Bleeding the Vine's Breast
Category Archive

Politician’s Lament

By Joshua Chalifour, 6 October 2008

I got something the other day.
After a glass of x knows what
and four men had to haul the
logs out of the corner, we
all might say we got something—
But really, it was I, I got it.

It started when the king fell
over. “No way to play chess”
I said,
referring mostly to myself.
But I hadn’t pushed him
and indeed not [...]

Interpersonal Telescopic

By Joshua Chalifour, 1 March 2008

Starting off in the distance, where the gelatinous ocean rose in spots and dipped in others, waves rolled. Each following another as it finally dispersed itself into the fine sandy shore. One wave followed another but each grew again in the same place. It was impossible to follow one and not feel it also somehow [...]

Midnight Lost its Magic, #1

By Joshua Chalifour, 20 February 2008

Midnight lost its magic.
The parties decease without happiness
just Boredom.

A skinny, unwashed boy yells at
the wrong windows.

He’d serenade her if he
could find her.

Doesn’t matter that he can’t
since any other window’ll do

Type Write

By Joshua Chalifour & Heather McLaughlin, 11 November 2007

Ever thought about a typewriter? The kind of thinking where you separate it all out, making it type writer. Then go on with type, just on its own. Type, type is what you see right here, in front of you. It’s a type of type too. Times, probably. Times type. What type of thinking is [...]

Fourteen Things to Do with a Drunken Slipper

By Joshua Chalifour, 14 October 2007

1) Knock (together) on the side of a fishtank–they won’t mind, even at 2 AM
2) Puddles, immersive treatments to all the world’s puddles
3) Treat it to a bedtime story
4) Show the crook of your shoulder to a good friend and the slipper; then they’ll have something in common
5) Lie down outside someone else’s disco and [...]

Donned in Details

By Joshua Chalifour, 19 August 2007

He went around the side of the house and climbed over a broken fence. Climbing it was easy, the fence gave way, giving him way, and soon he’d stepped through enough waist-deep shrubs and weeds to gather their briars, hooks, and brown hitch-hiking bits from his pants for a bouquet of prickly plumes, which he [...]

Parks before Spring Notebooks

By Joshua Chalifour & Heather McLaughlin, 15 April 2007

Four sets of photos, sketches, and text accomplished in four different Montreal parks (fifteen minutes each). First day of Spring.

Meditation, Passage Climbing a Good Hour

By Joshua Chalifour, 17 March 2007

On the night before, I slept very little to ensure I’d sleep the next night. That next night held a flight–an entire night mixed up with invisible hands batting our poor vessel about the sky.
Piano sound carries itself
winking uponaround three flights of interwoven logs:
Trees petrified in
preservation of [...]

Cheering Absurd Funnel of Resonance

By Joshua Chalifour, 6 February 2007

A cold polished stone
lolls on my tongue.
I curl the edges,
rolling the stone to the center
cradling it in a
sway of undulating
taste buds.

My tongue spoons
this sip of scotch,
rolling it
like a flaming
dollop of viscous honey,
down my throat–
yellow and round
an invisible note
of buoyant Bosch.

Nightmare of the Somniferumfly

By Joshua Chalifour & Heather McLaughlin, 12 August 2006

In mad flits, sobered strain above calm
Lepidoptera flew to avoid his enbalm.
He’d escape one true perish
Some deer devils’ ripe anguish,
But through circuits they’d track with aplomb.

Reading Jules et Jim on My Balcony

By Joshua Chalifour, 14 July 2006

Neither young nor old,
as Hispanic melodies reverberate
from a temporary sunday’s
Colombie in the park,
A man and woman
South heading a little way. arms
Full of boxes (two each)
filled with
thick glass Clicks,
in lock step with
their side-by-side gait.

(Black pansies and rose begonias
rustle near my toes,
using their surrounding breath fronds
to [...]

Scorching Sun Express Post

By Joshua Chalifour & Heather McLaughlin, 5 July 2006

With deep voices, camels crawl systematically on a wire that stretches from our start to their finish. We paid for tickets and laundered the first money to get rid of our dirty pockets. Because an urban rhythmist said that some understand, we’d thought we could ride these camels into the sunset.

We also signed up for [...]