what month are we?

(for Perec + Beckett, Endgame)

discipline: to abandon a language begin in another is
neighbour’s front lawn + discarded furniture
rusted joints nibbled gnawed enamel
discard-web with legacy concerns
tides of brackish coffee tables
chipped at its corners small diagrams of
granular shapes litter its underside
groans + wind shifts that pile that furniture-mountain
rises + your neighbour’s self portrait dwarfs the house

that extreme excess of search terms + status updates
as uncontainable as old couch springs
grain of splinters mixes with cotton stuffing
a desk a set of drawers || metal of lawn chairs
jut into footholds + the neighbourhood
races each other to the top grabbing spare cushions
always one shelf from summit

*/
we stealthy emerge each night
take one object back for ourselves
reupholster it in French
/*

excuse me sir, do you know mrs. pennyblossum?

walking distance cafe windows open to the street
each patron writing a novel || a manual +
each typing each person typing in chorus
finger-voices sing clone sloppy non-homerow
sing across laptop screens sing mp3s sing loops sing clones
|| reading subscripts||a novel ||a cookbook
flip pages simultaneously synced with each array
each flip a flap of thunderous wings a gale the wind
shoves stirred coffees + apple slice salads loop
punctuation in large strings picking bursts pause gusts pause
flip pause stir pause peck pause blast pause slice pause

binary signals: pages turning || keys clicking

DO YOU HAVE: Hair that feels weighed down?

I insist 2in1
cannot stand elevator lag
nor the bandwidth
of utterance to ears

don’t I know you from somewhere?

somewhere parallel-me
drives up + down highway-cut valley
pick-up mud up the sideboards out of wiper fluid
only the highway curves left instead of right
fence posts slightly opposite askew
other-me has his windows down
passing the Chevron that never changed into an ESSO

another-me still drifts up and down the Island
letting the ocean seep through his shoes still
the horizon-water reminds him of how big the mountains can get

a version moves rook axis to back rank
clicks clock and waits

another-still-me floats in circuitry driven by coloured pulses
+ passwords posts photos + snippy status updates
jets up + down wikis reciting
movie quotes from Joel Pepsi like
“I’m walkling here” or lyrics from
“I Kissed a Grill (and I linked it)”
alternate-me dresses in tighter t-shirts pants
squeezing his body until micro-thin
can hyperlink between pages OMG

Aaron Tucker’s poetic works and reviews have been published across Canada. His chapbook, apartments, was shortlisted for the 2010 bpNichol Chapbook award. His current project, tentatively titled punchlines, is coming out in chapbook form from above/ground press in the summer of 2013. More of his work can be found at aarontucker.ca. In addition, he is a professor in the English department at Ryerson University where he is currently teaching essay writing and digital literacy to first year students. He is working on learning chess in between watching his beloved Raptors lose games.

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