooded sweatshirt;
25, trying to hide my insecurities under Tattoos and sarcasm

I'm 18 and militantly anti-drug.
I'm drunk for the first time at 24
And laughing with my face against the Hardwood floor at the giant
X on my chest.

I'm 19, losing my virginity
And walking away a little disappointed.
I'm 25 and I feel the same way as I leave The Dark Knight.

I'm 17, being handed an electric razor Because my dad didn't want to teach me How to shave.
I'm 25 and realizing
I still can't grow a beard
And when I try to I look like
A pre-op transsexual
ODing on hormone pills.

I cried harder the first time I saw My Girl
Than I did when I got the news that Granny's heart fell asleep on her.

Most of the time I'm a little kid,
If you tell me my scraped knees
Don't hurt I'll keep the tears locked up for Cutting onions.

My brain's a
Fun house mirror
At a
Weight loss clinic
I feel like I never quite look right.
I'm a businessman on a unicycle
In converse high-tops
Or the
"Cool" English teacher at your high school,
Who had an earring and
Listened to The Beastie Boys
And he looks like an art teacher
And glides through the halls on
A razor scooter with his papers in an Orange messenger bag with
Che Guevera's face on it,
And if he catches you looking at it he goes,
"Hey, do you like Rage Against the Machine?"
And then talks about
Moshing and dreadlocks.
Did I mention that he has an earring?
It's a dangly one with a dollar sign on the end.
Every now and then he swears in class and Asks the students not to tell the man
Even though he is the man,
Even if he does wear sandals with crazy socks.
And you wished your dad was this guy Instead of
A guy whose knuckles are
The colour of a lit match
Cuz he has psoriasis
But you tell the kids at school it's because He's a bare-knuckle boxer
And for a while they believe you cuz
He's big like an old-timey pro-wrestler,
Loud like an air raid siren,
Fights like a cancer patient,
And rougher than dog elbows.
Then one day you find out the
"Cool" teacher's queer,
And while the rest of class thinks him
Cooler for it,
Making him just that much more different From the rest of the stiffs in your school,
You get mad cuz you wanted to
Set him up with your mom at the next Parent-teacher night.
You were gonna get her to wear her
Leather jacket
(With the line backer shoulders
And zipper pockets)
And you hope her short hair cut will be Enough to keep him interested.

And you're 25 and they never met
And mom's a budding cat lady,
Dad's twice divorced and lives
In the middle of nowhere
And my little sister owns her own business
And I'm 11 writing,
Dear diary, when I grow up
I wanna be a Cryptozoologist
Or not a disappointment
And I'm 25, reading over
The childhood entries
And circling the spelling mistakes
With a pen the colour of a lit match.

The designer hand bags
Underneath my blur tunnels
Twinkles like war paint
On a dead hooker
My mouth moves inefficiently
As my voice cracks like so many Randomized and meaningless twigs     
Under the foot of
A fat kid being chased through a wooded Short cut by hungry wolves or
Track star fast zombies.
What ever happened to the good old days When the undead shuffled like a tiny iPod?
When I die,
Don't let my corpse rot in this city.
Don't wash the blood off of me,
Let me marinate in my mistakes.
I won't bathe in an oily puddle that Shimmers like a sneaky Predator.
Let my bones go to chalk
Under the bully stare of the sun,
All over me like he either wants to
Take my lunch money or
Fuck me like he hates me,
Making my vision go nuclear blast
Bright white like a preacher's teeth.
These days,
Things can go from being
As great as thick girls to feeling
Sadder than Ron Sexsmith always looks
At the drop of a hat,
So I'm holding onto my toque
Like we're the only people left
On this planet
And it's up to us to re-populate the earth,
And she's walking away because she thinks She can probably do better.
And I think she's right.
Let's keep the gravel loose.
Sometimes, the worst thing about losing the One thing that you love
Is realising that you only loved
One thing.

Having my Mom tell me recently that she Signed my name into
All her financial affairs in case anything Happens to her
Is the worst Thanksgiving I've ever had.
She told me this as we browsed through a Value Village, my sister out of ear shot,
And it permanently
Ruined bargain hunting for me.
My mom's real sick
And most of my exhales are sighs,
Most of my sleeps are brief,
My appetites too busy to work
And the three hour alone time walks I've invested in are my support group.
The silence I show to my coworkers is rude
But the distractions I'm harvesting are in Full bloom.
A good cry is clockwork,
The exhaustion it leaves is taking it's toll
And I don't have exact change.
It all feels like a movie and
I want my money back.
I grind my teeth like a creep in a nightclub
And pull my hair out like it's unconscious in A burning car.
I don't believe in god, lower case g,
But if my mom dies I will pray until my Clapped hands
Fall off
And he, capital H,
Appears before me in a vision,
Just so that I can beat the fucking lightning Bolts out of him.

