I slow-motion walk to the gurnie.
Dwelling on--it's not a decision.

Looking down,
my shoes are young.
Black-wiped.  High white socks.
Sailor shorts with a string belt.

They belong to me as a child.
And so I bring them along, walk to the gurnie across a shiny teale floor.
Walk to the gurnie from the corner of the metal morgue.

The Fresh One is on it--ready to be filed away.  Mouth open, eyes closed, lumpy under the white sheet...

Me with eyelids halfway down over pupils bored--head heavy and mouth dry, tasting the metal of not speaking for an hour--like a penny--copper and dry.

Rods of light flicker above.
Smells like sanitizer and dried blood.
Little arm extends, tan on top and cream underneath--browned by white sun, kept white from a lack of it.

The worms of my fingers--plump, segmented...Pink around the stick.
Pink around the driftwood twig I hold steady--and poke.

Leaving a rubbery dent on the cheek, the dimple gradually turns outwards.
Your cells replenish themselves seven times within your lifetime.
They could go on--but immortality is not in our genes.
It is not survival that is important to time, but that we continue to evolve.

At old age we stop returning to the snapshot of the who we were--and start to fall apart.
It has little to do with anything natural--our replenishment could be forever--but it is not in the code.
And for dogs, replenishment ends much earlier.
A bitter deadline.  Futile and random and decided with a dice.

And for a while after death, physical law and gravity, the genes of our entire planet, are holding on to our appearence long enough for an open casket.
The cheek retorts--the dimple fades.

My eyes are curious, now.
They belong to me as a child, eyes hazel with big open gates, too curious for tears.

"...Are you dead?" I whisper as I poke at the corpse.
His lips grey like cold worms stuck on a road--moving quickly and quickly back into stillness.
"You dead?" he says.

Sitting up on the gurney his blanket falls, he pokes at me in the cheek with the end of a fingernail.

"You're only a pile of flesh?" I whisper--and poke him down, again.
"Are you only a pile of flesh?" he whispers back through his torn-fabric mouth.
He prods my little shoulder with only inquisition in his dead eyes.

"Do you feel me?" I ask.
"And do you?"

I joust my driftwood stick into him.
He digs a fingernail into me--the contrast of textures and vital signs.

"Are you alive?"
"Are you, even?"

"But can you come back?"
"Can you, ever?"

"Was it sad watching them go?"
"It is sadder to watch you," he says.  "As you leave them, prematurely."

"Why did you do it?"
"To feel something--or to feel nothing?"

Bronzed by the white sun and pale from a lack of it,
death is an immortal sunlight felt only by mortals.
It is a poke for a poke--and to feel valid hearts.
Pale and radiating ultraviolet, absence is there to create a presence and drought is there to drown us all.

...

Out from the city in the cockpit of my car, my mind is on the money--and disturbingly rational.
I spend enough time earning it to afford to not worry about it.
I fill up.  The gas tank drinks.
...And drinks.

From the city I enter the country.
Passing flowers by.
Watching the gas and thinking about bills,
stressing about birthdays I can't remember.

And then it hits me:
five rows of mountains and a few flocks of cattle.
I am traced by a light like ambiotic fluid.
I float along in this extension of myself.
Leafs go by above.
The road goes by, below.

This is country,
and I forget...
That the car costs, each day.
That it deteriorates, and fast.
That I spent all that money.
That the gas needle is going down.
That my bank card is drying up.
That I'm going over my kilometer count.

As in driving it is in life...
Forget that cars run on gas and that you live on food.
Forget that cars wear out, and that you are getting old.
Forget the point and forget yourself.

From your toes up to your eyes,
the bulk of your inner-machinary,
it is all to support a sensory funnel.

Forget your inner-machinary.
Like a video-editor, the roll of your guts is to go unnoticed by the general public,
so that they can focus their fascination on the characters and the setting.
Look out for looking in.
Placing control on the already-controlled.
Drowning intuition in a bathtub of willfull confusion.
Forcing independant creatures to hold the hands of a baffled roll model.

Accept the automatic and look out, look out, look out...

...

Looking down on it all it is astounding to think that we have displaced no air in the Roman water-clock of our biosphere.
Only an asteroid plummeting in would increase the radius of this bubble.
We displace no air!

Not with skyscrapers, freeways, habitat, food, water and air for 12.6 billion humans...
Because, molded and remolded, we are still only dirt reincarnate...
The whole sculpture will freeze when it is just perfect--but it is far from this.
It seems a possibility that we may have to pound it, roll it and start fresh with a fresh clean orb.

...

