A Very Good Day for Turtles is a fantastic children’s story, which is now available for purchase from Lulu. Wondering why turtles don’t hurry anymore? Mr. Clark’s poetic fable of a few precocious turtles offers an answer. The illustrations, a Gomez/McLaughlin collaboration, enhance the story with their imaginative light and leave the lasting impression of playful myth.

I’m not just calling attention to A Very Good Day for Turtles because the people that made it are close to me (and I happened to have had a pet turtle as a child). I love the book and know its creators put a lot of care into it, which is obvious the moment you read it.

A Very Good Day for Turtles

“Ugly! Eyesore! How could people think it was a good idea?” A giant slab of concrete in the middle of the outer edge of the park. For shame, city! This was no sculpture, I thought.

Monument between Parc La Fontaine and Sherbrooke

Why preserve and move the edge of a utilitarian-designed building to the park? If the rest of the building had been demolished, why save this? What a hoax this artist made.

Every day I passed the thing, monument of ugliness. Every day, for months, I felt the same about it.

The other evening though, I had an aesthetic transformation. Over the course of approaching it, passing it from the sidewalk, and reflecting on it, I suddenly loved the thing.

Between the park and the rest of the city–this monument. The side facing the city is straight, segmented like an uninspired, generic modern building. A corner of its simple, mundane concrete at a right angle.

The side facing the park is jagged and uneven. It looks like it was torn from a larger structure. Or intentionally left unfinished. It has a slice of blue paint running through it as well.

Could the straight, uniform side represent the city it faces, while the jagged side represents the “nature” it faces? The monument appears as though it’s part of a larger wall, surrounding the park and framing the divide between human-made structures, and those of the non-human, chaotic natural world. But let’s not forget that a park, no matter how much vegetation it has, is planned by humans and can hardly be raw nature. Of course, even the jagged part of the monument is human-produced so this fits the metaphor of the site. That’s how I decided I’d fallen in love with this piece of art.

In fact for several days, I admired the thing whenever I passed it. Finally, I noticed a plaque nearby. Why hadn’t I ever noticed it before? It explained the monument, a gift and commemoration, and nothing to do with my new aesthetic reading.

Was I impressed that this monument could eke its way inside me and strike that shift in my perception? Was it a function of time and familiarity? I puzzle with this. Or have I projected the aesthetic transformation on to it? Can I love it in spite of the plaque or does the plaque require me to go back to the beginning?

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 a single other
	game had finished,
	so they said. I saw a
	few pretty close to that
	viperously invisible path,
		which just grows .

That's why I thought, I'd go
chopping—chopping up growth and piling it somewhere to use later.
	someone writes redly in books about that sort of thing.

The leaves fell, big, while
	I chopped.

Soon kings slumped,
	their strong trunks
	chinked, their roots grappling
far underground, supporting
what wouldn't need support.

Or did the roots hold
Earth to its spacey sheets?

I stacked the logs for later
as I mentioned, in the corner, and propped myself
	at their base, unsure
who else had seen them;
so many.
I heard the kings whisper,
"That was someone else's
strategy."

Starting this project, I had no idea where it would go.

Yet on days like today, I joke that I’m almost there.

No doubt I’ll make it, once almost there won’t be.

Happy birthday, me.

1. Caught in a substance imperceptible to humans, like a spider-spun web (as their web substance certainly must be to insects). We go about our lives. One day Bill walks into the substance (the web) scarcely perceiving it. Months pass and he notices his struggle with increased workplace stress. It’s uncanny his desire for fried fat-laden food, ever greasier. Some people remark on his disinterest in physical fitness. Until the heart attack. People’ll say those elements caused the heart attack. But the elements didn’t. They were only indications of having walked into that invisible web—time experienced in a different scale from the predator—and the heart attack? The death bite. A possibility attested by the trap.

2. The air around my flesh, feels to me, indistinguishable from the way water around a fish’s scales, feels to the fish. I must constantly be wary of hooks.

3. God’s abattoir: Earth. Humans talk about an all-seeing, all-knowing, wise God. Of course, nobody understands why little Dana, the age-three tragedy of Brome, had to die of a particularly virulent flu. They’ll say that in God’s wisdom there was a reason. Marcus, age 102 on the other hand, lived a life of acme quality. He fell asleep Tuesday evening and never awoke. And the stutteringly handsome Vincent, back in the day, contracted syphilis—so efficient those sorts. God gets hungry. Or if not God, a few of God’s customers need nourishing. God claims it’s the most humane method of slaughter, which they believe. Humans get to go about living, relatively unaware of what’s in store. No one escapes Earth. But come time for a tender young dish, God readies the flu machinery. Customers demanding something aged to fashionable ripeness encourage God to dispatch more disease, swiftly and efficiently handling the stock.