I keep my head down cuz there's nothing to See here,
Just move along people, keep moving,
Let the momentum carry you, like Underdog's chest.
Everyone looks the same in the quick,
"Let me make sure I'm headed
In the right direction",
Glances I throw up like gang signs.
My eye lashes flick like a switch blade
In an uncertain turf war.
All I can do is hope for the best and that Makes me feel less than useless.
And it's like the best is right in front of me
And she looks
Real good
But
Real uninterested
With the strobe light of my
Way too rapid nervous blinking
And small talk manual fidgets
And palsy shake stuttering tongue,
Flopping around my candy breath
For that oh so simple
"I really goddamn need you right now",
Just when the time is right,
The second hand burns
Bright, ninja turtle jolly green
For that one tiny,
Dollhoused size window and you have
No idea how to get the
Straightjacket out of your goddamn mouth
So you fill it with snacks
And talk about the weather
Like you're a fucking meteorologist
And stand in the rain outside her
Broken umbrella with this awkward,
Orthopaedic shoed force field stance of crumby, fake nonchalantness
That makes your brain wanna
Find a new host
And you know deep down,
Thirty thousand leagues under your
Flannel shirt,
In your cardboard cut-out cave system
That the grand scheme of things
Isn't listening anyways.
Face it man, she really doesn't give a shit,
And you come across as pathetic when you Try to force feed her heart laxatives.
I miss the good old days almost as much as I miss Electric Jon and Patrick Swan.

A TV commercial once said that
"Seeing is believing"
And the world is playing pictionary
Right in front of you
But when you already feel worse than
Hands with no nerve endings,
Sometimes it just seems easier to look at
The world through Stevie Wonder's eyes.
If ignorance is bliss then I'm watching
The Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan
Do a strip tease
To a post 9/11 Toby Keith song
As I stuff counterfeit bills
Into his pink, satin hood.

My shaking teeth sound like a glockenspiel
As my fillings bash each other
In search of a spark.
My lungs fill faster than a soup kitchen on Christmas day.
I've made up my mind
And the fiction is killing me.
The pressure is strong enough to make my Head pop
Or at least collapse a lung like a cheap tent On a windy night.

And I can walk in circles,
My foot path
Sinking deeper
Until it strikes oil
And I let the tidal wave of midnight
Cling to my wet feathers and otter fur
With all its needy goodness.
But my sister can't get hugs from a shadow,
Call an inkwell when some
Idiot breaks her heart
Or ask a void for advice,
So I'm lacing my boots up
And pumping iron
with the wait that my mom is enduring
As the doctors process the test results
And hoping to hell that
I'm strong enough to squeeze
My sister's hand and pick up the pieces
Should Mom leave with the blueprints.

Last night
I had a dream
I was a bird
with paper wings
similar to cocktail umbrellas
and I was circling the runway
in a thunderstorm
then lightning struck
and my weather veins popped.

My boom boom in a birdcage,
wax heart in frosted glass beetle juice sculpture,
is a waterfall
is Niagra falls
is falls head over heels for you.
You invented gun powder
with the science in your fingerprints
and fireworks with the sound waves of your
lips
created fireworks in the crystal clears of my happiness
you get me hard as a Hell's Angel
harder than Han Solo encased in carbonite.
I'm trying to breath in your aura
and then hold my breath like a newborn baby
with day dreams full of soft spots
like Dalmatians with Osteogenesis Imperfecta.
Wanna hold you tight like I gotta break wind
but I'm crammed into a train on the Bloor subway line in rush hour and
your parents are right behind me.

And I know
you know
you know
I know.
So I'm standing here
with a retractable chest
Exacto-knife wind tunnels
reaching out to ya
with hooks for hands
and manhole cover eyes
steam jettisons from my retinas;
my windows can be too honest
and have a habit of falling apart at the most inopportune moments
like puzzles in a fist fight
and you're standing there with helium speech balloons
trying to tell me that you think you could honestly get used to the emptiness
in the same way that starving kids
in Africa don't mind the flies on their faces.
I'm sure they just appreciate the company.
I'm sure they do.
Who doesn't like physical contact on an empty stomach?
That's what all the buzz is about.
And you're telling me this
as I tip toe through your two lips
but I can see that you have witness protection program eyelids
hear say humdrums
And E.V.P. lip gloss
so I gotta collect call you on the bullshit.