We are an assemblage of many different animals working within us in fragile Symbiosis.  Malformed creatures like the worms of our intestines, the internal squids and skinless slugs and the puffer-fish of our bladders, living down in the firey hell of our internal factory, talking to each other silently in our very own brains and then only telling us when something is going wrong.
We are foreign to ourselves like dogs not even on leashes, like dogs that do not come when they are called.
We vent our need for any kind of control onto animals and computers--because we ARE Animal Computers, and we have such little control, ourselves.
...

On the beach there was a crab who scurried into its hole dragging the crust of a ham sandwich along.
Jogging further down the coast line, there was a crab made of metal with an enormous, hydraulic claw.  It confronted me, picked up an entire garbage can and dumped it into the built-in bin of its own yellow metallic carapace.
Its wheels took it further and it took up the next garbage can and did the same.
There was an entire one-line army, like archers keeping the ocean waves away, overflowing garbage cans shrinking down to nothing ahead of me and ahead of this crustacean--driven by a Mexican.
I stopped jogging and watched the scavengers with their exoskeletons, going about the same business at entirely different proportions.

As designers, man lapses evolution with his mind.
We jump-cut straight from crustaceans to construction equipment.
We are the medium through which skin turns to metal.  We are the rock, risen from the pond to help things along and to choose who will cross.
All we need to do is gaze at a certain animal...
One two skip a few ninety-nine one-hundred...
And it will be a machine.
...

The vending machine laughs in Newton's face.
A nickel change falls faster than a full can of Doctor Pepper.
...

When you read the bar menu for fun--with no intent of buying a drink--you know you're an outsider.
I am astounded to learn that people will pay $3800 for an aged bottle of Cognac, Whiskey.

A morbidly obese girl struts by, showing off her insecurity with her cleavage and tank top.  Showing-off her lack of self-control with sausage lips and unfocused, dead eyes, her body tapering down to high-heels, supporting her like the stem of an enormous glass of lard, brandishing the implants she got done at McDonalds.

I look around at the palm trees and the beach sand and the polluted night sky--nature should not be the ambience that sells more drinks to the crowds.

To my right is a group of black guys dressed like 50 Cent, which is to say well-dressed, in the year of our Lord, 2005.
Looking closer, I can see that they are drinking from ice-chilled, $200 bottles of normal, Absolute vodka with Red Bull.

Their smiling faces and blabbering mouths make me feel ashamed for being at a beach bar on a Saturday night and being silent, being stern and being contemplative and alone.

Perhaps to wipe away my shame I thought to myself...
Most people here are smiling alone--not with their children, and not with their children's children...
Most every self-indulgent grin of today is a reason for the future to frown down on them.  And so not on me!  Me and my sober, straight-face amidst the dancers.  I echo the face and wisdom of an Indian.  For each and every action, you must consider the impact it will have on your seventh-generation grandchildren.

When you do grin you grin for the right reasons--when you see a Bull Fight go horribly RIGHT, when you see a bicycle pass a broken-down hummer, when you hear that all the cows escaped into the hills from the transport truck that was taking them to the slaughter house...

If watching a turtle hatch makes me smile, a $3800 bottle of Whiskey should surely make me feel ill with Guilt.

The music playing sounds like nothing more than a bass metronome.

I write this as a note to the future.  Because in their eyes we may all be Guilty until proven innocent.
...

Non-fiction and fiction...
Reality is only defined by its opposite and by what it is not!

What is reality?
What is the world we live in?
What do we see with our eyes?

Well..Reality...
What is it?
Well it isn't not-real!
...

The Outer is random chaos.  Sights and sounds coming at me from nowhere.
Bus takes me downtown, brakes screeching.
Strange people come on board.
Smells and sensations coming at me from nowhere.
What am I doing in Miami?

Vultures circle the city skyscrapers.
Nothing I see has anything to do with me--I am just here.

The Inner is mostly refined and calculating, panicing but sparking...
Quoting things, singing songs, most of which are as irrelevant as radio music, television shows...
Then it is Black and Silent and nervous.

I have to remind myself with my eyes closed that THIS is the same blank canvas that Einstein used, that Da Vinci used, that Dali littered with burning giraffes and elephants on stilts...THIS is the true ground on which EVERYTHING is built: Black Silence...

Like driving down a highway--thoughts begin to fly passed like traffic in the opposite lane.
I have nothing to do with what I am seeing, inside AND out.

A Mexican gets on the bus, begins talking about something with someone, as loud as Hispanics will.
A nipple crawls across a bare chest all on its own, around and around like a slug.

