The days, the days, they march on
Incessantly, nothing to distinguish the one
From the other    but this suffering
Feeling that drags on like a lifeless cat
A drooping dog a rainy day soles
Scuffing slick pavement.

(The people new the knowledge fresh
The skies as blue as in the west
With yellow orange and red littering
This newly crinkling life)

Yet that is not enough
now
Now it is all some rhymed story
From a picture book written in another
Language for some kid I do not
Know. Without that language
Those pictures mean nothing.

When day I wish the next to follow
With drooping lids and wavered
Mind and yawning chasm of time
That stares me, blue from brown
Eye.

And when at night no sleep comes
But quickened, frantic, lively activity
That never tires    wakened dream
Of what I do not have beside me.

Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow
As seek to quench the fire
with words

Running feet on a treadmill shown    fist
Dragging my collared neck
On and —

Like an air mattress filled with one too many lung-fulls of air,
We float in suspended expectation;
Row of port-holed windows looking out just
Waiting for that pin prick to send us, blathering,
Careening, spitting, like a balloon let loose
‘til the last breath has been sucked out
And thrown elsewhere,       expired           a bout de souffle.
Until then, a “diorama” – the sort from elementary school art class –
Is spread out below humorously lifelike, yet
Inconceivably small and distant.
Sectioned off with bits of string, paced out with a ruler,
It’s a patchwork quilt, all patterned with diamonds
And stripes and checkered pockmarks –
I wonder what slumbering giant lays beneath
Its warmth – is that a toe sticking up there?;
that hillock a knee?
Here and there a strand of tinsel, silver, lays
Strung from last year’s Christmas tree
Tangling its way in a snakey fashion
‘cross fabric and carpet and fern.
If I were a crow I’d swoop down and grasp it in my claw,
Carry it away and stash it in my nest
To stare at it, and preen in its reflection.
But I’m not; these wings are artificial,
I paid a hefty price for them and I’m not even
Given a crack at the yolk.
Feathers slightly ruffling, I’m left
Riding this jet stream, ferried around
In the wake of those ahead of me.
And at some point, those milk-jug houses,
Row on row, the stickered football fields
And ball diamonds and golf courses that
Top a birthday cake in green shredded coconut,
(the water blue rumpled Jell-O)
At some point – one I cannot quite trap under my finger –
In a split second, it seems, it all becomes
My world again. 3D. Normal.

I almost vomited. And yet, my eyes returned, again, with a cave-man fascination for gruesome gore. Like a disfigured body that lies beaten, dismembered, and holds the eyes captive in disgusted awe. It is not beauty that enthralls us. It makes us smile, laugh, love and ponder, but it does not hold us. For ugliness is truly fascinating: we worship it. It makes us stand and stare, and cluck our tongue in thankfulness for being spared the misfortunes of others. It is the shock and awe of journalism; a break from perfect people and monotonous life. It is the guilt of an excited adrenaline rush when catastrophic events call for true remorse. And so, my eyes flitted from gruesome detail to the ground at my feet, never gazing long enough to feel compassion, but always straying back as if pulled by magnetic attraction. Her mangled flesh, an open-air autopsy of breathing tissue. Tendons, shedding their sheath in white frothy puss, quiver blinking from mole-like depths. Like a grenade had gone off in her chest, the hole gapes: as if some mad animal came in the night to feed, and left her rotting body for another meal. A vampire, perhaps, who keeps his victim’s blood alive — or else some poor soul had taken a rusty saw to her limb, but didn’t quite have the stomach to finish the job. This is a World War battlefield.
A swamp of living rot attacks my nose. In defense, I grab at my sweater, shoving my face within its depths, trying to drown this dying fish. It is a rotten salmon, sunbathing on river rocks, empty holes pecked clean by passing birds where once it saw, and swam. But here, too, it assaulted me. I was Grenouille, unable to escape the stench of life. The air grew moist, and heavy, as I gasped for breath through open mouth. But even swallowing had a putrid taste. I was in an Auschwitz gas chamber, lungs burning, as all around the gasping, clawing bodies crawl in vain for clear air. But it wasn’t flaring chemicals. It was scurvy, dysentery, and the cholera. A 19th century vessel, strewn with moaning, gagging corpses, their hollow eyes screaming for mercy from salted expanse.
She turned to me, with doe-like eyes, and took a step. She begged me to pet her, stroke her neck, and tell her everything would be OK. She could not see what I could; she could only feel the pain. She stood in her volatile cloud, and whimpered. I gagged. I couldn’t help it.

grounded.

That time between night and day
When the sky, incandescent blue,
Glows soft like a nursery night-light
And the clouds, still fluffy yet now iron-made
Seem to hang not in the sky nor before it
But elsewhere
And the hills and mountains,
Each in perspective, fade their mauve front
As if placed there
By a stagehand between acts
All in a line, yet paint deepened
To create distance.
The trees and shrubs, of course,
Grow darker black in nearer fields
And softly gain gray, dove gray,
Rosey blue branches the nearer
To the east they grow – as if sucking
The sun’s lightness straight from the soil.

