Benjibopper

Labels: 2013, love junk, nova scotia, Poetry

They were hauled into the office and plunked into cushy brownish-orange chairs that provided no comfort. The cold eyes of Secretary Alice White froze them.

They sat and thought of doom. It was called the principal’s office but everyone knew it was owned and ruled by Vice-Principal Morris. The principal, whatever his name was, was a figurehead at best. In the silence of Mrs. White’s frosty stare they took deep breaths, smelled the new carpet, tried not to look at each other, listened to the clock’s second hand tick and tick.

The American kid muttered something strange. "Lamb-are-eh."

He was in the middle. They glanced at him, nothing moving but their eyes.

"What?" Pierre whispered.

"Lamb-are-eh," he said. "It's French for...the f-word."

Pierre snickered and Danh cackled, a high-pitch staccato wail.

Mrs. White snapped her head up. "Shhhh!"

They looked down at the grey carpet, inhaled its chemical smell. "You talk French?" Danh whispered.

"Nope."

"Lamb-are-eh." Pierre rolled the syllables over his tongue. His maman was Acadian but he never learned her language. It thrilled him to know she’d hate him saying this particular word.

"Boys!" Vice-Principal Morris barked them out of their solidarity. He was a red-headed giant with a grizzly face and a gap-toothed beaver smile. He jerked his thumb and led them into his personal office with the placard reading 'Morris'. He pointed at two chairs across from his desk. Pierre walked past the chairs and stood with arms folded over his belly.

Danh took the seat closest to Pierre and Gerry took the other.

"Well boys," Mr. Morris began. "Mrs. Charles tells me you all had a little scuffle in the schoolyard."

He picked at his teeth with the nail on his pinkie. When the pinkie was retracted Pierre couldn’t see anything on it or the teeth.

"She tells me there were some expletives put into play, by which I mean some references to adults-only activities were made by you boys, and perhaps some of you described going number two in certain vulgar terms."

He went back to the teeth again.

"Furthermore, as I can see by your clothes, blood was drawn over the matter. It must have been quite serious. Care to tell me about it?"

Silence, other than Mr. Morris' wall clock ticking. It sounded identical to the one in the main office, equally relentless. Pierre didn’t dare turn to see if it was the same. He smelled the fumes of another new carpet. Mr. Morris' eyes were on him now, and only him.

"Pierre?" Mr. Morris said. His eyes were blue under his bright red afro, like some kind of sadistic heathen pirate on the Indian Ocean. "Pierre?"

Labels: 2012, Fiction, love junk, nova scotia

Before Pierre could count two he heard and felt Gerry’s forehead break his nose. Pierre dropped to the ground.

"Fuck you, fatty!" Gerry yelled, kicking Pierre in the gut.

Pierre felt nothing but the crowd around them getting closer, laughing louder. He could smell the mud off the boys’ boots at the periphery of his sight. He knew the girls would be at the back, peering over shoulders pretending to be disgusted. He winced and looked down, noticed Gerry was wearing shiny black rubber boots. What a loser. Pierre caught and yanked Gerry’s foot as he tried to kick him again. He climbed on top and sat on Gerry's chest, pounded his face.

His own pain was sinking in now and he felt blood rolling from his nose over his lips. His head was ringing. That was fine. He had to win the crowd back. That was the main thing.

"Up - yours - with - a - rubber - hose," Pierre grunted, one word for each time he punched. The crowd was laughing with him now. Every punch got harder.

Gerry was kneeing Pierre's back but it didn’t hurt. Pierre wailed on him harder. It was easy to connect; Gerry didn’t protect his face and he kept his eyes closed.

"Say uncle," Pierre said.

Gerry opened his eyes. There was blood all over his face and a drop of it rolled into his eyes. He didn’t blink. "Hockey sucks," he panted.

Sadly, Pierre was going to have to kill this kid. "OK," he said, pulling his fist back.

Labels: 2012, Fiction, love junk, nova scotia

-

"Tell me again about these guys."

Jamaica’s voice was soft, like a small sharp needle pushed ever-so-gently into the neck. He’d explained it before.