Hello, operator?
This is Spencer again.
I'd like to place a
Collect call
to a Mister and Misses
What-the-fuck-just-happened-here?
At 555 2424.
Sure, I'll leave a message.
Dear Anne Frank, Ayn Rand and anybody else who happens to give a goddamn.
Ghost Writer and I miss you dearly.
Jamal says, "hi" too.
We are writing on behalf of the apparitions who live in the dark corners of your room and look like a pile of clothes or a hat on a chair or a floor lamp with glowing red eyes
and the heavy lungs of a sex fiend.
I just wanted to let you know I'm yours.
Also, if you send this letter to 10 of your closest friends you'll have good luck in the new year.

We are the songs people slow dance at prom to.
Porno movies
jerk off with visions of our pretzel hands
parading around in their head in trench coats with brown paper bags
and old gym socks, proudly displaying strap-ons like Batman flashing
his utility belt at would be bank robbers.

Gangsters of love! I implore you to
Lick two shots to your vaginal cubicle great walls of China,
Index and middle fingers cocked like Foghorn Leghorn, serial rapist
until you comme ci, comme ca,
come straight outta Compton
like MC Ren leaving on a bullet train
Because he was fed up with being called
"that guy standing next to Dr. Dre".
Baby, you're so good looking I forgot how to swallow.
You make me so hot, baby;
my mercury is heading for the ceiling fans,
I got lava in my cheeks
the same colour as your full stop.
I have no idea how to stop being happy!
Fuck you for making me feel so nice!
And while I'm at it,
Fuck you to the construction worker who made fun of my tight jeans last week when I was walking home
from a shitty day at my shitty job,
fuck lottery tickets
and ice on sidewalks
and the guy who lives below me and plays
World of Warcraft
at full blast all night long;
if you need to hear the death gurgle of an orc that loud, get a pair of headphones you fuck!
Thank fuck for my sister
and fuck you to my sister for not letting me kill myself,
the hammer sitting on top of the gun handle knocks like a Jehovah's witness.
You are the dog who pops up and laughs at me and prevents me from duck hunting my inner struggle.
The firearm keeps jamming.
Maybe I should take the cartridge out and blow in it,
that always works with Double Dragon and Blades of Steel.

I'm part pet rock, I got real simple needs and you're bound to get sick of the gimmick that is me only being good at writing gay love poems.
All I want to do is love, watch TV, make it, kiss, hug, hold, ride bikes and tell secrets with you.
You're so special, you're so very special and I'm a creep
who rips off your favorite songs when he writes poetry.
And I ain't gonna hold none of these good vibrations
in my rumble pack
cuz I got the restraint of a Polaroid camera,
the brain of Bobby Heenan and the vocabulary of a speak and spell in the hands
of a Yeti
but when you speak I swell
and feel my inner Edith Piaf rise within,
putting on my skin like a dollar bin Halloween costume
and we start French kissing
with light saber tongues and just enough force to save Endor and
kaboom fake suns.

I'm walking to the store at 6 in the morning
to get an orange juice, some Combos,
beef jerky, a Mad magazine, a pack of condoms and a bottle
of Pepto-Bismal
and the moon is great and the secret language of the city lights drowns out the crickets I grew up with
and I kick trash cuz it feels good.
I get tired and lazy by the time I make it to College and Huron so
now I'm lying in a puddle doing the backstroke and being molly coddled by the hobo who
shares a room with an ATM machine when the snow comes and the rain shows up
and he's telling me he's a giant squid but his breath is too minty
and he has too many arms and legs
and he don't look nothing like a torpedo
and his beak keeps grasping at conversation
and he says he's ok and that he feels at home amongst the shipwrecks
and my heart wants to swim away but I listen cuz I didn't have any change on me so I figured the least I could do was be his sponge.
This is all too much.
I get my shit and head back eating a chocolate bar, cuz I like Big Turks even though they're gross.
And I get back and you say you missed me and I was only gone for a moment but we hate seconds when they ain't spent Siamese.
I throw my grey pants on the back of a wooden chair and make an ozone out of flannel blankets and we fall asleep on opposite sides of the bed
and wake up shadows
and you were choking me and I had you in a headlock and you were smiling uncontrollably
and nothing is moving
nothing is moving and everything is quiet,
so quiet,
so peaceful.
Pacifist mimes are looking at their hands and shifting uncomfortably in invisible boxes.
And then I rolled over and crushed a ginger snap with my hip and you ate it
and I ate your freckles and whispered "elephant shoe" with your foot in my mouth.
With clouds for eyes
with footsteps ahead
with what I've seen I hope I do go blind.

