Moldy Text

a furry growth of minute fungal hyphae occurring typically in moist warm conditions, especially on food or other organic matter. insta

[moldytext]

New Poetry Website

Hello all! I will be closing this blog down over the next few days. I have created a website (link above) and an instagram @moldytext for all farther posts. The website has been updated with all past works I’m still proud of -- the rest I will be storing away forever in a personal vault. :)  Thank you for following me and supporting me over the last decade or so. I hope you’ll follow me to the next thing!  I love you all, stay safe out there!

[moldytext]

Look, Man

I wake up every morning and I brush my teeth and in the mirror I say, look man, you can’t keep buying Tupperware and then leaving it at work. Tupperware is not an infinite resource and costs a surprising amount of money, you know this. Look man, you have condoms right in your top drawer. It takes five seconds to ask one of those guys who plays your guitar and who talks down to you for having a nine-to-five -- DOWN to you from his parents’ basement somehow -- look man. Do you want a baby? In the mirror I say, look man, you don’t actually have to wait 24 hours to do the dishes. You had mac n cheese it doesn’t need to soak, or it wouldn’t need to soak if you didn’t let the cheese solidify to your Ikea plates, become one with your Ikea plates overnight. What were you doing all evening anyway? Were you writing or were you sending screenshots of bad tinder profiles to your friends or were you spending money you don’t have on “experiences”. HEY – look man, I have to experience life before I write it. So did you write about last night? Well.

I don’t like blue toothpaste because it sticks to the sink and is marginally hard to wash down the drain. Look man, this is your life -- this is another day, starting your dreams dripping off your body as you step into the world. Look man, just start somewhere.  

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Capital Line

Reflected hard in the subway windows at night vacant, hunched figures propel homeward. How many times do I gaze out only to be met with the downturned faces of those inside bathed in the same yellow light.  I, too, illuminated in all of my losses -- count them, try to make out their shapes in the bag clutched tight in my lap. I feel the drag of my weight along the rail, howling, and still, I look out.

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hooks

Spitting out the hooks in your mouth is hard, because 1.) they’ve pierced your lips and not in the fun, fashionable way but in the way that makes you bleed and pulls at the wound, tearing, infecting, and making it hard to talk and 2.) without the hooks, what pulls you out of the water? The hooks, like some kinds of work, like some kinds of love, were actually anchored in the ground all along tethering your wretched, writhing body underwater but you didn’t know that. You didn’t notice that you were drowning. Where you’re from, you’re nothing if not hooked. Spitting out the hooks in your mouth is hard, because it still hurts to speak after -- in fact, it hurts to push up, follow the bubbles of your breath, and break the surface – gleaming light blinds you, fills your head, sounds you’d once forgotten, distance you couldn’t imagine -- and all around you, nothing. Open water.

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five months, give or take

You held him for a quarter of a year and grieved his presence the next half. You can't buy back that half any more than you would consider selling that quarter. A bird lands in your open palm so you freeze, hold your breath, and time stops. You observe each other. Inevitably some movement from within you or outside of you -- a shudder, a sound -- sends him flying. The world moves again and your open palm closes and falls to your side. Some day you will remember the imprint of his steps and you won't really think about his flight. Just one fragile moment when he came to you, and you held him.

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Summer of Double Shifts - Revised

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.

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The only thing I’ll write about you

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.

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The Turn of the Bad Year

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. 

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bridged considerations

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. 

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Work becomes the theme

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.

[moldytext]

A Sunday in May, Preserved

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.

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Marveling on New Year’s

The year coming to an end,  stumbling on a new set of feet than the one I walked in here with -- stomping and violent and careless. I’ve asked around and no one recognizes it.  No one can even get a good look -- it’s got its hands all over us, dirty thumbs pressed into our eye sockets  so we can’t even see ourselves or each other.  I don’t know about you, but  I don’t know where I stand with anyone least of all myself.  Trying to hold onto a plan  that the past year spun out of my hands and into something new entirely.  Can remnants still have a purpose?  How long have I been this before time spelled it out for me with perfect clarity?

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Retail

The stock’s coming down In boxes off the bridge -- six years of minimum wage added up -- and off the bridge, six years of the same shit coming down.  You can only sit on the same shelf so many times. Six years on minimum wage doesn’t leave any residue of your work; no sweat to pour into savings so the stock’s coming down off the bridge. It’s on clearance, it’s gotta go. 

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Summer of Double Shifts

The sand in my work shoes today dug its way by the spoonful into my soles after a double shift last night. Closing that second job at 9:30 -- 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. Kept in step with my coworkers into the night. Adults – pay-earning – with varying numbers of bills, we find our way to a playground and swing back and forth much in the same way we’re forging our paths: undecided, repetitive, childishly mundane, but our feet are off the ground and, washed in the low light of streetlamps, we are moved to state with new certainty that we are living.

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The April Melt

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.

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The Season to Settle

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 forgott’n 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.

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Let it Happen

On the floor, I take stock of it -- the light on the ceiling burning tired thoughts of turning it off behind my eyes. On the floor, as though knocked down, I open my arms, I take stock of it -- wrapped up in the feeling of now and its angry connection to then and its desperate connection to a later time. On the floor, I have not moved but I have, I have! Out there, I have broken over this side and that, and pushed through walls, and walked through the open doors that were offered to me in grace. I am simultaneously grateful and boiling with hot resentment and ever grieving. On the floor, I imagine tomorrow and I compare it with other tomorrows turned yesterdays that never once kept pace with my imaginings. On the floor, I am not held in the moment any more than the moment was promised to me. When something comes together it’s not because someone like me assembled it with unfaltering fingers. On the floor, I can feel the earth’s rotation in my bones, I am moved and just once, I allow it.