Outside he could hear the increasing pitch of a 767 engine as it went airborne. He patted down his cargo shorts until he found the Maalox pills. The crinkle of the plastic wrap was reassuring. He popped one.

"They're my best friends," he said.

"I thought Travis and Pete were your best friends."

He squinted water from his eyes and gagged a little on the Maalox. She was looking at him so he shook his head. "Nope." He burped softly. "Not even close."

"If these guys, neither of whom I have ever met, are your best friends, why you so nervous?"

"Pierre!"

He snapped his head sideways and peered back. It was Gerry. What were the odds of that? His flight must have come in early.

-

Labels: 2012, Fiction, love junk, nova scotia

Labels: 2010, love junk, nova scotia, Poetry

I have a short piece of holiday fiction in today's Coast. Thought I'd share it and wish all happy holidays. Click the image below to read the story.



May we have peace, love, joy, justice, sustainability, creativity and healthy communities in 2011.

-Chris Benjamin

Labels: 2010, Africa, Fiction, love junk, publishing

I met Ivan Prokopchuk the other night, in person. He's long been one of the most colourful personalities I've met as a blogger, and a character who consistently captures my imagination.

But there he was in the Lula Lounge, in full colour, three dimensions, in the flesh, across the table from me with his book, The Fire in Bradford, in hand. "I'll show you mine if you you show me yours," he grinned.
But with Another Story Bookshop on hand selling Drive-by Saviours I didn't have any swap copies. The swap had been my suggestion, but with all the insanity of travel, visiting family and friends, organizing book launches and an Eastern Canadian book tour, I'd forgotten. I promised to send Ivan a copy in the mail and he gave me his book, shook my hand and heartily congratulated me. And he was gone, making way for the next in line.

It was one of a series of surreal encounters I've had lately with old friends. The support has been overwhelming - people I haven't seen in years, people I've only met online, have come out to my two book launches in Halifax and Toronto to celebrate my accomplishment.

And now, writing from a friend's home in East Toronto, planning to head up to Kent Bookstore in Lindsay Ontario in a few hours for another reading and more old friends (and to meet a boisterous one-year-old), I'm feeling a deep easy happiness in that willingness to celebrate what others among us do.

At the same time, I ache for my wife and son, who flew back to Halifax yesterday morning at about crack o'clock, and I long for my own bed where I could properly nurse this worsening cold. Suddenly I'm a lone drifter again, something I missed and didn't expect to experience again so soon. Last time I was a young man, full of abstractions and equipped with an eager pen and ink-hungry notebooks. It all seems a little more businesslike this time - I'm a drifter with a mission, a product to move. I feel like a huckster with a money-bulge in my pocket.

That's not a complaint. I'm loving meeting people, sharing my art with them, and experiencing their kind and enthusiastic responses - their questions, comments and cash. Living the dream for me has moved beyond sloganism and into reality.

Labels: 2010, love junk, non-fiction, Toronto

Desire is seed.
Your arms
snychro-waving in the dark,
flashing across the dance-cave.
My stillbirth reborn.
My feet walk themselves over.

Tears lubricate my body over;
Tetris pieces withhold seed
until ancestors are reborn.
Telephone chords mimic arms
poorly, cold as caves,
desiring touch in the dark.

Tree pastors towering dark,
our shivers gratefully ruled over.
The sauna a geothermal cave,
where idealized eternity sows seed,
across the arc of the other’s arms;
tradition is repetition reborn.

Desire is reborn
in the deepest dark,
stillborn with too few arms;
hungry voices’ journey over.
Our spinning globe scatters seed,
frees us from the cubicle cave.

365 exploration of continental cave.
365 labours daily reborn.
Restively flailed seed,
unharvested from the faraway dark;
ocean’s gravity heaves vagabondage over.
Ancestors require our arms.

Hands in sand and legs as arms,
an inverted tower till elbows cave.
Reunion summer’s over.
Old routines reborn.
In cavernous downtown funkitecture’s dark:
A desire, an egg, a seed.

With his birth we’re reborn
in a solitary cave.
Desire is seed.