Our hearts gone gun powder in a world obsessed with Time magazine.
Our hearts gone gun powder with renegade conniption fits.
Our hearts gone gun powder with snapshots the remote viewer took while at work.
Our hearts gone gun powder surrounded by slam dancing strike anywheres.
And red stars on green hats and lazy intentions
and you got this echo going
"what am I doing here?"
I got nothing except love to offer
and I am trying to be strong
I'm bursting with tough guy
but you gotta remember, even The Incredible Hulk was never happy!
Our hearts gone gun powder
gamma ray gun fun run
side cramp exploder jihad
destructo blast off
cardiac kalbamo.
When world war three finally turns humanity into archaic mammals
and we all go ashes to ashes
and nukes reign down like loose eyelashes
and haunted houses colonize the suburbs
and even the cockroaches have had enough
and buildings die and trees die and the sky turns grey with the particles of us and we stain
the clouds with memories,
I'll blow my dust in your direction
so that our atoms can spoon under the
"do you like me? Y/N/M"
microscope of the alien invaders.

I feel like king kong
wandering around new york and it sucks
I can't even window shop no more
and it sucks
cab drivers lock all their doors
and it sucks
whores double their price for me
sucks
the rats in the gutters won't share their lice with me
sucks
homeless men won't take my change
because they find warmth in the corrugated bosom
of a rerun
the sun says I'm not worth the overtime
required to get that melanoma bonus
anymore
so I punched a dinosaur in the face and
nothing happened
they tried to lock me up but I'm the missing link on a fake Rolex
so nothing happened
so I climbed to the top of the empire state building
and nothing happened
so I put an old timey fighter plane
the kind with sandwiching wings and machine gun
mandibles
in my mouth and nothing happened
all I wanted was a banana,
just one banana
and I beat boxed my chest
with an up turned fedora at my feet but nothing happened
I had love in the palm of my hand
and she screamed, fainted, melted and smeared the growth rings of my fingerprints
and nothing happened
so I robbed a bank
and bought better hands
but it didn't work
and somebody filmed the entire ordeal
from the top of their apartment building and then posted it on the Internet
and technology collapsed in on itself
a waining star on facebook in rehab
digging her acrylics into the arm of the nearest tabloid sycophant
journalism school drop out
and sucks his ink limp
as she strangles a 14 year old girl and an unhappy mother of three with her
snuff-colored roots
until their faces go cobalt
and their tongues loose all meaning
and nothing happened because this is never not happening.
Bitch, get your Youtube's tied.

We'd rather drown while streaming reality than affect it
or at least that's what we thought
with our homing devices burning the same
terra cota bloodshot salmon as the exit signs hanging above pink slips
and high rise wide open windows
everywhere
every time I look out a window that's high enough to make my neighbors look like earwigs I can't help but imagine what it would be like to be a sniper
opening their third eyes like a mechanic at the sky dome
And then I think about the fact that a vikings 9-5 is killing shit
and I can't help but wonder why nothing ever comes up when I search for that on Monster Jobs or Workopolis
and while there may not be much weight to this argument I'm fatter than I've ever been
and my gas tank runs out of breath every time I try to order a salad instead of a cheeseburger as my gut pushes back the screaming fan of my t-shirts like an angry bodyguard and my dick loves the shade
and I ate a box of Oreo's for lunch
and I loved it
and doctors are gonna study my dead obese body one day and wonder how such a tyrannosaurs train wreck
managed to even get to the ripe old age of 30
before exploding with diabetes like a Body Break pinata stuffed with life lessons.
I'm as dead as I'll ever be.
Loan sharks smelled blood in the bathwater and came for what was left of my pulse
the minute I stopped giving a flying fuck about gravity
and I think I must have punched a sacred cow in the face
in a previous life
cuz today is being a real cunt
in the sense that she just keeps giving birth to disastrophes
and I'm walking to Ossington station from Dupont cuz I missed the bus and my lungs are smoke stacks
exhaling smog under the watchful eyes of a mini van's headlights
and I'm trying in pouring vain not to get choked up over the coffin shaped frog in my esophagus
and my Dracula tongue.
And you can call me whatever you want as long as you use a long distance plan of attack with your
"oh isn't he a lovely talker's"
the fires raging war in our tempers
us freezing,
clambering together in a house of cold teeth
sewn into the belly of the beast.
I am a manatee with a homemade valentines day card for a boat propeller
being swarmed by mall Santa's
And I pray to Bill Cosby, the father, the son and the holy Ghost Dad
that I come across another M somewhere
maybe lying on the side of the road like somebody tossed it out of their
very fast car window like a cigarette butt or a hate crime
so I can turn this
Coma into a brief pause.