4. Birdcall serves the ominous function of death siren. We get lazy, we humans. The birds singing, we enjoy or marvel. But there is one, always one designated per person. We let our guard down over the millennia. Birds know it. Birds stick around, calling, trilling, chirping, singing, etc. making us used to their sound. We lost our ability to hear only what we choose. We hear everything now, only selecting some things for consciousness. But we hear it all nonetheless! So there’s that one unique bird, paired with its person, just waiting for its moment. That bird may land or fly nearby. Maybe it’ll wait in a tree or build a nest by one’s home. The moment one hears its song, is the last. Hearing that sound affects one’s singular solo decrescendo into death. Do the birds cheer one another? Are birds satisfied or joyous in their duty? One must practise choosing not to hear one’s paired bird.

5. Waking and dreaming as states of life: the parenthesis between death and inverted potential. While the wakeful may arouse the dreaming, I’m anxious to encounter the counterpart of the wakeful in the inverted potential that accompanies my death.

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 slipped back to where it started–rolling like stripes on an old barbershop pole.

She sat on her towel, partially reclining against her elbows. The paperback du jour (holding the misfortunes of an Indian orphan) rested patiently by her side. She’d read a quarter of it before inserting her bookmark, a fading taxi receipt. The sun beamed beautifully but not too hot. She chose not to go into the water. Even though she’d taken a dip before reading, she needed to stare a bit longer. Ocean air floated through her nostrils, surrounding her thoughts with particles of all that floated on the waves. Continue »

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

I am not an expert at the following ten items. I am unlikely to become an expert at these because I bear no desire for expertise at these, much less much else.

1. Slavery without adhesive
2. Collecting litres of mud
3. Pirate ideas
4. Prognosticating the colours of life
   or the wailing songs thereof
5. Forgetting all the unwanted premonitions
6. Ice impermeable to slippery children
7. Commissioned murders
8. Round quarters
9. Neutral drugs that don’t even nudge
10. Alien statesmen that recite chaos as poetry

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 that? The type you think all the time. The type that differentiates. Two verbs go with it. There’s the type that you read but before that you must type it, with your fingers. Well, if that’s what you’re doing, you could very well be a type writer typing a type of times type at a typewriter.

Tick tick tap…

She said "you come from the earth and you end in the earth."

I said "no, I came from the ocean and I'll end in the sky."

Two fellows argued near a phone. One of them, greying hair, a turpentine diluted blue cardigan, gestured with both hands. The other rolled his eyes up and tilted his head sideways. He made fleeting eye contact and though not the elder, he was the taller. They spoke urgently, probably not clearly but I was too far away to hear. Their urgencies pushed through different happenstances. The taller one that often looked away, spoke less. Maybe he used shorter or quicker words.

The greying man raised his hands, hovered them somewhere between shoulder and head. Palms open and facing each other, they shook slightly in the space around his words. I think he asked for understanding, believing it’d be enough. Maybe he demanded a responsibility in full or he plead for the importance of one little family event. No saying.

The taller fellow, it turns out, wasn’t quite yet a man. Perched on stilt legs, his thick parka quietly bulged resistance around his torso. Birds puff their feathers to portray an image of dominance or the selfish impression thereof.

Finally, the tall one raised his hands in a gesture (probably unintentional) that mimicked the greying man. He didn’t look the greying man in the eye—just extended one leg in the opposite direction and followed it with the other. He stepped from the hip, in measures like a metronomic pigeon. His shoulders raised high and bent to incline the upper portion of the parka. He continued a few beats to the next corner. The greying fellow, resigned, strode away, his face empty and cheeks adroop.

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 watch the stars
6) Buy it a habanero pepper, on you
7) X-Ray its innards for signs of peppers (slipper’s consent)
8) Teach it basic piano theory
9) Perch it on the shoulder that does not house a parrot
10) Outline Peruvian buildings on white page halves but let it colour them in
11) Before and after photos
12) Mentally note the level of paranoia downstairs neighbours exude per squish on the squish
13) Name it after your first true love
14) The cavity behind a pomegranate seed feels fibrous, like bone, which gets you thinking about singing

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 tossed to the overgrown field. He set his bag on the ground, pushing aside some dead brown fronds. The field crowded itself, oblivious to the old endeavours of absent people. He’d work fast. Eyeing the sky, clouds were closing over the hills, ready to encroach on the old house. Everything was encroaching on the old house.

He unzipped the bag and lifted a solid, single lens reflex camera into the air. Digital never would compare to the uncanny accuracy of analog, which glaciated from molten instants of reality. Digital broke all that up into pieces. Every few months a company made those pieces smaller and more numerous, which would arrive to the applause of loving technophiles and neophyte consumers. He looked up, nervous. Not much time. Clouds furiously devoured blue. Tossing the camera strap over his head, he stepped from the bag and approached the side door. Continue »