Notes from the Silver Lining Café

C. J. Leon


Copyright C. J. Leon, 2008, Vancouver

museslave@gmail
myspace/cjleonspoken
youtube/thesurrationalone
********************************

Table of Contents

I know it’s happening.....................................1
A final word for Spring?.................................1
Crucifixes........................................................2
alors, tu es venue............................................6
quand on était là-haut....................................7
Returning the Flavour...................................8
The Wolf........................................................10
Through the intersection..............................11
There are ... competing impulses..................11
What can you offer me?................................11
Consumption..................................................12
Dad..................................................................19
Why do crackheads...?...................................22
Phone Messages I Would Rather
Not Have Had in My Voicemail
December 8, 2007...........................................23
Yo mama so fat...............................................25
Yo mama so dirty...........................................25
Yelp for Help..................................................26
an overgrown amphitheatre..........................28
impossible made possible...............................29
massive coronary............................................29
dishwasher/linecook......................................29
to whomever..................................................30
daily obsession................................................30
My girlfriend washed.....................................30
egos.................................................................30
I’m a Fuckin’ Genius!.....................................31
Just Remember...............................................31
The Office.......................................................32
Whence We Came.........................................35
Did you hear about?.......................................37
My dad thinks.................................................38
Congratulations!.............................................38
My mother......................................................39
My Suicide Year.............................................40
My Blank Soul’s Face......................................45
A tiny black ant..............................................49
Now, now, little sister....................................49
These days, marketing faith...........................50
The answer you’ve all been waiting for........50
And that about puts.....................................50
********************************

I know it is happening,
Spring, in full tilt,
leaves overwhelming
flowers in the trees,
more flowers than ever,
I hear, this warm dry season,
via the media;
but every other
moment still
has me gasping
for a lack of
words for wonder,
if not excess histamines.
********************************

A final word for Spring?
All this nose-blowing
certainly defies
appreciation.
********************************

Crucifixes

There was a crucifix above every door in Grandma's house,
and on a couple of walls top-centre otherwise barren.

She inherited that trick from generations of God-fearing home-owning Mr's
who kept the livelong day their singing house-keeping Mrs's
well-reminded of the plight of sons of men
and the world out of doors.

She decorated them with yellowing palm leaves
acquired one per year on Palm Sundays
at the Catholic service nearby.

She used to say that
'anytime you have the mind
is enough a time to pray; you could be
sweeping the kitchen floor or riding your bicycle, bored in class or climbing trees;
just turn to God and give.'

But voices turn to God purveying misery,
keeping their joys their own,
because the least likely guy
to be impressed by your jeweled sink taps
is one in the throes of execution,
compare lethal injection,
hanging, the rack, impalement, disembowelment,
exposure, starvation, and the electric chair;
and the least likely man to dance drunk
is the naked one publicly crucified
wearing a dunce crown
and a sign.

So, somewhere along the line,
I learned never to trust the man
at the end of the whip. Either one.
They're both preoccupied.

After a season of hunger, I glutted blue-rare
the Blood-Bodied Father and Son
and their ascetic bravado,
and I sucked
the fruit nectars of Lovers' Communion.

I learned to despise and war the misery of life,
not to glorify, not hope for deliverance from it in death.

It's pathological optimism,
or the poet in me,
but life is so much worthier;
Life manifests Christ
in its so many familiar faces,

Christ who is the resurrecting body,
the spirit of bread and wine and the urge,
Christ of miracles, of accomplished whores,
the good-loving Christ who always pulls rent
out of a fish's mouth or at least finds a place to crash
for a few days while the universe resolves the problem.