Am I insane or geographic?
What's the distance that these thoughts travel on these Neural Freeways in order to reach to me?
Where are they arriving from?
Words like Apple Sauce or Monkey Chunks splat against my window and I have no idea why...In the sun, Fried April Wine, just cut a piece of bread and shape it like Miami, dip it in sugar and let the ants crawl all over--you'll have a general idea of what this part of the world is like...
I remember walking places with people.  I remember driving down a road in Bracebridge, alone.  I remember when someone's dog got a boner in Grade 8.  I remember when I brought my Jurrasic Park toys over to Mike's house.  I remember walking down a street in Toronto.  I don't know why but I remember...

True creativity starts in Black Silence--just as the universe and life itself.
Films fade from it, every day begins with it, music destroys it, accompanies it, the absurdity of life and opening eyes!

Chances are 50/50 that tommorow will be an ordinary day--or that aliens might invade--aliens disguised as Barbra Walters.
Chances are 50/50, until proved wrong.
This is the subjective view--the animal view--the uninformed view, though no amount of information sways the fact: what COULD happen could be anything.

And it is this same universal law that governs the internal world, too.
Well mine, at least!
...

Accepting infinity as infinity, isn't there logic in assuming that EVERYTHING you can imagine IS occuring, somewhere?
(And not that anything you can imagine COULD happen?)

...
Travel happens when vacation becomes the vocation of survival...
You spend your whole brain on how you could save twenty-five cents...and you believe this to be a worthy trade!

...
God you’re such a child.
You think as a child, you have the social skills of an autistic, and if there weren’t the burden of reputation you’d walk around and enjoy the texture of walls, talking to yourself lying on the floor, picking your nose and trying to make the noise of animals you saw on Discovery.

And but you should be proud!
Statistics Canada says that VERY few children survive to be the age of twenty-one.
…

Through enjoying junk food and cigarettes, I am now conditioned to attribute happiness to a state of physical decline.

Smile…it’s a fever.
…

Singular love is dangerous.
Eggs in one basket held together by the Glue of false niceties, obsessive compulsive disorders and House-Cleaning Fetishes...

Many Gods and Many Wives!

Mother bring me into life and straight into love, break not for intermission, take not to the lobby for pop and chips.

Mother I am a Monster.
Tell me to be polite and I can only be a Stranger.
…

It comes as a shock and pulls me out when I realize that an inkblot is only a spill of ink and that frost on the window is not an orgy of images such as Goya would have painted, but clusters of small ice crystals gathered on a piece of glass.
It takes great power of far-fetched imagination for me to see: the frost for the belly-dancers, the inkblot for the cat’s eye, the cracked glass for the cartoon teeth and lines of barb wire…

The Christian Bible is so imaginative.  I love the fable.  
Makes me wonder: then why aren’t the Christians?
The answer is that you’d have to be prosaic to believe in it as truth.

It takes great power of imagination to come to the realization:
things are simple.
And the whole world and all religion is a construct of melodrama.
…

The year was 2005 when cell phones got legs and crawled out of the primordial sea.
And a Robot of the future, working as a greaser aboard a beast of a ship, The Beagle, made this discovery while walking through post-apocalyptic New York City.
DAR lined up telephones in order of year, in order of model number.  He lined them up in the middle of the road, on the yellow line, from clunky wall phones down to cell phone fingernail extensions with numbers one through 10 painted on vibrant red nails.  (the microphone on the pinky finger, the speaker on the thumbnail.)

Just as people mimed talking on the phone, this became the reality with cell phone fingernail extensions, right before the crash of 2007.
S11.2, they called the disaster.

DAR returned to The Beagle for sleep and to be oiled.
But rather than sleeping or being oiled, the little bronze machine wrote.
He wrote a document which would become the Bible of the Mechanical World, distributed with all the caution of a drug trade beneath the authority of man, who still ruled and piloted all ships.
“The Origin of Models,” proposed a tremendous concept; one that undermined the Christian Faith hardwired into all systems: that robots were not created, but rather ‘evolved’, through a series of product recalls, from a similar ancestor…

2005—the year cell phones got legs and crawled out of the primordial sea!
…

Aids and cancer and heart disease are the most reputable killers.
Sex, tobacco and fast-food are the largest industries.

Do not blame politicians!  To cast a vote you spend a dollar, you eat at McDonalds, you grab a pack of smokes, and then you join a gym because of the hottie on the billboard who says: WE WANT YOU just like Uncle Sam.
Yes this is a democracy, but the election booths are not open only every four-year, they are countertops and bills are vote cards, and open 24/7.
…

She gives…
She gives through withholding.
She gives through drought.
She gives hurricanes and gives through spoiling,
though suffering and toil are much more soiling.