Labels: 2010, love junk, non-fiction, Poetry

"the trouble with Flann O'Toole had to do with two things: his preoccupation with being such a disgustingly uproarious broth of a boy, and the fact that his middle name was Napoleon. An Irish Napoleon was a concept so grotesque it had to end up like O'Toole. O'Toole made potato whisky in a back room and seduction attempts upon the person of every female who entered the Elbaroom; he swore oaths regularly and broke promises unfeelingly; he was prone to fits of violent temper, but thought himself a reasonable man; he was likely at any moment of the day or night to keel over in an alcoholic stupor, but he considered himself a man of power; he was carried to his bed every night in a haze of obscenity and vomit, but he was convinced he was a leader in the community; he quoted poetry as he did ugly things." --Salman Rushdie [master of characterization]



Birth
At first it’s a slow leak,
nothing to panic about.
We watch the game
after a brief call to the midwife,
who is concerned by the snow
barricading her country home.

To bed for now,
in our basement bedroom.

4 am comes too early.
My between-contraction naps
become too brief and frequent.
Then pop.
Gush.
Bags of waters,
which protected this 9-month concept,
down the drain.
Still no midwife.

5 am the shrieking begins;
there’s blood on the floor.
A slightly panicked call to the midwife,
who says in the face of rapid dilation,
to stay low and calm -
no shrieking.

Just low moans,
at the buffalo frequency,
bouncing on your birth ball.

Fill the tub.
Muddy bloodied waters.
No problem,
as long as it’s warm
in the cold
and cool in the heat.

Stay low and calm
at the buffalo frequency.

Help me,
you whisper your scream.
We’re only 2 hours in.

Stay low and calm
at the buffalo frequency.

You can do this,
I mock confidence.
And then we’ll have a baby.

Where’s the midwife?
Your query
more rhythmic than contractions.

Friends come first,
with a breakfast to go cold
as they boil water,
like a 60s sitcom birth.
Filling our birth pool
by the fire they built
in our living room.

Where’s the midwife?

Stay low and calm
at the buffalo frequency.
Tepid water over contracting belly,
moaning low.
300 liquid scoops
cool the pain
until it gets worse,
and you push them away
as the midwife arrives.

I feel like I want to push.

No don’t do that!
quoth the ignorant partner.

The voice of experience
searches for cervix,
finds nothing,
says, it’s all natural.
You’re ready to go.

So up we go,
you staggering, punch-drunk
like a lopsided prizefighter
begging to throw in the towel.

Nobody can do this but you,
and guess what, you’re doin’ it.
You will get this baby in your arms,
she informs you, her lips taut
like the memory of a cigarette,
her voice all silken dominatrix.
Now push!

You scream your war cry.
Forget low and calm,
to hell with buffaloes.
You sweat methane.
Arm in arm we squat,
your full weight on me,
fire in our legs
and on our skin.
My back breaks,
as the pool is filled
with 37-degree water.

You climb in
but you won’t take my hand,
just ice-water.
Ice-water to forehead,
ice-water to lips,
to throat, then spilled
under a small slice of sea.
My hand is freed
For shoulder neck massage.

You wail, just short of ululation.
Your language is clear,
your cries reverential.
This is not the time to be crass,
though the neighbours think
you are being tortured.

The baby responds with a crown.
You can’t see it.
Anticipation fills the room,
like a back-alley yodel
you’re so close, Mama,
we all agree.
But you aren’t impressed
by the sliver of emergent hair.
I’m so far away.
Can I quit now?

Low moans,
buffalo frequency.

Seven more warriors cry.
Seven more uterine contracts.
Your baby’s face is slipping through,
and my hands are placed for the pull,
but the shoulder is stuck as we heave,
and it’ll surely break with such force,
our biceps one way
your contorted primal writhing
the other.

I can only whimper and cry,
as this marathon miracle 1st prize
passes through my hands, head-first
into the rivulet between your breasts.
Legs are spread to see
his swollen testicles dangling.
It’s a boy, my little baby boy!
But you already knew that.
My shoulders heaving tears,
your face a sheet of white shock.
What just happened?

