fried

when I turned thirteen

my aunty told me

that I should be afraid of thespians

because she thought they were lesbians with vaginas that lisped

she got all the queer stuff mixed up

and had a deeply profound disconnection from traditional forms of human language based interaction

she would touch her temples four times on each side of her head with her thumbs

and lick her palms at dinner

I think I caught OCD from her

so I kissed her husband ten times deeply with my tongue lashing out and into his throat behind the garage by the wild orange lilies

then ran in the back door giggling

and later by the pool table we did unspeakable things

that I would never stop speaking of through beyond in spite of and because of middle age

but that was years later before I stood in front of that little round beveled mirror with the translucent wildflowers carved into the glass in our little entry way

to the storey and a half house where so much blood was drawn

raised by wolves in a badly furnished den of heart hungry thieves

I stood and waited patiently practicing

watching my tongue so carefully as I repeated the five hail Mary’s

of speech impediments

relentlessly in pursuit of some tongueless toothy grin

some god like pronunciation sanctioned by Queen and country

“is that a thistle in your mouth or are you just unhappy to thee me?”

aunty warned me that if

I didn’t do my speech exercises

I would become a little fairy, or worse, “just like Paul Lynde

or Charles Nelson Reilly”

so I would repeat all those

sacred vowelized utterances

I had been taught by the speech therapist

with an s in front of them

- a e i o u - say see sigh so soo -

crossing myself with the sibilance

of those letters throbbing

fearfully with asymmetric phobias

being dangled before my dainty brain

“speak up little fairy and deepen that voice or you’ll be nothing but a laughing stock fit for bit parts on sitcoms on game shows and fops in regional productions of any given  Moliere masterpiece”

so there I stood swiftly saying

‘sally sits a sewing’

over and over and over and over again

‘she sells seashells by the seashore’

scissors seething slightly sinking slowly snipping softly sipping seething sloth

shit sally shit selling seashells on

the shitshore sally shit sally shit

who knew then what my tongue would be up to so many years later

what with little mirrors languid on glass coffee tables streaked with cumulonimbus tracks

of white cloudy atmospheres

but those are much bigger words than I had ever used by then but now

what with my slight lateral lisp

only making special appearances

when I become careless and exhausted and the tongue will flop a little

lashing up against the roof of my mouth dangling long enough to thicken every

snake like ’s’ that slides

slyly seeking solace

swiftly sucking swelling throbbing

what did they expect of me as a child?

was I supposed to pretend to be a prince

when back-hoed princess

was all men ever asked of me

and now that I am too old to die young

I remember you on my way

to the Kentucky Fried Chicken

that large lit up slowly twirling bucket

at that car accident prone corner of Chemong Road and Wolsey Street

mom and dad

before they left for shitsville

would hear the crash and drive me over to that corner to watch the aftermath unfold I always closed my eyes

and then we would go

to the dairy queen for a Mr. Misty

and then along the river road

and I would cry out

“I want to go to the flirtation plant to see the monkeys!”

I pronounced filtration wrong

and the community Riverside Zoo

was on the same sight

as the filtration plant

and I thought they were

one in the same thing

until I was twelve just before my first boyfriend died in a tragic car accident

and there he was

at Chemong and Wolsey

pinned behind the wheel

in the front seat of his father’s car

having backed over him as his dad  raged into the driveway

after he and his mom escaped

daddy suffered broken ribs and his mom was air lifted to Sunnybrook and lived to die again so many times

blood coming from his nose and ears

and I just sat and cried

on the grassy meridian

feeling like Jackie Kennedy

grabbing for pieces of my lover’s brain

and I remembered how

in black and white snapshots of our impossible lives

you took me to the park after school and we sucked smoke from that punctured

Tahiti Treat pop can and you made sure I wasn’t too crack hungry for a little boy

and then you did unspeakable things to my red red rose and the bright green palm trees on the Tahiti Treat can

always made me long for

beaches and summer love and Tarzan bathing suits with a flap in front

and a flap in back

and those memories never left my pelvis they still shudder there

on the tip of my tongue or any part of me that you initiated into lust

I will never forgive you for all that love

how can I ever repay the debt we owe one another

it has given me far too much lust

for the kind of lust for life that breathes in the swell of deaths magic allure

your lies made me an artist and if you had never died I would have been happy to be your wife at twenty and blow away our dreams in a bungalow

designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

in a trailer park planned by Icarus

in a handpicked nightmare called

my very own

I may one day have to amputate my own ear and paint starry nights and lather thick impasto crows plucking eyeballs from innocents as Hitchcockian Valentines litter the edges of my heart hungry for a drumstick and that ethereal cole slaw the colonel dripped along the edges of my youth

and I would roll little mounds of that sugary cabbage in the grease laden leathery folds of his Kentucky fried white skin baked chicken parts and imagine them a kind of southern fried sushi and fear for all those headless pluckless de-feathered chickens being electrocuted in southern pens and the cooped up lives of the most delicious white meat I ever tasted

but I did always have an inbred tatse for those  greyish succulent mounds soaked in a tinge of beige along the marrow deepening into the dark shadowed folds of flesh that were so unwelcome on the racist streets of the tiny towns I inhabited as a child I have run from those streets and into every arm of every body I could find

but then, yes, we danced after school

in Jackson Park by the bucolic orientalized shades of the pagoda bridge and you told me of all the restaurants you would take me to in a few years when we came of age and could

run away together to Calgary

because you deeply loved Buffy’s Indian cowboys and their big white hats

“big wide smiles” and you promised we would go to Ming and Pong those posh little martini bars that years later made me feel like I was a character in a racist movie of my own private life

and you had googled photos of the hot springs at Banff and spoke of

sacred ground overcome

by artist residencies

you told me how those Calgarian bars were lined with photographs of chairman Mao and furnished with chairs shaped like the palm of a hand just like the weird furniture in Clockwork Orange

and then you would pretend to kick me senseless and raw as we danced home from grade eight in a downpour and sang singing in the rain and lusted after

Gene Kelly’s stocky frame

then back in Ontario ten years prior

you bought crack cocaine in the

parking lot of the Brookdale Plaza

where we saw Aunt Jemima at the Dominion grocery store selling pancakes with what claimed to be the real boat from the African Queen in the back of a truck from a back lot in Manhattan touring  small  town Ontario from Wawa to Peterborough to Petawawa to Penetanguishene to Wasaga Beach 

and back again

and we laughed and laughed and laughed and you held me in your little fifteen year old arms I was a year younger than you and felt like your virgin bride

and you said we would live near a seven eleven  on 17^th avenue in Calgary where we could always get purple slurpees and hard pepperoni  sticks and diet cherry coke and smoked oysters

any time of the day or night by the time we turned twenty

we would stagger blithely home to our condo and dance naked on our countertop with the faux leather

Ralph Lauren backsplash  and the Jacuzzi tub with little round spots on the side for our pina coladas

and we would gorge our selves on week old pizza drowning in polluted Venetian anchovies and kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss until our tongues rolled themselves into saliva splashed love duets

as we lapped prosecco from the gorgeous deep ravines of our full 

post adolescent rumps as bubbles slithered rivulets and little waterfalls

into nether parts

but sweetheart I just couldn’t seem

to get by the fact

that you wanted a pint of my urine

for your pet iguana after watching Richard Burton and Ava Gardner on that makeshift screen and I rode you home

on your bike and rode you again

in a little bed under a Walt Disney comforter and grabbed your ass

and called you crusty the clown under my breath for years after

I had already given you so much

so when I saw you dead in that car

on my way to buy four snack packs

and three extra orders of cole slaw

for my aunt and uncle and me

and the half dead border collie

chained to the dog house

behind the garage who yelped so quietly as I kissed uncle doom

when I was fourteen going on forty five

and aunty and uncle doom

they were raising me since mom and dad had disappeared into the septic tank of my pre adolescent dream of escaping from this shithole and running away to a brothel in the foothills

where kindly gentlemen would make me a little porn star

well I felt very sad seeing you there like that because as hard as I tried I could not bring myself to feel sorry for anyone

but myself

and that kind of self indulgent sentimental crap that I write and write and write always makes me feel sad and angry and unoriginal

you were dead and gone but I was stuck there on the corner of Wolsey and Chemong still waiting to cross the intersection through the flashing lights of police cars and your mother’s screams

because I knew the dooms of love I cherished would not forgive me for coming home 

bucketless and empty handed but I was wrong they loved me

in their decrepit way

and it was always me who was fresh out of forgiveness and baked in bitterness before the playground stopped being a breeding plot me and Julio and all this stringy half imagined narrative

