Driving the Gardiner

Driving the Gardiner
is how the Christian virtues died

like noble old sages too pure and
patient, they let four vehicles merge in

front before they got rear ended and
ended. Driving the Gardiner

is a monastic event or some kind of
secular pilgrimage given that

we don't have a Cluny in Ontario
and France's crumbles like the Gardiner

the French one being where the refectory used to
serve pea soup and they put mustard on everything.

How much money did the Cluniac Order receive
from the provincial government? I hope it

covered the costs of fixing the leaky spot in the
porter's house, where water drips in without

asking permission or showing its driver's
license and pisses on manuscripts. Driving the Gardiner

gives you a terrific sense of impotence like
you feel when the abbot gets tired of waiting

for you to orgasm and he puts his habit back on.
The King of England gave him a chalice last

September, just before they closed the left lane
for 3 kilometres between Jameson and Spadina

and put up a sign saying CONSTRUCTION
along with some barricades and traffic cones

The sign ends with a hopeful deadline,
will be completed by The Rapture.

Happy

Soft happy thing
stolen from the wilderness bred and perfected
like an ideal strain, eugenics of happy softness
feels and thinks and moves and it is slave
to us and to our same desires only without
so much extraneousness.
Happy to be noticed to shit and not be beaten
to eat and not be attacked
secluded in a grove of artificiality
cut off from its Darwinian goal
too mortal
Is that what makes it Happy
or Beautiful?

Charcoal

Charcoal trap crushes dead matter, 
kindled bones and remains
raw black warmth and wetness, 
the charcoal crumbling like biscuits
tea-time traditions, oracles read leaves 
and stare in fires, a wet kettle boils, 
cook-cave shapes and cookie-cutter,
dead hairs and nails, bits of bone 
rubbed to shine like golf clubs.
Charcoal feast to ashen feast, 
wet gullets swallow and whimper.

Ringed larynx ridges, 
wedding bands to speech, 
constrict around undiamonds.
Shuffle it all with the poker, 
players, until he bleeds and 
vomits like 
an old train 
chugging charcoal.

Contact

Martian crackling ridges

grind, grind (silently)

nothing

something

nothing.

Light moth whispers and

dim fires smokeless.

Something followed by

something – the stir of some

decision reached

whale-like with the patience

of old deities, some Zeus

opens his eyes, beholds &

begins to awaken the world, sends

chariots of electricity across the sky

an instant eternity, optimized

to await contact.

First signal back – O, we have found them!

They chitter, signals rumble

wash in from the void

bottled scripts, interpreted by our

priest, bearded, reverent

formulating replies, divining

what it is they— what do they now—

the firmament shimmers like ancient silk

a little man in a box moves the spotlight center-stage

coughing in time with the flicker.

Baby

Baby grow shoots and vines and leaves and nooks where chipmunks hide where thoughts dwell deep cold inside warm-hearted warm-blooded man or woman in the making growing taking time stretching forward like a great long snake like a python wrapped around a world it means to take eat eat eat feed and suckle from the teat the tits of the world sag from so many babies still to feed but more come and come thanks to come and come seeds begotten in the sun grown big and scarce begun but what will it mean when all is done? What did the baby want or need? What did the parent want or need? What hungers does it need to feed when it longs to breed and breed? Why is it so cute and small and frail and waiting just to learn waiting to receive the font of knowledge the pen of ink which strikes the page which burns blue blood into a clear white field of wonderment and laughter and tears and blood and spit. What is the point of the pen that carves the sigils into the eyes of the baby and the soul it grows? Vines and shoots and leaves stretch forward like garden snakes looking for flies or whatever garden snakes eat. Why is the baby there? What is this defenseless thing this mushy soft blob of light and glory – where is the glory anyway in such an individual individual who has nothing no concepts or preconceptions or post-conception, only its conception which staples it to life like so many ink-stained pages, only these ones are blank except a few notes, a header maybe, with some pointers like “black” or “Hungarian” or “working class” and some recommended cultural norms to indoctrinate the child well. My child will not need indoctrination – it will be fine, very fine as it grows on the vine, as it picks the fruit from the tree of knowledge and explodes its world and then declines and declines and declines until it sits writing lines and lines into its pages a memoir perhaps before it all goes and the world collapse swallows it up into the realm of death and memory and nonexistence where I wait and wait and patiently wonder what the point was of having the baby at all when like snakes crawling through gardens we wish to disturb and shake and upset the scholarship of our wise tutors the ones with books and notes and rulers who want to show us the path to follow and what virtues to discard and what vices to wallow in what apologies to give and why by the end it’s still not good enough will it ever be can you ever be more pretentious than the phrase “human misery” I doubt it honestly and sincerely, as babies will keep being begotten and grow from cute cherubs to ugly sprites and headless ghosts will haunt the nights after they all go forth and find “the lights” of heaven or some other place like a motel on a highway late at a night after a long long drive and there’s no reception you can’t get a hold of the spouse back at the house you can’t get a hold of the boss or the mother or the father or anything or anyone because you’re gone and the baby’s come. You’re replaced or just on standby, since it never made sense and you never got the answers, so maybe they’ll come later growing fast like cancers and dancing beautifully like dancers around the mind mind’s eye maybe but first let us examine this baby this gift of god with small bones and little ears what will we tell it when it’s grown why is it so fucking special. What don’t you know how beautiful creation is how powerful it is that once they told one another it wasn’t even biological it was fucking theological creation starts with a gift from one more powerful than an elephant or a snake. But it was all a lie the stork and all as babies are just pumping and growing for a few long months a few blips of time and then bang pow whiz boom a Child Is Born and deck the halls and cast out your swords because human life is the only binder the only solitary reminder it’s all one and the same since you all live and you all came. And the babies go and that is the saddest loss, that they did not experience everything like us – oh if only they experienced everything like us – except all the things we did not experience or did not care to repeat so let us give the child a path skip the thorns and get straight to the roses because life, dear child, is transitory and though it may stretch out like an endless road an endless sea where whales slowly churn the waves and black bubbles of seething heat erupt deep down in the abyss it is not so deep and you are not so young, fresh one. Newborn and we’ll leave a place in your grave for the umbilical just in case. Don’t go yet, we’ll baptise first to make ourselves clean of this disgrace this disappointment of humanity that we brought you into – woops – you’re stuck now because we love you and can’t bear to see you go since we wanted your company. There’s billions of us but we needed someone just for ourselves, it’s selfish but true like all things human like you since you too are selfish and true and real and with hands and feet and a functioning pair of lungs we hope we pray to god you have everything you need since life gets much much much worse without the starter kit though it’s certainly doable I wouldn’t recommend it. But I’ll commit no matter how you turn out because I’ll fucking love you baby. Maybe I’ll love me too and your mother and all the world over all the babies that grow and all the snakes that watch it happen beside the cribs. No need for Herculantics baby that snake is you in a few years’ time stretched out and still hungry still wishing for the simpler time when you were just a baby sorry but it fades away but it does become invigorated by more babies, more babies I say! Fill the pool until all I see is giggling faces and pudgy feet then open the drain and wave goodbye to humanity in a bathtub. Baby and the bathwater caress one another atop the sea as we stare out into the abyss and say to one another, “We should have a baby. There’s never enough time for immortality.”