For Beatrice

Lady of the Perfume Jar

Devouring One

Daughter of Ra

Come to us

Lead your child to the sunlit lands in the West

May She who walks in the silent places

Guide your feet to make no sound

May She who hunts in the hidden places

Bring forth prey for you to chase

May She who sleeps in the warm places

Prepare a soft bed for your comfort

May She who sees in the dark places

Light the shadows as you pass into her lands

Let the sistrum ring for you

Let incense make the air sweet

Lady of Bubastis accept these offerings

Take your daughter home

Hamster Brain

    Didn't go to bed until 2 AM this morning, so right now my brain's doing that thing where it pinballs between an increasingly crowded field of really bad ideas and worst-case scenarios. So not much chance of productive writing or indeed productive anything really.

Summer 1991 (In Search of Lost Time)

    I'm 19. It's my first co-op work term, in Ottawa. Because I've never lived anywhere else and because it's close to downtown and reasonably cheap, I move into the YWCA. It's a lot like how I imagine living in a dorm would have been if I'd not ended up going to university in Calgary and living at home. My parents, overprotective even when I'm at home, insist I call every night. I tell them about my job (revising pamphlets for Health & Welfare Canada), the city (lots of museums and galleries, especially near Parliament Hill), and assure them that I'm taking my medications, that I have enough money, that I'm having a good time. I don't tell them that I spend most of my free time when I'm not at work or sleeping riding around on random OC Transpo buses deliberately getting lost; that I'm subsisting on noodle packets, fruit, cereal, peanut butter straight from the jar, and coffee because most of my kitchen stuff got nicked and I can't be arsed to cook anyway. I don't tell them that, alone, unchaperoned, and with no friends  here yet, I've never felt so deliriously, incredibly *alive*.

    After about 3 weeks, I've got a pretty good idea of where everything I want to see is, how long it'll take to get there, and that I *really* fucking hate the Y.  It's not the communal kitchen or bathroom facilities that bother me so much as the fact that I've already decided that I'm going to be spending all my time near the Byward Market, and also the punk girl in the adjacent room keeps bringing her boyfriend round for noisy, enthusiastic sex on work nights and I do actually need to sleep for at least 6 hours a night.  So I start looking for a new place, and find what appears to be a walk-in closet in a shared house 5 minutes from the Rideau Street bus mall for $250 a month.  The other girls in the house are tolerable, the landlady only shows up to collect the rent, and I don't really intend to spend much time there anyway, so it suits me fine.  

I start experimenting with becoming someone else.

Goodbye Hobbes

I have a problem letting things go.  Anyone who knows me knows this.  I've kept cars, relationships, and computers out of sentiment long past when they were actually worth the expense / effort / software jury-rigging required to maintain them.

I am trying to let my cat go.  He is 18 years old.  His eyes are clouded with cataracts, his gait is stiff in the mornings, and he's diabetic.  He also has what the vet believes is a tumour on his head, just above his right eye.  It's this last thing that might be the thing that makes me give him up.  Because although he can still jump up onto the bed with me at night, and his appetite is healthy, and he still enjoys lying in sunny patches around the house… 

There is a point - I've seen it in other animals, just before they died or were put down - where the spark goes out in the eyes, and they move as if they were only looking for the perfect spot to lie down and not move again.  And when someone asked me whether it wouldn't be kinder to have him put down… no. Because he's not at that point yet.  But if it's cancer, then that changes things, because I don't want to stand aside deluding myself that he's fine as it consumes bone and tissue and nerves.  I want to say goodbye before he starts to look at me in reproach because I won't let him die.

But really, I want my boy back in my arms for one more day / week / month so that my love will travel with him on the final journey into night.

Last Known Sighting

Highsummer golden light and we are caught
Between shadowed forest and brilliant tidestruck beach
Memory carries hallucinatory clarity
But it's not good enough for proof

Which amounts to a skittering muted recording
(That could be anything)
And a grainy pixellated photo of
You stumbling towards the shuttered trees
And me with a handful of scrambled magnetic wails

Through the Rust and Gasoline (dreamtime rehash)

It's raining, and it could very well have been a solid forty days and nights for all the difference the passage of time makes here.  Time is marked by the starting of fires and the slow rise of greasy black smoke into the slightly paler clouds.  It's marked by the slow change of steel to reddish powder and by the transmutation of bright copper wire to burnt verdigris.  Occasionally, it's marked by the sudden collapse of dysfunctional machinery into a tangle of useless scrap.

There are marks on the ground as well.  Muddy prints of boots tracked through the mud, filling up slowly with iridescent-skinned water.  It smells like oil and burning jet fuel with a faint hint of contraband and cordite. Sometimes it smells like rotting garbage or burning meat.

It's still raining.  You're shivering in the crumpled husk of a Lear jet, waiting for the pilot and not seeming to realize that he's slowly liquefying in the cabin up front.

Somewhere half a mile up, a vulture angel with steel wings circles lazily.