Author: Moldy

The sand in my work shoes today
found its way there after a double shift last night.
closing the second store at nine-thirty –
business is stagnant, and
I can taste the slow dissolve of brick and mortar.
For now,
they still need people to put things on the shelves.
Keeping step with my coworkers into the night,
we find a playground and swing.
Washed in the low light of street lamps, we live again.

Your absence comforts.
Your absence sits on my couch while I’m making dinner
in my apartment, which I found
and alludes to an old noise –
past chatter over your YouTube subscriptions –
now, instead, some soft song I never showed you.

Your absence sometimes presses
into the corners of new places I don’t expect it
and for a moment, like a phantom limb, it hurts
but unlike a ghost limb, I remember
it was never there.
I remember, if indeed I have broken
I have only broken even.

Your absence tries to move closer
but my skin (cell by cell,
shedding the parts you touched
and replenishing still)
keeps me warm by itself now
and I stop to marvel at this.

Your absence still comes out on top
of mind, when I’m drunk,
or when someone like you looks at me
and in their eyes I see the reflection of
brief gratification and commodity –
but I talk over them.
Your absence has made me loud.

Your absence fades in the company of
even those I’ve loved the wrong way.
With them, I know where I stand –
and if we’ve stood in bad places we’ve done so together
or called one another back to the paved roads.
I could have wandered off some edge
and I don’t think you’d have noticed –
but your absence does.

Your absence, in the same way
sits on my couch and notes my daily crusade
to strive, to seek, to find.
The memory of your presence becomes less tangible.
Your absence finds a home with me.

I woke this morning, some dream in hand,
and the day fell into my open palms.
I had let something go, finally,
and all at once I knew what to do with my time.
Autumn became my favourite season –
mine, who trembles at a second’s breeze –
October, my favourite month.
The year had been hard-shelled,
something to grapple with,
but again I could gaze upon fine details:
A kind word at work
a warm room to live in
a song I’d once forgotten –
and ask nothing more from the moment.
I don’t know where the time goes,
but I’m glad that it goes.
We keep nothing, and nothing keeps us,
and that leaves nothing to worry about.

Instead of being scattered to the river,
my treacherous, troubled brains
shaken to bits inside my skull,
I burn down.
I burn down.
I do not drown.
From those remains, I sculpt another self,
quietly tally up my losses
and write their names in smoke.
I take note of ongoing decay –
when I say what I would never say
when I can’t decipher day to day
when I realize I’ve been going the wrong way
for the last ten, fifty, hundred miles!
And, hoping they believed the smiles
I did display
(I can’t recall the play-by-play),
I start forward again, one ashy step
after another.
That’s not to say I didn’t fall
or that bits of my brain aren’t shaken.
That’s not to say, even still,
that I’ve written off the river –
a firm believer all paths are to consider.
This time, again,
I do not drown.
I do not drown.
I burn down.

Ticking down the minutes of some clock I can’t see
Cramped into an office chair that’s come to know me
I want to tell them that the days are in a fog.
Like the haze outside
born from the slow burn of the next province over –
blotting out an otherwise uncharacteristically warm August –
I forget, frequently, that it is August.
I forget, frequently, anything beyond one just-graspable moment
steeped in work at this job or the next one
and the movement it requires of me and my synapses.

I want to tell them that I have no thoughts.
I have no concept of how I am coming across to people
but I see the disconnect flicker across their faces when I speak
and I know the crevasse between myself and the discernible world
grows deeper yet.

People say I should enter the system we have in place
to fix things like this
as though the gradual dissolve of my personality is a tangible thing.
I want to tell them that the system is wrong,
intertwined in the systems that brought me here
and works tirelessly to make me a liability –
I want to tell them that it is built on the bad taste in my mouth
when I don’t speak for 24 hours
and profits from my silence.

I want to tell them that my words may as well be silence.

I want to thank them for listening anyway.

I am taking this moment
into my calloused hands –
blanching my knuckles for it –
so that I may never lose it.
Neighbors in a city we both harbor hatreds for,
she steps over my threshold
with chocolate chips in tow
and we make pancakes Sunday morning.

