I have a bad anxious-habit of biting my lip and grinding my teeth that I'm certain either only vigorous making out and/or heavy petting will cure.

forget regret

The mannequin in the window at the Chinese department store around the corner doesn't have any hands.

I edged the tip of my nose to the glass and scrutinized the gaping round holes in her forearms where her wrists should be. What a thing, to have your hands cut off. No, not cut - someone simply neglected to attach them in the first place. It's her legs that are actually cut. Sawed-off just under the knee cap. The ghost of her missing legs fill a pair of empty boots standing upright where her real feet should be. Hands gone so they can dress her more easily. Shins gone so her boots will fit. Her eyes are dull.

"You having hair problems too?" I asked the glass, my breath forming a warm little foggy alkaline-y 'o' about level with her exposed plastic outty-belly button.

Her blonde wig is tipped so far back on her forehead, her fake hair is real receeding.

"Wanna get outta there and go do something?"

The mannequin stared at me, unblinking.

A little spider crawled out from the hole filled with the ghosts of her forearm bones and scampered down the strap of a purse filled with scraps of old newspaper, trailing a web thread from his little spider-ass down to her sawed-off knees.

"It seems to me," I heard the mannequin say, "life's greatest con is that success is in holding on..." her dull eyes followed the spider tip toe-ing her plastic abdomen, "... but happiness is in letting go."

I looked at her cracked mannequin mouth.

The spider, balancing on the silvery wire running from the purse to a matted lock of wig, sambaed a leggy spider samba, then retreated to a forearm hole filled with bone ghosts and dried up flies.

"But no one gave you any hands," I said.

Sometimes you just don't have the right tools.

here's what you're missing

i didn't need to know what the city looks like at 5 am on a cold february nite, but now i do.

i keep my eyes averted to the sidewalk and the gutter. the icicle cigg butts, wet TTC transfers and cold vomit float and mingle on the top layer of unrecognizable garbage in a frozen puddle around a stinky grate. my lip curls in involuntary disgust, but all i can think about are my feet (it wouldn't matter if i had socks.. my toes are freezing off), my feet and all the eyes leering. the cars creep past with dark windows rolled down. my hand is in my pocket sinisterly; i'm projecting, "i have a knife." i'm hoping, "at least i have my knife." i know, "what good is a knife." it's uncurled in my pocket. so small. what a joke. as if it could do any damage. as if i could really be fierce.

walking across the city.

remember when i said, "never leave your lover with anything but a kiss?"

i whisper it aloud to remind my feet that they're strong, and the sound of it in my mouth makes me want to laugh but i can't because i'm so cold.

"never," i repeat louder, resolute, "because if you say all the things you want to say, it really will be over."

it really will be over.

As far as the metaphysical poets would have you believe, the heart is quintessentially an embodied symbol of love. No, scratch that, it is love embodied. Love and exquisite loss and pain and all the things that pang and suffer inside us. The heart - heart capitolized...Heart.

As far as I'm concerned, the metaphysical poets are full of shit.

The heart (not capitalized) is an involuntary muscle. It pumps or we die. Like our diaphragm, it contracts; like our lungs fill with air, it shifts our blood around or it's curtains. It works or nothing. It's the farthest thing from emotion. It's mechanic. My heart (not capitalized) is a machine. It's a computer. It beats in binary code - one, nothing, one, nothing, one, nothing... forever (or at least until it recognizes that no update can revitalize it, or that the drivers behind its primary function are finally expired anyway).

The truth is that emotion has nothing to do with heart. Emotion is a complex language that exists only in silence, inarticulate to ordinary ears and deaf to regular sound. Moot on its own point. A rambling mute. A myopic dancer. If the heart is a hard drive, emotion is a light-year technological advance; the heart is automatic while emotion is as unpredictable as a child with a new set of crayons - a sentient robot surprised by its own behavior. Emotion is the colour to the heart's black and white. Emotion is the infinite to the heart's ones and zeros.

Oh I know. Why draw the line? Ideologically, physical hearts represent metaphorical emotion... distinction isn't really necessary. But I've been thinking a lot about Heart (capitalized) lately, and I must say I know mine is just computerized flesh, but still my question of late is, 'what happens when it seems like my emotions seem to be vapidly following my Heart's suit'?

Mechanical.

What do you do when feeling begins to feel programmed? How do you jumpstart your capital-H Heart when it's drained out of you like a used battery? Who do you call for technical support when the hard drive is working but the software is fucked?

What do you do when you simply feel ones and nothings, ones and nothings, ones and nothings.

moth

denim tsunami

my jeans in macro

americanos at the beaver

Hello, we've never met.

