i like to write. i've never been confident enough in my abilities to produce long works or fully realize my ideas but i've written various short things which i'd like to share with people, i think. i try to capture momentary feelings and inchoate insights. i like rhythm and assonance, my poems should be read aloud or in your head for full effect.


poem for dead bird on roof
the sparrow who dared to dart out from its dense flock
of wingèd particulates plunged through the bright air
towards foreign gateways (as we gaze at Nature,
so it gazes at us) — the glass-guarded kingdoms,
straightsided and smoothcurved, space sorted and ordered:
wings sliced wind like water, whipped after the crystalline,
— and crashed, cracking birdbones, its course brought to crass halt —
curved flight dropped vertically, dead body tumbled down
onto sunbleached shingles and softly, in lawngrass,
landed with quiet thud; languidly lingered,
bereft of its bird-being, until swept away.

poem for dead mouse by side of road

“Ｃａｔｓ ｋｉｌｌ
ｂｙ ｓｅｖｅｒｉｎｇ ｔｈｅ ｓｐｉｎｅ
ａｔ ｔｈｅ ｎｅｃｋ”

raindrops fall on grainstalks (flowers on gay graves)
the cold in your bones drifts listless like alcoves
rotted shutters, roofs dart stark against the sky
(grey and red-grey) the dust of cigarettes
drifts placidly the bones soon rotted through
to woody cores the eyes that droop to feet
on dampened concrete, where greybody squirms
paw-pinioned to the pavement – squelching snap –
falls still. the feet keep on. the eyes float up
back to the clouds and bones of empty homes.
the grainstalks by the highway sway and flowers wilt.

poem for obligate lovers (i think this one is really awful, but i posted it because i think people will be able to relate to it)

i've been on nightdrives with doctors' daughters in new cars,
felt the cold of the floors of their great empty houses.
winter fog, phosphoresced by the streetlights, hung low
when I walked home. next morning, the ravine
filled up with sunlight: the stark rows of rooftops
were gilded with white gold. the snow fell in drifts.

your fingers, who yearned to feel warmth like bare treelimbs,
traversed the blank surface of my skin as lightly
as foot glides on ice, by the fence in the backyard
of the abandoned house, when the wind sliced us through.
your eyes gazed beyond me, at mazes of fences
and househusks and pavement and grey woolen sky.

if there is love, it hides in the corners of parking lots,
down long aimless stretches of road through the dead land,
or out the fogged window of your childhood bedroom.
what's gained from the presence
of another is absence:
the song of the heart rings most cleanly in silence.

convalescences (excerpts) these are selected verses from a 16-verse (!) poem i wrote while hospitalized last year. it's very self-indulgent as i was writing for the sake of entertaining myself - frankly i find this poem embarassing - but it has more of a formal structure and is probably more accessible to most people than my other poems. i have edited the verses to maintain the rhyme scheme of the original poem (last line of verse rhymes with first line of next verse).

On sheets of stainless steel pool languid flesh:
a bone-spire twists along its slender scaffold
of transparent plastic tubing, and the bedsheets
(geometrically arranged, Platonic white)
hang in disorder, linen cloth besotted
with feculent effluvia -- and oh!
What permeates the architect's great pride,
these grand and spotless panes of tempered glass,
but reverberating cries from far below,
the hungry seagull shrieking in his flight?

I lay beneath a paltry sheet last night,
in white-walled rooms (which ones, I can't recall --
there were a few). Awaiting fate's decree,
I gazed out at somnolent suburb-streets,
the sky a backdrop, comfortably blank,
and streetlights, beacons radiating warmth
and beckoning towards a path whose end
by skilful human hands was artificed,
while flickering fluorescent lights above
made figure-like the features of my face.

A dreadful drawing's easily erased:
the architect destroys and builds again.
Whatever hands may craft, those hands may heal:
the multifarious tools of the earth
are malleable, and bend to our requests
to mend material errors of our making.
But what of those strange faults which, unbidden,
surge from visceral depths and drown the peaks,
those infinitely high and sunlit mountains
of Freedom and of Essence, in thick blood?

Do what you will to stem the swelling flood.
Erect your barriers of metal, glass
and high-tech polymers. Intimidate
the beast with your pedantic mastery
of the atom -- how in school, you cut out
a pig's heart, poked it with your scalpel, laughed,
compared it to conceptual diagrams,
and, satisfied, strode off into the hall,
blind to your damp, dark, churning body-caverns
wherein contagion and its coven-mates conspired.

So waves of poisoned blood snuffed out the fire
that coursed throughout the causeways of your being;
innumerable parasites now breed
in each warm and stagnant crevice; as a vine
that's overgrown suffocates a tree,
disease invades and takes up residence:
the coruscating landscape of the self
with fractal peaks infinitesimal
and infinitely large - its topography
is lost, and lysed, in atavistic surge.