My Christ plays guitar, gets shit-faced,
gets laid, sings sauntering down the street,
brings strings of Christmas lights to her lovers because their living spaces seem lacking
a certain light these days.
My Christ knows the crackheads on her street
by name and jams with them
to mutual everywhere musical delight.
My Christ gives baked goods,
her poems, dead flowers
to perfect strangers
and makes them perfect friends.
My Christ gives licorice to the sore-throated,
treats her starved neighboring artists to sex
and breakfast with real maple syrup,
freezer jam, and unlimited coffee,
gets them stoned before noon,
and sends them home to their art,
because human spirits, Christ knows,
will not survive on omelettes and toast alone.
********************************

alors, tu es venue,
et alors, tu es partie;
et entretemps cela
m’a fait plaisir
de te voir, et puis
cela m’a fait chié.
mais bon, tu étais là.
on s’est vu.
l’impossible s’est
bien passé,
même si cela
n’était pas très
impressionant.
********************************

quand on était là-haut
avec le brouillard
tout autour de nous
et l’on ne pouvait rien voir,
je t’ai demandé
si tu étais à l’aise avec moi.
tu m’as répondu,
quand on est allongé.
moi aussi non.
de toutes façons,
tu m’as dit,
si on ne se voit
que tous les quatres ans,
c’est déjà bien
que l’on s’aime bien.
oui, j’imagine—
c’est à dire,
oui, en effet.
********************************

Returning the Flavour

She says:
After that three course meal
and all that alcohol, I owe you.

Come to my house. I'm making
dinner for the boys on Sunday.

What was that sauce you made
that you put on the beets
again by the way?

I say:
Apricot-maple-rum-garlic.

She hums and she nods her head approvingly.

At her house she asks the boys
what they want for dinner.
We've got salmon,
she says.

Nobody seems to bother
asserting one way or the other,
but someone is going to the 7-11
so she passes him money
for nacho chips.

In the interim she grates some cheddar cheese.

When the chips arrive she crumbles
them onto a baking tray,
spreads cheese,

and does 'er in the oven for a good ten minutes
before calling out "Dinner's ready!"
to a grateful throng
of ravens,

and assuring me once more
she can cook.
********************************

The Wolf

A gold and silver wolf, tamed
how many generations?

sits flat beside lesbian
mistresses drinking

vanilla iced-caffeines;
he pants his breaths

over a trembling tongue;
and he is beast in the feet

and the fur and the teeth,
and has the blue eyes of

an exhausted child.
********************************

Through the intersection
as through a memory–
What is that sound?
I know it!
They have hid away
my childhood stream
beneath that metal disc.
********************************

There are, quite naturally, I believe,
competing impulses within me.
These are, broadly, of two categories.
The first comprises the sexual,
which is prolific
and varies from subtle to intense;
The second is everything of what little is left.
********************************

What can you offer me? Beauty?
Really, I'd prefer a Word of the Day.
********************************

Consumption

So I got this letter from Toronto Health
to the effect that: your neighbour has TB
and you share a bathroom with him
so there's a chance that you do,
so you should get checked
even if showing no sympotoms,
and don't worry, people in Canada
don't die from tuberculosis anymore
because we give away the medications.

Having about the average motivation of a university student,
I kinda just ignored the letter for a couple months.
My flatmate had led me to understand
also that Korean medicine
was not as heathen
as the Canadians portrayed,
and that he will always test positive if injected with tuberculin
and that he had all the right drugs when he was a toddler
and they cured him then and he, on the other hand,
did have to pay for the doses we forced on him,
a lot, which maybe explained why for spite
he wasn't ever going to ingest them.
My motivation did not soar.
I was practically convinced.

Then I got sick. I got so sick
I lay in bed without the strength
to fetch myself food or water
and I developed this cough
where I hacked up blood
and rolling over made me dizzy
and I did a lot of staring at the walls
between naps and wheezes and sipping herbals.

And, you know, I started to think about that letter
that told me once that your neighbour has TB
and so maybe you do, so get checked,
even if you don't have symptoms,
which when I looked at again
read like a ticker-box list
of yeah, well, I guess
I got that one too.

I went to the clinic, where I said:
I got this letter that says I may be consumptive
so I need to get checked and could you do that please?

Yes, that will be $20, said the nurse.
Oh, I said, and my stomach dropped.
I took account of all the money that I had,
which was all the money in my wallet at the time,
which was a measly ten bucks, and I was hoping to eat it.
I suppose you want that in Canadian funds? I said.