But did I mention that I'm obsessed with your face?

You sit across from me as I hammer out my thoughts, and I imagine you in black and white. Every face, every candid snapshot, ever trace of you - I don't know what you look like, but I do. I can already picture you, but I can't. I imagine you in high definition, but the details are all a wash. You're beautiful, but I have no idea who you are.

I have access to this great digi-cam now.

Look for more pictures on indefinite article. I took them. I want to take yours too, if we ever meet.

This is a Saturday-morning portrait. A friend and his coffee. The Beaver is on Queen West in between the Drake and the Gladstone. I had the tomato-avocado on rye. The sun was shining and my eyes were filled with it. It was a good day.

twelfth white

I'm on the twelfth floor of a massive office building in fortune-five-hundred Mississauga right now and it's snowing so lightly, so lightly against the windows of 'mahogany row', that the snow is actually floating up. Little chick down exhaled from a soft pillow in a roofless porcelain room under the grey sky - a whisper.

I think it's the nicest little illusion of purity I've ever seen.

commuters

The halogen bulbs glowing inside the subway car boil a buzzing haze. A smelly urine-tainted fog hanging low, covering us like a soiled baby blanket, never wafting in any direction. Hanging. Hang ging ing ng g. Then we stop, and the doors open and three people get up and three sit down and the doors close and it's a centipede lifting up three legs to pee like a narrow dog in a drainpipe. A thrusting metal sea amenone. A farting worm. And I never know where to sit. Here, There or In Between. In Between sweats and Here is stinky again and I dip my fingers into There and find it wet like it always is so I stand and procrastinate. Here, There, In Between. A B C. Hump Day Bump. Deedle Diddle Dum. And steam whizzes by from moccafrappalappacappachinos. Little atoms of caffeine in the air. And the speed at which we're hurtling forward is desperate like a woman giving birth in a taxi cab. A fat man in a bunny suit. Estranged lovers in a sauna. And we never get where we're going. We. never. get. where. we're.

ELLE Magazine Canada sends me a copy every month now.

"Riley, sorry," my roomate croons, "I'm reading your magazine - didn't think you'd mind."

Wait. My magazine? Mine?

"Says your name right here."

Says my name in that bizarre halting computer-type and my address. Says it right on the cover. Has been saying it for three months. I didn't know. I never got that card someone has bought you a subscription... Frankly, I don't know why I get ELLE Canada.

Well, ELLE avait fais un jour historique (un jour dans sa meme historire). Fuck it. Why not tell you? I wrote the LSAT this morning. Humber College has a really serious anime society, so I guess that's saying something for the geeks that hit classes there.

I thought briefly today about ELLE Magazine and about becoming a lawyer.

"A rogue lawyer in jeans and high heels"

Ooooooh. That really doesn't work, because the very definition of being a lawyer is neither rogue nore jeans: two complete oxymorons in a conclusive phrase; lawyers gang up on people, lawyers only wear expensive pants.

Never said I wanted to be one. Always said I'd go back to school after I had my "first career."

Hrmmmph.

First career.

Who was I kidding with that? This isn't Europe and I ain't married to some fabulously wealthy importer/exporter.. not that I'd want to be anyway.

I have simple goals: buy a red scarf, get my computer fixed and get seriously and satisfactorily laid one of these coming weekends. Oh, it'll all happen. How do I know? I've got confidence; I'm going back to dance class.

morning in the basement

Scattered newspapers, phones ringing like meek lion cubs in dark holes, the cold air frothing just on the other side of the wall like an angry river you can feel down to your bones through the microscopic grooves of your fingertips as you press them against the gaudy yellow paint. Computers beep and blink. Detached voices say 'hello?.. hello?' Floor boards shudder and groan, old men in broken recliners, shaking as the heat fires up again - the 'Trane XR80' for all your heating and ventilation needs turns over like an engine, roars like a big grey omnivorous gargoyle. The house pulls its tilting shingled roof down over its ears. A vision of floating on top of a screaming sea in a soundproof bubble. A silent cocoon buffeted by screeching wind.

"You think everyday is another day, one more day of your life, but what if everyday was just one day less, one day less, one day less?"

The man who said that was quoting someone quoting someone else but he said it so acceptingly so knowingly and so cunningly with a tepid Mona Lisa grimace and a hand extended to me like he was asking me to please understand him that my heart promised to try, but it wouldn't and I couldn't because I couldn't get past the hurt of it. His quiet hurt.

That was a couple years ago and the man's gone to live somewhere quiet in the brush, but I think I get it now.