I am madly I love with a haunted house,
and it's terrifying.
I long to spoon its bumps in the night,
and whisper "I want to spend the rest of my life with you" in sign language to her shadow puppets
on a streetlight stained wall as she sleeps.
Want to learn everything about her attic.
I'm carving hieroglyphics into my wrists
with her knife edge glances.
EMF readers flicker in syncopation with our falling glances.
The floor isn't that fascination, but the gravity
of the situation is just too much sometimes.
I love you.
You're blueprints are my favorite book.
My ticker splinters in your wind chimes.
This house is haunted
but for the first time in my life I feel at home;

I didn't know I was missing anything until I met you and felt whole.
I've confided my deepest desires to the chimney
and wept softly with your window sills.
I won't let your bike rust.
Your bike can take you places an education never could.
Your happiness is my everything,
even when I'm an exit ghost.

My belt keeps reaching right
and my ribs are letting their opinions be known.
I've lined the underside of my security cameras with a lifetime of sandbags
to lessen the water damage to my cheekbones.
My smile feels like soggy paper mache,
please don't take a bat to my head though, there are no treats inside.
My ears have pinned the last of the candy hearts to their lobes
to show you just how sweet they think your voice is.
Your lips are the best things that ever happened to me
and your laugh makes babies swoon and encourages
space dust to get their act together and form a planet
in hopes that one day a creature even half as remarkable as you might crawl out of their
gene pool;
dripping with life and hope of a better tomorrow.
My arms boomerang for you alone.

I got hit by a car on my way to the museum today,
limped towards a partially complete skeleton of an extinct giant sea turtle called
Archelon Ischyros
and broke down like a dollar store defibrillator.
This is not a metaphor, but an account of a shitty day.
God, the museum can be such a cunt.
Who thought being surrounded by death and the fragments of failed civilizations
would be so depressing?
The numbers aren't adding up like I thought they would.
I pace my room with the methodical slide of an abacus.
I'm addicted to your math.
I'm addicted to your mathematics
and I'm swallowing calculators left, right and center
to try to make sense of why
I don't want to be me anymore.

So I did this poetry workshop at an elementary school in Burlington on Monday with Krystle and Amanda and twice we each took a class and got them to help us individually write poem that we would then go and perform to the reasembled group (get it?). The kids were so amazing and wonderful and excited and I loved it and made me happy, which sometimes I worry has gone the way of the thylacine. Anyways, here are the two poems these great groups of kids wrote.

1)
I have so much on my mind.
It's like Tayo's (a kid in the group) afro weighing down my thoughts.
I'm running low on power. I need to find an
AC/DC jack to recharge and get these stones rolling
Before I'm crushed by all the homework.
I'm being swarmed by all these books
Like my annoying brothers and sisters as soon as I
Walk through the door.
I wish everyday was a snow-day
So I can avoid getting bullied today,
For a while.
Spend the day indoors.
The Burlington Mall is square one in my
Escape plan. It's a simple plan,
But it will succeed.
It's a hundred yard dash
As I run away from racism,
From the fear of neglection,
Of Lester B. Pearson Highschool.
But as I race to school today
My bubble bursts
POP!
And I realise that today is Gummer Day (official initiation day at Lester B. Pearson High),
Listening to Fall Out Boy to get away,
High school days aren't far away.

2) *for this one the kids all beatboxed and "Hip Hop danced" (a dance which they spent 15 minutes during lunch our teaching me) around me as I rapped the rhyme they wrote.

We're always
In the hallways
Skipping class
Breaking rules like glass
But in the end, we gotta learn and pass
Otherwise we get trapped in summer school
Missing out on the pool
Like a fool
Insted of hanging out with friends
We're running into dead ends
And the Walrus (they were obssessed with walrus' for some reason)
Is never gonna help us
Cuz he's to busy working at Toys R' Us
It's a bust
We must
Thrust through the crust
Trust us
Rise up like yeast
Peace in the Middle East!
Believe it!