Uh, so, I got ten bucks.
Uh, what can I get for ten bucks?
The nurse shook her head: The needle is ten,
the check-up is ten, you need twenty.

I started to wheel around on my heel, pulling a grimace,
and holding that black-letter injunction in my shaking hand,
eyeballing it like the agonizingly raw and painful death sentence it was,
and I thought, if only for the concerned pale horror on the faces
of clinic bysitters, that I should give it a go.
I spun 360.

I don't need a new needle! Rinse one off!
And don't bother with the name brands.
Or why not just give me the needle
and I'll google my results
on the Internet.

Now look here, I said pointing,
I got this letter from Toronto Health
that says my neighbour has tuberculosis
and we share a bathroom so there's a chance
that I have tuberculosis, so I need to get checked
even if I don't have the symptoms, which, actually, I do;
but, it says here that the medications are absolutely free;
and so, since I'm pretty sure that I've got tuberculosis,
and I can't afford to buy your stupid little test for it,
why don't we just skip the fucking test
and you give me the meds?

For some reason, unlike the frosty, needly
red-green, Christmas mucus in my lungs,
these suggestions did not float.

On my way home I started composing my obituary;
and I figured I better get to polishing my work.
The best of headlines I could dream for
with all my cynical romance was:
Starving Artist Consumed:
Dead from TB,
First in a Very Long While.
It was miles more desirable than:
TB in TO: Beware!
And I'd be damned if I wasn't going to get it.

I didn't feel overly badly for myself, really.
I was soon to put my foot in the door
of the hall of all dead young writers
(where I'd give Keats a pat on the back,
especially were he still choking on his lung).

But all those twisted patients' faces
as I left the clinic untested and untreated!
Had they hoped we lived in a socialist democracy?
They seemed to watch me step out through the cracks.
********************************

Some of our egos are intact;
some of them are maniacs.
********************************

Dad

When I just a child flew from soft place to soft place
say the couch or my bed propelled from the back of my neck
and you screaming this or that and that I hadnt what I dont remember.

When you held my six year-old hand in the toilet because
silly me in my youthful excitement I had forgot to flush.

That after a couple of years playing T-ball
you missed the registration for softball
put me in hardball where I was
counted an out all season
and quit baseball
after that.

When crushing grapes for wine at ten
I got so drunk I puked all night
and Mom was real pissed
and made you sit
by the bathtub
with me.

When I fifteen said: You really dont know me.
You said: Clint I know you like the back of my hand.
And I said: Oh really Dad. Then when is my birthday?
And we all waited Mom Dan and myself as you squinted
and were silent and then said: Well I know your mother's and your brother's.
I said nothing that my point and left and Mom said: Oh my God! You dont know his birthday!

You watched television until your wife
and children left you and when I said:
The one love of Mom's life was plants
and you moved her to a lightless place
and all her plants died and she cried-
cried you promised we would move
in a year and at the end of the year
she left you and took us and moved
into a place on her own with sunlight.
You looked like I just revealed some
profound geometrical theorem to you.
And that time you didnt say anything.

When I in France phoned you to ask
if you could put a tenner in my account
because the machine wouldnt allow me
to take the last of my money, there being
insufficient funds for the fees and exchange,
you said: You got yourself into this you get out.

That you said youd pay for my university and didnt
stepping in finally when I defaulted on my loans
and I couldnt go to any school any more.

But that you used to take me to hockey practices
the cold and early winter mornings before school
and I was a cranky bear and once you asked
me what I wanted for breakfast and I said
Frosted Flakes with warm milk
and you did it for me;
it was awful
but I never told you that.

These things when I recalled them to you
you did not remember. Funny that.
Since we were both there
I would have thought
they kept you up
at least half as
long as me
the night.
********************************

Why do crackheads
always try to sell me pot?
Am I that clean-cut?
********************************

Phone Messages
I Would Rather Not Have Had
in My Voicemail on December 8, 2007

1) 6:38 p.m. EST calling Vancouner(-3)
I am phoning to tell you that I am going to commit suicide. I'm going to take pills. The only problem is getting enough pills that are strong enough to kill me.