Later, my love drives me
to the ends of the earth
and we share methods of escapism
and indulge for once without admitting
to indulgence.
The summer so hot
my skin bakes golden
and stills my perpetual shiver.
Sunlight on my eyelashes,
frogs singing by the river,
downtown traffic humming,
my fluorescent workplace, my small home,
all of us singing of our future,
steeped in want.
Someday, this too, I’ll miss.

She leaves,
and I don’t call anyone.
I read a book by the gazebo
and chase mosquitoes down the ridge above the golf course.
I stop at the liquor store
and connect, fleetingly, with the clerk.
I step home,
close the door,
open a beer –
and steeped in want,
I can feel the future reaching back for this moment
when she needs it.

I give it to her, willingly.

The winter all throughout the year
kept residence within my bones
and like you, was not something I
had ever thought to make my own
but northernmost was where I kept
my things, and yet more northern still
my heart did harbor tendencies
and I supposed, it always will.
And so I wrapped the winter up
in blankets of its scarcer charms.
I knew that it would come again
and stay too long, so in my arms
I took it, like a forgotten thing,
to care for in its ugliness –
to learn to love and live ‘longside
the cold with tired tenderness.
And so with you, I took you up
in all your bundles and your heaps –
for you! Like winter, always there
in spite of who I sought to keep.
I try to make the best of things.
There’s only so much I can make
before the northern winds do bring
the opposite for me to take.
And like I said, my heart was cold.

But colder, colder still were you
and winter, ever recurring.
You both resided in my bones
and left me frozen in the spring.

Trying to keep warm
my body tries to move inside itself –
it feels the air and every cell winces,
atoms clinging to each other for warmth.
It’s cold out there.
My desk at work is by the window
and the A/C is always on.
It’s cold out there
and the winter is too long.

It was cold when no one had touched me
and it was colder still after somebody had.
I think, even wrapped in their arms, it was cold
and my own arms have done a better job
but even then
it’s cold out there.

Spring and summer feel like dreams –
time doesn’t pass the same way.
I picture sun reflecting off skin
loose, unclothed movements
and no arms around me because I didn’t ask for any –
but –
at least nine months out of the year I shiver
and no one holds me down so the cold
moves me
and every hour freezes in my mind:
unforgettable drudgery.

Trying to keep warm
I try to break out of my body
blaming it for perceiving cold
but demanding it garners warmth
as if it could do just one.
I expose the warmer flesh to the air
to try to build an immunity
but the cold is worse when your skin is wet.

When you said you were leaving
I imagined your absence –
your voice vanishing from the driver’s seat,
the window rolled up because no one was smoking –
and I thought, how free
I would be to find love in other places.
Up close I watch you searching
without acknowledging what you seek,
I see your destruction,
and still I marvel.
I imagined from far away,
all I could see would be your best laid plans
and I would wonder why your thoughts,
your anger and your set jaw
had ever held me in such a trance at all.

I would be free of you, but

without you in the driver’s seat,
no one would be driving, and
without that open window,
the city’s night air would taste stale
and the world would go as still as it was
before you.

I do love you,
as anyone has loved anything –
it is not absolute.
It speaks to no greater thing,
nor soars above all human pursuits,
but I do love you –
chasing whatever you chase in the night
beside you.
Your grand and selfish search.
I could always make you laugh
and although that is the only time
you glimpse me,
I do see you.
You may have decided to stay,

but
nothing has changed
and I,
well,
I have to go.

The snow came earlier this year
then went away, and winter one
did sink into the ground again
as autumn two had just begun.
So too do I still think of you
and of you only can I pen
a word that’s focused, soft, and good
but will not let me start again
on something else: the crack of life,
how far I’ve come and where I’ll go,
and Better, hand in hand with Worse
conversing still of tomorrow
inside my head. It is these things
which I sit down to speak about –
to place in text and say my piece
before my last word casts me out –
but you. You’re between ev’ry word.
It’s you that this is written for
I’ve felt all I could ever feel
and still I find I can write more.
But let the winter fall on me
and let me feel a stiller cold
than this of autumn wind that tastes
of all the seasons you withhold.