USER FRIENDLY

reality is just a crutch for people who can't handle drugs

Robin Williams   

we watch with sad eyes

as the seagulls fly above us

and the once wicked waves waver 
then flat-line in quiet introspection

the storm has ended - over

but the clouds still linger lofty
grey sheets passing passively
in a dying day

it's this feeling - a memory
and an impulse that returns

alone

she gave up long ago

believed there was no hope

that no one could save her

that no one cared

but weather can be deceiving
sometimes hard to predict - unfair

because when we can't see very far
there remains no signage
no signals

nowhere

and we miss that sliver of sunlight
in the shifting tide




U S E R  F R I E N D L Y

 

 

GETHSEMANE

when I can't write
I feel like a block of stone
dreaming alone of nothing

a boat without eyes
for the oars
and no horizon



G E T H S E M A N E
 

 

nothing to lose

music evokes pictures

pictures provoke feelings

one thing leads to another and ...
here we go - always at 5 am
  
a deaf woman sitting alone

looking out a window

an all American boy filling his face
at a hot dog eating contest 
champion eater - 3 years in a row
51 dogs - 10 minutes

a beggar in the garden
of Gethsemane holding up
an empty cup
staring into the night
no one listening
his last night
on earth

caroling crickets

a mother calling out her son's name

only to realize he's gone
in anguish; "Aadish come" again
no words left behind
no trace

hearing it - now seeing it

years passing
a trailer park just out of town
in Cabot Arkansas
 
she's been alone for days
big bag of Lays and another beer
at 1pm

ashtray is full and the place is a mess
staring blankly at the TV (fuming)

plus size house-coat

eating and screaming at Springer

because that f*cking bitch
needs to die

they're bleeping the sound but we know
what they're saying - filling in the blanks
reading their lips
 

turn them on each other

it's something my Dad taught me
watching you through my sterile scope
analysing - improvising

curious - cautious

me with money - you not

common and yet ironic

because I can see you

but you can't see me
because I am your


micro-manager

something still not right 
looking over my shoulder

you see - it's supposed to be
the other way around
it's ass backwards

confused

I'm bathing in bubbles

surveilling the dark shadows 24/7
and still there's this haunting feeling in that

you're not afraid

but I am

TEMPLE

i'm not afraid of your suffering

i'm not afraid of your joy

i'm not afraid of your hunger 
your desire

i'm not afraid of your rage

i'm not afraid of your love

i'm not afraid of your lies 
or your truth

i see you

i feel you

i need you

i love you

 T E M P L E

tragic trajectory
tempestuous

It's a message to you alien creatures:
translated into English - my language

It's what you see, entering our atmosphere
A blue ball with brown blotches and bolts of lightning
You could probably land on the blue or the brown - preferably
but stay away from the dark parts that light up
because they are dangerous

Our sun is a star yes - a man
Our moon is just a rock - a woman
They sustain and heal us, so that we may live
In our shelters - homes or houses
and give birth to smaller humans
who carry on after we die or
cease to exist

Our children

Light skin and dark skin
continually presents problems here
Ok we don't always get along 

We fight a lot

We humans are really not so bad
Under-developed but basically good natured - really

We have our moments when we love others

Then we have others when we fear
 

 Especially you - an intrusion

We pray to Gods - different ones depending 

on what part of this world we live in

Religion serves and protects us
Even though many of us aren't religious

It's something we've designed/made up 

to appease the fear and suffering

ongoing and unrelenting

That strips us of our humility - our ability

to empathize with others

Despite our worship

Most will fear you - mostly because you're different

Because you pose a very real threat to our survival

Even though I know - you come in peace, and

That you care about all living things too

. 

 

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN

Marketing manipulates.  I am grappling with the concept of political ideology in a broken world, and in what separates liberal left wing and conservative right wing thinking.  

At 10pm on October 31st, 1966, she left him.  After dark with a truck pulling up - some furniture and us in tow while he’s at his new job as a radio dispatcher starting his night shift at Overland Express in Woodstock Ontario.  After years of broken promises, she had had enough; sick and tired of his lies and his absence and most importantly, his impotence.  Hardly around and when he was, he was mean most of the time, and it was common with many married men there who thought they deserved more, taking their anger and frustrations out on their wives.

 


Liberal and Conservative Canadians lived seamlessly together and it didn't really matter what side of the fence you were on.  