2) 6:42 p.m. EST
I really really want to talk to you. Was I just a body? I'm going to start taking pills.

3) 7:47 p.m. EST
I have now taken two Tylenol 3's. These have codeine, so I'm pretty sure these will kill me, eventually. So, I really want to talk to you.

4) 8:04 p.m. EST
I have now taken four Tylenol number three's. And I am going to keep taking them. And I really think a conversation with you would help at this point.

5) 9:20 p.m. EST
I have now taken five or six Tylenol 3's, I'm not really sure, Tylenol 3's with codeine in them. And my stomach is beginning to hurt. But I'm going to keep taking them until I'm dead. So, you should call me before I'm dead, because I'll be dead soon.

6) 9:29 p.m. EST
I'm just calling to tell you that I lost count of how many pills I've taken. And my stomach still hurts.

7) 10:23 p.m. EST
It has just occurred to me that you may not be answering your phone, not because you don't want to talk to me, but because you're at work. So, I'm going to stop taking pills until you call me.

% And, thus, finally,
my social disinterest
in other human beings
saves one wretched life
just in time for Christmas.
********************************

Yo mama so fat
she needs an inhaler
just to say her ABC’s.
*

Yo mama so dirty
she needs a chisel just to scrape
the barnacles off her teeth.
********************************

Yelp for Help

When she told me
last week she swallowed
a whole bottle of aspirin pills,
I became very grave.

When she told me
after two hours
she wasn't ill,
didn't even
have a headache,
I burst out laughing.

Come on! she said. So I came on.
I just couldn’t say "sorry" enough times in one breath,
so I went on for two or three, I don't remember.

But you shouldn't have used aspirin. I said.

Why not? she said.

Well, first, they won't kill you, I said,
you need something stronger,
though they will give you brain damage and stomach ulcers.

Her face distorted silently into the yellow thought
of obese middle age, disability, obscurity,
into the thought of not dying perfect.

But I don't matter. she said.

And second, I said,

I don't
want
you
to.
********************************

an overgrown amphitheatre
my brown irises with green rings
my thirsty retinas
an echoing
my mind

the world is running back and forth
frantically trying to remember forgotten lines
it is a painful sight: rhymes with... sounds like... then
there was a... yeah, it was something...
yeah, it's right there...

i watch it all go by
dissociated by haze
a film, a silver screen
nothing gets my blood up

when my true love
fucks another guy
i'm happy for her
they deserved it

softer
than applause
nothing stays but
white static
hum
********************************

The impossible made possible:
He asked me how it was
that I got along so well with the boss.
I said “Well, he's an asshole, that's for sure;
but, then again, I don't hold that against him.”
********************************

Grandma's massive coronary:
Something to be said
for going out clean.
********************************

Of course,
he’s a dishwasher/line cook,
like every other musical genius I know.
********************************

And to whomever it was
gave me this hickey, thank-you.
I have a feeling you remember who you are,
even if I don't.
********************************

I have a daily obsession with the female nude.
********************************

My girlfriend washed my sheets.
She received thank-you cards
from across the province.
********************************

I’m a Fuckin’ Genius!

I’m going to open up a chocolate and pastry shop
right across the street from the abortion clinic.

I’ll call it: Silver Lining,

and the sign’ll be a big black sucker-punched
ellipsoid rain cloud with silver veins
running up from the bottom,

and I’ll be expecting
mostly bingers.
********************************

Just Remember

You’re better
than that two-timing bitch
and that’s why you’re in the driver’s seat
and she’s in the trunk.
********************************

The Office

Who works the earth these days?
For that we have machines
that eat dirty diesel.

The office
is above-ground,
the higher up the better,
giving us that nice metaphor
of ‘climbing ladders with snakes’
while ‘keeping eyes to the skies’
via skyscraper pyramids.