I would never see you again since it was a closed coffin and I got a day off school and you got the rest of my life off school

and my aunty dressed me up in my robins egg blue seersucker short sleeved shirt and a little navy blue suit with gold insignia and a white bow tie that even then I found very inappropriate for a funeral

and I slipped on favored penny loafers

at the last minute

with no god damn pennies and now  pennies replaced by loonies and two-nies are gone form earth and heaven in this penniless country

and aunty handed me hand written directions to Comstock’s funeral parlor and set me off alone at thirteen to my  best friends fucking funeral

I tore that fey little bow tie off five fucking minutes after I left the house and raced crying up to Jackson’s Park and dove into the arms of the first parked car I could find by the pagoda bridge and there I slept in someone’s arms with my boyish briefs over my head and smiled thinking you must be happier in hell than this buttfucked earth

but the taste of blood frozen in an ice cream cone crushed at the bottom of a trash can at the drive-in dairy queen is like a fairy sucking the life out of a silly dream through imagined crack pipes pop cans and the woven fictionalized tales wrought from images and memories of a childhood where he never should have touched me

where his racism never should have punctured my pink ears

it should have been you

little adolescent white boy

with your dreams of sloth and glamour

and taking me away from all that I would never be

in 1969 we weren’t quite old enough to be hookers not quite wise enough to runaway to become

a part of stonewall history

but we were young enough to be

the brokenhearted infantalized heavy hearted whores

our families made us hate and love and covet

yes, it should have been you as I peered across the classroom during the lords prayer and god save the drag queen and I knew you were winking at me in your heart I knew it I did I knew you were

but I’ve killed you haven’t I

I’ve written you into my bony false fried poem where there is so much that is true in my fake nostalgia for a past wrought with less banal trauma

I want my memories to stink

because the stench I have

come to terms with

has left me in the cold

he never should have touched me

I never should have been deemed

to dream of kissing him

so many times beside that dog house

not far from the long gone

twirling canister of

fowl cackling body parts

as I tell tell these purpose laden

accidental tragic lies

having tired of the dismal lurid truth

 that I have come and come and come

to love and love and love

to write and write and write

to weave and weave and weave
to mend and mend and mend
to fry and fry and fry

into the greasy corn fed

tortured bony chicken parts

of my carefree winsome youth

tra la...

casino poem

I'm sorry

but I want

a fucking

casino

I was that child at Ontario Place in 1971

that post adolescent in 1976 dizzied by the CN Tower

closeted on steel bridges dwarfing waves

marveling at cinesphere

flying over Lake Superior

by the steeply raked theatre seat of my pants

mesmerized by geo-desic domes

floating familial fun filled flotillas

hell bent on leading me nowhere

and now god dammit

I am done with all that

in my restless maturity

and I'm sorry

but I want

a fucking

casino!

one I can walk into, gamble a little

risk my life on sordid cocktails

morbid gleeful conversations with illicit strangers

lurid fashion choices threatening my tenuous grasp on proper casino attire

I was that child

And now I want to be that overgrown infant

Rummaging thorugh my filthy purse

Weeping into empty laps once filled with chips

Arm wrestling with one-arm bandits

Telling strippers that I love them deeply

Why do we always push the playgrounds for addiction into the margins

Relegate them to our deepest reservations about our ability

to manage our little first world pathologies - reservations we have already exploited and mismanaged with reconciliations that can never undo our risky colonization of the hearts and minds of many

Canada! Ontarry-arry-airy-ons!!! My God - I want a casino!

If we really want to help ourselves and pre-selected addicts

Then lets keep them close to home and off the highways leading to far off Orillian, Niagaran, Kawarthan slots and blackjack bistros loitering in the regions smirking at our uptight urban fear of more of what already lines the gut wrenching streets of our gorgeously garish tarnished cities

Oh God! Canadians! On-tarry-arry-aryans!

I’m sorry

But I want

A fucking casino!

A casino with provincially funded childcare

and free on site seminars for managing addiction

because they can be managed!!!

And when our governmentally challenged healthcare gambles our lives away and becomes the house of rising suns advertising on billboards that our civic duty lies in the carpeted corridors of casino castles equating family with a weekend of water slides wet bars wolf lodges bearing bare chesty daddys in the hotel lobby on their way to wave pools lined with plastic beaches like  some simulacric Waikiki with slots in the morning and slots at night

Then who are we kidding!