I am fascinated by all this, especially now in May 2017, 105 days after Donald Trump has been elected President stateside and am truly baffled at our caustic counter-productive bi-polarity.  That said, I am extremely curious about why he has appealed to so many people’s fundamental values - framed in a turbulent tradition, despite appearances in an obvious capsizing of moral judgement, enabled in reaction and empty of response.  I am in awe of the human tragedy, in it’s absence of reasoning - stubborn and stupid, defaulting to numbness.  Like a saucy scrap on Jerry Springer followed by a punch in the face while everyone in the audience chants and cheers while she placidly does her toenails in front of the TV - sipping wine and giggling.  Newsflash.  The differentiation between church and state is now dissolving after his newest EO/Executive Order and the dismantling of regulated systems (designed to protect us from greed) proliferate.  The gloves have come off and we are officially at war with ourselves and what’s worse, is that the manipulation is metastasizing, even in Canada. 

All this takes me back to a time when nothing mattered; a time when politics was just a thin particle board sign on a spring fed manicured front lawn every few years. Ah small town Ontario in the 60’s; tulips and daffodils.  Our local candidates always had that predictable family man smiling face and a kind pose for the camera that said ‘trust me’, only back then, if their face was on a voting sign in Woodstock Ontario, they probably were trustworthy. 

Now entering my twilight years - fast-forward, in what feels like a relatively fulfilling life, I am left to ponder;  reflecting on how I came to be and what it all means.

 

 
Canadians were basically on the same page and there really was no right or left (like there is now).  

My parents weren’t overly political, although I later discovered that Dad was very much an alt-right foot soldier (as were most of his so-called friends).  Mom wasn’t interested in politics and had no position in it.  Like most of her girl-friends (wives and Moms), it just wasn’t something that women thought about back then, because well - they weren’t supposed to.  The husband decided and the wife just followed along.  Growing up in Oxford County felt more like growing up in an incubator more than an open patch of land in southwestern Ontario.  

Everyone knew each other.  I would sometimes accompany Mom to our weekly grocery shop at the local Dominion and remember her always stopping to talk to another woman … “hi Pat! - oh hi Mary - how are you?”  Here we go.  "How's Don and the boys?  Ah ya know".  I’m always bored listening to them smile and laugh insincerely, almost like what they are saying and thinking are very different.  Innocent and frightened.

Introduced to life’s ongoing hypocrisy early on.  Always hidden behind a curtain of courtesy and good manners but fundamentally well intended.  When Mom quietly left Dad in 1966, I was 10 and it was a shock but I adapted out of necessity.  Having a younger brother made it all tolerable.  I knew for some time that Mom and Dad were unhappy and later figured out that they both had been unfaithful.  Mom was a mess but at least she expressed it.  Dad was a train wreck emotionally but concealed it; having been introduced to life in 1925 in Woodstock too, only growing up repressed during the great depression in the early ’30’s - second oldest in a large family; talking about it years later, after his 7th beer in Stoney Point where we lived with Agnes (her 8th); one of Dad’s early acquisitions.  Apparently she was a fling he had early in his marriage to Mom.  Ag was married too, having left her husband Earl and their kids, to be with Dad because well, marriage (and parenting) wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and this felt like a fresh new start … right?  Wrong. Shit-show. 




 

I myself, didn’t think about political correction until I got into my late 30’s, having moved to Toronto and started a family.  I kind of knew I was a Liberal thinker (compared to others), but it just wasn’t important to me.  I had become immersed in my passion and my ongoing muse - music, and well … Canada was doing just fine anyway and me voting one way or the other was almost irrelevant.

Canadians were basically on the same page and there really was no right or left (like there is now).  Leaning left was in my DNA and I think that it may have been originally realized in a previous life because all the signals were without any grounding in my immediate history here and now.  

Politics wasn’t something that very many people north of the 49th thought about very much (at least in my circle) and that was just fine with me because I had more important things to think about.  Liberal and Conservative Canadians lived seamlessly together and it didn't really matter what side of the fence you were on.  

