and yeah: that’d be a pretty weird thing to do -
but then all my life i’ve been called a weirdo,
and after all, like all mammals, like you,
i am just a dancing salt-flat
that shits mineral deposits and bleeds
oceanic, and as if that weren’t weird enough
i’m one who loves to hide in dark corners,
and yet lives for the spotlight.

though among the weirdest
of the many weird things about me
is probably that i took the time to study
the anglo-saxon language, better known as old english,
from which study i learned that weird means fate, or destiny
more specifically, “death fate,”
as in a person’s weird is their fatal destination
not just the oddities and boddities
of which they are made

i saw this clearly one drunk night
when my friend asked
what is kryptonite to superman?
and though i don’t know much,
i gamely answered
his weakness?
his achilles heel?
his flaw?
but each time he answered nope,
nope, we’ve had that already,
it’s not that
until finally it hit me
and whether he agreed or not
i asserted
it’s his weird!
surely kryptonite is fated
to be involved in superman’s death,
but the fact that he’s an interstellar humanoid
who can only be hurt by kryptonite
makes him pretty weird.

and i know, the idea that we are captive
to fate and divine trickery
isn’t so popular these days,
so i suppose i should explain
that my concept of free will is a train
running uphill towards a split in the tracks
repeating to itself
i think i choose! i think i choose!
i think i choose! i think i choose!

and that i believe life is a death sentence
as in, by coming into this world
i am going out of this world
so in the meantime, i’m just here.

and if that seems limiting to your potential
i might tell you how wings are a limitation
that allow birds to fly,
like this body has limitations
that allow me to dance

the way my blood murmurs that i can’t bypass
this medical inheritance from my forefathers
yet i take heart from their morbid humour

the way my grandma’s storytelling
moves my mouth, and teaches my words
to be host and kitchen and cook-fire,

the way i was raised on poetry
so i learned to speak from poetry
and can do little else besides

and i would still tell you that we are
a marvelously complex biological phenomena
puddles of dust become microverse
but i would say that
in spite of this inborn sense of agency
things will be as they will be
and we are as we are,
and what i am,
as far as my limited self-awareness allows me to say
is a shy exhibitionist with an itchy brain
and the words
love is alive! and its asshole tastes delicious!
tattooed on my smile -
just another weirdo preaching
a gospel of strangers


maybe that’s why i invite missionaries
to speak with me, like the young highwayman
of christ who ambushed me, while i was puffing
in the grass, outside a skytrain station.

i bore him no ill will, but i have to say
the look on that mormon boy’s face
when i was finished with him was priceless.

in response to my telling him
i couldn’t care less what happens
after i die, that i am alive
and happy to devote my energy to the struggle
of living and living well while i do it,
he launched into his bit about the cost of admission
to paradise being accepting jesus as my lord
and savouring the way those words tasted
on his tongue he was shocked
when i interrupted him to say
i don’t rightly know
that i believe death exists.

with that, i began walking away
while this young missionary
like some slack-jawed disciple
followed at my heels
you mean you don’t believe we die?

i reassured him that we die
that our bodies cease to exist
but for a moment, i was tempted to see
if i might convert him to the view
that we are an unending cascade of echoes
and glances, passing clouds turned mountains
and ever-present sky -
that when the body is gone, the breath remains.

i could have told that boy about my grandpa,
how the old man still lives
in my voice when i hum solutions
to my problems with his plodding barione in my throat,
or my knees when they foreshadow
the feeling of his cane in my hand
or my arms when they long to wrap my family
in a
great, big bear hug

i could have told that boy about a friend and fellow poet,
how sometimes i feel his breath
slip into my body, pass through my lips
faster than they can give it shape,
transforming my words into lightning
striking quick and articulate

or how his words still straighten my spine
or how my ribs still grow sore from his punching
as i remember how he would tell me
you have to be tougher, johnny!
and laugh and laugh and laugh

or how i continue to hear him speak
on the tongues of those his voice lifted -

and yes, when his body was gone
i still puddled in grief and senseless alcohol
and felt like a lost child
and yes, when he died
many voices loosed a heart-rent howl,
many hands forgot how to work,
many words transformed
into incoherent moans of agony,
i kept hearing people say it was a tragedy
but i could only think
let us die in foolish accidents.
this has always been our way.


and his echoes still rumble in the ground,
cracking voices and bursting dams,
and i am shaken with tears and laughter
for the body is gone, but the breath remains

but i might have told that boy about the wyrd sisters
who only make their cuts
so all these yarns
might be woven into a larger fabric
where we will live together again,
as two words in a sentence,
bonded molecules in exhalation,
a subconscious gesture

i might have added that the word yarn
derives from a root that means
guts, intestines
those chords on which our body plays
when it plugs in and goes electric,
so then i might have asked him to listen
to the music vibrating on those twisted strings inside him,
and explained that we are sound shaped out of silence,
nothing more than music of the cosmos,
resonating waves washing one over the other,
and that every wave breaks,
then washes back into the sea
giving rise to new swells
just as the body goes, the breath remains

finally, i might have told that boy
that i am happily on my way to whatever
weird place i’m going, and that if i have any thought
of an after-life, it is a dream
that i will become a story, and a compost heap,
a glimmer in the eye, and a curling lip,
a pool of laughter collecting in the lungs of people
who never knew me,
and a drop of water in the eyes of those who did,
that i will become a signpost reading
Love Your Weird!
pointing in whichever direction you are traveling,
and that i will leave behind me such things as
a smell of aged paper,
a sound of dirty laughter,
a touch of rain and wet hair,
a taste of figs,
an echo
rumbling in the ears of those i leave behind
that sounds like a smile, saying

This!

This!

This!

because this song
is The Song
that never ends

really,
it sounds like nothing at all,
and everything all at once.