The radio sings:
I’m Here
for You

A smile washes over my body.
He looks like me.
He looks like you.
A smile washes over my body,
blocks my fears
of tyrannical fatherhood.

We kiss,
each other and him,
our lips his cheeks.

Just sculpted lines between mother and child
have blurred and blended again,
leaving a singular hope.

Labels: 2008, love junk, nova scotia, Poetry

Your mouth tasted like a train
but you were the only place to go
when I needed a little sin
so please don’t ask me where I’ve been

I stood up in the underground
put pretty red paint over crumbling mould
cranked the treble through a whammy bar
sipped an overpriced cheap whiskey
called it a den of creative energy
for new talents to get our heads bobbing
but every morning I had to emerge
blinking against the dawn
every morning I had to come home
and report everything I’d done wrong

Your skin felt like a carnival
complete with games of chance
there was a good chance I’d lose
so just don’t ask me where I’ve been

You hit me in the knees
with that falsetto melody
hammered me with a violin
until I couldn’t think straight
it was all images of nudity
feminine forms dancing just for me
on each note your eyes shot at me
It was like controlling your dreams
I could get away with anything
and it would all be erased in the morning

Your chest pounded like a marching band
but the big game was cancelled
any remaining routines
left no trace of where I’d been

Labels: 2008, love junk, nova scotia, Poetry

You feel like Dante's innermost circles have risen around me
shown themselves to be playgrounds and creatively wacky theme parks,
pogo sticks on trampolines

You give me vertigo and soothe that fear with targeted foot rubs
slow my heart rate to a post sauna tingle, when the skin is crystal clean,
and satin smooth

It's a bizarro anticipation for what has already been, because spinning
old is new again, same old conversations make us sweat again, solitude scary
as birth again

Same sense of separation, don't fear; though fear is natural as conflict
In death, chaos, and survival know that you are adored, treasured, wanted
because

You feel like Satan's fall was never intended, that it never mattered
just a joy-ride, a bare bones pleasure cruise, under low hanging candy
and whipped cream

where there is no entertainment but what we create together
This is how you feel when I remember you here, when my mind is ready
and my body can be put at ease.

Labels: 2008, Canada, love junk, Poetry

"Like a personal trainer with a penchant for fat women, I got secrets," he said. "I hold them for the protection of those around me."

I looked straight into his pale eyes, smirked, and challenged him to reveal some shade of truth.

He looked back at me. His face revealed nothing in those lingering seconds until he said:

"You don't wanna know the depths of my shoes, and that mirror you're holding so over-confidently is one place you don't want me to look.

"You think you can warm this statue, wash it clean of centuries of bird-shit and lovingly peel away the thousand layers of cold hard stone, reveal a lederhosen-clad rich boy smiling at the rain, who will hug you, relieved to have found a safe new home.

"You can scrub all you want. You can cut and slice but you underestimate the skill and the bitter obsessive determination of this stone mason self-sculptor."

I reached for him and then stopped short. He was long gone.

Labels: 2008, love junk, nova scotia, short story

In the roughneck tarpits of delusion
as they asked me to prove myself
worthy of some compensation
or sympathy

In the shot-down boredom of empathy
when I realized everything was corrupted
and there was no place safe to stand
or register

As I paid the price for my wager
the cost of my own existence
in this dodge-ball shotgun choice of life
or living

I said your name
I showed my ring
I drew your face
I smiled
I walked home

In the uninsulated time capsule basement
at the moment of no regrets
limbs entwined in the vulnerability of trust
or deception

Naming that naked moment of honest exposure
elucidating the consequences
of each and every opposite action
or reaction

As we laid bare the price of admission
for a forever existence together
and the smiling lips irremovable from our faces
or bodies

I spoke your name
I made a ring
I kissed your face
We smiled
We were home

In the daily face of insanity
departing from reason love and peace
walking into false transactions of cash
or truth

My pen hacks at conmen weavers
atop a chain of fool-hearted power
trying to catch a falling leader
or star

As I fumble for my credentials
letters planted in compressed trees
and they ask me who I am
or why I matter