‘Jumping through hoops’ has something
to do with consistent treatment
of assorted assholes,
and while the necessity of this is guaranteed,
(oh, yes, there will be assholes aplenty
and some in glory,)
whether colleagues as whole humans
or their anatomical specifics?
The case indeterminate
and dual.

It has its over-share of tidy
frustratingly electrical things.

It works fingers to the bone,
not hands in the dirt;
and these are not the same.

There is ploughing through employees,
who are only incidentally alive,
furrows of the beaten brows of ball-broken
businessmen in their fine suits, in their law suits,
they are like staplers wearing ties
filling and filing forms,
trenching through the stacks of pages,
immaculately unimaginatively
conceived worlds of black and white
mapped over with nosily inquisitive tables.

Most prominently
in this workplace, however,
in each and every grey partition,
is the desire to break
with doses of oral stimulants,
with the sharp white-as-cancer smoke inhalation
and the bitter black steeped caffeine fidgets,
the unnatural hours of the day,
and all that does resist
the minute hand.
********************************

Whence We Came

There once was a village
whence we came;
that village still exists;
and some of the family
with too much money
go there on ancestral pilgrimage.

Invariably these pampered
brand-clad yuppies touchdown
more uneasy than content,
more in terror than nostalgia,
more perturbed by than
proud of their experience;

But for some reason
there’s always someone going,
and coming back to tell us
all those typic tales
of no utilities
and outdoor facilities:

‘Scarce more than rocks
and moldy cedar planks
stacked on a hole in the ground,
that’s both the toilets and the homes.

There aren’t many people there;
there never were.
everybody looks
the same kind of ugly.

A very pretty mountain, though.
nice trees. good water.
no, not just good.
no, the water there... is sublime!’
You’d think we’d learn;
but maybe we can’t.
sure, fine, the Old World’s wine
in our New World skins,
but boat over plane?
we’re not that drunk.
********************************

Did you hear about the farmer
who got his dick stuck in a sheep?

Ewe! ... It was a baaad fucking scene.
********************************

My dad thinks I'm insane
(he may be on to something there);
and I think he's uninteresting
(a bull's eye if ever there was).

Where does that leave us?
Both sinners in the other's book.
*********************************

Congratulations, dirty bones!

Immortal angels
have reviewed your work.

You are a bone fide artistic genius!

To claim your prize,
i.e. glory, simply
die.
********************************

My Mother

My mother is of an older school.
Funny she adheres despite she never went.

Never lifted the hood of a car, never will.
Put out by substance use, in general,
(and her with me for a son!),
admitting she just never got it.
Anxious about anxiety pills, then they help.
Lonely, convinced she should be alone.
Morbid as the bat is rabid
that hisses in the predawn.

It's all part of her (at the door
she greets you in a torn bathrobe
with a bathtowel turban on her head─
You've walked an hour from the terminal.
“Have some soup I made it!”)
charm. Ah, Mom.
********************************

My Suicide Year

When I was 12 years old I resolved to become a Buddha, like Siddartha Gautoma, and save the world.
I became vegetarian, started meditating, and tried hard to have Out of Body Experiences.

When I was 13 I realized, after surveying the field of New Age "literature",
that I needed only to convince people I was an enlightened being
write a few sappy books on personal development
and I could be as rich as the sex-guru Osho
with his fleet of 96 Rolls Royce's.

At 14 I resolved that I would kill myself if I hadn't achieved any greatness by 26.
Einstein explained Relativity and the Compton Effect at 26.
Keats died of tuberculosis at 26.
Nick Drake, 26.
Black cards in a deck, 26.

It's one drawback was writers.
Writers sometimes sucked well into their thirties,
then whammo, stardom; but I figured if I wasn't a prodigy,
fuck it, it wasn't worth the wait.

I traveled to foreign countries
with a Swiss Army knife
and a sleeping bag.

I devoured women and fake pearls
in dry grass under hunching olive trees.

I fasted until I fell
down and was hospitalized;
and I saw such beautiful snakes and stars.

