Tonight, last night, and Elsewhere

Tonight there were people at the bar. You know how they're always laughing and drinking. Someone must have given them a script. I saw their jackets buttoned all tightly, they were introduced to me for the fifth time. Sorry I'm not good with names.

Anyway, that was just tonight.

Last night I dreamed of tiny babies, so tiny that they could fit into eggshells.

In my dreams the babies were kept in little plastic egg-shaped pods, stored in decrepid wooden bird houses outside this tiny little cabin of a hospital in the woods. The paint is peeling off the wood. Every now and then I open up the pods up to inject various chemicals into the solution that the babies are bathed in. There were twins that I had placed in a single pod, so that they could be together. They have little weak cries that sound like mice squeaking.

The bird houses were kept near a sink so people kept jostling the babies and sloshing dish water into their little pods and I kept trying to clean the whole mess up.

Elsewhere, in reality, the police were called to investigate a loud party in a hotel room in Montreal. A few Inuit families had come down from Inuvik for the weekend. The police entered the room and saw crack, booze, and two little Inuit boys on the floor surrounded by open Tylenol bottles. The oldest one had an ear infection.

February evening

Came back inside from the blustery cold this evening. It's a cold subdued night in the city. The streets outside are deserted and people are in their warm homes getting ready for sleep.

My sister is home. She's ironing in the room down the hall and I can hear the iron's quiet hiss and it passes over clean cotton. Smoothing out the wrinkles for tomorrow's chaotic day in the hospital. Putting an ordered seamless front against all the chaos that comes from putting the sickest people in the world into one building along with the thousands of others who are in charge of managing all the damaged cells, organs, blood, and egos.

The smell of steamed linens reminds me of my mother who to this day still irons her bedsheets.

My kitty, fed by my evening kill at the supermarket, licks his paws and looks to me with content in his eyes.

The fridge sings a familiar hum and the clean dishes sit by the sink in their blissful normalcy.

No talking, no rehashing, no questions, no answers.

Outside it's still so cold.

It's February, and everyone is sleeping.

ultra violet

what does it mean
to say that
you're a pretty girl
you're a good girl

you're beautiful

even though
you don't burn
my eyes
like dozens
of blazing sunspots

sweltering
and radiating
from
the sun

did you know that
the sun
is the universe's
object of transcendence?

so far away
from this
dusty
lonely
frosty
town

what does it mean
to say that
you're a good girl
you did your homework on time
you got an A
in swimming class
you didn't complain once

and that was all
OK
by me

even though
you didn't
burn my skin

like millions of
ultra
violet
sunsets

like thousands of
stinging
snakebites

like dozens of
smouldering
cigarette butts

you know I
smoked them
one by one

but they didn't burn me

captions, commas, transitional words

captions
commas
transitional words

I just wanted to tell you
in plain language
what I really wanted to say
tonight

did you know that
captions
commas
transitional words

are all just pictograms
mimicking
voice inflections

and

voice inflections
were designed
to talk
over the noise of thunder

hooves running
drums thumping
lungs breathing
babies crying

now the noise of traffic
and tv
is all you might hear

but i still use
captions, commas,
transitional words

just to convey to you
exactly
what I would
be saying
if you were here