God my brain is getting confused.

The lights are flickering like a dying fire in this house. Rats chewed through the wiring, and now all day snow falls on the roof, melts, and drips down the walls in the form of grey water. Whenever the water finds a wire, there’s a buzzing, and burning smell. 

Maybe some day this whole place will burn down. That’d be nice.

I’m living in a cloud of smoke lately. Everything seems obscured, and far away. Voices always echo, like they’re somewhere out of reach. I spend a lot of time, talking to myself. 

My imagination has grown stagnent and dead. I have nothing read but an improperly translated version of the Bible. It has no words that use the letter “M”. It’s not a very good book, but it’s all I’ve got.

There’s animals, not just rats, but other creatures, living in this house with me. I hear them creeping about. Spiders the size of tennis-balls. Feral beasts with jagged hooks for claws and beady black buttons for eyes. 

I arm myself with disinterest, and I try to sleep, as much as I can.

I remember once, when I was about thirteen or so, I went to school in sneakers, and snow started to fall, and then I wound up going home with my parents, and we drove the ten miles out of town, but when we got to the logging road we had to drive down to get the rest of the way home, the snow was easily a good three feet deep, so we had to park the truck to the side of the road, and walk the last two miles to the cabin. 

Yeah, I used to live up North, in the middle of BC. In the middle of nowhere, down dirt road and logging roads, and without electricity or running water or a lot of civility. We did have chickens though, and draft-horses and one time, for a little while, even pigs. 

I hated it. It was just me and my mom and my mom’s boyfriend and he really didn’t like me. Right before we’d moved out into the woods I’d gotten him in trouble by telling teachers about how much he hit me, so after we’d left town, things were still pretty tense. 

For some reason I was expected to do the labour of a full-grown man, by the time I was ten years old. We put miles of fences through the woods, and we built a barn and a chicken coop and a tool shed. We cleared land with our own two hands and a single chainsaw. We worked in minus-thirty weather, and in the middle of summer with swarms of mosquitos attacking our hides. 

Now I live in the largest, southernmost city in my sweet-ass little country; I call her Terminal City, and when things are best for me, I’m either living right downtown with all the other fags and foreigners, or out in the East End, with all the other poor folk. I paint my nails and I colour my hair and I wear a tie to work. I do a lot of things that specifically have nothing to do with where I’m from or how I grew up.

There’s snow on the ground today, maybe two or three inches of it. And it’s a half-hour walk through the downtown core to get to work. And I’ll still complain about it a bit, but deep down inside?
I know how much better things are now. 

Snow is falling like ash from a volcano.
Snow is falling like it’s the end of the movie and the film is all degrading and fading to a pure white light. 
Snow is falling like I’ve got nowhere better to be than here.

I wanna pierce my nose with a safety pin.
I wanna write on the back of my jacket with spray-paint.
I want to fuck a girl with green hair.
I want to get kicked out of the worst bar in town.

She’s not as cold in here as it is outside.
But she’s cold enough.
She’s cold enough to get her message across.
And I’m cool enough to get to be here to hear it.