I lived in a cave without eating.
My numbed feet turned purple.
I regained health on gravel beaches
and in rat-filled alleys at Marseilles.

I lived in the streets, ate market waste,
carried wilted flowers in my hands.
I was insane with the insane,
eating sweet mangoes.

I read hundreds of books,
memorized scores of poems,
believed in the pantheon of gods
and goddesses and spirits and devils
and in the theorems of poetry
and mathematics.

I got scars from
my trials and stupidity.
Knife cuts, burns,
the rock slide, the hockey stick.
The track marks have faded nicely.

Maybe now I'll go to Israel and Ireland,
break bread in nations without countries,
find faces in the wooden tents of nomads
and the aluminum trailers of gypsies,
where the poetry and the music
flow, beautiful and desolate,
that when the world hears
the world twitches limbs
in a restless sympathy.

Maybe I'll dump my cynicism and start
writing rhyming first person love poems
to anonymous idealized second persons,
put them to music, and become, thereby,
universally
palatable.

Maybe I will become a monk,
and by river salmon, with hillside butterflies,
sit cross-legged on a tuft of mountain scrub
and reacquire some metaphysical illusions, like purity.

Yeah, maybe.
It's possible.

And maybe the end of this is closer than I like to think.
I've got some work to review and consider.
I'm 26 now for one month longer.
This is the suicide year.
********************************

My Blank Soul's Face

There is a joyous boy I meet,
cyan, yellow, pink, magenta, green.
He knows me well, Luciferian child
with glowing amber of ember eyes.
He lives somewhere inside me
between my bowels and my throat.
He carries fire in his light-wand hands.

The candle-flame eyes of this curious angel
spark like teardrop sapphires in his Hermetic faces.
His twilight complexion shimmers on the silk veil of my unknowing.
He shifts. From darling star-smile boy to linear mythic beast,
from glimmer-moon joy to smooth antlered mammal
he changes: this is all a sharing game.

What it is we play:
on paisley, an arabesque,
when I am awake, it's like cartoons;
when I am asleep, it's dreams.

The multi-faceted
re-veils itself with a single face,
coordinated worlds hiding in words and their games.
A woman reflecting the sun with a mirror woke me
this morning into a stream of dust Tyndall-burning.
It's like Kabbalah, or for me, just writing poems.

He shows himself as the green face of the new moon,
that the moon had when the moon was new,
spinning fluid aglow, unhardened,
ungrieved, untrampled
by our tragic trudging.

He is innocent
or perhaps guiltless,
and he sees and he shows,
holds his office with a solemn bliss,
offers solace, calmness, a clever twist.
He is the tear in the Holy Sheet,
provoked there by God
and so permitted.

He was the one who told me: The only difference
between the House of Being and the House of Nothing
is the colour of the wallpaper. They're both caverns full of boring.

His voice tinkles like a bird, a chime, a kinked string.
Yes, I hear now, he whistles like a lark tumbling
above phosphor night's rich woven dress
of fields of fireflies of black moist soils
of all of her folding dark extent.

This astral subtle other, familiar stranger, oddly known, foreign friend,
is the quick silver screen dancing spirit of my blank soul's face,
while other others have proved to me that "soul"
is a synonym for "carbon atom".
******************************** 

A tiny black ant approaching on my bed
occasions a good ol’ game of Pinch-n-Toss.
********************************

Now, now, little sister!
What’s that you carry home,
over your back-bent black head
in your clamping jaws?

A back-bent black ant,
a corpse-image of yourself,
flat as the bottom of my slipper.

I feel less bad about the murder
seeing you scuttle,
seeing you recycle,
seeing you eat your dead.
********************************

These days, marketing faith is faith in marketing.
Every sidewalk prophet needs a business plan,
something catchy, something portable,
something, you know, like a cheap book
worth a whole pocketful of God.
********************************

The answer you’ve all been waiting for:
If everybody knew everything,
God would be out of a job.
Which is why people
are so stupid.
********************************

And that about puts the last nail
in the Christ, wouldn’t you say?
********************************