I am that child, and I fear for children and where they play as we push so-called sin into rural margins

Beware - it could flourish there - the management of all our urban fears - it could flourish there, swept under carpets in dusty faded margins

On farmland, in fields, it could flourish there, where children play…

Tampax tales

Tampax for me was always something

tucked into a paper bag my mother folded

and slid into in my pants pocket, early nineteen sixties, and said -

“give this to the cashier sweetheart,

and tell them to read the note inside,

but don’t look at it yourself, and don’t open the bag once they’ve filled it for you”

I don’t know if my mother ever figured out

that I can’t keep secrets

and when someone tells me not to do something I just do it

it was a short walk from our house to the strip mall

by the bowling alley and the barber shop to the Pharmacy

and those hot Italian barbers, the Adamo brothers

with the beautiful hairy necks that were sometimes shaven

clean when I went for a haircut as a child

and sometimes rippled with feathery waves of thin heavenly grasses

over the edge of their white barber collars

like slender black reeds on taut marshy seas of flesh

like an acre of night in the eyes of a curious child exploring heaven’s cellar

against dew dark skin

sweet swarthy sexy haiku

braying boyish lust

hushed by my timid manner

I saw their necks like I saw Tampax

sites of desire I didn’t understand yet lurking in secret spaces I was trusted with

so they would cut my hair

and sit me high on a flat bottomed wooden hobby horse that didn’t rock

to lift my little seven year old frame toward their manly scissors

one day I was sent to get my hair cut

alone and told to fill my mothers secret Tampax order after my haircut was done

Phil Adamo raised me high out of the hobby horse’s saddle

I pulled the money out of my pocket and the folded paper bag

fell on the floor and Phil Adamo bent over and picked it up

and said “what ya got in there little fella?”

I had looked in the bag already

and I had seen the word scribbled on the little square of paper

and I looked at his beautiful neck and felt strong, invincible

and I thought of the strange word Tampax

and I had no idea what I was looking at or what the word meant

it made me think of Ajax

a little town near where I lived

and I knew it was also the name of a cleaning product

named after a Greek hero

so I thought maybe Tampax was Greek too

and I wanted to sound smart and confident in front of that sexy barber

so I said -

“It’s Tampax for my mom

I get it for her all the time

I think it comes from Ajax named after a handsome Greek man”

the three other barbers

and their patrons

all looked up

startled uncomfortable and laughing

I was a timid child

blond and small

and no match for all the testosterone

assembled in that barber shop

that day

Phil Adamo, or one of his beautiful brothers,

had always lifted me into that hobbyhorse

but this day was a turning point

I was getting a little big for the lift

 and from that day on he let me get in and out myself

and wasn’t as friendly as he had always been

and my mother noticed he wasn’t as friendly to her too

 and didn’t comment on her nice new hot pant outfits 

like he used to when she first became a widow 

and I grew up fascinated with my mother’s body 

and men’s hairy necks and how sleek and lovely 

they looked when they trimmed that hair

and my father’s hairless chest was always a map of the world for me on Sunday mornings

crawling into bed with my parents and peering over the sleek exposed mounds

of his upper torso enchanted by geography I had yet to navigate and conquer

and the lacy edges of my mother’s night gown

frill and brawn inhabiting my little head, like myth and story

at such a tender age

like Greek Gods and the young men and older women who must have loved them

I think it all just made me want to have sex with men named Ajax

and women with secret folded notes

in barber shops who laughed at childish mythological stories about Tampax

and how my mother bathed me with her

when I was small enough to fit in the same bathtub

and her perfect breasts were like those shaved necks to me

It all just meshed together with thoughts of 

beautiful Italian barbers laughing at me

and growing out of child seats 

but never growing into manhood 

until I was almost middle-aged

forever that little boy

sent on his own at such a tender age

to play with adults

but never given proper instructions

just notes folded into flattened paper bags

and men who would never love me the way I dreamed Greek heroes ought to

sometimes it only gets better

when we unfold those notes ourselves

and refuse to keep secrets

and do what we’re told not to

and learn to love women bathing us like goddesses

half afraid but terribly curious in a Greek tragedy kind of way

of what we might find

In the luscious folded layers

of all these mythological bodies