It was later (summer ’96), when I first consciously realized how different I was from Dad.  Having previously lived with him against my will for 6 years in isolation 25 years earlier, I remember asking him back then at 15 what was going to happen to me/us (my brother and I), living in Stoney Point because I could see no future there and high-school was finishing soon.   His answer was something like … “You could get a job picking tomatoes; good money in that.  Find a good woman and settle down here - your own house - kids”.  Right.  Dad had zero interest in sending us to college (let alone university), because of the expense of it so this is what’s on the menu.  Lots of ripe red.  The Heinz plant was in Leamington and thousands of locals had become pickers or processors and lived comfortably on their hourly in some shack in rural Essex County - collecting an unemployment check or welfare during the off months.

Men came home late, drunk while their wives chain-smoked cigarettes and watched a fuzzy TV; their kids out vandalizing mailboxes.  One of Dad’s big regrets was that he wasn’t able to get into a good union and wanted that for me, quietly confessing. In March 1973, I realized that getting out of Stoney Point was essential to my sanity and being 16 allowed me to move back to Woodstock with Mom and my step-father without my brother who I left behind alone.  Dad always resented me for doing that - away again.  Slipping out when he was at his new job, sitting on a bar stool at the Cooper Court Hotel in Belle River at 2pm, abandoned YET again.  That resentment continued until he died in September 2002.  I found out in 2005.

I think back to our yearly visits a lot.  I’m still learning from my Dad.  I’m sure he had no idea how important he was to me and I miss him.   I’m thinking that the lessons he meant to leave with me are much different than he intended and I still feel his pain.

 

It really hit me how different our political views were - our outlook on life - perspectives, visiting him in 1996 especially.  After a one sided discussion on racism south of the border and in his incremental inebriation, he sarcastically laughed out loud.  "You're a bleeding heart liberal”, he said scathingly and that flattened me thinking, what the hell is that?  It was then that I realized that there was 2 opposite sides of the nickel (heads and tails) and was then formally introduced to the idea of conflicting ideologies.  It was also when I realized that Dad was essentially a hard right thinker and I now know that if he were still alive, that he would be an ardent and loyal Trump supporter for all the obvious reasons.  I also now understand that quietly leaving him that windy early summer afternoon in ’73 was because our beliefs were diametrically opposed only I was still unaware of that then in Stoney Point. 

M A K E  A M E R I C A  G R E A T  A G A I N

What’s most fascinating to me now (looking back), is that I could have easily subscribed to Dad’s vernacular viewpoint, like the few friends I had there did - staying behind and carrying out the tradition that their fathers were proud of.  I could still be there, perhaps having worked myself up to foreman at the plant ... that union job that he always wanted for me.  

Carrying his legacy forward to the next generation. Thanks Mom. 

"you can control your children
through threats and punishments

and they will learn to fear

or you can love and guide

without controlling or interfering

and they will learn to trust themselves"

William Martin - The Parent's Tao Te Ching

 

CLODY EYES

in his mind, clody eyes - feeling love

in these eyes, clody lies

in his heart, clody eyes

clody lies, in his eyes, in his heart

in his heart, clody lies in his heart

clody love in his heart, in his mind

in these eyes, clody lies

CLODY EYES

a jim lamarche remix

February 2018 
Fear N Loathing House Sessions - VOL 6  

assembled in Logic Audio and Final Cut 

 http://www.jimlamarche.ca/

.

borderlines

you stand there staring ... into light

anticipation waiting, to ignite

b o r d e r l i n e s

there are the prisons we choose to live inside

and then there the prisons that choose us

we grow up in both, so we now know
what separates one, from the other

or do we?

either way

it's a lonely place

with not many people - well real people

a cold place - the food is bad

not a lot of love

I survived because
in the end

life wins
a new plan
presents itself

every time 

realigning our reason
calibrating our curricula
building new bridges
tearing down
old ones

been here - done this

trying to remember what it was like 
staying true to form - action affirmation - shaking
in this moment of 
awakening

one metal gate closes behind 
and a second opens
in front

stepping through it
 free again


barbed wire and electric fencing
it's part of my past

   




letting the sun in 

just for a minute, then two - then ten

appraising the potential

where do we go, from here? right
look up

squinting and feeling the warmth on my face
for the first time in months
thankful for this
walking
no one waiting - never is

this world keeps spinning us around
and I may never touch

the ground 

 it's what I remember about you
always afraid to look back

now I understand why

b o r d e r l i n e s

as we look out into what's old

another mystery untold

another newborn star 
will shine

,