This is the time through which I walked,
Dear friend trotting along side
Tail wagging, collared neck faithfully clinking
Like change in the pocket.
The leaves, rattling a little, breathing
Lengthy sighs at each exhale of wind,
Gave nothing away of the fierce gale
Which raged within my mind as I strode on.
But the storm inside my head was
A constant one, so constant that I
Had no memory of when it had begun
And all I knew of it was the shivering state
In which it left me.

Head back, a star, one of the brightest,
Shoots through the steely clouds
Like a bullet aimed at some far-off heart.
The meal has been served and stomachs
Are full of anticipation,
Trolleys, with contents gently plinking, have
Been pushed up the aisle and now
The pillows are being offered to snoozing
Seat-holders while sleep-drugged businessmen,
Shirts rumpled, minds churning over tomorrow’s
Proposal, are passed by.
Here and there an over-head light shines
Yielding poor sight for reading
(those sorry sleepless travelers)
But looking pleasant like scattered stars.

I wish I could be there, breathing
That over-oxygenated air and hearing
Those precarious engines drone on.
Marseilles, I bet, spicy sea air sucked into
Flaring nostrils as the mouth surrounds rich wine
And the tongue spits olive pits
From the balcony window.
Or maybe London, swarming Cockney
Voices and fretting, sweating bodies
Crammed into underground torture chambers
Of stress. Mind the Gap!

Soles crunch on the gravel road
And the neighbor’s sprinklers chug
In satisfied green.
Dear Jones will be proud, I think
For I am grounded.

A line

which divides

the known from

the unknown

Flashing, blinking,

blank space of

blank thought

My friend, my enemy

Oh how you torment me!

Your repetitive strobe

a drip of water

mushing, softening

the brain

like something Chinese.

You are the under uttered,

the over stated,

the unformed something

that is yet to be discovered.

You are my constant

when coffee has failed

when the bulb is about to burn

out

and the fan is whirring

angered revs at me

melting my palms;

still you remain,

a sledge hammer

to the eyes, a hypnotist’s

cursed monotonous ramblings

which fix me, stupid,

questioning what exists

(or doesn’t exist)

on the other side of that wall.

Oh Mr. Beckett, what is this Endgame? What is this game? I read you and I do not understand you. And yet I do understand you. You confuse me. You make sense.

Why are Nagg and Nell living in dustbins?

Is this really merely the hopeless ramblings of an existential world? (Can I use the word “merely” in that sentence?).

I was disappointed to find that the entire Can Lit class, for what ever strange and delusional reason, is under the impression that Surfacing is about a schizophrenic woman. They had pegged it to a “T”, these second-year psychology students, let loose by that little man they call Lethbridge and for some reason worship, citing symptoms and claiming absolute certainty that their analysis was correct and right and intelligent. But it has been in my experience, or perhaps inexperience, that the answer is never what “everyone” thinks it is. That would be too easy, to simple, and to dissatisfying. It IS too dissatisfying. A book can never be “just” about something. Why can no one ever admit it? Surely someone, one of those people, must feel something ELSE when reading these books.
Surfacing is not about a schizophrenic woman, and claiming so is degrading and, actually, embarrassing.
What IS sanity, anyways?
This is precisely the question. My fellow Can Lit-ites may assume that the un-named narrator sinks into the watery wasteland of insanity only to “surface” back into the brightly-lit, rosey-sunrised air we call life. But what is this life? Who are these smiling faces waiting for us? Anna is a self-concerned, weak-willed materialistic embodiment of woman. David is crass, heartless, incapable of feeling. Joe is lonely and tamed, impersonal and direction-less. The Americans are everywhere: taking our land, stealing our culture, our language, our livelihoods and individuality; robbing us of our nationality. Flooding valleys so those south west desert-dwellers can dump our water into their swimming pools and fountains and green manicured lawns and wait for the bus under a fine mist of Canadian water. Ripping down cabins and building Walmarts.
And this is sanity? This is what she is “surfacing” to?
No. They are the insane. She is the sane. Or, at least, she attempts to be. She has the makings of a sane person. And yet she cannot achieve sanity fully because sanity is not attainable here, and now. She must resign herself to what we call humanity. And so, Surfacing is not a depressing insight into the mind of the insane and the turmoil which plagues its reasoning. No, though it is, to me, depressing. It is the struggle against humanity and society and life and the dissatisfaction that these things deliver. It is the cry “unjust! unjust!” and the yearning for something more and better and purer and more right than what we can have.
If this is insanity than I, too, am plagued by it, and so are all the writers of the world.