January 2012
3 posts
untitled work (01/2012)
I. The laurels and oranges of your dreaming, a winter passed in Antwerp. The steep and ascending paradises we arrive at, the billowing descents, the rooted chill of such altitudes, the silences we seek, our footfalls consecutive. A shoulder thrown back into place and a built fire, a moonlit gnawing of depiction, an endlessly flowing existence, the cut teeth and hung carcasses pulled to a...
journal 20/07/11 (powell river/tofino)
Mountain’s edge filed to dust, sky plied with hawks, the fly-plagued trail to the satellite-dish summit where we could remain righted on the sea of the world (where we could see the start & the end of the sea of the world [where we could make love in a dream on the swim-happy surface of the sea of the world]). Here was a map of our fever, your old bedroom in the attic, the paper mill,...
journal 14/06/11 (tofino)
Dream upon dream, switchbacks seamed into coastal island. Thick fields of interest rising into woody altitudes, into bone-white groves made thin by summer fires. In a thin cream of silence, you’re slow to kiss me in canyons caged by snow, one pupil broken large, light swimming upon the lake-like surface. You can drink light like that, your skull buckling under pressure. You can lie...
April 2011
1 post
journal 30/04/11 (california)
A re-intrusion of the coast; or, rather, a never-leaving of it, turquoise-grey shadowbands & a sparkling continuum of our exterior lives. Here is one road, flat + rising, a glot of taquerias and you sun-golden licking chicken-oil from your fingers. Sand fills my boots & together we staunch nosebleeds under white turbines in the desert, run dizzily into a lifting landscape of sorbet red,...
March 2011
26 posts
journal 07/23/09 (montreal-vancouver)
Brief joys: The days rolled like dice thru alcoholic, ink-stained squalor, legs thrown around your tiger: all those fabulous sine-waves of hate & love & pleasure. Fighting & making up — that incredible gallop your heart takes up when he suddenly does lean in to put his mouth against yours. At any rate having your mind roar around in long ferocious circles of good & bad ideas,...
journal 20/09/09 (montreal)
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow flat on the wall. The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs. You had not expected this, the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light pummeling you in a stream of fists. You raised your hand to your face as if to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light streamed straight to the bone, as if you were the small room closed in...
journal 27/09/09 (montreal)
“Good night,” the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself, it was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, it was a...
journal 28/09/09 (montreal)
Cap-guns & Jack Daniels, wheat-thins & I can’t stand straight; catch me, dear friends, guardians symmetrical on that suede couch, totems on each others’ shoulders. 24-hr cafes in which I am losing consciousness next to businessmen who may or may not be dreaming of “the electric-yellow fields of Budapest”, face-down in their bagels. Ragdoll ecstasy switcharoo, best...
journal 07/10/09 (montreal)
Only recently healed up — that regeneration left for lesser creatures. Thinking of that time we drove for hours just for you to drink bone-marrow soup, that time I thought we would die in the jungle. How easily could you overturn me, breath in a staggered sequence of hours, in a diagram of compulsion. My dark horse, my temperate finch, my twin-faced protagonist, I mean, antagonist, I mean...
journal 01/11/09 (montreal)
Manhattan is an island, cut cleanly against the night. As pure image, New York is flawless: tidy, discrete, simple to hold in your mind, and for this reason particularly easy to romanticize. Emblem, icon, colophon: its skyline stands for a story. In Which Nothing Will Cut New York But A Diamond There is really only one city for everyone, just as there is one major love. Dawn Powell Sometimes we...
journal 04/11/09 (montreal)
I sat at the desk for a while fooling with my hair and looking at the black birds on the bakery roof. Pulled the curtain, put my hair back, and said it’s time to start. Now it’s after three. You are still on the bus, I guess, looking out the window. Sleeping. Knowing your defeat and eating lunch part by part so it will last the whole journey. I heard there are women who light candles and put them...
journal 05/11/09 (montreal)
What if the dust behind a jeep on a dirt road is the dust behind a jeep on a dirt road in Bosnia, what then. It’s the context, or do I mean the content, or do I mean the connection, one trajectory to another. Rocks coming up against a window, rocks going down through a window casting double-shadows on the floor. You can stand in the vaccuum of a doorway & look dashingly contemporary. You...
journal 07/11/09 (montreal)
- Now we’re going to talk to Gary. Gary, how are you feeling? - I feel fine, I feel good, I feel of use, I feel I could do some good here, that I can help, that I can be a part of things, I feel things I’ve previously thought impossible could actually happen, I feel it might take a little time but eventually I feel I’ll sort everything out, I feel fantastic, I’ve never felt...
journal 22/11/09 (montreal)
More & more I need to figure out why certain images appeal to me; & I can’t do that verbally. I.E. instead of writing about the feeling of riding on your rims thru high-rise corridors, I should be drawing the feeling of riding on your rims thru high-rise corridors. Figure out why I like autumn light or the sun in my eyes or apartment blocks or figures in forests, the feeling I get...
journal 30/11/09 (montreal)
33 train songs. Your location and my location approach one another at a very constant speed. I’ve got greased-up eyes; there’s oil in your hair. There’s a beat to this sort of moving, sunlight filling the car up like something drinkable. Five-dollar bills fly away from me, become feathers of a thousand seabirds, vague taste of a breeze. You said you’d be there to meet me,...
