The first shawarma i had was at the Cedars in Calgary. The old Cedars where the homemade hummous supported a pool of olive oil sprinkled with paprika and dotted with kalamatas. i ordered the shawarma sandwich, a shawarma wrapped in pita with tahini and lettuce and peppers, and it came with that mound of hummous and giant, garlic packed dill slices. i drank it with a Pepsi and talked about music and writing with a guy named Grant. i was nineteen. i miss the worn tiles of the Cedars, and the vaguely Arabic music in the background, and the flavours of the Med. i miss shawarma on cool fall days and walks nestled in the canyons of my urban youth. i miss towers and theatres and comic book shops and talks with homeless geniuses on street corners, waiting for walk signals telling me to cross. i long for that moment on the C-Train platform, right at the edge of that yellow line, thinking of the simple step that would take me into the train’s path and send my crushed body spinning and bloody into oblivion, and the decision to stay where I was and feel the wind of the train rather than the force. i want those days back, but it will never be, so i will just go running on the sedate path down the street, and keep the shawarma for my daydreams. 

Two weeks sick, and now I have bronchitis. I need this to fucking end, man.

hello little anony-mouses. thanks for your niceness and your care. i promise you some cheese with no traps. :)

misty wraith of end times, overdetermined destructor,
meets us, hovering over a rising hillock of asphalt,
manifests in haze the like of which we’ve never seen.
an impossibly serendipitous diffusion of fog
smoke and curvature and light and unseen dark matter.
hyperion’s disk, a golden capped mallow beyond reach,
smoking its way out of the embers on a stick.

violence, the red one, meets us with joy
on a web in the sun, dew flecked and tenuous,
as a day moth flutters and spasms to its sticky end.
pregnant, death slips along her strands
to sheath her prey in silk. spinning spinner.
a meal for her unborn in a time of need.

she tugs and pulls and drags her meal,
it comes to the verge of her dank hole,
an under-roof cave, ventilated with breeze,
hidden enough to tuck away and dark enough
to pounce upon the tremors of her invisible weaving.

gagged and bilious, vomitous in the sinuses, on the tongue,
a reflection that skews our synapses into abuse,
calories of non-nutrition, flavours of toxicity,
distended bellies of glutinous, intestinal corrosion.

our senescence is everywhen, our conception’s twin rider,
pale, putrescent, gangrenous, mortified, rotting our flesh
cleaning our bones, dusting us to nothing. without fail.

now our pillow begs for our repose,
as the world continues its disintegration around us.

the world dies large and small for us, and will always.

It’s a struggle this life. Keeping it is a struggle. Having no fear of the oblivion of death, makes the struggle harder still. I don’t keep it because I fear the nothingness like so many others, so I have to find something to live for in the now.

But my body is always in pain from early arthritis that invaded my joints because of a hip disease, and I’ve relinquished my pain killers to extend this life that I barely want.

And my mind is always working against me, keeping me awake (moreso now that I’ve relinquished my sedatives to extend this life that I barely want), forcing me to listen to things that can’t be there (can they?), making me hate my body when I look in the mirror, isolating me from community, filling me with loathing for self and everything/everyone else.

And then I get sick, a simple cold, and my two best senses — taste and smell — are dulled, are cut in half or worse, and the food I eat at night brings me no joy, and the smells of the people I love disappear, and a huge part of them becomes blank. And I wonder what I would do if those senses were forever dulled or gone, and what if I lost the other three? Would there be anything to keep me here?

Then there’s love. Is that enough to keep me hanging on? And is it love to saddle people with this lesser me who can barely make it through the interminable hours from waking to sleep?

Or these words. These letters and combinations of letters and words and combinations of words that I’ve told myself are reason enough to live — another lie because these words are my souls equivalent of water boarding. I am dragged from my cell day after day and tortured until I produce the words that they want, then spent I am tossed back in my cell. My liberation is merely a respite from pain. Is that enough to live on?

It’s not a question for me of “what does it all mean?” It’s “why do I bother?”