I say your name
I hold your ring
I see your face
I smile
This is home

Labels: 2008, love junk, nova scotia, Poetry

My hip first skipped when your lips quipped
about the history of fistery and so-called sex liberty
My shell was felled by the smell of pure hell
You told me what ought to be with the lies you taught to me
I walked through your talk of the cocks that you rocked
laughing at my chivalry and the women who'd forgiven me
You hypothisized and mythologized while my eyes apologized
because I was behind the times that bind and finalize
the free radicals acting magical with their Vagisil
while I'm insecure about my pedicure and quite unsure
if I enjoy these orgies before me You may deplore me
for being vanilla but I'm a thrilla not a killa
So sue my monogamy my romantic dreams if my love ain't free
to pass around and put down charge a pound at the lost-n-found
Not trying to hetero-normalize as I philosophize or de-politicize
It's just that I'm hip to partnership and my lips are for your hips alone.

Labels: 2007, love junk, nova scotia, Poetry

All through this room
images of you
abounding in shadows of flowers
a riverbed stream
where you held a righteous dream
and picked me sumac
to while away the hours

The puppets come to life
dancing before me
tracing our paths
to another lifetime

When we owned the world
and our pride stole it away
it was then we were freed
in the arms of each other
casting shadows on a green wall
two figures in the thralls of love

Looking up to you
you see my S-shaped arms
sketching in a sketchbook
the artwork on our walls
no this life’s not our first together
not likely our last

Children on your t-shirt
make a future of the past
this room smells of you
your skin on my mind
your skin all over me

You are the one
who freed me from time

Labels: love junk, Poetry

There are songs that remind me
of you
That you've probably never even
heard
There are ways you are part of
me
That infiltrate the parts of me
I don't even know exist

There are memories of places
That lift us like a melody
and we haven't even been there
together

Yet we have

There is poetry in every moment
That I know you exist
Music in every movement
you make that I don't see
There's a dance in my subconscious
That I can't do awake
That you taught me while we slept
inches apart

There are parts of me you've touched
That no one else knows
That I don't even know
And they feel like birth

There's an iceberg floating our way
It won't even know what hit it

Labels: love junk, non-fiction, Poetry

Off to Prince Edward Island for the weekend, showing Big Bro's girlfriend Anne of Green Gables, a dream of hers. I leave you with some recent thoughts; catch ya on the flipside...



‘Good times with old friends’ is what I wrote. In the documentary of our lives there is so much that goes unrecorded and unspoken that is so difficult to articulate, like that sadness that is missing someone wherever I go. This is the price the global citizen pays for mobility.

Every summer I fall in love in a new city. I fall in love again with old friends, fall in love anew with new ones.

There’s a goodbye party because meeting all these splendid lovers individually is physically impossible on a chronically tight schedule. So in one night they flash before me in a parade where every float carries the significance of the fact that I won’t see it again, at least not for a while.

As evening ticks into morning, I collect the hugs of the ones I just got to know and the ones I thought would never end. And I feel so heavy, weighted by the sadness of the ones who dare to cry, to say that it’s a sad day. I love them the most in this moment of departure.

The party is organic and free range, dynamic and boisterous. At one point a bunch of 30-something white folks are dancing to Billy Jean (but who else would these days?) and they all want to moonwalk. Some flow out onto the deck to stargaze – supposed to be a meteor shower tonight. The conversations are fleeting and soft despite the gravity pulling us together this last time.

I hug everyone goodbye including the ones I barely spoke with because there were just too many competing interests among us. So many good people assembled here.

It was a brief summer of brief encounters, squeezing too much into too little time and too much space. It felt much like Christmases of the past decade, in and around that cottage by the shore in the East. Over the years the numbers there have diminished but not the quality.

It is inevitable now that the same will happen at the centre of the universe I’ve inhabited, built up, settled, where I’ve connected, lived and loved. It is the price I pay for my homecoming, to return to the place where I belong.

Labels: Canada, friends, love junk, non-fiction, nova scotia

I wrote this one in 1999, and it sort of reminds me of some current life-changes, but this time there's a lot less heartache:


The first seven weeks of the summer of 1998 were some of the best and simplest times of my life. My girlfriend and I were back together and were living together for the first time in almost a year. We also worked together and that went better than I'd hoped because we managed to keep our distance at work.