journal 01/12/09 (montreal)
Q: Why is my heart always so geographically interspersed? Maybe it’s because of the eternal globe-trot of my parents — riding trains in India, purses full of downers in Spain, my mother’s hands greased with car oil somewhere near Andorra. Her tiny Hong Kong tenement, his cold-water Chicago flat, mink coats robbed from a New York armoire, the fact they stayed barely a year in the...
journal 11/12/09 (montreal)
————————————— Asleep in a bed of paper, limbs shadowed with ink. Asleep thru a meteor shower, blankets shaken out on the mountainside fibrillating your dreams. The dreams themselves growing absurder, life quieter: cello songs & condominium murmurs, raindrops & diligence. In the snow, everything softens....
journal 31/01/10 (montreal)
Amy Cutler, Siege Snowdrifts & dog shit, invasive topography of slush. Packs of Marlboro Golds, un-nameable plants, the rarefied turn into clarity riding -33C below. Fever: the cold-sweat culmination of these habitually pockmarked days. A cautious & loving suspicion creeps furrily around corners. Sometimes I get irritable, why can`t everything be as wonderful as you. I`ve been losing,...
journal 03/19/10 (montreal)
To shake dust from one’s lapels is to be unable to distinguish residue from residue: sawdust or cocaine, tapped ash, carded adderall. I waltz thru the rush with eyes euphorically closed, swallow birth control with ennui and espresso. In the interminable pre-dawn, I treat you to a crackled concerto of sorrow, let you fumble to give shape to our diminishing future. I lie around pixelated, in...
journal 06/04/10 (montreal)
Fixed my bicycle, rode out for hours beyond glassed off freeway, created interiors of alleyway. A couple of men are arguing, wrong decade — blue suits, cream shirts, Toyota with the windows up. Turn back at the taste of affluence, spice and turkey in the wind, tunnels leaking the sweat of a century suddenly created around me. Forest transports, downhill grade into the wastelands of Montreal...
journal 18/04/10 (montreal)
Banks Violette, Not Yet Titled (Light Spill) Red lights beat soft in the mist of a Tokyo dawn. Hotel room a stack of clean planes, paced like animal enclosure as all rooms were paced those days. A linen tin for moods that move beyond your sleeping frame. 2006 I wrote for nobody, sleeplessly heating water for jasmine tea. Headless, with every bone showing more vividly… A laceration of...
journal 19/10/10 (vancouver-montreal)
I. Think of Ben & I sketch-obsessed, tall letters & thin women, freedom scrawl & death-fixation. What does it mean to be displaced in space, singularly in gauzy airline stupor & then on a mountain with a boy in a sharp jacket, technicolour sunrise & my jaw terror-tight. What does it mean to still need you, even at my most powerful & adored? There are songs about death,...
journal 17/11/10 (vancouver)
The gold line over the final city; the smokestack obelisk; the lone mosque on the highway. The refusal of sorrow, the cross-eyed ecstatic deluge, sugar-slow slip into delerium, confoundment. Since when was this an exercise in resistance, the ink & the charcoal, the meditative stroke into sculptural fullness? The rain misted on the track, the milk fog thru the mountains, the myriad crows in...
journal 22/11/10 (vancouver)
mirrors darkness ladders death wells dreams infinity mountains oceans sorrow rains smoke industry waterfront ocean depthlessness openings doors windows bottles teeth blood death buildings glass lesions tenderness bodies bones spices woodlands cranes ports ships “how the ocean & sky become singular with night” british columbia railroads mountains forests mystery soil crystal symbol...
journal 24/11/10 (vancouver)
“The spine allows us movement & pain in every direction.” Vjeko Sager “O you / were the best of all my days.” Frank O’Hara, Animals ———— Ripple rise of rib-bone, a gentle acceleration, cabbie in a word warning against my neighbourhood, my neighbourhood, fitting mongrel cutaway crux of Gastown, Chinatown, the cut legs of Hastings, all the...
journal 19/12/10 (manila)
Things I like: Endless corridors of lucky 777, a fashioned darkness & sky full of portals. The cotton zones of dimenhydrinate. Christmas carols in Narita, fried potatoes & memories of you, the ergonomics of furniture, another sparse piano trio of ice in a class, transcendental charcoal dust & a brief but vivid irritation, refusing perfume samples outside of a future duty-free. The...
journal 28/12/10 (vancouver-tokyo-manila-)
Here is the woodland of his hairline, cedar & pine. Here is a poem about death, three numbers & the police asking me where in the house my friend is, me not knowing, listing the prescriptions, booze, & drugs, shifting a few degrees off axis as the officer hangs up. Here is you, removed from me: still slender, maybe debating as you always did the Beijing-Siberia sleeper train trip; the...
journal 19/01/11 (vancouver)
Hangover sky, quickly descending night. The radiant ovation of nightfall, one eagle circling its image in the grey water, one eagle giving us luck. There’s a jungle vascillation, thick heat & crosshatch of lethargy, butter on my fingers, a liquored overturn of outrigger gut, animal reflex & a certain tough talk. Make me a wilderness queen, all dark beat & bhangra wingspan....
everything was forever until it was no more...
The majority of my work (at the moment of this journal), both written and drawn, is born of a fascination with the perception of time as non-linear. I like the idea of space and time as inextricable from each other — for place to be an anchor around which all events occur simultaneously. To percieve things in this manner eradicates the function of narrative and chronology; instead of order, one...
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