My lungs are tied in knots. Hoarse words emerge --
"more morphine?" -- and the portly nurse obliges.
The black-blood torrent twists along its course
of veinways, architectures before man,
and meanwhile washes over me in waves,
coating me in febrile blood and then receding,
leaving bleached upon the shore dried seabird bones,
a dessicated husk, through which the air
shoots sharp like needles, and the sterile sun
irradiates, in its incessant glare.

A printed plastic band enwreaths my arm,
revealing my name, my date of birth,
my allergy to walnuts -- all that's relevant,
emotional errata filed away
conveniently, and somatic clutter
abstracted down to numbers and a name --
"So the problematic code can be snipped out,
the pencil-sketched deformities erased,"
the doctor sniffs. He leans his back against
an ivy-obscured window, smooths his coat.

Nature proliferates. Its vulgar growth,
growth of sunflowers and the growth of weeds,
from butterflies' miraculous rebirth
down to the sludging-through of soil worms
or gluttonous exorbitance of microbes
who feed upon the beating blood of men --
its growth explodes out from the central point
and branches off in darts and curlicues,
with endless knottings and encirclements,
an ever-spreading ivy, one and multitudes.

If a straight line sketched on paper seems, when viewed,
similar to maple branch or human arm,
it's pareidolia and nothing more. The force,
the endless pushing-through and breaking-out
of Nature's power, like a waterfall
which gushes fervently, and when it meets
its reservoir, bursts into crystalline
fragments of itself, each fragment whole --
this force will never be contained within
a sterile room, nor doctor's calipers.

Yet within the drowning body-world there stirs
a nature of its own, in opposition
to the nature of disease, its violent spurts
that dissolve the order of the blood and bone:
a scintillating core of brightest light,
a heatless fire at the heart of being,
that propagates and surges up against
the force of illness, spreading with the essence
of unearthly Springtime: birth and purity
and health, eternal convalescence, breathing
with the rhythm of the Earth, becoming one:
a parting-gift from Nature to her son.


alright so those are my poems; here are some longer things. i have spoilered them because if i posted all of them this page would be very long. i don't like to write long things generally but i do it sometimes. i left the first one unspoilered so you can get a sense of what my more organized writing is like.

agony, ecstasy, and tedium

the thing about having intense experiences, whether they're intensely bad or intensely good, is that it shifts the scales by which you measure your life – so that your baseline lies no longer at the centre of the graph but somewhere above or below, and greater depths of despair or heights of exorbitance are opened to you.

so everything's thrown off balance and you're left drifting around in a liminal space bereft of meaning and direction, awaiting the next event that'll hopefully hurtle you back towards the spot you once occupied. and if it doesn't, what does it matter? you're lost already.

if life were a movie, you'd cry out in agony and plead to God for relief with blood pounding in your throat and claws tearing at your chest – then, spent, you'd collapse on the floor and awake to baptismal sunlight streaming through your apartment window onto your placid skin, fresh and newly-formed.

but life's not a movie and instead you lie motionless in bed while vague animal discomforts squirm around your viscera and you stumble through suburb-streets in autumn and stare at the pavement. and you walk and you walk and you walk and the pain in your legs isn't pain anymore because all you can recall of pain is its dictionary definition.

there is knowledge but not knowing. the irreducible light-burst that cries out “this exists!” is extinguished. the drive to go and do and move forward and run towards has left you. and so you walk for miles, never going anywhere.

eric's story

this is the very beginning of a story i was going to write about a schizophrenic boy in a mental hospital. i wrote it while i was in a mental hospital, although i am not a schizophrenic boy. i never finished it because i couldn't figure out where to go with it, and also because i got discharged from the mental hospital, but i wrote this, and i like some parts of it. there was more to this actually but i lost it somehow.

Spoiler for click here to read:


some thoughts on death
just some ramblings. armchair philosophizing intermixed with semi-narratives.

Spoiler for click to read:


tyler's dream
this is an excerpt from a longer story that i wrote to make fun of my friend tyler. although it was written in jest there are parts of it i like and this is one of them. it deals with dreams, dream-imagery, and dreams as insight into the psyche.
Spoiler for click to read:


teenage diary (excerpts)

this is based upon the same theme as "eric's story" -- it is epistolary and written in the voice of a schizophrenic teen boy, although it takes place in a suburb in 2003 and not in a mental hospital. it is unfinished as all my narrative things are. my goal here was to depict the bleakness of suburbia & of life with mental illness.

Spoiler for click to read:


i also wrote vampire porn for money once.
thankfully, that piece of literature is lost to the aether.

so that's my writing, if you find it interesting or have any comments i'd be glad to hear it. just posting it here to get it out to an audience i suppose. i also doodle a little but i don't really consider that art, it's just for fun but hell, have some doodles (click on the thumbnails for full size)...


yep. so that's my art i guess. i hope you enjoy it or find it interesting in some way. : ^ )