I can't say much about that time except that we had fun, simple vegetarian fun, and rarely had conflict. Work was hard but interesting, money was plentiful enough, our home was good other than the roommates who spent too much time fighting over trivial things.

We had each other, and were deeply in love and as close as we ever could be. We spent a mid-June night in a 2 1/2 star hotel near Pearson Airport just West of Toronto. It was half-price because it was under renovation, but it was nice enough. That night we had a stupid fight that I think was caused by the painful feeling that I was leaving behind the only thing that would ever really matter in my life.

We got over it and cried a lot of tears but when the morning came I held her in my arms and hoped for some kind of future forever. And then I went to the airport and nothing in my life has been quite so typical since.

Labels: 1998, Canada, love junk, Travel

1. When I first came to Toronto back in 1997, fresh out of the brain factory and following the scent of a scantily clad woman, there were two men who saved me from mediocrity: RK and BC.

2. RK was a California long-hair who was just too cool for Canada, and rode me in his red jeep with the top down all the way to Niagara Falls, me shivering in the blind wind the whole way. We drank ourselves white as breaking water and had an early breakfast. He had the lumberjack special and I had poached eggs.

3. BC got himself a corporate banking job and filled two grocery carts with high-end liquor, half of which he fed to me over a high-stakes game of monopoly. He expressed shock at my choice of pizza toppings. "I think that's a disgusting combination," he said with the dignity of old money, before ordering himself a heart-attack-special.

4. These two opposite men teased me for my incumbent vegetarianism and general anti-corporate stances - they couldn't quite fathom such choices after what we'd been through together, specifically completing a degree in Commerce. In between laughing spasms we could all feel the chasm that was starting to separate us.

5. RK soon disappeared to all and everyone who'd known him up to that point in my life, and none of us has heard from him since.

6. BC became a father last season to 1.5 pounds of premature miracle, a real beauty. The mother claims she married BC because she wanted her liberal vote to cancel his conservative vote so they had to live in the same polling area - may as well be the same house and bed.

7. He and I don't see each other much any more - he's got higher priorities now than an old acquaintance and I completely understand that.

8. I'm free from mediocrity now anyway.

There you go TWM, eight random things about me (as random as anything can be amidst the organized chaos of intelligent design), with some added inspiration from Ivan. I won't tag anyone else so the chain may die, but I don't think anyone will miss it. I must say though that I did enjoy this little challenge. If anyone else feels like playing, consider yourself tagged.

Labels: 1997, love junk, non-fiction, Toronto

It was our first date. To commemorate:

Tar smells
over birch tree stings
and temperatures at both extremes
Bodies there
lay totally bare
and yours bore all my big dreams

In darkness we dove
till moonlight we rode
followed roads into our past
"Moonlight suits you" I said
it went to your head
these were the times that last

If novelty's gone
our future lives on
we can't forget the past
Gets better from here
we shake all our fears
and hold each other fast

Your body round
so deep and profound
explains the universe
My eyes explore
my hands adore
the reasons why we work

An experience shared
a common concern
rooted in compassion
We stay the same
steady as rain
pictures fall from fashion

The wrinkles that come
as the skin sags
from our bodies proof of age
We'll see it all
the Roman fall
when idiots outsmart the sage

The brook babbles by
dry leaves under thigh
softness of cries escape
Sometimes we scream
through nightmare dreams
before laughter finally takes shape

Salt on my lips
searching your hips
seeking the taste of skin
Latin feasts
sea-supplied beasts
Making the most of sin

The heat of promise
broken and kept
delayed and finally delivered
The warmth of home
the rush of bliss
elevating the peak we entered

The brush of your skin
you invited me in
I finally decided to stay
Your lips on my cheek
my strength when I'm weak
the constant in my days

Hot tears on my face
so easily traced
from all the times I cried
My love my hope
my strength my faith
My reason not to die

Labels: love junk, non-fiction, Poetry