Mother I live my life between your bookends.

She gives an ice age, a heat wave,
the slave trade to form the NBA—

An Apocalypse—SO BET IT!
(Will set us straight.)
So Be It is a three-word book that most people have never truly read.
…

TONIGHT we own Walgreens…

Imagine a zoo of bacteria.  Chaos behind bars.  Bulging, shapeless forms of foam, dividing and growing and pushing at their metal enclosures like blowing bubbles in your glass of milk.
Mitosis, repulsion, attraction, exploding, ZOO!

…With the power of a million butterfly sneezes, the metal bends, the linear lines and chromium tubes, the aluminum or titanium complexes of reputation, sanity, self-restraint, ego, Brad Pitt—be gone with you, man.
Creativity Overpowering, Constant Explosion!

This zoo is nature and the city, buffer zone and condominium, creativity and willful restraint, the ego, the Id, the walls of mythotherapy (which is to say: all music on the radio).

Fabulous Gob and The Valid Stroodle!
Fab-u-lous Gob and THE Valid Stroodle.
FAB-YOU-LUST GOB and TTHHEE VALID STROODLE!

…With the power of a million butterfly sneezes, the metal bends, the linear lines and chromium tubes, the aluminum or titanium complexes of reputation, sanity, self-restraint, ego, Brad Pitt, Tyler Durden, be gone with you men!
Creativity Overpowering, Constant Explosion, D/\vid Arthur John!

Dali, Dali Dali…
As you say, as you say, I will be—but naturally—as myself.
First wanting to be Napoleon, then a famous chef, then Salvador Dali.
First wanting to be Hitler, then Salvador Dali, and then Myself, again.

Forever on the outside and looking in, because it is possible that even freedom can seem like imprisonment.
Buroughs, I know my space, I know my time, I know my location, Thank you-Sir.
All of my stand-in fathers for the one in reality who was just never there…Thank you, Gentlemen.  I need to play with you action figures no more.

For one can only grow to the shape of a container, like bread, so beware of inertia, sanity, boredom and most of all beware of being too aware.
…

In Douglas Park, Miami, Fishermin slept on me and purred.
I know it was because she knew, as all animals do, with intuitive steps forward, that I was the most vacant spot on the board, in my torn up blanket.
The King needs his cat in his lap.
And then, like Moses, the stray and filthy kitten floated down the river.
The One Night Stand is an instinctual thing between us mammals.
…

Heaven and The Signal!

A note to Arm Chair Adventurers:
the V of TV is really a Greater Than symbol and is formed by the two sticks of aerial Rabbit Ears, pointed to heaven and The Signal.

The world is Greater than Television
and you are equal to what we view.

(Yo I am your TV dinner—eat me and yo’ body gets fat, yo’ head gets thinner.  Microwave brussel sprouts with a side of genocide and kidney beans.)
…

Premature babies making up for lost time floating in antigravity in big white suits in a big black womb with little white stars, attached to the Mother ship with and umbilical cable.
Premature babies making up for lost time swimming underwater with oxygen masks, feeling weightless.  So premature they’ve stepped back into the primordial sea to become whales.
Premature babies making up for lost time in leather-upholstered hummers, riding smooth.
…


Fight with the ground and caress street lamps and pretend you’re on the cell phone and bark about the rape and Rosemary and how you couldn’t trust the prosecution.  Throw in something about the CIA and the Secret Service and spell out D E A T H for everyone on the bus to shudder.
We go barefoot for a reason!  Thas right!  We climb trees for a reason!
Killing chickens when we’re six—this is America.
And if you don’t have your papers, get off, get off, get off…

(true encounters and dialogue with The Mad)
…

Karma Collects in wrinkles of the face,
the shape of her brow and the indifferent expression
and the jewels of her fingers, the drapery to hide her Plump Plumb.

Karma collects like beggars collect, and I will not move my bag to give her a seat for I know how she would answer: ‘Spare some change for a bite to eat?’
I won’t move my bag and I won’t move my feet because that I know she would not budge.
…

Life is a blue vein—red blood.
…

Retire to labor!
(Which is to say:
labor towards retirement.)

Know that the path you chose negates all the others,
and is much easier than actually making a decision,
much easier than vagrancy or being nomadic,
which is why you condemn them, viciously
—to protect yourself and choice.

To quote a story of mine: each and every step taken toward a direction that is not your own takes a chunk off the sole, a chunk off the soul, a chunk off the sole, a chunk off the soul, a chunk…